Poong the Joseon Psychiatrist: Episodes 7-8

by Unit

This week, an incident tests our hero’s resolve as a physician, but he doesn’t waver in his decision to do everything he can to protect his patients. Thanks to said incident, we also come a bit closer to unraveling some secrets connected to his past.

 
EPISODES 7-8 WEECAP

Poong and Eun-woo run into their next patient at a stream where she’s saved from drowning, and they learn that she was arrested for attempted arson. Eun-woo recognizes the lady as the daughter of a middle-class bookstore owner who spent a fortune to marry her off to a poor nobleman. The lady neither admits to nor denies the arson, and Eun-woo finds her silence rather odd because she used to be very outspoken pre-marriage. Another odd thing is how she always wants to drench herself in water, which Poong says is a result of the lady bottling up her feelings of rage.

To find out why the lady is so enraged, Poong and Eun-woo visit her house and learn that her daughter passed away. Poong attempts to find a by-the-book treatment for the lady, but Ji-han is more practical and suggests that the lady just needs to say goodbye to her daughter. The lady is then taken to the “afterlife” which in reality is just a cave, and Ib-bun acts as the daughter. This act of saying goodbye comforts the lady a bit, and soon she opens up about what really happened to her daughter.

Her husband and his family lived off her family’s money and when their daughter fell sick, her husband forced her to leave the girl for some money making venture. He promised to look after their daughter, but he didn’t. And by the time she returned, her daughter was already dead.

Due to their differences in status, the lady hasn’t been able to speak up to her husband neither has she been able to confront him on taking a mistress (the victim of the attempted arson). To help the lady release her frustrations, Eun-woo learns some cuss words to teach her, and it’s funny how Eun-woo’s first successful attempt at cussing is directed at Ji-han immediately she learns that he accused her of eating too much. She’s so petty, she even visits the lady’s mother-in-law to stab treat her with acupuncture. Heh.

Regaining her self confidence, the lady marches to the mistress’s house accompanied by our clinic family (who look like a bunch of gangsters lol), where they have a refreshing showdown of cusses at the husband and his mistress. The real arsonist is then revealed to be the mistress herself, who set her house on fire in an attempt to frame the lady and become the legitimate wife. Pfft. This is such a remix of last week’s case, and said husbands aren’t even a good catch in both cases! Anyway, the mistress is arrested, and the lady – free of her frustrations at last – dumps her husband.

Before leaving, the lady thanks the clinic family for helping her, especially Ib-bun who played the role of her daughter, and drew a picture of the daughter as a memento for the lady. Awww. Ib-bun might be lacking in many areas, but when it comes to helping people she doesn’t hesitate to lend a hand. She’s really her father’s daughter, isn’t she? Or not. Because as we come to learn, she isn’t Ji-han’s biological daughter and he adopted her after her mother (a patient of his) died.

Commander Im holds this secret against Ji-han in a bid to get him to hand over the land on which the clinic is situated (prime real estate). And when Commander Im tries to bully Ji-han with the information in front of Ib-bun later on, she’s all… pfft, was it supposed to be a big secret? Heol! Apparently, Ji-han’s drunken habit is to spill her birth secret, and everyone in the family already knows this. Ib-bun is even more concerned that her real father was surnamed Ahn which makes her Ahn Ib-bun (meaning “not pretty”). Heh.

But Ib-bun’s birth secret isn’t the only one Ji-han thought he successfully hid. Poong also confronts him about hiding the fact that he and his father were friends and studied under the same master. At first, he tries to deny it, but when Poong persists, Ji-han tells him never to bring up the matter again. Ji-han actually looks the most angry I’ve ever seen him, and no surprise there since he witnessed his master being killed under the orders of the second state councilor. The master is also the author of the half-burnt medical text, and was killed because of his research on the poisonous plant.

Speaking of which, the plant (which the second state councilor thinks have all been destroyed) regrows in the village, and gets plucked by some unsuspecting kids. It gets into the honey they make for sale, and a “plague” begins in the village. Like every greedy caricature villain ever, Commander Im buys up all the remedial herbs in the village to frustrate the clinic’s effort and pressure Ji-han to sign over the land to him. Sigh! Can this man just go away already? But Ji-han isn’t one to be bullied, so he successfully organizes a heist and empties Commander Im’s storage. Heh!

Unfortunately, none of the remedies work, and the infected people get worse. I find it slightly surprising that Poong doesn’t recognize the resulting sores as the same ones on the late king. But Ji-han recognizes the sores, and knows it’s from the poisonous plant — although he doesn’t speak up because he’s afraid that word will get to the second state councilor. The second state councilor finds out anyway, and orders Shin-woo to burn all the infected people alongside Poong, who volunteered to go into the isolation center with them. Tsk.

After watching one of the patients bleed out from his sores, Poong finally matches the sickness to that of the late king’s. And when Eun-woo consumes the honey and gets infected too, Ji-han comes clean to Poong about the poisonous plant and its connection to the sickness. Poong remembers reading about the plant and its antidote in the medical text, and sets out to find the antidote using a map he found hidden in the text. While Poong is away, Shin-woo – who also consumed the honey – arrives at the isolation center with his soldiers to burn down the place. He pauses on seeing Eun-woo there, and goes to track Poong down.

Poong manages to find the antidote and runs into Shin-woo on his way back. And when Shin-woo tries to kill him, he passes out from the sickness. I wonder if they also took the hippocratic oath in Joseon because I would have left Shin-woo there in self defense Poong brings him back to the isolation center just in time to save the place from being torched by Commander Im (and his utterly ridiculous face mask).

Ji-han isn’t sure about the dosage for the antidote and says they have to experiment on the infected people. So Poong turns himself into a lab rat and ingests the poisonous plant, and I have to admire his dedication at this point. Thanks to his sacrifice, the infected people get well, but all Poong is concerned about when he wakes up is Eun-woo. Lol. It’s really cute how their romance – or whatever this is – is being played on the back burner. It’s just the right amount to not disrupt the flow of the show, but still keep us engaged and rooting for them.

Meanwhile, Ji-han is concerned that the second state councilor might use the opportunity of the plague to burn down the village. So he pleads with Shin-woo not to state the happening as a plague, and write it as a non-transmissible sickness. Shin-woo obliges and states the cause of the sickness as unknown in his report to Hanyang, and the second state councilor is left to wonder which report is true. An unknown cause, or caused by the poisonous herb?

My gut says that the second state councilor doesn’t believe Shin-woo’s report, especially now that we’ve seen that father and son are not totally on the same page. Last week, I kept wondering why Shin-woo seemed to be clueless about the circumstances surrounding the late king’s poisoning, and it turns out that he really doesn’t know anything about it. Plus he wasn’t even the one who killed Poong’s father! So are there two assassins, or did the second state councilor do the killing himself? If so, why did he leave the acupuncture needle on the body for Shin-woo to find?

With two weeks left in the show, it’s a good time to begin to wrap things up, and for all these secrets to come to light. At least let everyone know where they stand, as well as their allies and enemies, so that they can make plans in order to protect themselves and their loved ones.

 
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