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As close to perfect as a drama could be. Great storyline, suspense, cinematography, acting, soundtrack. Characterisation is excellent, every one of the soldiers is different, nuanced and you could root for their various personalities, even the captain, stuck between a rock and a hard place. The male lead Dong Yoon Jang is excellent, completely believable as a sweet, fun loving, not-the-brightest guy who lights up when he gets to talk about nature and animals. The ex-soldier mother is great too, great to see all the women as smart and well rounded as the men. Very sad its over!!! Loads of scope for Season 2!!!

Great acting all-round, great stunts, great driving soundtrack, subtle comedy, witty dialogues, excellent movie.

I am a big fan of Lee Dong Wook, I think he has great range as an actor. He can do sweet and normal man-next-door (all his rom-coms), he can do dead-pan comedy (everything he's in, if needs be), he can do tortured soul (la dolce vita, goblin, hotel king), he can do boring work-obsessed doctor (Life). All brilliantly. I found this series appalling, almost unwatchable. Stupid story, ridiculous acting (by him), painful love story. I think he should choose his projects more carefully.

I am a relative newbie to Korean drama and continually being delighted with the gems I find. Utterly different in style and content to Western ones and superior in many respects. This series takes AGES to get going, mostly because the female lead's character is practically non-existent and thus boring to watch, until you understand why she is the way she is, a meek woman cowed by years of emotional abuse and betrayal by a bully of a husband. She develops brilliantly as she escapes his clutches to become an independant woman. Lee Dong Wook is outstanding as an emotionally scarred man with a horrible past he can't escape. First a rotten childhood and then he ends up being the sidekick to a vicious chaebol heir who treats him as his personal slave and worse. He plays everyone from lad-about-town, psychopath, crazed lover to tortured soul and I found him utterly believable. The end is harrowing. I am not giving a spoiler, its in the synopsis and its the first five minutes of episode 1. Despite finally having something to live for, he can't overcome the cruelty he suffered in the past and his complicity in some of it. Or his destructive and unhealthy relationship with the heir. Few western dramas would end the way this one did, they wouldn't be brave enough. Don't watch it for fun because theres not much of that. I still thinking of this long after watching it. Powerful.

My expectations were not very high as I thought it would be fairly superficial and glamorous (read silly) but the series was excellent. Lots of clever plot twists, some somewhat unbelievable but it never got boring. The two leads were very good, Lee Dong Wook and Lee Da-hae, they had lots of raw emotional acting to do, and they really developed as characters along the way. Right to the end, it was hard to predict how the plot was going to play out, and i was glued to the screen for all 33 hours. A pleasure.

I like serious drama and loved two other Kdramas, Life (Laipeau) and Strangers. Courtesy of Netflix, I've dipped into several other Kdramas and found them unwatchable because of the high degree of silliness, by which I mean overacting, drippy over-emotional men, women who behave like school girls, painful rom-com plotlines that drag on forever. Perhaps this is a cultural problem on my part. This series was halfway between serious and silly. It had two superb engaging storylines, those of the goblin and the grim reaper, with lovely melding of the past and the present for this two characterters. But the love story between the goblin and his bride I found interminably boring and repetitive, boy toys with girl ad nauseum, and the grim reapers story was dragged out too. I know from Life that Lee Dong Wook is an outstanding actor, but I wouldn't have guessed it from this series where all he did was cry for the most part. Again maybe its my cultural problem but I like my men to be men and women not to be stupid. The end though was gripping and emotional. I regret wasting so much of my life watching this though. They could have done the job in 8 episodes if they had cut out the silliness.

I am new to KDramas thanks to Netflix and am thrilled with the quality of (some) of them. I watched this because I was impressed with Seung-woo Cho in Life (Laipeau), where he (along with Lee Dong Wook and everyone else) was superb. I also know Doona Bae from Sense8. Its an excellent series, complex and gripping, and full of twists and turns which keep things interesting. The two leads work really well together, her warmth and humanity versus his aloofness. Brilliant characterisations and the same excellent acting I am beginning to see across many Kdramas ( in truth, the same actors too, as there seems to be a pool of actors reused across many series! - and why not, they are great). Nail-biting finish, which is an achievement after 16 long episodes. If you like serious intelligent crime series with good detective work and no silliness (which Kdramas tend towards), then this is for you. And theres lovely subtle humour too, stemming from the interaction between the two leads, who couldn't be more different.

This series has an amazing ensemble cast, all individually outstanding actors, who work together brilliantly. The first half of the series was gripping, tense and had a real sense of foreboding about what was to come wrt the Chairman and his meglomaniac control of the hospital. The various subplots, the relationship between the Ye brothers, the budding romance between no Eul and Mr Gu, the under-appreciated Organ donor officer, the whole question of whether Mr. Gu was a decent man or merely duplicitous, were all enthralling and entirely believable. But then it seemed to lose its way. Without wishing to spoil anything, the series ended with NOTHING happening. A minor boardroom skirmish at best and a lot of unfinished storylines. I hope there will be a second series because the first established some fabulous characters and storylines. The series has such potential and such great acting that it would be a shame if it just stops where it did. First time for me to view a Korean drama and I enjoyed how stylish and slick the cinematography was and how unusual the editing is, relative to western tv. Well worth a binge.