Kim Ji-won's Doctor X Asks If a 5·18 Survivor's Hallucinations Are Worth Curing

In the Oct. 24 episode of SBS's Friday-Saturday drama Doctor X: Age of the White Mafia, a patient with a bullet still lodged in his head since the 1980 Gwangju Uprising climbs to a hospital rooftop, and a helicopter carrying an unconscious former president lands below. The ex-president, Ji Doo-seok, is a fictional figure clearly modeled on Chun Doo-hwan, the military leader tied to the May 18 massacre.

The scene lands in a drama that has increasingly used its medical premise to revisit Korean history, a pattern familiar in Korean television, where the 5·18 movement has been revisited repeatedly in film and drama for years. Here it arrives through the surgery room rather than the battlefield.

A volunteer for an operation no one wanted

The episode opens in the past. During a harsh overseas posting, Kye Su-jung (Kim Ji-won) was nearly strangled by an unidentified foreign soldier, until a child appeared and tearfully asked, "Are you Doctor X? I heard only you can save my brother."

In the present, Kye's workplace, Gusae University Hospital, faces serious deficits and the prospect of the foundation closing it. Management planned a publicity stunt: perform surgery on a 5·18 victim as a show of goodwill. The operation was high risk, with death or a vegetative state possible if it failed, so every surgeon avoided it. Kye raised her hand and said she would operate herself.

The patient, Oh Sang-beom, has lived with severe pain and hallucinations since being shot in the head during the uprising. The bullet is also physical evidence that soldiers fired indiscriminately into the air at civilians. Kye told him that without surgery he would survive, but asked whether merely surviving was acceptable to him. With help from Jang Hee-sook (Lee Jung-eun) and others, she won his consent.

The question that changed his mind

Then Kye reviewed video footage and noticed that Oh always sat at the end of a bench, his gaze fixed on the empty space beside him. She asked whether he sees his older brother, who died in 1980. She told him that surgery would reduce hallucinations and seizures, and with them the chance of seeing his brother, saying she was sharing it because it seemed important.

Oh, who cannot speak, asked in writing whether his brother was a symptom and not a vision. After hesitating, he decided against the operation. Once everyone had left for the night, he put down the notebook he uses to communicate and went to the roof, apparently to keep his brother's apparition and to apologize to the man who sacrificed himself for him.

A helicopter and a collision

At that moment the helicopter arrived with Ji. Oh, who was struck by a bullet during helicopter fire in 1980, staggered at the sound, as though the old horror had returned. Jo Won-jin (Lee Jin-hee) and Park Tae-kyung (Kim Woo-seok), who had followed him, threw themselves in to protect him.

Ji was carried out wearing an oxygen mask. Oh, who has lost the ability to speak, reached out toward him and roared. Kye, seeing in Oh the child who once begged her to save a brother, ran toward him shouting "Please!" The episode ended there.

How the series resolves a scene that pairs a victim with a stand-in for his persecutor is the open question. The next episode will show whether Kye reaches Oh in time and what the hospital does with a patient like Ji.