Doctor X: Mafia in White Episode 4 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
Jang Seung-jo as Na Dae-il

In a flashback, someone counts chest compressions over a boy named Baraka and begs him to wake. Then a voice calls for Jang Hui-suk as something burns. It is a glimpse of the past behind Gye Su-jeong, the freelance surgeon the show calls Doctor X. Hui-suk's locum tenens agency, a firm that hires out freelance doctors, has placed her at GUMC, the hospital in the fictional city of Seonam. In the present, a new surgeon, Na Dae-il, has joined general surgery. Su-jeong's new contract is on hold, so she stays in the ER.

Over noodles, Hui-suk fumes. Su-jeong saved the cleaner and spared the hospital another scandal. Yet she is back in the ER, and the hospital has held a press conference to take the credit. A flashback to the meeting fills in Dae-il: a career military doctor who later worked in the US and came at once when his alma mater asked. The table's verdict on his skill is mixed. A military surgeon can presumably stitch people up, and the liver transplant one of them watched yesterday was not bad.

Hui-suk gets her extra noodles today, but Su-jeong, who calls her Aunt, will not let her order a drink. Su-jeong says they must never live like that again, and nobody argues. Before Su-jeong leaves, Hui-suk promises she will operate again soon. Then she calls her back to stand up straight and remember who she is and who raised her.

Hui-suk has met Dae-il herself. Tall and handsome, she notes, but his hands reek, and she wonders where he came from. When Su-jeong comes into view, Dae-il offers to greet her. He is told she is not in their department and will not greet him back.

Elsewhere, intern Park Tae-gyeong is found unresponsive, feverish and soaked in cold sweat. He has been half dozing through a recurring dream of rupturing an artery during an ABGA, an arterial blood draw. It was not a dream, he adds. A senior grumbles that interns are all thumbs. The cure on offer is seonji haejangguk, a hangover soup made with congealed ox blood.

Su-jeong walks into Dae-il's OR

In the ER, Su-jeong has floored a man with a knife. He is Kim Seong-jin, the ER chief, playing the assailant in a violence drill he announced in the group chat. He thinks his arm is broken, but he takes it cheerfully, since general surgery is not calling her back. He is also directing a promo video and brags about playing Macduff for Guseo University's theater club. Over her protests, he casts anesthesiologist Jo Won-jin as the hostage.

When Won-jin remarks that the ER seems quiet, someone asks why she said it, and the trauma arrives on cue. Scaffolding has collapsed, and five workers have fallen from the third floor. One is unconscious, with falling blood pressure. Su-jeong finishes so fast that Seong-jin calls her his army, then watches his army walk away.

In the OR, the CT shows 42-year-old Han Ji-hun bleeding from the liver, but the blood hides the source. Dae-il is operating, and someone on his team falters at the sight of it. Su-jeong walks in uninvited. Over protests that she belongs to emergency medicine, she finds the bleeder. The pressure steadies, and the bleeder is tied off.

Hospital director Bu Seung-gwon, meanwhile, is taken to task by Magnolia, the circle of Guseo University medical alumni who run the hospital's politics. The family of Seo Jin-yeong, the EMT who died on duty, is appealing, and Seung-gwon has publicly promised to cooperate. The precedent puts other hospitals in an awkward spot. Someone threatens to cut off all support, and the one who handpicked Dr. Na for the staffing shortage wants to know why no thanks have come. Praise for Dae-il follows quickly, along with orders to prepare for a visit from the mayor.

Dae-il starts asking about Su-jeong

After the surgery, Dae-il tries the nickname Dr. Gye-snake, built on her surname, on Tae-gyeong, then says he is only kidding. Tae-gyeong defends her, saying she only ever looks at what lies ahead. Dae-il calls it the first respectful word about her he has heard. He would like to be close to her, he says, and asks the intern to tell him what he knows.

Hui-suk, whose eyes and ears are everywhere in the hospital, checks in with Su-jeong about the OR. She expected scissors in the wall and a lot of swearing. Instead he smiled, which she finds bizarre.

At the ER desk, Dae-il tells Seong-jin that Su-jeong is welcome to cause trouble again, and says he knew where the bleeder was too. He brings pastries, chosen on Tae-gyeong's tip. Su-jeong clocks out on the dot, as she does every day.

Once she is gone, Dae-il visits the recovery room of Yeo Jeong-sun, the cleaner whose aneurysm Su-jeong clipped. He asks how fast Su-jeong is and hears that it is too fast for anyone to want to discuss. He lingers over the chart naming her primary surgeon long enough that someone wonders what is wrong with him.

Off the clock, Su-jeong's day becomes gossip. Her listeners swoon over two doctors with their hands together in a bloody abdomen, and over the handsome military man. They ask whether she got his number. Hui-suk is unmoved: the man's hands reek, with a stench she knows. When someone asks whether what she smells is money, the reply comes back, "Money always reeks."

Tae-gyeong finds blood on a book belonging to senior resident Ma Seong-gyu. He hears again the resident's advice to finish his rotation and go. He is already sick of blood, he mutters, and for a would-be doctor, he decides, that is pathetic.

In an elevator, Su-jeong collects a small win of her own. The neurosurgeons who bet their white coats on Jeong-sun's aneurysm said it would rupture or run into trouble within days. Now they learn she has moved to the general ward. Word of the elevator scene travels fast.

Mr. Kwon and his savior

At Buil Diner, Seong-jin treats Su-jeong, Won-jin and Tae-gyeong to lunch to celebrate his one-woman army joining the ER. He urges her to drop the surgery jerks for good. Won-jin wonders why she and the intern are there at all. Just as a table opens, a man nearby is suddenly in trouble, and someone in the group recognizes him as Kwon Chung-hyeon.

Elsewhere, surgeons note that it is not like Mr. Kwon to be late; he calls ahead even when he is five minutes behind. He is a sales rep for Ugang Pharmaceuticals, and they remember him fondly. They recall golf after a seminar, legendary boilermakers and a karaoke chant of Do Yun-sik's name. Once he spent a night in a sauna to make sure they got hangover soup. Someone warns them to stop owing favors to pharma reps before anyone says the word rebate.

When Yun-sik phones Mr. Kwon, Su-jeong answers. She tells him that his cholecystitis, an inflamed gallbladder, needs surgery now, though he would rather wait until next week. Every doctor here knows him, it turns out, except Su-jeong. Yun-sik arrives irritated, and Mr. Kwon apologizes. Then Dae-il takes the case, as Mr. Kwon hoped. After a salute, Dae-il scolds him by his old rank: Private Kwon Chung-hyeon.

In Mr. Kwon's own flashback, his father's death and the family's bankruptcy push him from college into the army. There, hazing and beatings begin for reasons he never understood. One night he fights back and is beaten until he bleeds internally. The ambulance is 30 to 40 minutes away, and there is no other doctor at the Namil Clinic. The young military doctor Dae-il vows to save him and see his abusers jailed, then operates himself.

Back among the surgeons, the story makes Dae-il a hero who handled anesthesia and surgery alone. One recalls Mr. Kwon saying he joined the drug trade to work in health care, like the man who saved him. They mock the Gye-snake for asking Dae-il whether he would go in laparoscopically, as if a gallbladder came out any other way. One swears he saw a halo over Dae-il's head when he promised to start that way for a quicker recovery.

The operation is set for next Monday, because Dae-il has something important on this week. At a math academy, a father brings his child tuna gimbap, seaweed rice rolls. On Tuesday, with Mr. Kwon's name in front of her, Su-jeong concludes that he will not last until Monday, and that something else is off.

Dae-il catches her at clock-out and asks her to a meal. She does not socialize, so they talk work: he will operate if his schedule allows, and if not, someone else will. When she raises Mr. Kwon's liver, he puts it down to an adhesion from scar tissue left by the operation 15 years ago. She tells him he is guessing. He has watched her surgery video: "You seemed like a god. Or a monster." Told that she only looks ahead, she says Tae-gyeong does not know her, and Dae-il asks what she left behind.

Friday night, everyone is somewhere else

Time stamps carry the week from Wednesday to Friday. At 7:50 p.m. on Friday, the Magnolia circle toasts Dae-il's new chapter. He thanks them for the prestigious Magnolia pin he has wanted so badly. Earlier, at 7:38 p.m., a child calls Dad and gets no answer. At 8:15 p.m., someone outside Taeseong Academy calls emergency services.

At 8:55 p.m., Su-jeong is still at GUMC, long past six. A dump truck driver has dozed off at the wheel, and of about 20 victims, 12 come to GUMC first. Mr. Kwon is brought in too, with a high fever. Seong-jin reaches Dae-il at the dinner, where Dae-il excuses himself from Chairman Gu Bon-pyeong, who heads the foundation behind the hospital. Dae-il says he may not make it in time and doubts Su-jeong is free, but she has already said she will operate.

Her fingerprint no longer opens the OR, and someone fumes that the surgery jerks have revoked her access. The surgical team has left for the crash victims, and only Won-jin remains. Su-jeong drafts an assistant and starts. Seong-jin calls Dae-il to say they are opening Mr. Kwon up for severe adhesions and that there is no need to come. Dae-il leaves the dinner for an emergency surgery, he says, and ends up in traffic behind the accident cleanup.

Dae-il does not make it in time, and somewhere a voice curses the name Gye Su-jeong. Inside Mr. Kwon's abdomen, on the liver Dae-il operated on 15 years ago, Su-jeong finds what was bothering her. The marks are letters: D.N.

Thoughts

Dae-il's charm offensive drives the hour, and the show lets every kind gesture carry a second meaning. He learns Su-jeong's taste in pastries from the intern, studies her patient's chart and asks what she left behind. Then the man he once saved falls ill while he is collecting a pin. The important thing he put ahead of Mr. Kwon's surgery is, it seems, a dinner. Mr. Kwon's devotion, from the boilermakers to the salute, plays very differently once the liver is open.

The other thread is Hui-suk's nose. Set beside the fire, Baraka and the vow never to live like that again, her familiar stench suggests she has met men like Dae-il before. It hints, too, that the past she shares with Su-jeong was not a gentle one. I keep thinking about Tae-gyeong's blood dream as well, which he insists was not a dream. I suspect a real patient is behind it.

My bet is that Su-jeong will not let those letters go. The trouble is that the man behind them was handpicked by Magnolia. And Mr. Kwon, still under the knife, is grateful and sure that Dae-il is his savior.

Up next: Doctor X: Mafia in White Episode 5 Recap. See every episode in the Doctor X: Mafia in White episode guide.