EPISODE 1 (and a bit of 2) RECAP
Xiao Yan is a surgeon. She works abroad in Switzerland at a military base. Yang Mi once again proves that there’s no profession she can not look fabulous in. Kind of like Barbie.
She and her boyfriend have a talk about how poor medical assistance still is around the world. On that same day, the boyfriend proposes. He gives her some flowers and a ring and their colleagues around start chanting “marry, marry”. Which is a weird thing to say for… a lot of reasons.
First of all, ‘marry’ as a word cannot stand alone without an object unless you’re talking in, like, Regency English. If people really want to chant something in these cases, it would be “say yes, say yes,” or “kiss, kiss”. Secondly, I don’t think anyone would appreciate external pressure while they’re being proposed to. Just be quiet and let the girl make her decision, people, even if you already know what it is.
Anyway, Xiao Yan says yes. But right at this time, an injured person is rushed in for emergency assistance, so Xiao Yan has to start operating right away.
It kind of looks like she’s frying noodles more than anything else, though.
In the middle of work, the lights went off and Xiao Yan’s boyfriend has to run outside to grab some replacements. But a bomb goes off nearby, giving him internal injuries. Xiao Yan tries to save him but is unable to. He dies the same day. What can we say? Guys who propose in the first episode never last long.
Xiao Yan requests to go back to her home country because of this.
The male lead Bai Shu (Bai Yu) works at a hospital in China. The drama wastes no time in letting you see that he is a jerk. He purposely lets people wait to get a meeting started even though it is common courtesy to come a few minutes early, especially when all of the senior doctors are already there.
Today, they are discussing a critical case of a patient with heart disease. This man is a scholar who has contributed a lot to his country, so it’s a big deal. It becomes an argument when Bai Shu insists that he can perform the operation while the board and the patient himself choose to stick with the treatment he is on right now.
Bai Shu says that a doctor’s job is to treat illnesses, period. He is also highly skilled and confident in his decision. Not that the drama actually shows you how this guy is skilled besides his words. But I guess the fact that… erm… Shen Wei loves him is good enough proof?
Dismissed by the board for being an intolerable show-off (which he is), Bai Shu goes and talks to the patient himself. The patient still doesn’t want to go through with the operation, but his wife feels like she can trust Bai Shu; so she speaks with him more about it. She wants to know why he is so confident he can cure her husband. Yes, tell us why.
Of course, they don’t tell us why. The conversation happens off-screen and then we cut straight to the wife convincing her husband to risk the operation. The husband agrees at last, he wants this second chance. The operation goes on successfully.
Xiao Yan is back home at this point. That morning, she is on her way to the hospital for her new job when she bumps into Bai Shu in a breakfast shop, spilling coffee on his shirt and knocking his cup to the ground. What a great opportunity for Bai Shu to show he’s a grumpy jerk again, and you can be sure he doesn’t waste it. He mumbles a few spiteful comments and tells her to forget about it.
Despite being late for her interview, Xiao Yan insists that he takes her money to buy new coffee. If it were me, I would just move on and hope I’d never run into this guy again. But C-dramas female leads live in entirely different worlds, I guess. Honestly, I’m just happy that a traffic officer ends up scolding both of them for exceeding their time limit on the parking spots in front of the coffee shop.
Unfortunately, they do run into each other again. Xiao Yan has to stop to perform CPR because a pregnant woman has fainted on the street. Bai Shu rushes over too and immediately clashes with her.
Bai Shu thinks they should take the woman to the hospital ASAP, Xiao Yan thinks they should wait for emergency service to come with the right equipment. They fight over it. While Xiao Yan only points out the fact, Bai Shu does the same thing while also being rude to her, saying things like “are you blind?” and so on. You know, bluntness is one thing, vulgarity is completely another; and I think this guy is confusing the two.
Due to some info provided by the woman’s mother through a timely phone call, it turns out that Bai Shu is correct: they need to rush to the hospital.
The woman is saved. Bai Shu starts bragging about his “great judgment”. Xiao Yan admits that Bai Shu made the right call, but she criticizes him for not following protocols and being too personal with his decision. In most cases, calling an ambulance would be the right choice, not taking an unconscious patient to the hospital in your own car. And she is absolutely correct. Not that her logic does anything for Bai Shu’s big head though; he insists that as a doctor, his job is to “save lives”. I’m starting to think his character is written by a kid who just wants to become a doctor but hasn’t actually seen what doctors do in a day.
At lunch that day, Bai Shu badmouths Xiao Yan with his friends. He casts doubt on her ability because she’s been working at a military base and not a prestige hospital like himself, or whatever. He does it loudly enough for her to hear. She walks over to confront him and asks him to shut his mouth about things he doesn’t know about.
Forget about being surgeons, I don’t think these two have even completed their residency programs yet given these behaviors. Still, I’m rooting for Xiao Yan to kick this guy’s butt. He is truly a pain.
Back to the pregnant woman a little. Her family is facing a dilemma, they want the hospital to give her heart surgery and worry about the unborn child later. But she insists on having the child safely out first because her husband has died and she wants to do this thing for him (and his bloodline). Cause we don’t have melodrama already.
The hospital board has another discussion. They decide that Xiao Yan will be in charge of the heart surgery. This pisses Bai Shu off like nothing else, and he certainly makes it known. It’s even worse that he is appointed to be Xiao Yan’s assistant during the operation. He raises his voice and nearly makes a scene in the meeting room.
When they get off work that day, Bai Shu finds Xiao Yan and asks her to back out of the job. It’s a complicated case and she might not be able to handle it, he says. Give it to me instead, the surgeon who can’t stop bragging about what I can do.
Xiao Yan doesn’t comply, of course, but she is calmer about it than him. She suggests they make a bet: Bai Shu will let her drive him on her motorcycle as fast as she wants, and if he doesn’t vomit by the end of the ride then she will refuse the job. Yeah, OK, I think I have seen enough “medical” material.
SOME HUMOR-FREE THOUGHTS
Let’s talk about the male lead first because – like it or not – this drama has successfully made us pay attention to him. Bai Shu is the familiar arrogant-but-brilliant protagonist who will undergo an emotional journey to (hopefully) become less braggy. There is no problem with this type of character. But Bai Shu himself is a full bag of problems. It is about the way the drama writes him in the beginning. Realistically, someone like him would never be allowed to work in any medical setting unless he goes through the backdoor.
He isn’t just arrogant, he is unprofessional. He blurts out whatever is on his mind because he believes his skills can make up for his lack of tact. But what makes him not quite believable is how the drama doesn’t really show us his alleged “skills”. How is he better than the other doctors? Does he have more precision? Experience abroad? Operation technique?
Let me point to another Arrogant Doctor character that has been done before and done much better: Kim Su-Hyung from the K-drama Doctors.
He’s a jerk, he cares for nothing except his work. And that is the point — he respects his job and the environment he works in. Despite his personality outside the hospital, he operates with integrity and professionalism. He has a burning passion for medicine and the uncanny ability to make split-second decisions, which is demonstrated in the first five minutes of the show. When you watch him handle his equipment, you believe that he is a doctor.
Bai Shu? All he does to distinguish himself is chanting the mantra: doctors are supposed to save lives no matter what. While giving us nothing to believe why anyone should place their life in his hands.
A few episodes in, Bai Shu still doesn’t act like a physician, he is just Bai Yu in a lab coat.
The character arc this drama wants to give him is no less problematic. The main conflict is clear: Bai Shu cures illnesses with passion while Xiao Yan does it with logic, and they will eventually learn from each other. The concept sounds like a good place to start, but it is too basic to be stretched over that many episodes. The drama also makes it look like Bai Shu is the only doctor in the entire place who cares enough about his patients to dive into this concept.
Passion vs. Logic in medicine is a notion that I’m quite sure med students get to talk about at some point in their school lives. It isn’t a philosophy that experienced doctors need to fight about on a daily basis. Yes, you can fight over details; and when it comes to it, you will have to disagree with someone. But this isn’t medieval times, doctors don’t go around declaring that “doctors save lives” like it’s a new discovery, and then use it to criticize other doctors who lean towards logic and protocols.
On the other hand, Yang Mi looks pretty cool on a motorcycle; despite her ever-the-same acting, she is one of the more watchable aspects of this drama. And naturally, I believe her character deserves better than Bai Shu, even if he will change his way.
Overall, this isn’t a terrible drama from the look of the first episodes; if you’re a fan of either lead actor, it can be enjoyable. Though don’t expect too much from the medical-related stuff.