Let me begin with saying that I enjoyed watching this show, but after having watched some pretty great and recent cdramas that also had no OTP related love triangles & decent communication between the leads, I just don't think this one stands out. Calling it a clichefest might even be correct depending on one's point of view. I have read many Chinese webnovels over the past 10 years and this one has adopted MANY of the cliche things from those works, especially about doctors & soldiers. Technically the ML is part of a SWAT police unit, he is not really a soldier, but the things they do to train & the moving targets etc etc are the same that every one of those soldier MC novels have. Mi Ka as a doctor is even more outlandish. She is supposed to be a surgeon, or aiming to be a neurosurgeon to be more specific. However not only is she a talented surgeon, but also a diagnostician on the level of Dr House MD. Her goals as a doctor are not exactly consistent all the way through the series and there are lots of crazy things she has done and is expected to do. Mr Miyagi sending her to the emergency surgery department (could be a mistranslation, because that's a strange, but not impossible department for a hospital to have) for her own good is just plain stupid.
If I were unfamiliar with Chinese pulp fiction, I would just assume that the medical things occurring in this drama were poorly researched.

All of the above doesn't bother me too much. The reason why I don't think this drama is so great is that that there were quite a few annoying things. The second couple's story makes no sense at all. Not only is their weirdly undefined relationship dragged on and on forever, there is even a pretty annoying love triangle..
The leads seem to have had a decent chemistry, however it took too long for them to get together and once they were together they kept being really awkward with each other for like 10+ episodes.
Naturally this drama too needed to have a 2 years long forced separation plot, because studying abroad as a relatively senior resident doctor is an absolute must.
Episode 6 was so bad that I almost dropped this drama out of anger there and then. (see the end of this review for more information)
3 episodes were wasted on the bitchy Shen sisters, that's 2 hours of my life I'm not getting back.

Calling the overall plot draggy would be unfair, but long action(medical action, or police raids) sequences were frequently used as fillers. These weren't boring too watch, in fact the early ones were quite great, but after waiting for some foreshadowed progress to finally happen sidetracking this way is not what I wanted to see.

The OST could have been more exciting, I would say it's below average compared to other cdramas that I've seen that have come out in the last 2 years.

The good things that everyone is saying about the drama are not all wrong. The leads and second leads were really great at their roles. The entire cast is great, pretty much all the supporting actors were more than on point. The visuals, the cinematography were just awesome. The typical flaws of Chinese cinematography were completely absent.
The OTP did indeed communicate rather well & they had quite a few borderline brilliant scenes. I really liked the FL's appearance. She looked like how a normal (admittedly pretty) doctor would look like, as opposed to the nation's little sister pretending to be a busy resident, while sporting a 2h hairdo.

DotS has its flaws, but I think that's a way more fun drama overall. (not like comparing these two dramas makes a whole lot of sense though)

I thought about giving the show a little higher rating, but decided it's too highly rated anyway and I will never rewatch this, nor do I feel the usual feels after having completed a truly great drama.



This is the comment I wrote while watching episode 6:
I just picked this up. I'm watching ep6 right now. I'm not saying that I don't like the show, but what kind of crap hospital is this. Queue at a lift, so they cannot take a patient recovering from brain surgery to the ICU? Netizens not understanding that brain damage takes priority over a broken arm? Let's not even talk about the transfer. It's just a plain stupid episode so far.
(in a real hospital there are enough lifts and if not people with minor issues can just walk up the stairs.)