Broadly speaking, I don’t mind Bai Lu and Wang Xing Yue in these roles as they go off working together to solve cases. Do I think that Bai Lu could enunciate better and have more emotion in this role? Yes. But it’s not horrible. I primarily have issues with how their characters were written.

Main female lead’s self destructive tendencies

I haven’t read the book the drama is based on so I don’t know if this is true to the original novel but the main female character, Li Pei Yi, is exceptionally self destructive and that bothers me a LOT.

Even in the opening scene, she uses her own life as bait and ended up in a VERY life threatening situation where she was also brutally maimed. However, in the next moment, she is saved, though with some self help as well and then she’s up and running with no problem. Despite having basically been nailed with wooden nails into a coffin. That…doesn’t seem like it’s something you can easily come back from without seriously causing harm to your body. But hey, we’ll go with it. She’s able to fight no problem in the next instant. This often happens in historical dramas where there’s so much plot armor when a main character gets injured. Yet in this drama, it’s almost too egregious to let go as there are multiple instances of where she uses her own body as bait where she should have been killed.

While the drama actually points out the fact that she IS self-destructive in order to solve a case (words directly from her mentor) and it IS a flaw of hers due to her childhood trauma, that doesn’t make her necessarily a character you want to root for. Why? Because she’s supposed to be running this detective department. She’s supposed to be smart and calm under stress. A lot of her tactics, while brave, come off as unintelligent and rash because she wasn’t able to use any other tactic to save herself and she also often needed others to save her, particularly the main male lead. Hence, while I admire her drive and willingness to solve the case, her methods of doing so honestly puts her below other star detectives in other recent dramas. 

What’s the main male leads role? Why is he even here?

There’s not a whole lot to complain about for Wang Xing Yue in this role. It’s one I feel like he’s comfortable with and he has played similar roles in other dramas. So my biggest question is…why is he even here??? His role is to be an imperial astrologer as a Tai Shi Cheng but why is he suddenly turning into a detective? He’ll use lines like “I don’t have to work tonight” in order to justify why he’s joining Li Pei Yi on stakeouts. It’s just super odd and out of place. I’m only 18 episodes in but I have a feeling he has another identity (well the plot synopsis on Baidu says that) so maybe that’s why it feels off. But at least for now, I’m like, you just seem so out of place here. 

Too many similar dramas that this doesn’t stand out

The challenge is that this drama comes off the heels of many similar dramas that are even set in similar time periods and sadly, at least with the first 2-3 cases, they don’t stand out. The main group is fun to watch as it’s always engaging when people are working together to solve cases that you know will inevitably be solved. But the twists are not too difficult to see and the underlying of the different cases are not too thought provoking. They have good messages yes, or at least try to unveil certain grotesque behaviors, but they’re similar to what we’ve seen in other dramas. Additionally, Li Pei Yi seems to be solving cases just for the sake of solving cases. She has her bar of what is right and wrong and that’s all fine and good, but the cases seem very black and white and she seems to go through the motions in order to get to her true motivation – learning about her family’s death. I don’t know. I think I’ll have to keep watching to see if it get’s better.