‘Romantic Doctor, Teacher Kim’…A gripping medical drama, that puts forward some pretty compelling arguments on what it really means to be a doctor.
The title of this drama can seem a bit handful and often misleading, but let me clear that up for you before we move onto the review. The romantic in the title refers to our protagonist, (or hero as I would prefer to use) Dr. Bo Young Joo a.k.a Master (Teacher) Kim’s romantic ideals, while the Doctor and Teacher are both titles he goes by.
Romantic Doctor is a gripping medical drama, from start to finish. It is brilliantly written, with some great character arcs, and continuously hammers the argument of what it means to be a good doctor, the best doctor in an unforgiving capitalist system. This argument is set in motion from the first episode itself when Kang Dong Joon’s (a brilliant Yoo Yeon Seok) father dies in the hospital ER, after an assemblyman, a V.I.P patient is treated before him, even though he was admitted to the Emergency Room (ER) after Dong Joon’s father. This incident alone creates a number of discussions throughout the series, as it is revisited, revised, dissected a good number of times. It questions a doctor’s role, pure function, decisions, and the implications of those decisions when he/she is independent of hospital politics or the hospital’s economic losses or gains. This becomes even more thought-provoking when Dong Joon grows up to be a doctor and ends up making the same mistakes he vowed not to make, and constantly grapples with his ambition of being a successful doctor, which so far has meant money, connections and a top position in the top hospital.
So to re-examine those thoughts, it is appropriate that within the second episode, Dong Joon is transferred to Doldam Hospital, a small hospital in the remote countryside, which as Master Kim (a fantastic Han Suk Kyu) puts, runs entirely on its patients. There are no Directors, Chairmans or Chief surgeons to run this place, neither are there any departments. It’s just a group of doctors and nurses treating anyone who walks in with an ailment or injury. The lack of a proper organisational structure strips the ER/Hospital to the bare necessities, where only and only doctors have a say in the matters. Also, by setting the whole show within the ER means that swift decisions and resolutions must be made, and with limited resources such as the number of Operating rooms (ORs), machines or beds and the nearest hospital being a good one hour away, those decisions instantly turn crucial. Take the scene where Dong Joon, right after transferring to Doldam Hospital, is asked to treat a critically ill patient. He is so consumed with procedures like paperwork, guardian’s permission, or the right equipment, that he refuses to treat the patient first. This lack of procedures (that larger hospitals generally follow) upsets and confuses him so much, that it’s no wonder that he and Master Kim don’t see eye to eye for almost half of the show’s runtime.
On the opposite side, you have Do In Beom (Yang Se Jong with a great screen presence), whose father runs the hospital. It makes sense that Dong Joon sees him as a rival, as being the son of the Director (Choi Jin Ho) means that In Beom got his job handed to him on a silver platter, while Dong Joon had to rely entirely on his hard work. But there’s a twist — In Beom is actually good at his job, better than Dong Joon even. If Dong Joon hesitated to operate on his (first) patient at Doldam Hospital, In Beom jumps at the slightest opportunity to save his patient, even if it meant operating at a hospital he didn’t work at. Of course, his background rids him of that moment’s hesitation and he wouldn’t have gotten into much trouble later anyways. In comparison to that, Dong Joon understandably would be hesitant, as his last unsuccessful surgery shipped him off to this remote hospital. This backing from a powerful official, however desirable and rewarding, tips the scales in a much later episode when Director Do requests a favour from both the young doctors. Dong Joon, due to lack of any personal ties to the hospital, is able to contemplate the positives and negatives of the favour and finally takes a decision that is best suited for a doctor, but In Beom sadly doesn’t have that liberty.
For the first time in K-Drama history (please correct me if I am wrong), the second male lead doesn’t appear as a romantic rival but as an academic one, where the friction between these two characters is skillfully utilized to present two different sets of arguments, opinions, and thoughts. This clash isn’t restricted to just these two characters, but also extends to Yoon Seo Jung (a remarkable Seo Hyun Jin) Master Kim, Doctor Song (Jang Hyuk Jin), and Director Do as well. Director Do and Master Kim especially have some of the best verbal sparring sessions throughout the entire series, where both voice out their point of view on a medical problem — one from the standpoint of a doctor, while the another as a businessman and while each is right in their own way, the show doesn’t conclude any of these arguments, leaving them open-ended and letting us decide who is right and who is wrong. This is where the show draws its most of its conflicts from, not from differing medical opinions, but from every doctor’s approach to treating the patients, which then again stems from either call of duty, seniority, rivalry, etc, eventually boiling down to the central motif of What makes a doctor?
Without delving much into the medical specifications, Romantic Doctor uses its hospital setting to delve into some social issues (in a manner similar to the recently watched Prison Playbook), like physical abuse in the military, drunken driving, special treatment for the rich and the powerful, medical treatments and expenses for the poor but more particularly on what a doctor’s role in such situations is supposed to be, and to what extent should they be involved. The show’s long format (twenty episodes) is used to its advantage where these issues are discussed in-depth, from both the patients and the doctors' point of view, instead of having one problem every episode, which would have come across as checking off a bullet point list. One of the prominent episodes on the issue is the one where Master Kim’s patient (with stabbed wounds) is later revealed to be a rapist. Doctors are expected to help everyone irrespective of their background but in such an instance, where you have become aware of the inhumane crimes this person has committed, will you still want to save them? Master Kim arrives at a solution halfway, and it is a momentary glimpse at how doctors can play God when required.
The best-directed episodes, however, are the ones with MERS (which particularly hits hard during the ongoing pandemic), and the following episode with Chairman Shin’s (Joo Hyun) operation. The MERS episode starts off with the doctors preparing for Chairman Shin’s operation, which so far, has been the focus of the conflict between Director Do and Master Kim. We wait in anticipation, to finally see who chooses which side, but then, a family is suspected of contracting MERS, and the hospital is sealed off. This was an effective attempt to raise the stakes right before an equally tense juncture in the plotline and incorporate a subplot pertaining to the very real 2015 MERS crisis in South Korea. It doesn’t come off as a last-minute addition because the drama has been subverting our expectations right from the beginning. Whether it was Seo Jung seizing the spotlight from Dong Joon in the first episode, or the hostage situation in the OR, or the episode with the health inspector, the stakes are always high in an ER/hospital, and with added obstacles, the drama only heightens. So, the MERS doesn’t come across as a filler episode, to just jack up the tension leading up towards Chairman Shin’s operation, but to show us how unpredictable life can be.
Chairman Shin’s operation, thankfully isn’t dragged up to the last episode and is actually placed quite well in the middle of the runtime. It also doesn’t take up a lot of screentime, a brisk thirty minutes, yet it is a glorious culmination (which follows on in the later surgeries as well) of all of our characters’ growth. Seo Jung at long last gets to perform a combined operation with Master Kim. Dong Joon and In Beom work together as a perfect team, leaving their differences outside the OR. After spending a good fourteen or fifteen hours with these characters, the payoff is gratifying. Furthermore, the operation truly made me appreciate the complexity and the skill required to perform such a complex surgery. I won’t lie, I was holding my breath till the operation was over.
Romantic Doctor Teacher Kim paints a very real, critical, and emotional picture of what doctors go through day in and day out. A doctor’s decision, which may seem right at the time, doesn’t always yield the correct results. A doctor isn’t God, and within the limited time and limited resources, they try to help as many people as possible. Han Suk Kyu’s Master Kim anchors this belief. As someone who has gone through his own set of hardships, his wisdom helps other doctors to contemplate their decisions, question their fears, and ultimately take the path that a doctor should. The last episode, which is completely absent from Director Do’s meddling, is a nice look into a continuation of their lives, trying to their best abilities to be the doctor their patient wants them to be.
