SO...clearly a lot of people put a lot of effort into making this drama, and I fully respect that effort. However, this drama was pretty poorly executed. The story was long and drawn out with lots of inconsistencies and super slow parts. I think the flaw though was the role written for the female lead. It's pretty incompatible with the role written for the male lead. There didn't seem to be a lot of chemistry between the female and male lead, I believe the issue is primarily in the way the script depicted them both.

While the story is standard enough, a spy who falls in love and wants to give up the spy life to pursue love, it's the love part that is its downfall. The spy is pretty clever and does all sorts of clever spy things....but the female lead is portrayed as a complete simpering idiot.....not in a loveable way, in a pretty obnoxious way. She seems to have a few skills and they could have made her pretty clever too, but instead they have her be an obnoxious, judgy, lovesick, bimbo...and it's pretty annoying to watch. There doesn't really seem to be anything in her personality or appearance that the spy would be able to fall in love with, especially not in the represented timeframe. She's basic as shit.

When you start with a flawed premise, the things that follow become flawed as well...the viewer is expected to suspend disbelief not only with the normal spy never dies and overcomes all odds shit, but also with the main love premise of the show, it's too much. I don't think casting a different female lead would have made a difference, I think the material she was given to work with was inherently flawed.

The side characters were actually pretty well written. Dark Death and his long lost love were both very fun to watch and their interactions were stellar....though her suddenly being accepted and taken into confidence by her estraned bad guy husband was a little hard to believe. The male spy handler dude was pretty well written as well and provided the only highly limited comic relief in this dry inconsistent drama.

Overall, I would not recommend this drama over most of the dramas I've seen and I for sure would never force myself to slog through it again. 5-stars might be too high, but I wanted to at least respect the effort that went into makingit.