This review may contain spoilers
It was decent until it wasn't....(I watched 31 1/2 episodes)
Using my personal rating system of "loved," "liked," "meh," & "nah," this was a “liked” up until the last two episodes then it became a “nah”. I actually did not even watch the last half hour of the last episode. Read on to find out why.
Things I liked:
Ji Sung did an excellent job in that role. I actually liked all the characters. I liked the slow-burn romance between the two leads. I liked that there was zero love triangle, the sisters reconciled, and the father got a dignified end. I also liked the growth of the two “antagonists” (the prosecutor and the nurse) throughout the series as they realized they were focused on the wrong thing.
Things I did not like so much:
At first, I could handle the medical inaccuracies. For example, a main characteristic of the disease that afflicts Cha Yo Han is mental disability/development delays. So, the fact that this incredibly rare disease (despite it showing up a lot in medical dramas) had two characters with the disease and neither of which had one of the key characteristics was a little much. The other thing I dislike about medical dramas in general is that apparently hospitals consist only of doctors and nurses and zero other health professionals. Having worked in the hospital setting before (as one of the health professionals never featured), hospital work is much more complex and involves not just a team of physicians but a team of a variety of different health and health-related professionals.
Minor points of dislike: The fact that Lee Se Young's character was always in tears and the fact that, apparently, her hair dresser got called away to deal with a family emergency in the middle of her hair cut (or someone was putting in extensions and only got the first piece in before suddenly dying a of a heart attack or something).
A key dislike I had was the fact that the show kept getting “physician-assisted suicide” and “euthanasia” confused. What the former minister and the attorney were trying to promote was physician-assisted suicide, what Cha Yo Han had gone to jail for was euthanasia (btw, with that severe of a disease, no way he survived prison…and is that a drama thing that a doctor who euthanizes a patient and goes to jail gets to be a doctor again or is that really possible in South Korea!?). Those two concepts from moral, legal, ethical standpoints need to be treated differently. One is a patient’s informed choice about the end of their life, the other is NOT a decision made by a patient but rather an ethics committee or family or physician.
But the big reason why I ‘dropped’ it halfway through the last episode was the jack@$$ male lead ghosting the female lead for three years, during one of which he was stalking her—all of this after she’d begged him not to keep her out of his medical problems! Then he shows up and says that if her love for him was strong enough, she would not have moved on and would take him back. Such *clap* BS *clap*. Served him right if he came back to find her happily married to someone with much less drama in his life! But no, dramaland would not let such a toxic move impede a ‘happy’ ending, she immediately forgives him because, of course, she could not live without him and kept herself loyal and single (and most likely a virgin) for three whole years despite the fact that he had his colleagues lie to her about his situation, had been in the country for a whole year and didn’t tell (plus stalked her!), and didn’t trust her to help him through his medical issues. At that point, all the little bits and pieces that hadn’t made sense came crashing back in, I could no longer ignore them, and I was done. At that point, a ‘happy ending’ of them getting together was no longer a happy ending for me.
Should you watch this? I don’t know. It wasn’t a bad drama as medical dramas go. The romance was not even that bad, but I could not handle the sudden toxicity at the end. The conflict that underlined the entire show was anti-climatic and not enough to be worthy of the mystery they tried to make it out to be. If you’re a diehard Ji Sung fan, he does look very good in this, so there’s that. :D
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