Season: Summer 2022
Broadcast by: FujiTV
Rating: 2/10
Recommended for: NA
Liked:
- The first episode. If you had read my thoughts about that episode on Dorama World's Twitter and Facebook pages, you probably would remember how I praised it for being better than expected. If not for this episode, I would have given this drama a lower score.
Disliked:
- The story is the biggest issue. The warning signs were there but I still pressed on till the end, with the hope that the story would turn things around especially how Ep 1 had shown so much promise. On hindsight, it was clear that the story was not prepared to go to the extent of showing true "dissonance" and the romance was so lacking that it hardly met what a "junai" love story should be - the love between the leads was hardly considered pure nor heart-wrenching.
Often, the villains looked as if they would do something drastic and evil but all "pulled back or were pulled back" from going that final mile so every bad thing done just felt half-baked and the so-called "consequences" of the bad deeds hardly left an impact nor impression. To make it worse, there were times when there was no logical explanation on why someone behaved in a certain way or had a change of mind.
If the drama had been like this from the start, I think I would have been less frustrated and annoyed at it - at least there's consistency. To start off high and go all the way down, that's also a feat, albeit in a not-so-good way.
- Due to the limitations posed by the story, I thought some of the characters were not developed to their full potential so it was such a pity that they ended as forgettable roles. And that's a pity considering the cast this time who could do more than this. I was so looking forward to see how things would develop between Higa Manami and Sato Ryuuta's characters.
For example, the cynical Nitta Masaki who disappeared after Ep 1 - I thought this would have given Nakajima Yuuto a great chance to showcase the gap between the goody-two-shoes surface and the jaded and untrusting inner self. Although I understood that Nitta's pride and self confidence took a serious beating in the 5 years after he left his teaching job, the monologue scenes about Nitta's true feelings about the people around him and the world he was in helped in making the character more comprehensive and easier to understand so it wasn't surprising that the Nitta I saw from Ep 4 onwards felt so flat and one-dimensional.
Likewise for Sae, the spunky teenager just evolved to become a wishy-washy adult who seriously lacked that elusive charm for viewers to believe that she would have 2 men going gaga over her. I get it, she went through a lot in the 5 years but still... It also didn't help that the wardrobe and image design in her adult years were not so flattering to look at.
Manami's change to become a love story writer also felt terribly forced. It was not mentioned specifically why she chose this path as by the time she got together with Nitta, she was still the unglam version back in the high school arc. And the weird vibes between her and her elder brother - that was also never addressed which could have given an idea as to why she was so antagonistic towards Kosaka or developed an interest in Nitta.
Last but not least, Michika's hatred for Manami's father disappeared so quickly but there had to be some more build-up to explain how he grew to fall for her and forget about the past. And there really wasn't much of an explanation of any emotional turmoil he had when it came to putting down his revenge and choosing love instead. It seemed that he was more hung up over whether Manami could forget Nitta. Same goes for Manami's side - I find it a bit difficult to reconcile how things happened between them when there were just some "touch-and-go" interactions that hardly featured prominently in the story.
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