It’s no secret that Doctor Stranger is a drama with a lot going on but with only two weeks left until the end, this drams has kicked the intensity up to a whole new level of crazy! There’s so much going on, I can barely wrap my head around it all but I’m certainly going to try! Who’s with me?
It seems to be the trend, of late, to begin and end each week’s episodes with Hoon and Jae Joon competing in a surgery which would be fine if said surgeries weren’t full of dramatic pauses, intense stares and a whole lot of sabotage but they are and I’m left sitting here, trying not to fling my laptop across the room! I mean oh my goodness people! Really? Are we really so base that we’re perfectly okay with plotting the deaths of innocent people, just to get what we want? It would appear the answer to this question is yes, yes we are, and while it makes me think I should never get sick while visiting Korea, it also proves that the only decent human beings in this entire drama and Hoon and Soo Hyun because everyone else in that stinking hospital is willing to kill someone to get what they want!
I’m not gonna lie, I was completely disappointed in Jae Joon this week and not just because all of my hopes for him and Hoon getting together to take on the world were dashed into a million tiny pieces. In fact, that whole failed bromance thing paled in comparison to the disappointment I felt when Jae Joon decided to hold on to a completely ridiculous and unfounded grudge against Hoon and completely sell out to the Prime Minister. Ugh! Jae Joon! I had such high hopes for you! Now that Jae Joon has landed himself right in the middle of the Prime Minister’s sinister plot, I find myself wondering what he’s going to do when he realizes he’s been totally played. Is he even going to realize he’s been played and even more important, is he even going to care if it means he gets to take down Oh Joon Gyu? I’d really like to believe that there’s more to Jae Joon than bitter resentment and an over-developed sense of revenge but with the way things were left this week, I’m having a hard time seeing what that might be. I suppose his coming to understand his feelings for Soo Hyun might count in his favor but even that’s not going to make up for the fact that he’s now plotting with the Prime Minister to take down Oh Joon Gyu and Hoon at the cost of an innocent person’s life. Seriously? If anyone is a quack doctor in this drama, I’m pretty sure it’s Jae Joon.
Speaking of quacks… Poor Soo Hyun! She finally found the courage to admit to the world that she likes Hoon and seconds after she confesses to him, she learns that her dad is responsible for ruining his entire life! Talk about shocking! How does a person even begin to deal with that? The crazy thing is, the shocking revelations don’t stop there! Not even a day later, Soo Hyun discovers that Dr. Han and Jae Hee are the same person which means that, not only is Hoon taken, but she’s been confessing her feelings for him to the very person that holds his heart! Talk about mortifying! At least Soo Hyun had the gumption to call Hoon out on this one and I have to applaud her for it. Even if she’s taken a thousand years to admit that she has feelings for Hoon, it’s been apparent to the world for a long time and Hoon would have to be a complete idiot not to have noticed. It would have been so easy for Hoon to let Soo Hyun know that he’d found Jae Hee but he didn’t and now Soo Hyun feels like she’s dying of a broken heart.
I think I would be a bit more upset by the way things are going between Soo Hyun and Hoon if Hoon had completely forgotten about Soo Hyun after she learned Jae Hee’s secret identity but he didn’t. In fact, he was so worried about Soo Hyun that he had to have a rather adorable fight with his phone before setting out to find her on his own. (Sorry but that whole frustrated phone flipping was just so cute!) I’m not even going to try to deny that Hoon’s appearance in the ER, just in time to save Soo Hyun from those gangsters, made my heart skip a beat. I guess I’m just too sentimental or something but watching him step in to save her was just so great! Of course pretty much everything that happened afterwards made my heart skip a beat as Soo Hyun reveals her heart to Hoon and he comforts her without hesitation. When you add to all of that, the fact that Hoon lied to Jae Hee about being with Soo Hyun, I find myself feeling that there’s at least some part of Hoon that cares for Soo Hyun and that makes all of the heartbreak Soo Hyun’s dealing with at the moment, bearable. I refuse to give up hope for her and Hoon just yet, especially now that Jae Hee is starting to take herself out of the picture.
I have to admit, I’m still up in the air about Jae Hee. There’s so much of me that doesn’t want to believe that she’s good and yet there were a lot of things that she did this week that made me waver in my utter dislike of Jae Hee. For starters, Jae Hee confronted the Prime Minister with a proposition and a plan to save both Hoon and his mother, which makes me think that there may actually be a part of her that does love Hoon. I think this theory of mine gets a bit stronger when she plots with Sunglasses (Kim Tae Sool) to take out Cha Jin Soo. (Totally didn’t see that coming, by the way and all I can say is, that punk had better stay dead because if he comes crawling out of that lake, seeking revenge, I’m seriously gonna start flipping tables!) But the thing that really makes me think that Jae Hee’s love for Hoon is more than just an act, is the fact that she’s voluntarily taking herself out of Hoon’s life. By removing Hoon from the competition and herself from Hoon’s team, Jae Hee is slowly severing the ties she has with him because she knows that Hoon will never life a normal, happy life if he stays with her. I think it’s the fact that Jae Hee has come to accept the fact that Hoon would be better off with Soo Hyun, that makes me think that Jae Hee might not be as completely evil as I imagined.
As always, there’s still so much more I could talk about here but if I don’t shut up soon there won’t be much left for Tanya and I to discuss later so I’ll end here and ask you what you thought of this week’s episodes. What did you love? What did you hate? What took you by surprise and what frustrated you to no end? I’d love to hear all of your thoughts, plots and ideas so be sure to leave me a comment below!
You can also tweet at us @Hallyu_Tanya and @TheZombieMamma or find us talking about all manner of Hallyu goodness on our blogs: HallyuKnow and ZombieMamma Catch up on all of our previous Doctor Stranger reviews here:
Episodes 1-2: [Part 1] [Part 2]
Episodes 3-4: [Part 1] [Part 2]
Episodes 5-6: [Part 1] [Part 2]
Episodes 7-8: [Part 1] [Part 2]
Episodes 9-10: [Part 1] [Part 2]
Episodes 11-12: [Part 1] [Part 2]
Episodes 13-14: [Part 1] [Part 2]
Episodes 15-16: [Part 1] [Part 2]
I still think JH is being conniving! If she really wants to take herself out of the equation why would she say in her voice msg to him that she will come back to look for him. It’s basically not putting a fullstop to the situation and asking Hoon to wait for her AGAIN! She still wants to keep him away from SHyun. That is the feeling that I get. Am I overthinking?
I think you’re right, actually. If Jae Hee really wanted to make a way for Hoon to be free from this whole tangled web of crazy, she wouldn’t have left him with a message full of hope and promises. At the same time, I’m kind of wondering if Jae Hee knows something we don’t, about what this final surgery really means. I have this feeling that maybe Jae Hee knows that every one involved in this plot will end up dead at the end and this is her way of saying goodbye and giving Hoon the closure he’s going to need if he’s ever going to be able to let her go and move on with his life. Of course, I could be the one over-thinking all of this and really she’s just as evil and conniving as ever and she really loves messing with Hoon’s heart and his head… I really can’t decide what she’s up to at the moment but either way, I still think she needs to go. Hoon would be much better off if he never saw Jae Hee again.
Call me suspicious but I still don’t buy the idea that she is the real JH. It is inconceivable that someone in JH’s state of health in Budapest could have survived a major operation, take a bullet, fall off a bridge into the icy waters and still survive! Best of all…miraculously appear after 2 years in the pink of health, sans scars, kickass spy & medically qualified to boot. My head spins with all this irrational information and my brain needs to reboot. I try as much as possible to disregards a lot of stuff but the rational side of me still cannot buy into that! Why is the writer & PD insulting my intelligence????? 🙁
Those are all very good points! It does seem pretty much impossible for Jae Hee to have survived the ordeal in Budapest in the first place but to believe that she not only survived, but suffered in camps for years and is now back as a spy, is really too much. Of course the impossible happens all the time in Drama Land so I can accept all of this with a roll of the eye and a “Whatever” but I cannot accept Jae Hee as a good, kind, loving individual. In my eyes, she’s as evil and manipulative as Cha Jin Soo and she needs to follow his example and fall off another bridge. Does that make me a terrible person?
Nooooooooooo..that makes you my new best friend! Lol Lol Lol
Oh..1 more point…she was trying to imitate the way the prison camp JH called Hoon ah!!!! Why would it look so foreign to her if she’s the real mccoy! That has been bugging me for the longest time! I hope I’m being coherent here…it’s almost bedtime 🙂
You’re totally making sense and that’s been bugging me too. I can’t understand why she would do that, unless she was reliving some memory from the past but that’s not what it looked like to me. Also, can you really have surgeries to cover scars? Don’t surgeries usually make more scars? Is there some sort of medical procedure I’m completely unaware of that can hide scars because if there is, I’ve got several I’d like to hide. I guess the pictures of JH’s kidneys are kind of believable but we all know medical records can be faked, even if they were done twice. I honestly don’t know what to think about JH’s identity, I just know that I don’t like her and I would really like it if she disappeared, permanently.
ZombieMama, our thoughts are really the same. Jae Hee in best of good health trotting in South Korea, outmaneuvering agent Cha, and even pointing a gun to lollypop guy is UNBELIEVABLE! Knowing this that she only have less than 2 years to recuperate and prepare for everything. Makes really no sense.
Now, there’s a news that DS will shoot a movie version for Chinese audience. This time the movie has a different ending. What’s your say about this?
This is the first I’ve heard of a Chinese movie version of this drama but I’m all for it! If it gets more people interested in Doctor Stranger then I say, “Hooray!” I’d actually really like to see this story played out in a movie, I think it would be quite interesting to see how they sum up a 20 episode drama in 2 hours. I have a feeling there would be a lot more action and a lot less medical drama… As long as there was still a love story woven in there, I’d be happy. I can’t say how I’d feel about an alternate ending yet because we still don’t know how this one is going to end. All I know is that if we don’t have a happy ending for our Quack couple, I’m going to be very disappointed.
Cha Jin Soo: That punk better stay dead. Hahaha. I just thought how his death was too easy. Too easy. I’m just waiting for him to rise from the dead. It’s just feels weird. I never saw his corpse. That’s what makes me feel unsettling.
Right!?! It just seemed too easy. There’s a big part of me that expects him to just suddenly appear out of nowhere, wielding a gun, ready to ruin the lives of everyone, just because he can. As much as I’d like to believe he’s dead, I just don’t buy it. Something just isn’t sitting well with me on this score and I won’t feel at ease until the final credits roll.
A spy doesn’t die easily.
And that’s why I’m worried.