"Doctors" Episode 9 recap

Hye-jeong and Ji-hong are still cute. That's about all the depth I can get out of their relationship, unfortunately. The closest we get to dynamic story action is that Hye-jeong pulls away for the sake of investigating her grandmother's death while Ji-hong offers unconditional support. And of course they still have time to go on dates anyway. The lack of much real conflict in that regard tends to be a bit stifling. It would be nice if Hye-jeong faced some serious resistance every once in awhile.
...Unless we count Seo-woo, which I'm not sure is reasonable considering that Seo-woo seems to be disliked more for personal reasons than professional ones. This is why I find myself sympathizing with Seo-woo even though objectively speaking she is in fact kind of a jerk. Seo-woo's flaw is that she doesn't put much effort into getting along well with other people. The problem is, Hye-jeong has the exact same flaw, yet people love her anyway for reasons that are not convincingly explained.
This is especially jarring because these expressions of affection frequently cross the line from being cute to unethical. Like that whole scene with the car. Never mind ethics- that kind of thing is probably explicitly illegal, and yet the whole incident is passed off like a big joke. Contrast that with the way Yoon-do rips into Seo-woo in the park. If the production team wants me to hate Seo-woo, they really need to spend more time having her do bad things and less time bringing the poor woman to the verge of tears.
Elsewhere the political storyline mostly fails to elicit any material that can be described as even remotely interesting. It may not be popular to say this, but getting the money necessary to do important stuff like build hospitals is legitimately pretty hard. Seo-woo's family, much like Seo-woo herself, are villainous less because they do bad things and more because they happen to have less than perfect personalities.
For me, that's really not enough to make them into monsters. The extent to which a medical drama even needs villains in the first place is a tad suspect, since one would think that keeping sick patients alive is a big enough challenge in itself that political conflicts aren't all that necessary. Alas, even the medical aspects this time around are fairly dull, with nothing anywhere near as interesting as the wide-awake surgery to give a neat visual.
Review by William Schwartz
"Doctors" is directed by Oh Choong-hwan, written by Ha Myeong-hee and features Kim Rae-won, Park Shin-hye, Yoon Gyoon-sang, Lee Seong-kyeong, Kim Yeong-ae and Jeong Hae-gyoon.

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