I am a fan of the Di Renjie franchise and have mixed feelings about this because I saw the potential of this drama from the very first episode but unfortunately, it didn't follow through. Let's break it down.

1. Pacing and cases:
4 episodes for every case was damn long and sometimes plain boring, (with material on ground, they could have done 2 episodes per case and still not run out by the 100th episode fr) out of all his most interesting cases, these ones are the most bland. Come on, Di Renjie had empire shaking cases straight up from his origin days, but what's this? I could barely keep my eyes open halfway through the show because everything was so predictable.

2. Wu Zetian:
Normally, Renjie's stories focus entirely on him and push the empress to the background, but based on the first episode, I saw potential for different here but unfortunately, it didn't pan out.

3. Very good acting (slowpoke in the last few episodes, but I'll take that over cheesy any day), cinematography and clearly an expensive set. Gotta give it up to the actors, they tried with what they were given. You could tell they were trying to make Di Renjie look (I don't know if look is the word here 😂) 'human' away from his Obsessed God of Solving Cases vibez but I don't know if it was a success, depends on who's watching.

Conclusion:
It was a good drama, but it could have been better. I am conflict about the rating so I just gave it a high based on acting.