I feel like this drama is basically a Rice car. On the surface it looks amazing. The cast is full of good looking people, and the two male leads absolutely nail their roles. Did Shin Ha-kyun deserve the actor of the year award from the Baeksang Awards? Probably. Did the show deserve the best script? Absolutely not.

This drama suffers from trying to be greater than it is. In doing so, it tries to add suspense and wonderment through (if I actually counted) probably around 50 different plot twists. I'm all up for plot twists, but they weren't meaningful in any way. Just a bunch of cheap suspense tricks. E.G. You see X as following victim at 8:10 so he must be the killer. Surprise we now know that at 8:15 X actually left the victim and the at 8:16 Y was the last person to be wit the victim. So on and so forth for almost the entire series. I don't really know why people claim that they were at the edge of their seats from suspense, but to me this is not suspense. It's the equivalent to cheap scares in horror movies. Just like cheap scares don't count towards making a scary movie scary, these cheap twists don't create actual suspense and certainly don't qualify as good writing.

People also praise the character development in the show, but I am still wondering what they are talking about. Sure we are all cheering for the two male leads to get along and at the end they finally do, but I basically just revealed the entire series of events that lead to that development with, "they finally do." LDS is dead set on finding the culprit for his sister's death the entire series and continues to hide from his friends what he's doing until he's doesn't and until he's not. We never see the progression of his anger slower subsiding, realizing that there is more to life than being stuck on his sister's murder for over 20 years, or that he should share that burden with his friends and family. The only semblance of development we get from LDS is his attachment to HJW which can be summed up over the prison scene where he says, "we protect our own," HJW multiple random barge ins and suspecting LDS, a bowl of soup that LDS treats HJW to, and the last episode where they smile at each other. HJW's development isn't much better, he's pretty much dead inside until he feels sorry about his father's crimes and then again the smiling scene before the end credits.

Lets talk about the council woman's unconvincing confession. She confessed because her son said he'd kill himself if it turns out to be true that she killed chief Nam and KJM. But she didn't and her confession has no bearing on that. There was no evidence that she did killed anyone and it was never shown that her acquittal banked on such a confession. Heck it didn't even show that she was ever arrested or charged. A huge leap in logic to reach the outcome we got. Plot convenience is not good story writing.

Now lets talk about the crucial moment where HJW learns of his father's crimes and convinces LDS to not take things into this own hands. He promises to go to hell to bring his father down by gaining his trust. He makes this promise knowing that the recording he has would be inadmissible in court. Not only does HJW not go to hell, he didn't even go to jail. He did absolutely nothing Beyond Evil worthy to go to "Hell." In fact, his father goes to jail because the Council Woman's plot convenience "confession" ( her word against theirs) magically makes the recordings admissible in court? Yea, sorry that's now how that works. And what exactly did gaining his father's trust do to bring him towards arresting his father? Absolutely nothing. Just some more showboating that make the audience go "OMG," with no actual substance. Just like the cheap plot twists exhibited throughout the series. What was the point of HJW saying he'd gain his father's trust if there wasn't actually going to be any follow up on that? Just more rice.

This show did not deserve best Screenplay of the year. Not even close.