This drama makes a lot of cop outs during its 16 episodes to make the story work and even tries hard to drag it.

Igyeom is first set up as a fool who does stupid things like shouting in broad daylight at a tavern that he's a *Secret* Royal Inspector. Then gets transformed into a cool guy with amazing martial arts skills and a good mind for handling the investigations. Then does stupid things unlike his character to get in bad situations which creates artificial suspense (well only if you don't care for writing quality and do not notice where it faulters), or at times he forgets how good he is with martial arts and suddenly he's unable to defend himself(picture a dude with arms tied up playing around with 4 armed guards just with his legs free and then on another occasion he's not able to do anything with both hands and arms free and 4 unarmed guards with similar level of skill as the previous ones). And then he's back to being smart and seeing ahead.

Same thing happens with the other characters too in many situations. Don't even get me started on Nara's character.

Let me make an example. Like towards the end, ML goes to a slave market. Does not get any station guards with him to shut it down. Usually they only get the guards after they have some kind of evidence for it, which they find after investigating and infiltrating a place. This time though, the slave market itself is illegal by default. It is not a sanctioned gov prison, therefore so long as there's people inside cages, it's illegal. He then almost got captured because he trusted a corrupt official not to talk about his objectives to their corrupt governor who went personally to the slave market to capture him. Both slave trader and governor called him a royal secret agent to his face when trying to capture him so they made it known they knew his identity. ML escapes. He then waits for a full day before summoning guards to capture everyone, while bickering with his team about sending a woman back to Hanyang for her own good. Obviously the governor did everything anyone with an ounce of intelligence would and got both the slave the ML actually tried to save (a past lover) from the slave market as leverage and showed up on ML's way to the station guards and captured them. At that point there's a scene where the ML is super surprised after announcing his identity as the Royal Secret Inspector, that they already knew it, as if they didn't call him that in the past capture attempt at the slave market. And remember ML is supposed to be the intelligent secret spy. No consistency whatsoever. Had the ML been consistent he'd have gotten guards to shut the slave market down right then and there and would have proceeded to capture the governor afterwards having the people as witnesses. But bad quality writing uses such cop outs where the viewer is expected to turn a blind eye to such things.

This alone should give you an idea of the level of quality.

Honestly I only watched this because Lee Yi Kyung is in it. And he was about the only good thing of the drama. His character is a classic servant who's simplistic although does some good things once in a while and delivers the comedic relief in the show. He was one of the most consistent characters in there. He's not an actual moron, just very simplistic and not educated or into politics to be clever. Even if you don't think that's an excuse, at least he has way more excuses than the ML who's gone through all sorts of inconsistencies throughout the story. It'd be one thing had he played the fool while being intelligent to make everyone underestimate him, but that wasn't it at all.