Watching the first 3 double episodes I was thinking that this show was hugely underrated, it was insanely fun. However as the story progressed I started to feel bored & by the time I reached the end there were more negatives than positives. The love triangle isn't good, the leads did not really have a good chemistry, once they started a more cordial and friendly relationship. Also the writers kind of given up on the timeloops quite early on and instead we delved into office politics & corporate in fighting. I'm yet to enjoy office politics in a kdrama and the focus shifted onto this way too much. The last few episodes were a clichefest with a lot of "noble" intention. Even though there is a happy ending, it's the rushed 10 minutes long unsatisfying kind.

Thumbs up for it being a time travel drama that does not feature any Joseon hats.

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This is everything I want a romcom to be. It's really funny, it's heartwarming, there is no angst whatsoever and the ending is beautiful. The leads have good chemistry and the show does not have a stupid love triangle, the second ML gives up fast enough not to be a bother. Although the supporting cast was not important in this one, they were nonetheless all excellent. Simply put this drama is fun from beginning to end.

The cinematography is very good and even though the OST is a bit repetitive at times, it's still above average.
All the actors are extremely pretty too, although that's no surprise considering how large a pool China has when it comes to selecting actors.

For comparison's sake, this one is much better than O2O. Comparing it with "A Love so Beautiful" is a bit harder, but I would say that this one wins, because a.) There is no Wu Busong b.) There is no stupid separation plot.

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edit: Today, nearly a year after writing this review I have learned that there is a special followup episode that every fan should watch. On MDL it can be found as the "Put Your Head On My Shoulder Special Episode".

edit2: The webnovel has been recommended to me, so I have read that today in 2022. I was told that it's completely different from the drama etc. It was actually quite a surreal reading experience for me, I think "Put Your Head on My Smug Shoulder" would be a fine title for the webnovel :-). Largely the same events happen to people that have the same professions, interests & names, but have COMPLETELY different personalities. The drama is basically a cute fluff, with the leads having really mild personalities. Not in the novel though, the leads are basically cats & dogs quarreling all the time, it's actually quite funny and the novel becomes rather raunchy reaching the later chapters. The only thing that I disliked about the novel is how much worse Fu Pei's character is than in the drama. I don't know which one I like more, probably the drama, because of Fu Pei & the studying abroad thing was handled worse in the novel. Still it's an apples and oranges comparison, it's quite fascinating, how much of a difference the dialog can make, even if the plot is the same.

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Yawn.

I tend to love conflict free cdrama romcoms. This show however is not a comedy at all, but as it happens I also like slow-burn melodramatic shows, as long as they are low on the makjang & that certainly applies to this one. So why is it that my rating stopped at 5.5? Well, in my opinion this is a fairly boring show overall, I fell asleep multiple times watching it. The romance is basically a Hallmark tier love story. Yes the actors had pretty good chemistry & looked great together in the second half of the show, though I do think they took their sweet time to get comfortable around each other, thus the early episodes were far worse than the later episodes because of that reason. I've been told repeatedly that me finding the romance boring in this one is because I wanted more conflicts & love triangles and whatnot. I assure you all that is not the case, this drama is just really mediocre compared to some of the better recent and similarly conflict free cdrama romance stories. (for example "Meet Yourself" or "Hi Venus")

If I look at things outside of the OTP romance, the drama is really really annoying on multiple levels. It feels like it was funded by the police/government to help find partners for officers and perhaps just to aid with recruitment, as such there is all kinds of social engineering in the show.
Also the amount of patriotism presented is on another level. My tolerance is very high in this regard, because American shows tend to have a lot as well and I grew up watching those, but good grief, there is really an immense amount here..
One other thing I hated how the writers dealt with the -toxic- fathers. Basically both of them decided to just suddenly stop being toxic & that's it. (this makes literally 0 sense based on the plot up to that point)

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it's the best slice of life cdrama I've seen, but with some heavy political undertones.

The Good
⌲ The overall top tier acting
⌲ The excellent OTP romance
⌲ The outstanding side characters
⌲ The out of this world good cat actors!
⌲ The fantastic OST
⌲ The incredible mood
⌲ The incredible visuals
⌲ The Fantastic sismances
⌲ Li Xian is far more authentic here than in anything else I've seen him in before.
⌲ There is a lot of peace, healing and wholesome in this drama.
⌲ The outstanding child actors
⌲ The dialog is rather incredible at times.

The Average
⌲ While the village looks incredible, it feels very artificial.
⌲ Nana's unreasonable netizen backstory
⌲ Hong Dou's homestay has some weird plot issues. (it's admittedly not too important)
⌲ The plot itself is very simple and predictable. (also not that important)
⌲ I'm being nitpicky here, but I think that plum? harvest episode was a bit poorly done.

The Bad
⌲ There is a lot of political content in the drama. (the cdramas I typically watch are better in this regard)
⌲ This relates to the previous point, but there is abundant cleverly done & some rather blatant social engineering in the show (and this bothered me quite a bit at times)

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The Mainland reimagination of Someday Or One Day

This drama is obviously very strongly inspired by Someday Or One Day, but in my opinion it cannot really hold a candle to it. One of the bigger problems is that the foundation of the plot is extremely unsteady. Specifically the time travel phenomenon has major problems. It doesn't really matter whether it's really time travel, or the implied alternate universe thing, things just don't add up, the FL is not making reasonable decisions based on either of those things. (Logically it's gotta be the second one, but if you think about that in detail, it becomes unreasonably dark and cruel real fast)
The first half of the drama is basically an extremely average high school cdrama, with all the problems those typically have and more. As per usual in good old cdrama fashion the "children" can only be "very good" friends and that's almost always tedious, at least when we don't transition to college life in a timely fashion. To add insult to injury beyond that we have ridiculous gangsters, even more ridiculous childhood connection flashbacks and finally an absolutely horrible second ML. Basically it's the same second ML character I've seen in Extraordinary You, but without the plot justifying his bullshit.
As for the OTP romance before the angsty parts started, I did just not feel it. Even if I completely ignore ML's stalker-y tendencies, I just could not get immersed in their romance. Based on the MDL comment section, the problem is probably with me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. On the plus side, had I been more immersed, the events following the 13-14 episode long high school part would have eviscerated me, bullet's dodged there.
The ending is one of the worst endings I have ever experienced and I'm not talking about the largely irrelevant final episode, but rather FL's depressing final attempt to save ML in the episodes preceding that. Just to reiterate again, if it's not time travel, but the multiverse thing, then it's just the absolute worst.

I enjoyed some of the second couple's moments, but they had no plot relevance whatsoever.

The minor sloppy, or silly things in the plot are quite numerous, but ultimately those are quite easy to ignore, except in the last episode. That episode felt like fan fiction. The final scene is once again not great and thinking about that in depth - beyond it being just FL's fantasy - leads to quite silly conclusions.

The production values are through the roof, this is a very pretty show and the OST is up there with the very best cdramas, though they sure neutered Eddy Kim's song quite a bit..

Someday Or One Day has one of the most beautiful romances I have ever seen, it's written much more cleverly, the plot is sequenced much better and that show has much more charm across the board, it feels like a work of art as opposed to the TV equivalent of pulp fiction.
This month has been dominated by time travel dramas for me, but this is the worst one of the 4 that I've seen(Shining, Someday, Rainless Love, Reset), still I don't regret watching Shining for One Thing.

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The writer did not bother to write a well thought out ending, why should I give this a high rating?

Okay, so the ending is just horribly bad. It's not just that I did not get the happy ending that I have wanted, but none of it makes any sense. BYJ leaves the sports department to be with her love NHD, joining the New York office is the bestest idea -also BYJ. I hugely dislike watching shows that are about first loves failing amicably, but I don't think this show ever wanted to be that. (otherwise they would've set things up differently) What I think happened is that the writer had no idea how to finish the story, so she kept procrastinating until the last two episodes & then just went with this knowing that no matter what she does, the commercial success of the show is not in danger anymore. Behavior like this is fairly common in Kdramaland, but this ending is truly one of the worst ones I've seen, in my opinion it's far worse than How I Met Your Mother's, there should be a blowback, right? Unfortunately I cannot do anything else other than writing this review & giving the show a low rating, so here we are!

If I want to be entirely honest, the ending is not the only problem with this drama. Yes, up until episode 10ish, up until HD made up with Go Yurim this was a 10/10 drama for me(Episode 9 was probably the best kdrama episode I've seen since IOTNBO's episode 3.), however after that, much of what made the drama so great has been toned down several notches. For example it would have been possible for me to partly ignore what happened with the OTP, if we would have gotten more fencing. Like I don't know, HD at the Olympics, HD at the Olympics for a second time. Could have even gone with some fairly standard plot with Evil Foreigner injuring GYR & HD having vengeance with her saber, there were endless possibilities to end this sports drama respectfully as a sports drama. Fencing was more than just cool up until episode 7-8.

So if you have have yet to watch this drama, should you watch it? Well, if you are not obsessed with getting closure, then yes you can watch the first 9 (perhaps even 10) episodes & then stop. Treat it like it's the American TV show Wonderfalls and just enjoy the ride. (Speaking of Wonderfalls, I should watch that again sometime soon)

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It's kind of bad, but not the worst.

The only overwhelmingly positive part of this drama is the FL's fun characterization, which Park Shin Hye clearly had a blast bringing to life. In the early episodes this was enough to carry the show, but as the episodes went by the increasingly declining plot with all the asspulls & absolutely insane sequence of events made it very difficult for me to keep enjoying the drama.
Boredom is also a problem, I for one did not enjoy that every other episode had 10 minutes worth of torture scenes/fillers. All the procedural parts were on the boring side as well.

There is not that much romance in this show, but what there is it's really not working for me, the chemistry is not there & the whole romantic plot feels incredibly forced.

As I said before the plot is crazy, but it's not like they suddenly piss off the viewers with something really annoying, it's more of a perpetual eye rolling situation.

As for why is a show that's just barely hitting mediocre so successful? I think similar to Squid Game the audience that is normally watching regular kdramas found all the action scenes & bloodletting a new-ish experience that's still different -in my mind far worse- than now aging American shows of this type. -\_(ツ)_/¯

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There were some amazing acting performances in this drama. I've always been a big fan of Gong Hyo Jin and she has been amazing here, she has shown (once again) that she has quite the acting range. The rest of the actors were great too, especially Hyangmi, but there are no -acting related- weak points really. It's worth noting that this is a very pretty show, the cinematography is just excellent.

Onto the bad stuff:
One of the biggest problems with this drama is that they've extended it to 20 episodes, all the filler stories that were used to fill up the additional 4 episodes were related to things I usually don't enjoy watching in a kdrama, namely Confucianism crap and an incredible amount of melo. I'm fine with watching melodramatic scenes in general, but this was just way too much, for way too long. There is also a shift in writing after XYZ's death, it's like all my favorite things in the show got dialed down to the bare minimum. Some characters got some personality & intelligence adjustments mid way and then in the finale everyone suddenly changed their world views for a super fast ending that was quite underwhelming. To sum it up the pacing is just off. The disadvantages of live filming were on a honking display here. Oh I almost forgot, the 30 million won thing, I have no words for how stupid that was..

So why do I still rate the show at 7.5?
Well, I enjoyed the first half (more like 2/3rds), there was quite a lot of "Monogatari style" dark moody, but funny dialog. The romance was great up to the point when Yongsik's mother started interfering with them. The balance was perfect between romance,comedy and mystery too up until XYZ died. Even though I'm not happy with the last 6~ episodes, I would feel bad to give a show this memorable a score any less than this.

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I feel that I wasted my time!

The Good
⌲ The main romance is alright, though there is not a whole lot of it.
⌲ The friendships
⌲ Muscular Teacher Watermelonface
⌲ No love triangles (though as I said, there is not that much romance to begin with)
⌲ Chae Soo Bin did not disappoint.

The Average
⌲ FL's family (heavy character adjustments here)
⌲ Tak's backstory
⌲ The underutilized Min Do Hee
⌲ Kang Daniel was bad, but I expected worse for his first appearance as an actor, he is not totally hopeless like Lee Minho.
⌲ The cleaning lady

The Bad
⌲ The crime/procedural part of the story is full of intelligence insulting plots. (Windows password 4 digits, copy protected video, lack of food during boot camp & countless others)
⌲ Corruption in kdramas is always portrayed in a really weird way, here it's worse than usual.
⌲ The first three episodes are about abuse by older students, this is no fun to watch, should not have wasted more than 30 minutes on that.
⌲ Assault is a crime, even in South Korea, Uhm Hyuk should be in prison not training cadets.
⌲ There is no satisfying conclusion, the ending is just whelming.
⌲ Dae Il's random romance with Hana
⌲ *'s meaningless death, I did not even feel sad, just confused.
⌲ The cadets investigating stuff.

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Relatively well written thiller, sponsored by RAZER©. (only minor spoilers below)

Okay so 8/10, objectively this should probably be worse, but for a CHINESE crime/thriller drama this is quite incredible, the best that I've seen thus far. Most of the plot is cleverly written and the acting ensemble is up there with the very best cdramas. Also it's extremely laudable that they did not try to explain the magic, how the time travel/loop aspect works, that always leads to unsolvable plotholes that they've nicely sidestepped here.

Speaking of plotholes there are quite a few non time travel related ones though. For instance, it's established that ML's parents exists & also that FL has a "home" to call. Does it make any sense that the police would not rally those people, not even once in any of the loops? Also why was the innocent truck driver held responsible?
The young hot headed police officer really behaved out of character in the last episodes.
Another nitpicky point is related to how the police attempts to stop the bus with cars pushing up against it with their tires spinning so fast that smoke is generated, that's not how physics works in real life :P
I could also talk about how incredibly competent the Chinese police is in this drama. L, L2 & their old master is nothing compared to the reaction time & intellect some of these policemen have. Normally I don't particularly care if Chinese nationalism, or some sort of political agenda shows up in a cdrama, but this was way too much for poor old me.

Besides the nitpicky problems I've highlighted above, I have three major problems why this is not 10/10 amazing.
The first is that in the first 5-6 episodes the police interrogations are way too draggy & it's annoying how the leads willingly walk into them without a plan. (We dutiful citizens must inform the police!)
The second is that the perpetrator backstory is utter garbage, in a bad kdrama-like fashion and not only is it garbage, but also an entire episode is wasted on it.
The third and final thing is that there is no peace for the leads, there is not much intermission. They had the option to chill, to mentally recover between more active, traumatizing loops, at least before they have become aware of a certain issue & they've not taken it once. In other timeloop stories those intermissions are often the best parts. (for example Jack kissing Carter in Stargate SG1 and many other intermission scenes in that episode)

As silly as the ending is & as much as it's not exactly the ending I've wanted, I enjoyed it very much despite how juvenile I felt it being. (I wanted the leads to produce some 40 minute long fluff after everything's over)

Based on reading other reviews before starting this show, I thought that this would barely have any romance. The reality defied my expectations, the romance is actually quite excellent here. Not only is it great how the OTP is bonding during literal life and death situations, but also their progress felt really natural. There was no silly courting & silly confessions, they have just become each other's everything after all that they've gone through. (It goes without saying that there is no time for a love triangle)

Some of the supporting characters were pretty mundane, borderline boring, but "Lu Apostle of Cat, Conqueror of Asthma, Chosen One of the Light, Di" is the absolute best drama side character in the history of dramas.
Then again it would have been way more unrealistic to have 8 super interesting individuals randomly show up on a random (or not so random!?) bus ride.

The rewatch value is low, because there is not all that much fun to be had after completely knowing the plot.

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This is not the worst thing I have ever seen from beginning to end, but it comes pretty close. If I look only at the main romance, then that's a decent 6/10 guilty pleasure with a minor twist, where the woman is the mysterious aloof one, not the other way around. The problem is that there is just too much padding. Later on there are episodes, where the main characters have less than 1 minute of screen time. Overall the part that I wanted to watch took up about 10% of the drama.
Even though the -extremely pretty- actors are okay in terms of acting skill, overall the characterization in the drama is just terribly bad. Most characters couldn't be any more 2 dimensional, I mean sure this is a fluff cdrama so I did not expect too much depth, however the writing is beyond terrible. Each storyline outside of the main romance and perhaps the hacker girl's stuff is dull, boring and uninspiring. The entire drama feels incredibly sloppy. It's like every second scene should have been reshot, but the director decided that it was "good enough" let's go home early today, which is a pretty big shame, considering that the production quality otherwise is quite good, they used high quality camera gear, hired a skilled cinematographer & the 2-3 original soundstracks were also up to standard.
There is also the issue of subtitles. The machine translated subs are enough to understand the story, but there are many fine nuances lost and there were times, when I couldn't make a sense of it.

I'm a bit baffled by some of the other reviews, perhaps ppl are just a bit too mesmerized by beauty? ^
If you are interested in watching a fluffy Chinese romcom look elsewhere. A Love So Beautiful, O2O, Put Your Head on My Shoulder are all infinitely better in almost every way.

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it's not in the same league with Hospital Playlist.

The Good:
-Seo Hyun Jin
-The show has charm.
-There is no love triangle.
-The head nurse and her ?ex-husband?

The Neutral:
-The romance is alright, but there is very little of it.
-It's not a very well researched medical drama
-The overdramatized surgeries
-I could just not warm up to Teacher Kim.
-Hospital Playlist is just a thousand times better in almost every way.

The Bad:
-There is not much plot beyond going from emergency to another emergency, but what plot there is, it is just pretty bad.
-The hospital politics
-In Bum is a somewhat poorly written character
-Surgeons do crazy non surgery related med things.
-The silly main villain
-There were way too many unreasonable BS characters.
-Yoo Yeon Seok's acting (It's crazy how much he has improved since this drama finished airing)
-The big cheating/drunk driving reveal never really happened.
-Seo Jung's PTSD faded into nothing. "It's alright, the audience won't remember!"

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It's a rather strong & quirky healing drama.

The Good
⌲ The acting is amazing across the board.
⌲ The leads had fantastic chemistry.
⌲ I'm just repeating myself at this point, but OMG the FL actress is just amazing. (11/10 pretty, 11/10 chic, 11/10 acting ability, similar to Jeon Jong Seo in Wedding Impossible)
⌲ In my mind the romance is 10/10.
⌲ There is a lot of wholesomeness & wholesome healing content in this drama.
⌲ The main plot is rather interesting.
⌲ The 12 episode format works well for this show. (though I would've preferred 13.. **)


The Average
⌲ The drama had some really cool superpowers, but using them in a cool way only happened like once. (Lois & Superman scene)
⌲ Adding to the previous point: The least fun use of mind reading I have ever seen
⌲ The fake fat was not great, though not horrible either.
⌲ The sister's boyfriend/marriage plot really overstayed its welcome.
⌲ I'm not entirely comfortable with the backstory about swindling/scamming, especially thinking about FL's relationship history, basically whoring herself out at the call of her "stepmother". (This leads to fun writing, but they could have made the background story less offensive without anything else degrading in quality I think.)
⌲ While 12 years old Park So Yi did an amazing job, she is completely miscast for the the high school adolescent role, she's way too young compared to her classmates, it's just jarring.

The Bad
⌲** I'm displeased about the 5 second happy ending & how it happened. (though considering where e11 was on the emotional roller coaster, I totally expected something like this to follow.)
⌲ The drama had some slow & boring moments. (admittedly not in a huge abundance)
⌲ I'm not happy about the redemption arc the stepmom has gotten. I for one don't think what she did to a child etc. is forgivable so easily.
⌲ I feel the writers pushed the chicken and egg paradox way too far.
⌲ In this drama the characters talk a lot about how abusing precognition to get lottery payouts is stealing. While technically true, I find this sentiment really silly.
⌲ ML driving his family members around with his car = awful.
⌲ Electric stovetops exist..

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40% sports, 60% romance

The Good
⌲ The top tier noona romance
⌲ The nice romantic plot in general
⌲ The chemistry between the leads
⌲ The lack of breakups
⌲ The high jumps were filmed very well, they looked very authentic to my eyes.
⌲ Jumping was more interesting than I thought it would be.
⌲ There is a lot off fluff.
⌲ The realistic progress of their relationship
⌲ ML is acting immature even for his age, but it's refreshing that Lou Na just likes younger clingy guys, it's not the usual 30 year old noona with the personality of a high school junior formula..

The Average
⌲ The love triangle (it's not bad, but the sML had a few rather annoying scenes)
⌲ Chinese sports dramas tend to be borderline unwatchable for me, this one may be better than usual, but the sports aspect is at best average. (training and coaching are rather strange..)
⌲ The supporting cast is rather numerous, but most of them faded into the background.
⌲ ML's mom (She is bad, but has so little screen time that I found her character tolerable)
⌲ Shi Yin (token -pointless- love interest for ML that just gave up without wasting too much screen time)
⌲ This may be a romantic comedy, but the comedy is not exactly fantastic.

The Bad
⌲ The party with the childhood photos
⌲ Li Ge (the drama could've been 4 episodes shorter & I would've rated it at 9 without this character existing)
⌲ The discipline switching, twice
⌲ Stealing a kiss from a sleeping woman..
⌲ Episode 24 is horribly bad. (rushed scandal BS to chase away the talented athlete, I'm surprised this passed the censors tbh)
⌲ The ending is less than whelming. (rushed happy ending following a senseless long distance thing)
⌲ The cinematography is fine, but the editing is horrid. (brightness, contrast, color grading)
⌲ Some things about sports & athleticism were extremely poorly researched, or just forcefully adjusted to fit the frame of the story.

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