Bạn đang xem: Doctor stranger
Tell me if these actors' names sound familiar: Chun Ho Jin, Kim Sang Ho, Choi Jung Woo, Kim Sang Joong.Tell me if this premise sounds familiar: a prominent member of the SK government greenlights a secret mission to NK and then orders the men sent to be killed. Years later, that man has become the prime minister and the son of the man he betrayed returns to SK.
Guess the kdrama.
City Hunter you say? I wish. The name of this drama is Doctor Stranger.
I blame Doctor John for this. It probably left me wanting to check other medical dramas where you have a doctor a la House trying to save people left and right. I had checked the premise of Doctor Stranger a while back when I was reviewing other Lee Jong Suk shows after watching the excellent While You Were Sleeping but something didn't sit right with me so I decided to skip it. Maybe I checked the reviews and forgot about it. Should've trusted my instincts at any rate.
This show is part medical drama, part North-South political conspiracies/plots, and part romance (maybe?), and I think it fails at all three of these. With the exception of the first episode I think I skipped-watch all the way to Episode 10 where I decided to drop this show for good before even finishing the episode. In trying to figure out why I was getting more and more frustrated with the show this is what I came up with:
I was completely uninvested in Park Hoon's obsession with Jae Hee. It was very easy to root for LMH's revenge (and the way he went about getting it) in City Hunter given the betrayal that his dad and many other soldiers experienced at the hands of a handful of corrupt and self-serving politicians. An injustice was committed and LMH's character wanted to set it right. Park Hoon, on the other hand, seems to be entirely driven by his desire/obsession to find and later protect his girlfriend, Jae Hee. Unfortunately, I never cared for this plot nor her character. If the writer (Park Jin Woo) had spent more episodes (he had 20 episodes to use!) fleshing out the relationship between Park Hoon and Jae Hee, similarly to how the relationship between Captain Ri and Se-ri was developed in CLOY, maybe I would've been more saddened at her sudden disappearance and "death," and shared Park Hoon's desire to find her. As it stands, I was half-hoping she would get shot at one point in the series so we could get rid of this plot altogether. When they doubled down on this in Episode 10 I knew it was sayonara for me, or in LMH's words...
This is supposed to be part medical drama but nine episodes in there wasn't a lot of medicine to show for and none of the doctors were likeable, with the exception of Park Hoon and Soo Hyun, played by Kang So Ra, the real OTP. Everyone else is despicable to the point I was wishing someone would remove their licenses and kick them to the curb. So there's this other doctor, Han Jae Hoon, played by Park Hae Jin (My Love From the Stars), who's the hospital's rising star until Park Hoon comes into the picture. Due to an important upcoming surgery the hospital decides to hold a competition between Park Hoon's and Jae Hoon's teams to see who will perform the surgery. When Park Hoon says he'll compete as long as the hospital foots the bill I thought, "Finally, the boring political plot is getting sidelined and now we're going to see the two teams practice some real medicine for several episodes!" Hahaha, you fool! Instead they decide to hold a single "event" (disgusting that a hospital would even consider holding such a contest) where the two teams will perform surgery on twin babies and everyone is out to sabotage Park Hoon by stripping his team of doctors. This "hospital" was about to let him operate on a patient without assigning him an anaesthesiologist or a First. I was outraged that these "doctors" would rather play politics than save a baby's life. Even Jae Hee screws him over and only decides to help him when it suits her agenda, what did nothing to help her character in my eyes. Again, the only exceptions were Park Hoon and Soo Hyun, what leads me to...
I can't remember a clearer example of a second FL deserving to be first FL. When Jae Hee and Jae Hoon both witness Park Hoon holding Soo Hyun's hands as he guides her through an imaginary surgery I wasn't the only one who thought, "Game over." The scolding Park Hoon gives Jae Hee for playing with the babies' lives was a highlight of the episode and for a moment I thought Park Hoon was maturing and had decided to get over Jae Hee. Only for a moment sadly as he soon goes crazy when Jae Hee's in danger and is about to let one of the babies die if not for Soo Hyun. I know chemistry between actors/characters is rather subjective but I saw more chemistry between Park Hoon and Soo Hyun than I ever did between him and Jae Hee. There's just more feeling in the scenes where Park Hoon and Soo Hyun are together whereas his interactions with Jae Hee strike me as forced and empty. At this point, only this OTP would've encouraged me to continue watching so I decided to skip to Episode 20 to see whether I'd be better off dropping the show altogether. That turned out well...
The North-South political conspiracy/plot was still alive and kicking in Episode 20 and it had already outstayed its welcome only a few episodes into the show. I tried to figure out why I enjoyed it more in City Hunter and the explanation I came up with is two-fold: a) you know exactly what's going on in City Hunter, you know the different players and understand their agendas, whereas in Doctor Stranger it all seems very convoluted 10 episodes in; and b) LMH's character is actively trying to expose the conspirators, he's an active participant rather than a passive bystander. The time spent by Park Hoon and company trying to expose Jae Hee's identity earlier in the show felt like a waste when we already knew she was a spy and that there was no way she would be outed that early in the show. I feel maybe they could've played around more with the idea that Jae Hee had a doppelganger or had maybe lost her memory without letting the audience in on the fact she's a spy. Who knows, maybe they would've botched that too.
I'm starting to notice a pattern with these 20-episode long shows, they let me down more often than not. It should be a warning sign that the writer lost control of the plot if s/he ever had a grip on it in the first place. I know I haven't watched all 20 episodes of this but I would be highly surprised if it actually needed them and couldn't have done better with 16. Most of the bad reviews I've read on the show agree that it started good, had great potential, but squandered it somewhere along the way. I remained skeptical after the first episode but still willing to give it a shot because of LJS, hoping to see him helping patients and solving cases, and later the possibility of a first lead-second lead pairing. It didn't go well. As it stands, I'd recommend Doctor John for the medical drama aspects (despite much of the nonsense) and City Hunter for the political conspiracies/revenge plot. Both of them also seem to do better in the romance department.
Have you watched this show? Did I get it wrong and Doctor Stranger gets better in the second half? Did I jump ship at the right time? Feel free to share your thoughts on the show in the comments so I can check whether I'm suffering from burnout.
NewsletterSubscribe
Start your day with a roundup of key stories from The Korea Herald with news and comment on all that’s happening in Korea.
Han Jae-joon’s tragic childhood revealed in ‘Doctor Stranger’ By Chung Joo-won
The vengeful past of Han Jae-joon, played by actor Park Hae-jin, was revealed in SBS medical series “Doctor Stranger” on Tuesday, as the elite doctor took revenge on the founding family of Myungwoo Hospital.
As a child, Han lost his parents in a medical accident that occurred in Myungwoo Hospital. The hospital head Oh Joon-kyu, Han’s boss and the father of his lover Oh Soo-hyun, refuses to acknowledge the medical team’s responsibility. Moreover, he covered up the case in fear of failing to win a state permit to open a university hospital. The orphaned child grows up to become a surgeon at the hospital that killed his parents.As a doctor at Myungwoo Hospital, Han successfully wins the favor of Oh Joon-kyu, up to the point where the hospital head wants the elite surgeon to wed his daughter Oh Soo-hyun. Han begins by secretly turning in the hospital head’s eldest son to the police for embezzlement charges. When he finally tells Oh Joon-kyu who he really is, Oh becomes extremely shocked and falls down on the floor. The old man desperately reaches out for the telephone to make an emergency call, but Han removes the phone and coldly watches him suffer. Thanks to the heartthrob doctor’s revenge, “Doctor Stranger” hit a 10.1 percent audience rating on Tuesday, topping its rival Monday-Tuesday shows, research firm Nielsen Korea reported on Wednsday.“Doctor Stranger” is a romantic medical drama, starring Lee Jong-suk as Park Hoon, who was kidnapped to North Korea with his medical guru father and flees to the South after losing his father and one-and-only girlfriend Song Jae-hee, played by Jin Se-yeon. In South Korea, Lee becomes a doctor at Myungwoo Hospital, as a colleague of Oh Soo-hyun and Park Hae-jin.
By Chung Joo-won (joowonc
heraldcorp.com)
More from Headlines
The Korea Herald by Herald Corporation
Address : Huam-ro 4-gil 10, Yongsan-gu,Seoul, Korea
Juvenile Protection Manager : Ahn Sung-mi
