Doctor X: Mafia in White Episode 1 Recap

Who's in the cast:
Kim Ji-won as Gye Su-jeong
Lee Jung-eun as Jang Hui-suk
Son Hyun-joo as Bu Seung-gwon
Kim Woo-seok as Park Tae-gyeong
Kim Young-min as Do Yun-sik
Lee Jin-hee as Jo Won-jin

Gye Su-jeong, the freelance surgeon at the center of the show, is on a winning streak at a pool hall. She loudly tells the room she does not know how to lose. Someone wonders how she will ever pay off her debt. She orders tangsuyuk and jjajangmyeon anyway, sweet-and-sour pork and black-bean noodles, extra-large.

Across town, Kim Chang-su, president of the Seonam Medical Association, the city's doctors' body, congratulates Im Ho-seok, a doctor just elected mayor. Kim Myeong-seop, the veteran surgeon known as Director Kim, asks Mayor Im not to forget him or his hospital. Dr. Do Yun-sik credits his latest paper to Director Kim and Chairman Gu Bon-pyeong, who heads the foundation behind the hospital.

Back at the pool hall, a young man teased for choosing general surgery watches a friend double over with groin pain. Su-jeong learns he is only an intern, undresses the patient over his protests and has him cough. She diagnoses a left inguinal hernia, pushes it back in by hand and says he still needs emergency surgery. As his friends haul him off, the intern calls after her for her name. She draws a big X in the air and walks off.

At the banquet, a speaker rallies Magnolia, the circle of Guseo University medical alumni, against unions, reformers and a hostile press, after years of pandemic, operating-room cameras and strikes. Mayor Im swears before the white coat never to forget Magnolia's support. In the restroom, Bu Seung-gwon mutters that doctors should be protecting patients, and wishes gout on the lot of them.

A mercenary doctor at GUMC

At the ER afterwards, the intern is still puzzling over that X. A narrator explains that the white tower of medicine is crumbling, with hospitals in turmoil and patients overlooked. At Guseo University Seonam Medical Center, or GUMC, in Seonam on Seoul's edge, doctors and now nurses are quitting. Before rounds, a senior doctor frets and hears that a temporary OR hand has been found.

Park Tae-gyeong, the pool-hall intern, reports for his first day. Senior resident Ma Seong-gyu skips the welcome because Director Kim has called rounds. The narrator then introduces Su-jeong as a freelance surgeon tied to no department. She is a mercenary in the era of the mafia in white, when money and power decide who gets saved, and her name is Doctor X.

On rounds, Director Kim remarks on her unusual surname and sends her to the pre-op conference. The patient, Seo Byeong-gyu, is 80 and booked for open surgery to remove his gallbladder over suspected cancer. At his request, Director Kim will operate himself with the MS Technique he has spent 30 years refining. Dr. Bae Heung-gon and Seong-gyu are named to assist him. Then Su-jeong objects.

Whispers identify her as the ace of a locum tenens agency, a firm that hires out freelance doctors. She argues for laparoscopy instead. Given his age and his pneumonia after COVID, she would take out the gallbladder through keyhole incisions, biopsy it and open him only if needed. Director Kim insists a real surgeon must see and touch, and Heung-gon, the laparoscopy specialist, dutifully agrees. Su-jeong says the director is thrilled to get a case after years and is hiding that he cannot do laparoscopy. When she calls him greedy in his old age, he throws her out.

A hospital caller complains to Jang Hui-suk, who runs the Jang Hui-suk Locum Tenens Agency, about the mad dog she sent. Hui-suk apologizes for Dr. Gye's mouth, vouches for her skills and knocks money off the first month. A caption marks February 9 as Su-jeong's first day at GUMC.

In Director Kim's office, Byeong-gyu explains he chose the director after a TV documentary hailed him as the god of gallbladder cancer. The family presses a gift of homemade jocheong, a slow-cooked grain syrup, on the director. He accepts after a show of reluctance, then tells Tae-gyeong to bin it. Someone in the room remembers a late grandmother who made it, and gets to keep it.

The senior surgeons want Su-jeong fired. Her résumé lists medical school at Cubanacan University and the University of Florida, medical missions abroad, and surgery as both her hobby and her special skill. Short-staffed, they give her a free one-week trial trailing Seong-gyu and Tae-gyeong, far from Director Kim.

Su-jeong clocks out at six

Tae-gyeong finds her reading Byeong-gyu's chart and asks about the X; he takes it to mean he is not good enough. When a senior doctor scolds her for reading it, she points out that Byeong-gyu runs a rubber factory, and Tae-gyeong adds that it supplies the hospital's gloves. Sent back to her work, she asks the senior doctor whether he would let Director Kim operate on his mother. He says he would. As the patient's child, he adds, he would want the director too, for the sake of his own future.

With Heung-gon in the room, Su-jeong unloads. She describes doctors who studied to get rich, grovel upward, bully nurses and hand surgery to an old man whose hands might shake. She calls them "merely doctors by name." The doctors order her out, and she squares up for a fight. Then she spots the clock, announces "Six o'clock!" and leaves mid-argument.

In his room, Byeong-gyu and his wife tell a visiting doctor about an earlier caller, a woman without a white coat. She ate their mango and yogurt and suggested postponing the surgery or changing surgeons. Byeong-gyu refused, since his factory cannot wait. The visitor promises tomorrow will go well.

Over dinner, Hui-suk calls GUMC shady enough to offer plenty of ways to profit. When Su-jeong asks about Director Kim, Hui-suk will not tell her for free and says she will dock her pay. Hui-suk then visits the director with an apology and the agency's signature gift, a top-grade imported melon. The fruit goes to his secretary, and the box, pointedly, stays with him. She asks him to keep Dr. Gye on scut work, and Su-jeong is cleared to observe the operation.

Director Kim operates

On surgery day, Seung-gwon joins the observation gallery at Director Kim's invitation. Gossip says he was in line to run the main hospital until he was pushed out to the southern branch. In the OR, Director Kim demands powdered gloves because the others make his hands sweat. Anesthesiologist Dr. Jo reports a smooth start, and the CCTV rolls.

From the gallery, Su-jeong says they should stop and get an MRI, for Director Kim rather than the patient, and is told to be quiet. Working slowly, the director finds severe adhesions and declares the open approach vindicated. Then Byeong-gyu's blood pressure crashes and he goes into shock. Director Kim collapses too, weak on his left side, in what the team calls a likely ischemic stroke.

Every surgeon, Heung-gon and Seong-gyu included, rushes out with the director. Tae-gyeong and Dr. Jo are left with an open patient and nobody to page. When Tae-gyeong offers to try, Dr. Jo snaps that he is just an intern. Then a voice says there is someone.

Su-jeong takes over

Su-jeong steps in and orders everyone to raise their hands. She switches the team to the gloves she sent for, has them change scrubs, maxes out the air exchange and calls for epinephrine and dexamethasone. The alarms stop and Byeong-gyu's pressure recovers. With Tae-gyeong assisting, she works fast. Watching, Hui-suk introduces herself as head of the country's first locum agency and Su-jeong as its star surgeon. The staff thank her one by one.

Seung-gwon, back for a forgotten phone, hears that Director Kim pulled through, and someone asks how she knew. A flashback shows Su-jeong injecting the collapsed director with something over shouted protests. Then the surgeons confront her for operating without permission. She shields Tae-gyeong and tells them they should never have left a patient on the table without a surgeon. She keeps eating while they demand to know what she injected, and an on-screen note explains that epinephrine treats allergic reactions. Before answering, she spots a clock, declares it six o'clock again and walks out.

Afterward, Director Kim speaks to her only through Yun-sik, who relays the director's praise and his claim that the MS Technique proved him right. Su-jeong answers that the day proved he should never have opened the patient up. The director has Yun-sik fire her, nutjob and all, and she goes home.

Over a meal, Tae-gyeong protests the firing, and Heung-gon says any experienced doctor could have done the same. A colleague recalls being sent for non-latex gloves, and the table works out the cause: latex anaphylaxis, probably from the rubber factory, though nothing on Byeong-gyu's pre-op form said so. When someone suggests she drugged the director, a junior calls the hospital a circus for firing the doctor who saved a life.

Seung-gwon then visits the recovering director. Director Kim, he says, went into anaphylactic shock too: his secretary threw out a melon that morning, and in the OR he kept scratching his neck. The director and his patient are both allergic to latex, and he insisted on powdered gloves, which the law bans for this reason. It is not in the footage, Seung-gwon says, but he has something else, and a caption reads: may exacerbate latex-induced allergic reactions. He also raises the agency's box, a free perk for the director, since the hospital pays the temp fees anyway. He wants only one thing.

Su-jeong's contract

Soon after, Seung-gwon leads his own rounds as Director Bu. In the director's office, Hui-suk thanks him for requesting Dr. Gye and presents a contract with eight-hour days, paid overtime and per-operation bonuses. The special terms list everything Su-jeong will not do, from attendings' research to rounds, staff dinners and talent shows. When failure comes up, she says, "I don't do that either." He hires her on the spot, and she informs him she does not do pleasantries either.

Someone chases Seung-gwon down to warn that Su-jeong will not help build the future he wants. He calls her an asset, points to the surgical video of her impossibly fast hands and passes her résumé on. Whoever reads it calls her a mad dog who hates groups and authority and could throw everything into turmoil.

Someone hands Su-jeong a white coat, noting her name had not been embroidered on it yet. The last clue follows: latex allergies can extend to tropical fruit, which explains the melon and the mango. Voices shout for her, one calling her Gye-snake, a nickname built on her surname. Seung-gwon says she is disposable, someone the hospital can cut loose with its other problems, so they should wait and see. The narrator names her Doctor X once more.

Thoughts

What a way to build a heroine. The premiere spends most of an hour making Su-jeong unbearable to every senior doctor in the building, then hands her the one operation nobody else can finish. The six o'clock exit lands twice, and the second one, mid-interrogation and mid-meal, got a real laugh out of me. I also liked how fairly the medical mystery plays. The rubber factory, the gloves it supplies, the melon, the mango and the director's demand for powdered gloves are all on screen before anyone collapses, so the reveal feels earned.

The more interesting player may be Seung-gwon. He reads at first as the one decent man in a room of self-congratulating doctors. Yet he turns a near-death in the OR into leverage over the director, and soon after he is the one leading rounds as Director Bu. Then he hires Su-jeong while privately calling her disposable. Hui-suk deserves watching too. Her melon and her pointed box sit right in the middle of the director's undoing, and the episode never says whether she knew what that fruit could do.

My guess, from this episode alone, is that the no-rounds, no-dinners contract gets tested within days. Magnolia, fresh from toasting the white coat, will surely have opinions about the new director's new hire. I would also like to hear more about those medical missions abroad, because a surgeon this allergic to authority usually learned it somewhere.

Up next: Doctor X: Mafia in White Episode 2 Recap. See every episode in the Doctor X: Mafia in White episode guide.