Summer Time Rendering

I'll start from the premise. What is Summer Time Rendering? It's a show about a boy who left their hometown and love interest to study in a different city, and he goes back home a few years after, after getting news of his love interest's death, and interestingly he had a recent message from her too. Somehow though, on the trip back he's been mysteriously given this power to rewind time and he sees a vision of his love interest. It's a story of a guy trying to figure out what happened to his love interest and finding out a secret cabal of otherworldly creatures in the process.

There also seem to have been a series of disappearances on the island, including the protagonist's parents. Apparently there exist these "creatures"(?) called shadows that can take the form of a human and their memories and absorb them, replacing them.

So far so good, right? Seems like a v cool premise for a mystery show with a side of horror and using time travel to advance said plot, even better because at the end of the second or third episode the protagonist gets marked by the likely antagonist (Haine) so they can now follow them through loops allegedly. That sounds like it might lead to an interesting spooky conflict as the tensions rise, riiiiight? wrong, it's an action show now babyyyyy and a poor one at that.
So the problems start fairly early on, the protagonist learns about shadows from a fairly secretive source, how they're this curse or something and anyone could be a shadow more or less (they call it Shadow Sickness). What does the protagonist proceed to do? Ask people about "shadows" at the funeral broad in the open. The character's intelligence has been defined by this action to me as a watcher. Not helping that is the fact he keeps doing the same mistakes after, re-learning the same lessons and wasting his ability away as well. He also learns through this constant failure process that his loop distance keeps getting closer from the point he got on the island, this sets a fun urgency to the plot, but it's got no basis on the time spent in a loop, because in some of them he stays for a few hours, in some days, and the time span shortens for about the same length, as much as the plot requires it to. This also means many of his mistakes get set in stone for later. Anyway I'll talk about supernatural elements more in a bit, for now I'll focus on character. The protagonist goes from not putting two and two together without dying a few times to setting full on inter-loop plans in the last third of the show, while the first half of the series it keeps retreading the same ground constantly and over explaining things, the last third keeps "surprising" the watcher by showing you something happening and then showing you the characters planning said events afterwards. He goes from a fool to a mastermind with no character development inbetween.

This all doesn't help the fact that he's just very uninteresting, one of the most boring characters I've seen in a mystery show. He feels like a filler character, he's only defined by his ponytail, his wish to help and his visual appearance of his eye. Oh also his constant use of the phrase "bird's eye view".
The other characters are fine, the worst is his sibling who's got feelings for them and that's the extent of that character. there's a love triangle. in my mystery show. hurray.
The mystery factor was very interesting for a while, I was quite on board even up to the reveal of the bad guy's world thing, i actually thought they'd go with the antagonist being a victim of WW2 and how that's affected them and their path, since bomber planes are part of this fake world they go into, but no. he's just an evil old dude using Haine (who goes from this force of nature to misunderstood child) to gain immortality. We went as an antagonist from an ominous otherworldly creature that creates Shadows to a sus dude. worst case of a scooby doo moment. Anyway the big plot with the mystery is Haine has been there on the island for decades, the morgue feeds her dead people and she's been getting hungrier lately. She wants to kill everyone and take them as shadows to her world when she leaves. I think? Because she also seems to phrase it like she needs to kill everyone to use them to get home as well, so I'm unsure.
Now let's get into the meat of this review, the supernatural aspect of the show, or where everything falls apart.

1. I'll start with the main character. So, I'm not too sure if this is a power - it never gets explained, the mc just does it. At some points the scene will have a blue hue and he'll float above himself basically and i think this is his "bird's eye view", it helps him think? idk just looks like jojo stands, it's a weird way to show internal thinking.
2. The time travel ability, the protagonist finds out some details about its source, but that's not relevant, what is relevant is that the power is really at the whims of the character, and not in a "they have the freedom to do what they want", no, the character asserts at one point - with no basis - how the power works in a very bold assertion (how if he loops then gets killed too soon after so his "loop back difference" puts him behind the point he just looped to he will die?) and the world just bows to his will, and it makes it so. I honestly just asked "based on?" whenever the character referred back to this theory until it was actually referenced by the bad guy later in the show. He also does the same thing with saying if he kills Haine the other shadows die too. If he said these were assumptions, I'd be fine with that, but he says them with such conviction as if he knew the truth.
3. There's also the power of shadows. So shadows have a main body (the shadow on the ground), and a fake body (the human), the main body and the fake one are connected HP-wise, so if the main body is hurt, the human body will be hurt too, and vice versa. They can however re-scan the source of their body and heal from that. Or they can "print" objects they've memorized, like guns. The issue is this ability has no limit other than range and knowledge. It's just crazy that they only utilize it to make some more nail guns basically.
   Spoiler, click to viewclick to hide

   Oh and a funny bit, at one point the protagonist wants to shoot at an enemy sitting across a ravine, with shadow made bullets. The distance is too long, and the character says as much after seeing the bullet fizzle mid-air, however the shadow who created these items moves like 15m towards the edge of that ravine, and the protagonist doesn't think to try shooting again. bonkers.
4. Lastly though, the worst of them all, shadow detection. It gets established early on that humans and shadow's human body look identical. the way to differentiate the two is pay attention to the shadow's main body - the shadow on the ground. If it avoids being stepped on and such, it's a shadow. All well and good, but that also only gets used like once within the same episode and then never again. Not only that, but at one point they fight a shadow-y creature and they lop off a chunk of shadowy mass, see a human body and assert that that is indeed a human in there. They cannot see their shadow, they have no way of knowing this. It also makes no sense because that specific character was remotely piloting that thing too (we find this out in the last episode more or less), they only added that bit to lead the plot into a specific direction, and that's my main issue with this show:

It feels like it was written backwards, they wanted some specific moments to happen, instead of setting up the stage and letting characters live in there. There's numerous times where the plot just bends over backwards to have the characters reach a certain point and it's just full of inconsistencies. Like the antagonist hunting for the MC or not based on if the tension is too low or too high overall in the show or not yet. It just felt very much like a first draft kind of show, if there even was one.
For example, the shadows go from "evil things killing just for the sake of killing" to "ok they kinda act like humans how do we feel about that" with basically no build up, the friendly shadow they had can reverse gaslight enemy shadows into not being murder hobos basically and that's a good thing. It's clear they wanted to engage in a debate about what it means to be human, and if a creature that showed up with all of your memories, would that be you? in a very ship of theseus way. but sadly there's no room for such a topic after we watched the first episode and saw the shadows make a pile of corpses out of these poor townspeople.
Overall I was v disappointed to see how good of a reception this show had, I had high hopes from the first episode but it all kinde dropped off fast. The mystery was ok but we needed a smarter character to not waste half the show on basic stuff to explore that, the characters were at best bland and at worst moronic. The combat choreography was decent but this ain't no action anime if you know what i mean. The show keeps being pulled in multiple directions and it just didn't know what to do with itself for most of the runtime, and when it got an idea on what to do it had to rush through character moments to get to where it wanted. The ending was fine-ish, but there was a loooot more potential that just went untapped.