Shin Sae Kyeong (SSK) ruined the show. With a good actress, even the most ridiculous plotlines would've made the show exponentially better. SSK just can't act. She has one facial expression and her mouth is always open. If the sound was on mute, we wouldn't known whether Mongwoo was happy, sad, horny, or constipated. She had no personality and her face always looked the same because of SSK's stiff acting. Half-way through, it was impossible to ignore her overbite and teeth always showing. I don't blame the actress because it was the director's or producer's, or whoever was in charge, responsibility to manage her and to tell her to keep her mouth closed. I am absolutely flabbergasted that they thought her mouth being open in every scene was ok. Even Jo Jung Suk, being the superb actor that he is, couldn't save the show. When one person spills his heart out and the other one just stares blankly, it completely kills the chemistry and any romantic mood.

Let me emphasize that the gender bender/cross dressing trope is ridiculous and outdated. It is also very suspect. Dramas where a man is trapped in a woman's body and has a romantic/sexual relationship with another man get ruined by bad endings because the producers try to make them less gay. But, apparently, it's not gay at all to have a man liking a woman pretending to be a man. Totally not gay, because he is actually a she, right? Not really, considering that the guy who is having a crush thinks he is interacting with another guy and keeps questioning his own sexuality. If the show was set today, poor king Jinhan would be erratically taking internet quizzes to convince himself he was not gay.

The king should've found out that Mongwoo was a woman after she came back from the dead to eliminate any bias and identity crisis. This is not to mention that SSK was completely unconvincing as a man, as most women are. There were plenty of opportunities for Jinhan to find out early that she was a woman, like when he grabbed her hand and commented on how delicate it was. His ridiculous conclusion was that she was from a rich family, instead of questioning her gender. Any sane person at that point would've already had a pause, but the writers insisted he remained in the dark to drag the tension out for as long as possible.

The revenge plot was also nonsensical. They spent half the show talking about revenge and not doing anything. It was unclear why they even wanted revenge and what the king did for them to seek revenge. Mongwoo was portrayed as an intelligent person, but her motivations were very narrow-minded. I have no idea why she disliked Myung Ha. All he did was love her and wanted to marry her. Even forging the confession letter was done to protect her from being tortured. It seemed that she judged people's character based solely on their ability to play baduk, which made her very shallow and elitist.

Overall, bad acting, stupid tropes, and a boring and badly written plot make this drama a hard pass.