Doctor X: Mafia in White Episode 6 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

Gye Su-jeong, the freelance surgeon at the heart of Doctor X: Mafia in White, works at GUMC, the hospital in the fictional city of Seonam. She is a locum, placed there by Jang Hui-suk's locum tenens agency, a firm that hires out freelance doctors. In a flashback to a place full of soldiers and gunfire, a boy named Baraka finds her and asks if she is the one called Doctor X. His little sister has been shot, and a wounded doctor he calls Baba says only Su-jeong can remove the bullet in her head. Hurt himself, the boy insists on walking where bullets from behind would hit him first, because she has to survive to save his sister. His name means Blessing and his sister Neema's means Grace; Su-jeong tells him to close his eyes and hold on until he sees her.

The story then jumps ahead to a later night. A bulletin breaks in: Ji Du-seok, a former president, is unconscious and on his way to a hospital. At GUMC, someone demands to know where Oh Sang-beom has gone. Security wants him moved so the whole floor can be cleared, after all the fuss of a VIP-room welcome. Someone wants to complain to the director, Bu Seung-gwon, though another voice guesses he has already approved it.

Magnolia wants a bullet out

A week earlier, unannounced visitors from Magnolia, the circle of Guseo University medical alumni, drop in on Seung-gwon's office. They seem to include Chairman Gu Bon-pyeong, who heads the foundation behind the hospital, since someone asks whether the chairman would be here if proper channels worked. Talk of a task force to rescue the hospital turns into a blunt request: do a surgery for them and take out a bullet. The patient is Sang-beom, 57, a survivor of the Gwangju Democratic Uprising, in the southwestern city of Gwangju, in May 1980. A bullet fragment has sat in his head ever since, left because removal was too risky, and it still causes spasms, seizures, headaches and hallucinations.

His records are gone, and he refuses exams and lives on painkillers. He blames himself for the older brother who died shielding him. What interests the visitors is that the brothers were hit by fire from a helicopter. The martial law command has never owned up to such violence, and the proof is in his head.

The pitch is political: win him over, promise the victims support, and the white coat alliance looks like justice. Nobody else will take the case, the visitors say, and when the hospital balks, they answer that Magnolia has already decided. One of them then shows Seung-gwon a door in his office that leads straight to the parking lot, so a director can slip out if things go wrong. Seung-gwon should not assume he will never need it, the visitor warns. A staffer interrupts: a reporter keeps calling about the foundation weighing whether to shut the hospital, and the reporter knows the exact deficit, leaked from the main hospital. Someone concludes that GUMC is being set up as the patsy, and the room bristles.

When the doctors argue over the case, someone calls it unseemly to hang back while a life is at stake. Do Yun-sik is told it is ridiculous for him, of all people, to say so. The odds sound grim: the patient could die on the table or end up in a vegetative state, though one voice notes that nobody has seen a scan. When someone asks who will operate, Su-jeong answers: "I will! I'll operate."

Elsewhere, someone predicts that Su-jeong and Hui-suk will take the bait and that any failure will land on them alone. It could be the chance to push Su-jeong out for good. Hui-suk, meanwhile, calls the payment a bit weak and is promised more when the job is done.

Later, Hui-suk tells the group she never asked the amount. Instead, she works it out from how deep the shopping bag was and how big a 50,000-won note is, the largest in Korea. It is enough for a new car, to cheers. The mood sours when someone points out the trap. The room was packed so everyone would see Su-jeong step up, and a failure could be pinned on her. A flashback shows the message that summoned her after a week of appendectomies, in three words: bullet, brain, surgery.

The road to Gwangju

At the train station, someone is relieved that the hospital put Park Tae-gyeong, the intern, on the case. Anesthesiologist Jo Won-jin joins them because she was asked, and hears that the team needs at least one member who actually passes for a doctor. Then phones fill with rhyming texts from ER doctor Kim Seong-jin, fishing for Gwangju souvenirs.

A voice recalls running a small shoe store. In Gwangju in 1980, a boy who keeps hanging around the shop turns out to be Sang-beom, little brother of Seung-beom, who shines shoes near the provincial office. They are not related by blood: when he was four, his birth mother left him with the family that took him in. He has saved up to buy his brother shoes, and he boasts that Seung-beom loves classical music and wants to learn piano. The shopkeeper gives him a pair for nothing, claiming the uneven laces make them unsellable, and tells him to save for a piano instead.

The boy bows and promises never to forget the kindness. Then someone shouts that they have guns, and people seem to be fleeing the provincial office. Held back, Sang-beom fights to reach his brother and screams Seung-beom's name.

On the way, someone tells Su-jeong that the song just played is the original of Song of May. Stations played it around May 18 in the years that song was banned. A fellow patient from 1980, now a doctor, has been looking after Sang-beom. His brother's body was never found, and for more than 40 years he has gone there, whatever the weather, straight after his own work shining shoes. He stopped talking long ago, and his last words were that it was all his fault and that he would pay for surviving by living in pain.

Sang-beom's friends speak for him

At a clinic whose sign reads Woo Jae-gyeong Internal Medicine, the team meets the doctor and two others who shared that hospital in 1980. One friend loses patience with Sang-beom's silence. The government is paying, he says, so does Sang-beom want to wither like Geun-sik did some time ago? If they keep vanishing one by one, the friend warns, their story will be erased and rewritten to blame North Korea. They need to live a long time, if only out of spite.

Once the angry friend is sent outside, another says Yeong-pyo cries over Sang-beom's lonely life whenever he drinks. To them he is still the 12-year-old who begged to go home and woke sobbing that it was too heavy, when he meant too scary. Someone who is a doctor himself asks whether the surgery is likely to fail. Su-jeong is blunt: she might fail, and then he dies, so he does not have to do it. Someone pushes back, asking whether he is really fine just existing, with a thick file of nothing but painkiller prescriptions. Doing nothing leaves no chance at all, so they ask him at least to take some scans and then leave freely if he wants.

At the send-off, a friend comes on behalf of the others with gimbap, rice rolled in seaweed, and promises to come on the day of the operation. Then comes money everyone chipped in. In caring for him, they say, they are as rich as Elon Musk or Samsung founder Lee Byeong-chull. He should hold his head high, since they did nothing wrong. Sang-beom kneels and bows to them.

Afterward, someone keeps asking why he had to kneel, and is told he will be fine. On board, someone thanks Sang-beom for the trip and learns he has never ridden a train or left Gwangju. Asked why, he writes his answer: "Because I feel guilty."

Su-jeong claims her patient

At GUMC, his chart records a bullet fragment in the back of the head. Staff fuss over his meals and sleep, and then Kim Chang-su, who heads the Seonam Medical Association, and Mayor Im Ho-seok arrive to shake his hand. Su-jeong tells them to leave if they are done shaking hands: he is her patient, and their speeches and credit-grabbing wear him out. As a fire alarm sends the visitors scrambling, someone lectures her that the world belongs to people who say yes, not to those who say no. Won-jin confesses she pulled the alarm; she has always wanted to press that button.

Su-jeong has reviewed the scans, and she asks Sang-beom whether he sees his brother. The first time she saw him, he sat at the very end of a small bench, looking sideways as if someone sat beside him. He was not wearing the notepad that usually hangs around his neck, since he needs no notes to talk to his brother.

Surgery will ease the seizures, pain and hallucinations, she says, and with them his chances of seeing his brother. He writes to ask whether his brother is just a symptom, and she says yes. Asked if she can pull the operation off, she answers, "I don't fail." He writes that he is not doing it. Someone quietly wishes they could see him too.

Sang-beom goes missing

At home that evening, a banquet of marinated crab and sausage is laid out when the bulletin from the opening returns in full. Around 7:50 p.m., Ji Du-seok, once the country's 11th and 12th president, collapsed in cardiac arrest in the sauna of a golf clubhouse in Gyeonggi Province. He is being flown to the Gyeonggi branch of GUMC. Tae-gyeong calls Su-jeong to say Sang-beom has disappeared and they cannot find him. Someone spots him on the rooftop.

Su-jeong, rushing back, hits heavy traffic while a voice urges her to run and stop him no matter what. At the hospital, an EMS helicopter is bringing Ji Du-seok in. On the rooftop, voices scream Sang-beom's name and shout for someone to grab him, begging him to pull himself together. His note about guilt flashes up once more, and the hour ends on a plea for help.

Thoughts

The hour is built as a mirror. A boy begs Su-jeong to take a bullet out of his sister's head, and a man refuses to let her take one out of his own. Everyone around him wants that bullet for something. Magnolia wants evidence and good press, the hospital wants someone to blame, and Hui-suk wants a car that does not need pushing. Only Sang-beom's friends want him, and the send-off with the gimbap and the pooled money is the warmest scene the show has done.

The bench scene is the one I will remember. Su-jeong reads his loneliness from where he sits. Then she tells him the cure will cost him the only company he keeps, as plainly as she would read a scan. Her familiar promise never to fail lands differently when the patient's reply is that he will not do it. I am less sure who wishes they could see him too. My guess is Su-jeong, thinking of Baraka, but the episode leaves it open.

The politics are blunt, but they work: a man shot from a helicopter is on the roof just as a helicopter carries in a former president. I also doubt the director's escape door was mentioned for nothing. My bet is that Seung-gwon ends up using it. I also expect Magnolia's interest in the bullet as proof to collide with Su-jeong's insistence that Sang-beom is her patient, not a press event.

Missed the last one? Read the Doctor X: Mafia in White Episode 5 Recap. See every episode in the Doctor X: Mafia in White episode guide, updated as the SBS drama airs.