K-Drama Review: Good Doctor

Written by Kidge with interruption by Aimes.

So I thought I would start reviewing some of the K-dramas that I have watched in the last year. Some are new and some are old.

I won’t be giving them a rating, because being a teacher, I have to do enough of that already, and really, feedback is the most important thing. So sorry if that’s what you came looking for, you will instead have to enjoy my reflections on the good, bad and ugly of each show.

Good Doctor

Quick summary:

A young savant with Asperger’s syndrome, becomes a paediatric surgery resident. The show follows the trials and tribulations he faces to become accepted at the hospital, and create relationships with those around him. 

Thoughts:

So I’m not going to lie, I did skip over certain sections of this drama. Namely, the office politics. I’m sorry, but I really do not care about who is going to become the Director of the hospital, or the next Chief of Staff, or even where they are going to get their funding from. All of these things I may have cared about, if the show had done a better job of making me like the characters who were particularly involved in these shenanigans, but…they didn’t.

On a more positive note, this series did an amazing job of making me care a whole lot about the main characters. Joo Won did an amazing job as Park Shi-On, getting many of the characteristics of people with Asperger’s down to a T. I remember watching a kind of dream sequence later in the series, where Cha Yoon-seo (played fantastically by Moon Chae-Won) imagined what they would be like if he didn’t have Asperger’s, and it just demonstrated the subtle ways in which Joo Won had managed to completely change himself to become this character. (On a fangirl note, I re-watched that scene a  few too many times). The chemistry between Park Shi-On and Moon Chae-Won is great, and helped me overcome my reservations about the reality of any possible romance for these characters.

The supporting cast contains some great characters with weird and wonderful quirks. I guarantee you will fall in love with Ko Chang-Seok and Jin Kyung who play the senior nurse and head nurse respectively. They are a riot. Shout out to Kim Hyun-soo who is freakin talented and at the age of 13 pretty much stole every scene she was in. (The picture is from episode 7. Watch and you'll understand why I chose it).