Doctor X: Mafia in White Episode 2 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
Lee Jin-hee as Jo Won-jin
Kim Young-min as Do Yun-sik
Kim Ki-cheon as Park Gwang-cheol (VIP patient)

Gye Su-jeong is a freelance surgeon on loan to GUMC, the hospital in the fictional city of Seonam. She works through a locum tenens agency, a firm that hires out freelance doctors by the job. The hour starts with fire: a building burns, and a voice tells a child to stay put and promises to go back for the child's brother. Nothing yet explains it.

In his office, Director Bu Seung-gwon prepares a press release about the surgery of Park Gwang-cheol, chairman of Sun and Steel. The chairman's donation expanded the pediatric cancer ward. Someone grumbles that the hospital still caters to VIP donors while the surgical staff room's expansion waits for funding. Surgeon Do Yun-sik admits the chairman insists on surgery before chemotherapy and will not be talked out of it.

Outside, protesters chant for Gwang-cheol to step down and pay the wages his company is withholding. Inside, he asks senior resident Ma Seong-gyu whether he really has cancer. He has faked illness before to dodge an audit and a trial, and nobody believes him now. Then a girl collapses, and Su-jeong takes the chairman's wheelchair to rush her to emergency. In the ER the girl gives her name, Lee Ju-hui, and says she has type 1 diabetes. The chairman fumes, and the news reports he allegedly faked being a patient to get his sentence suspended.

The surgeons freeze Su-jeong out

In the surgical staff room, the surgeons grumble that they are too short-staffed to refuse Seung-gwon's hire. Seong-gyu, now all over the news, wants revenge. Gossip says the chairman picked Yun-sik, over drinks, as the easiest surgeon to push around. A partition goes up to hide Su-jeong, then comes down, because not seeing her makes everyone more anxious. Next, files pile onto her desk until there is no room for her. Seong-gyu assigns intern Park Tae-gyeong to be her CCTV and watch her at all times, and announces the staff's new name for her: mad dog.

Tae-gyeong finds her at the café, where she orders a pile of cake on his tab. Meanwhile, Gwang-cheol demands the mad dog be brought to him and orders Seung-gwon to save his life at any cost. Back at the café, Su-jeong says she is broke and in debt. By her account, Jang Hui-suk, who runs her agency, gives her 100,000 won a month, keeps her passport and hits her when she overspends. A comic cutaway, apparently of Hui-suk, shows someone dangling cake in front of her. Then Su-jeong asks Tae-gyeong to treat her to jjajangmyeon, the black-bean noodles, today and to leave work with her at six; he says interns don't.

A fight in the lobby

In the lobby, Su-jeong remarks that the payment kiosks help the hospital, not the patients. Tae-gyeong urges her not to take the staff-room bullying to heart, though she had not noticed it. Nearby, Ju-hui's mother, Yeong-seon, who uses a wheelchair, and her aunt, Yeong-ju, face an interim bill on a maxed-out card. Gwang-cheol spots Yeong-ju's protest vest, and his people start shoving her and her sister's wheelchair. When he sneers that people with less shout louder, Ju-hui goes for him, demanding her aunt's unpaid wages. She comes out of the scrum bleeding.

Later, Yun-sik tells Ju-hui's family she is a rare case: type 1 diabetes plus a pancreatoblastoma, a pancreatic tumor. Su-jeong slips away and turns up eating pork cutlet, with a hallway diagnosis to answer for. She spotted Ménière's disease in a dizzy woman waiting for internal medicine and sent her to ENT (ear, nose and throat), which confirmed it. An ENT doctor drops by, amused to meet the notorious Gye-snake, a nickname built on her surname. An angry internist calls her a butcher and demands discipline and a pay cut, neither of which applies to a temp. A colleague suspects she crossed the line on purpose, to win back her desk.

Two patients, one schedule

At the case conference, Gwang-cheol, 67, is presented as a VIP with a 4 cm tumor in the head of the pancreas. He is set for a Whipple procedure, a major pancreas operation, under Yun-sik. Su-jeong objects that the cancer may have invaded two major vessels, the SMA and SMV, so sparing them would leave tumor behind. She proposes taking the vessels out with the tumor, and when the surgeons sneer that no one messes with the SMA, she tells them she doesn't fail. Next is Ju-hui, 15, with an 8 cm pancreatoblastoma and no spread; her operation was pushed back so the chairman could go first. Now her case goes to Su-jeong, and when Yun-sik protests that he needs the girl for a case report, Seung-gwon asks whether they would rather delay a surgery.

Over a card game, one voice warns Su-jeong to keep her head down and another doubts she can. The verdict on Yun-sik is blunt: he rose through papers and politics, and Ju-hui could have died under his knife. When face and status fall away from hospital doctors, the reasoning goes, that is when they go in.

Tae-gyeong explains the risks to Ju-hui and her family, but she asks to skip the operation. Kids call her a junkie for injecting insulin in the restroom. Her mother is in a wheelchair and her aunt takes on double the wallpapering jobs to support them, so she begs them all to let her die. Su-jeong tells her everyone dies. Without surgery she will die within the month; with it, in about a hundred years, as long as Su-jeong operates. She asks Ju-hui which she would rather have, and the family signs.

Tae-gyeong notices she has been reading Gwang-cheol's chart too. Yun-sik stops by to say he is counting on her, while noting he could have done it himself. She asks whether he is sure he doesn't want to switch patients, and he demands a reason. "You can't do it with your skills," she says, and his shouting carries down the corridor.

At a dinner table, a voice calls Su-jeong to eat, and the others guess she is mapping out the surgery. Someone is teased for eating all three meals there. On the morning of the operations, Yun-sik reminds her that her patient is in OR 5, and she tells him it is not too late to switch.

The operations begin

In OR 1, Yun-sik opens the chairman, finds the SMA completely encased by tumor and decides to close. Over the intercom, Seung-gwon refuses and asks whether Yun-sik will tell the patient he was opened and closed for nothing. When Yun-sik suggests calling the family, Seung-gwon says nobody came, because everyone is waiting for the chairman to die. Then he makes a call.

Outside the operating rooms, Ju-hui's mother and aunt half-joke about taking up religion if she lives. Yeong-ju finds a letter Ju-hui left for her family. In OR 5, Su-jeong works steadily through Ju-hui's pancreas with Jo Won-jin, the anesthesiology professor.

Then Seung-gwon calls OR 5 and orders Su-jeong to OR 1. Tae-gyeong refuses on her behalf, but she says she is on her way. He blocks her and asks whether she is dropping Ju-hui because the girl is poor and not a VIP. She answers with one word: priority. He shouts that she promised Ju-hui a hundred years.

In OR 1, Su-jeong takes over while Bae Heung-gon, the laparoscopy specialist, heads to OR 5 to cover. She has the chairman's leg prepped to harvest the great saphenous vein. She also pulls Won-jin over from OR 5 to run anesthesia. Accused of leaving a patient, Won-jin retorts that a concern for work ethic should be full-time, not occasional. Then Su-jeong asks Yun-sik to assist and announces an en bloc Whipple with SMA resection.

In OR 5, Heung-gon arrives to find the tumor already out after about an hour, and Won-jin has confirmed the bleeding is under control. Asked how it went, Heung-gon marvels that there is no bleeding at all. The surgeons can barely believe it is Su-jeong's work.

Back in OR 1, Su-jeong lays out the plan: remove the cancer with both vessels, rebuild the artery with the leg vein and replace the vein with a synthetic graft. Someone accuses her of practicing on a patient. Seung-gwon orders Yun-sik to follow her lead and adds, "Dr. Gye was never in this OR." Once the bowel is reconnected, she leaves Yun-sik to finish, which lets him save face as the senior surgeon. She reminds Seung-gwon that two surgeries mean two fees. He promises to keep her part secret, and she adds that he will pay in cash.

Yun-sik holds on

Afterward, Seung-gwon tells Yun-sik that his first instinct was to close up and quit, so in spirit he had already left the OR. Yun-sik insists he stayed to the end, humiliated, before a wall he could not climb. He will keep holding on, he says, until he makes his mark. When he asks if Seung-gwon knows his dream, Seung-gwon says he understands.

Hunting for Su-jeong in the men's locker room, Tae-gyeong hears that she took Ju-hui's tumor out in an hour. A colleague reasons she must have planned both operations from the start. Tae-gyeong mutters that he had no idea and hurries off.

Ju-hui's letter plays over the aftermath. She writes that her mother and aunt love her because she is family, but that she would have liked them anyway, because they are wonderful people. She asks them to meet again someday, not as caregivers but just to have fun.

News reports say the chairman is in recovery and investigators are searching Sun and Steel. At GUMC, someone argues the procedure matters less than what it implies: Su-jeong is a mad dog who will push any operation for her own success. Seung-gwon finds her sitting away from her desk. He says he has already delivered her pay to Hui-suk and thanks her for a tall order, and she says it wasn't much of one.

The search for the procedure turns up an article from seven years ago. It says the GI surgery team at Cubanacan University of Medical Sciences performed the same en bloc Whipple with SMA reconstruction on a patient once called inoperable. Su-jeong's résumé from her first day lists a similar name: medical school at Cubanacan University. The patient died two months later, the cause was never found, and the surgeon's name was never released. The chart carried only a pseudonym: Doctor X.

Thoughts

The hour's neatest trick is structural. For a few minutes it lets Tae-gyeong, and the audience, believe Su-jeong has dropped a poor 15-year-old for a rich man's fee. Then it shows that Ju-hui's tumor was out within the hour. Her one-word answer turns out to mean triage, not greed. I also liked that Yun-sik gets his dignity back. His speech about standing before a wall he can't climb is the most human the surgeons have looked so far.

The closing article is a smart hook. If Su-jeong is the surgeon behind that Cubanacan case, a patient died two months after the same operation she just performed on the chairman. The colleagues already calling her a mad dog would have paper to wave. I'm keeping an eye on the chairman's recovery and on the fire that opens the hour, which nobody has explained. I don't fully buy Su-jeong's account of Hui-suk, either. A boss who keeps her passport and pays her 100,000 won a month is either a real problem or a running joke on a gullible intern, and the show seems happy to leave that open.

Up next: Doctor X: Mafia in White Episode 3 Recap. See every episode in the Doctor X: Mafia in White episode guide.