I fell in love with the drama after watching the first episode...it had that genre-bending feeling. 2nd and 3rd episode retained that horror, mystery element. And though things changed afterward, I still enjoyed it till the 8th episode. Then it faltered. I admire that they tried to stretch the story to the end but so not effectively that it hurts! Unlike many, I was waiting for the romance and Lee Jin-uk and Kown Nara have a really nice chemistry in my opinion and that is despite the vague writing that they got.
The idea of reincarnation is tricky and if not dealt with tact, feels stupid. Without their memories, none of the characters are what they were in their past lives. The 1000-year timeline is so long that it minimizes the connections in between. The relationship between Dan Hawl and Sol could have been explored more. The romance of Hawl and Sangun could have been more mature and direct, after all, they are grownups and the fatalistic outlook towards their relationship felt weird to me. I don't know if Lee Joon worked too hard for a character that is written in such a lackluster fashion, but he created a buzz that the story couldn't justify, so all his eccentricity gets reduced to a certain sort of nuttiness! No motive just wishful thinking and an unbelievably adamant belief in his victimhood. The monsters had no underlying plot, they just exist and Hawl just kills them...for episodes of running from them, this is disappointingly underwhelming. By episode 12 I sort of lost hope about how they'd wrap it in only 4 episodes and rightfully so.
But they did provide some nice moments- especially Hawl's revisiting of Ms. Lee's life and Sangun's following comforting scene is a highlight of mine from the later episodes. What I don't like in many k dramas is how the story ends long before its runtime (maybe I haven't watched many) so, I liked how they were keeping the plot tight but who knew that would be a double-edged sword?-_- The only redeeming quality is the performance of the cast which I thoroughly enjoyed. Even in the most childish scenes Nara and Jinuk had a gravity, their 1000 year past selves weren't even given any time, they just stand and stare at each other and it still worked!
It started off with such a promise and went on with this gusto that I hoped they have something decent for us in the end but that was a misplaced hope. 50 years from now is stretching it so far that it literally doesn't make any impact. The ideal ending would have been in the present. Everything turned so flimsy in the end, I feel like if 1000 years ago Sangun told Hawl that she's leaving him for 20 something years and would come back later- none of this would have happened...or if Hawl tasted a drop of blood somewhere he could have remembered everything much easier and early. And now that I'm thinking I don't know why Ok Eul Tae couldn't kill this version of Sangun, what was the catch?
I guess the victory of the show is in the fact that after this myriad of complaints, I'm still going to say that I mostly liked it. I liked the initial suspense, the pretty visuals, the amazing OST and mostly, the acting. I wish they had done justice to all these great elements by writing a decent plot that in the end wouldn't just fall flat like this.