There are some episodes with too slow timing, some episodes are obviously tear squeezers, but on the whole the production is not sickeningly maudlin. It may not be the best TK dorama, but it's not the worst either.
Many details of the plot do not hold water. For example, Yuri Maroev seems to sound vaguely Russian (though the cinematographers stick to choosing nonsense names, God knows why when there’s so much info and databases on Russia available), Yuri and his father speak a stretch in Russian, and the Urals is a mountain chain dividing Europe from Asia and situated in Russia. It beats me how those supposed Russians look like the Japanese and behave like the Japanese, and nobody recognizes them as aliens in Japan. By the way, the other terrorists also look like people of clearly Japanese, Chinese or maybe Korean origin.
I also don’t understand why Yuri bears a Russian name, his brother Samile (Shamil?) a Chechen Moslem name, his mother Emily Rynn – an Anglophone name, and his younger brother and sister – Japanese-sounding names, e.g. Omoru. So we are dealing with a Eurasian country speaking Russian, but not possessing population of Russian origin? How did the Japanese get to the Urals in such quantities as to create a separate state there? Why did they take up Russian and forget their mother tongue?
Not to mention the fact that Russians (even quasi-Russians) again pose as bad guys, backing terrorism throughout the world. A cliché, and I won’t even mention that for people of Russia this isn’t a very pleasant and even offensive stereotype, which, like every stereotype, is rather a misconception. And not to mention the fact that the country run by Russians presumably MUST be totalitarian, cruel, poor and immoral. Then, why the Ural Republic? Are the Urals no longer Russian? What’s happened to my country, may I ask? Did it disintegrate (when? I’m unaware of the fact), was it taken over by somebody else? Does it still exist?
Only the fact that Yuri turns out to be strong-willed, persevering, but amiable and loving, torn and suffering, true and noble reconciles me with the plot to some extent.
What I liked – Miho’s tenacity in defending her love and her beloved, her resilience and strength of character. Yuri played by Takeshi Kaneshiro shows a varied emotional palette, and, as I said, is lovable. He alone saves the audience from branding all Russians as immoral scum and renegade spooks of the world. By the way, he honestly struggles through several sentences in Russian (and it’s a hard task for a person with the language background entirely different from Russian), and though it’s not his fault that these sentences are ‘dead’, sterile, ‘plastic’ (no one speaks in such artificial but grammatically correct sentences), and though the intonation is entirely wrong, he demonstrates a charming accent.
What I disliked – the things already mentioned, and the fact that there’s no ‘touch of nutmeg’ in TK’s acting. He’s emotionally rich, skillful in portraying the torment of his character, but there’s not a single ‘giveaway’ thing about him – nothing prompts that for Japan he is a foreigner, no gestures, facial expressions, tilts of head, mannerisms of Russians, no ‘devil-may-care’ fire in his eyes that appears in Russian eyes when we throw everything to the wind embarking on a desperate scheme – be it love or war. No abandon, no burst of fire, where there must have been at least one. Instead he’s as impenetrable and unreadable as a native Japanese when he faces a crisis. Not so with Russians, our faces are more tell-tale. On the whole, he certainly has the chemistry and the magic, he’s the main attraction of the film, an eye-candy as usual.
