Kim Jun is the son of an escaped palace slave, who gets raised by monks. Years later, after being torn from his home during wartime, Kim Jun must renounce hispacifist ways to partake in a deadly game that could be his ticket to freedom from his masters, Choe Chung-heon's clan. During the Mongol invasions of Korea, Kim Jun rises in the ranks to become the top military official, and eventually rules the Goryeo empire for 60 years in place of its king.
They shouldn't have had made Wol Ah / An Shim be played by the same actress regardless of their intent to have have them share resemblance to one another. Wol Ah had her own role and was a turning point in the story. Since An Shim came to the picture, up until the end she was nothing but Wol Ah's replacement and had no real character. The drama, unsurprisingly, shared a common problem with others of the same genre. The drama started with the backstory and the hero journey but later on it striped the personal attachments and turned it into a battlefield between nations instead of mixing both elements together. It got turned around the other way back and forth 4 more times, making each transition more jarring than the last. This is why there was a massive disconnect after the timeskip in the early second 1/3. In addition, the last 15 episodes were too long to endure.
