Season 1, Episode 7
Date of release: January 24, 2025 (Netflix)
Written by: Choi Tae-kang
Directed by: Lee Do-yoon
“You're actually going?”
“I'm the gunshot wound expert, so who else?”
Dr. Baek is an expert in everything. Is there something he doesn't know a single thing about? How about English football and the history of the Premier League? Is that something that would cause question marks to pop up above his head?
I have already realized that this show is going to frustrate me more than it is going to entertain me, but there seem to be episodes that still make me roll my eyes out of the back of my skull. Like this one. Why would a doctor, his assistant, his nurse, and his anesthesiologist hop into a plane to fly to Central Africa and treat a patient when said patient could be flown to South Korea instead? Or to a location that would make it easier for him to be treated by doctors? I have no idea how many countries South Korea has deals with to plant military bases there, but maybe Korea's connection to the United States could have allowed them to use some of their military bases in Europe or Asia to evacuate the Korean soldier to. Anything that would have made it easier for Dr. Baek and his team to treat the soldier, instead of having to be dropped in the middle of an ongoing civil war, to get to work in a hospital that can't pay its electricity bills, and is being targeted by rebel forces.
Yes, this entire story had me frustrated up to my nostrils, but I guess this is what Korean dramas are like – written to be entertaining, not realistic, to be visually striking, not to force the audience to think long and hard about what is transpiring on screen. Now I know why I never got a chance to get into them in the first place, and why I still have trouble doing so. All I want for a Korean drama in my schedule is to be a little more realistic, to focus more on the characters than the visuals.
This episode tried to make me care about what Baek was going through, with almost the entire hospital administration transforming into supervillains to scheme him out of a job, and his team having to work against some of their colleagues to save a patient. The fact that this fictional hospital employs people who aren't interested in saving patient lives is absolutely astonishing and definitely has me riled up, which is either a conscious thing done by the writer (that way, I'm forced to root for the protagonists), or just one of the elements of the premise that help the action flow from one episode to the next, no matter how realistic it is.
Plus points for the mention of the Hanbit Unit (of which the injured soldier was part of), a part of the United Nations Peacekeeping Unit that has been active in South Sudan since 2013. It's been a part of the South Korean army since 2011, but a dedicated unit itself was officially formed by the South Korean government in late 2012, so that a permanent presence in South Sudan could be established. While the show doesn't have a lot of realism, at least in that part, Korean viewers were given a tiny bit of their own current history.
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| On their way to a whole different continent for the sake of good patient care. |
