The majority of the drama is painting a very three dimensional portrait of Young Soon who endured loss her entire life and to cope with the trauma of her husband's mysterious suicide after they had been abandoned by everyone they trusted, she raises her son to be a weapon of revenge without a specific aim at a person, but rather at the entire Korean justice system, which is a lot of weight on the shoulders of a man let alone a little boy. Instead of filling her son with warmth and understanding, she isolated him from finding joy with her, within himself, or in anyone or anything else, so he'll be single mindedly focused on becoming a powerful prosecutor. She's very lucky that Kang Ho is a born artist who is empathetic and observant and can see the glimpses behind her abusive parenting tactics and realizes the true targets he needs to hunt down for justice for his family who he played in a long game. Those are his true strengths that kept him from hating her for her behavior, which he has every right to no matter her intention as he still carries the emotional scars she inflicted on him. She herself realized the harm she had done only when she was forced to reflect on them after his accident left him with the mindset of a seven year old and he refuses to eat because she always forced him never to be full at meal times so he can stay awake to study. It's shocking he got to grow as tall as he did without much food. The majority of the drama sees Young Soon trying to fast track his physical and mental recovery before she herself succumbs to her stage four stomach cancer. The drama misses out on showing Kang Ho finding himself through his interactions with various people and memories. It was so disappointing that the memories from his 18 year old self when he kissed Mi Joo after saving her from the creep who was harassing her at the hair salon did not move up his mindset from 7 to 18. It's creepy that Mi Joo kept kissing a man with the mind of a 7 year old and he was able to be taken advantaged of by the village thief and loser Sam Sik. Instead of organically unlocking his memories in a meaningful way, of course Kang Ho recovers them after more severe head trauma from saving his mom and Sam Sik from the burning pig farm. Lee Do Hyun did a fantastic job portraying both the Kang Ho who is suffering from the mental regression and the pained adult enacting the 35 year revenge plan which required some difficult to outsiders to understand methods including keeping innocents in jail to save their lives and to cozy up to the company chairman.

He got to experience agency and happiness during his college years with Mi Joo who volunteered to help with the household chores and expenses while he studied. He broke up with her because there's something he can only do himself and offered to tell her why as he reached the time when he had to start his revenge plan, but she refused and kept her pregnancy a secret from him so as to not interrupt the plan that she didn't want him to tell her. She trusted that Kang Ho is doing something so important that he would leave someone he loves to do it. That's an intense trust level that she has with him, but also partially learned behavior from her mom in staying the man she loves no matter what. Sadly her mom's situation was staying in a toxic relationship with her abusive, cheating husband until he died just so her daughters wouldn't be fatherless, a insult that is levied at Kang Ho and also his seven year old twin children Ye Jin and Seo Jin who Mi Joo lies to that their father is a nail salon owner in the US. The twins are the creepily precocious kind, but Ye Jin is smart enough to tell Mi Joo to just get divorced from the man who clearly doesn't care about them and they'll live a good life without them. It's really awful that the drama makes this smart observant 7 year old man crazy and spending the majority of the time obsessed with marrying the guy she doesn't know is her biological father. That's not cute, it's just weird. It's also a big misstep in not showing a scene of Kang Ho finally introducing himself to the twins as their father and Young Soon as their grandmother, having a scene of their family finally formally together before they have the final celebration with the extended village family. There was time that rightly showed the love hate sibling like bond between Young Soon and all the villagers, but shortchanged the bond between the direct family members. Lion the pig also disappeared even though the pig was in the main opening sequence for every ep and was part of the story for so long. Could have shown her giving birth to the piglet that Kang Ho uses to propose at the end or something. Kang Ho also loses his job as a prosecutor and it looks like he becomes a pig farmer like his parents, with no mention of Mi Joo settling her major financial problems after being scammed by her former work best friend. They could have even thrown in a line to tie that up.

The tone of the series is really all over the place. It would go to very dark desperate places like Young Soon contemplating murder suicide to hanging herself to motivate Kang Ho to stand to then the annoying antics of Sam Sik and the bumbling goons who bumbled their way into becoming cabbage farmers. The more serious of the goons becomes a major whistleblower for Kang Ho. Yet again the show was missing a scene where the goon hits the final straw with a hit ordered on him to get him to the whistleblowing point. It was at least a little amusing to see that they found their calling as cabbage growing savants, but Sam Sik was just awful the entire time. A spoiled son that ends the drama having transferred his obsessive infatuation to Ha Young who is serving time for having incriminated herself in order to bring her father down. She's an interesting character who was also spoiled and haughty but melted to Kang Ho's seeming care for her. She does have a soul being haunted by her role in Kang Ho's attempted murder and seeing how corrupt and murderous her father is. She doesn't deserve to have Sam Sik being foisted on her though. The gag that the village chief's wife always covered her face with sheet masks and face masks because she is a Japanese mob boss's daughter didn't go anywhere. Her skills and resources was entirely unutilized and her character was just used as a sight gag the whole time.