Thanks for the recap. I still love this show. Two favorite moments: 1) Mom consoling Jung-woo and 2) when it seemed like he was about to propose, but instead he pulled out the picture of the patient who needed plastic surgery.

While last week was admittedly a bump in the road

Ya mean, the show was in a slump?
I can be quite superficial, and I like this show when it's being cute and animated and when PSH is fighting showerheads, not when it tries to be serious. So my reaction to most of this week was "What do you expect from a show (largely) about someone whose job is to make you sleep?"

feelings can coexist, and I thought the moments with Jung-woo crying over the black suit and his talk with Ha-neul’s mom were poignant because emotions are messy and rarely clean-cut.

@lovepark Thank you for putting it into beautiful words.

Ep 14 won me over and cooled my frustration from last week's ending. I don't know of the drama wanted to redeem Kyung Min by saying he was an extended victim of the mom's control, but the real profound impact came, not from Kyung Min's sob story, but from Jung Woo's conflicting feelings.

Kyung Min's voiceover saying "He did not do anything" made me wince. The only familial love that Jung Woo had received at that time was from this egoistic KM and to severe that tie must have been a blow bigger than losing his reputation, paying penalties etc., Hopefully, Ha Neul's family will make Jung Woo forget his own lack of familial love.

That car ride was hilarious and realistic. Spilling stuff and being squeezed against the door. I also enjoyed the subverted love triangle trope that was added to the secondary OTP 🤣

When dramas are used to showing the betrayal and revenge part, Dr. Slump stuck to its core concept and showed the difficult part of taking time to process all the feelings. Kudos!

So from the recap I gathered that show's penultimate week was about following healing thesises:
- hyung-from-hell was not ALWAYS bad and ofc HE HAD HIS REASONS (!);
- when trying to stop a murder you don't have to try VERY hard. Actually it's perfectly fine to fail, as long as person you unjustly hate will suffer from the consequences of your failure;
- returning to the job where you were bullied for years to the point of nearly suicidal depression is OK as long as you were promised a promotion;
- engagement after only few months of dating is exactly what two deeply damaged people in the dire need of some Netflix and chill first need. It's not like they already more or less live together anyway so it absolutely makes sense!

Thanks, everyone, esp @lovepark for your service! Now I'm confident I can do better with 2+ hours of my life than wasting them on this dubiously healing show. Hyungsik, darling, I beg you - next time choose something more... yeah, something MORE, pls!

I wonder how Jung-woo is going to handle his parents. His mother is the worst. I don't think she cared about her son getting into a top university so he could have an excellent life after. It was all about her and her reputation.

Who asks a person who just underwent surgery and had an organ and part of the lungs removed if she can still drink? This show refuses to handle drinking in a sort of responsible manner.

At this stade, I'm kinda detached from the characters and the story.

Kyung-min's story wasn't really interesting. He hurt Jung-woo when it was the mother the villain. He took drugs, he gaslighted Ha-Neul, stole her work... But it was touching to see JW trying to handle his feelings of pain and anger.

Ha-Neul didn't learn anything. She overworks again.

And her healing was ridiculous.

I'm disapointed that the writer decided the story needed a villain. A burn-out, depression because of life were more interesting.

"Dae-young only has eyes for Hong-ran, and after the party, he tells her that he wants to be her boyfriend."

What on earth is the point of dragging this one out? He and the nurse seem to have more chemistry between them anyway.

I really did like this week much better--but who else shouted, "Don't you dare HUG HER!!" when Jeong-woo showed up in Ha-neul's step-down hospital room?? It was cute--but it never actually seemed like she had had the time to recover from the fact that she broke her ribs and lost part of her lung in a major surgery just a few, what, days ago (?) before hugging people, walking around...you know? 🤷‍♂️😆

I genuinely just watched this casually. I didn't pay attention to most of the episode because I didn't care and just caught some moments. The moments I did catch were sweet, like the family visiting the dad's grave and the them separately being comforted by mom and uncle. However, I did not care that Kyung Min died, not even little bit, so the grief associated with his death was very uninteresting to me.

Whilst my overall feeling is that the Drs’s writers hit their slump recently, there were some lovely moments in here:

The ML’s confusion over his conflicting emotions towards the antagonist,Kyung-min, and the fight between resentment and forgiveness, hit home.
The fact that this came to a head on the family trip to Busan was great as it gave us more Mother/son in law bonding scenes (I love these two together!).

It was also fab to see the show reinforce the idea that there is no ‘right way’ to express grief (or indeed any emotion) which is a key theme this show has mined well.

Other highlights included the recruitment ad for anaesthetists – great job there😊 I like to think there was a medical consultant in the writer’s room who slipped in that origin story.

And strange to say, I actually enjoyed the 2nd leads rom com beats in these eps. The work lunch and inadvertent love triangle made me laugh. And ping pong and piggy backs with adorable son are just KKiiuuuttte.

I didn’t even want to slap the brother in the face with a dead fish, which is a first (well, maybe just a light tap with a sardine)

I still am very bothered by the writing of this, particular the way the characters are written. I'll leave the truly obnoxious brother out this time, and fixate on a major incident of these two episodes: the truly excessive outpouring of grief for the death of the villain designed to hit us over the head with the idea that all our emotions are "complicated." The villain was for a time the ML's "one true friend" (although we saw in high school that the ML had a group of friends). Of course, he was a paid tutor, so the "friendship" never came without strings. Second the ML ALREADY knew that his "one true friend" had
a). Tried to kill him by drugging his drink.
b). Nearly destroyed the career of the woman he loved
c). played a major role in destroying his successful clinic.
The ML and the villain had already gotten into a fight, where the villain showed no remorse whatsoever. Wouldn't post-fight that have been the time to have the outpouring of grief, because of break and betrayal?

Then, finally, the villain drove the FL into a white truck tag team, nearly killing her. And the ML still had "conflicting emotions" about the villain, because the guy had once given him a suit (probably bought with the ML's parents money) and then on his deathbed the guy said, "I didn't really want to kill you and destroy everything you had, but your Mom made me do it?" (Note a couple of things about this: this type of deathbed "confession" in real life would NOT be to ease the ML's pain, but be a purely self-centered act by the villain designed to alleviate the villain's own guilt--and also how the "real villain" is now the Mom--yet another show where trauma caused by an evil parent is a mainspring of action. ).

In all the ML's grief he never once said anything about the villain's role in undermining the FL--instead the focus was on the emotional trauma caused him, by the "conflicting emotions" surrounding the villain, because that was the POINT of these episodes, just as for the FL the POINT was that she take a rightful place in the hospital filled with nightmare memories for her (unlikely) showing how she had recovered completely.

For me, and obviously, I am an extreme outlier amidst viewers in disliking the manipulative way this show has handled depression, relationships, and overcoming career difficulties, its not that every aspect of this fantasy romance has to be realistic. Its fine if a few weeks of medication and a little baby talk from Park Hyung Sik cured the FL's depression. But if a major theme is going to be the complexity of emotions that come with mid-career turmoil and failure, even in a fantasy healing romance, those emotions and the narrative have to be a little more subtle. You can't have people continuously get amusingly drunk; you can't have a guy behave like a cutesy 4 year old in both his male relationships and his love life and then feel a lot of sympathy for his wracking...

@lovepark Thank you so much for the lovely recap.

I guess I am in the stark minority on here still loving this show with all its onion peeling of characters and events.

It feels like moments are not wasted by our OTP or by our writer. Sometimes scenes which are done for comic effect seem like throw aways but then are used for more poignant points later. For example when HN in the first episode gets called back to work after staying up all night and in her rush out the door she loses a shoe which is retrieved by her uncle. He quips whether she thinks she’s Cinderella. However that scene is later repeated in episode 14 but there is stark contrast. In episode 1 she is tired and in pain looking hassled and rushed. Now, after all her down and losses she discovered life is more than work and to slow down and enjoy the simple pleasures and appreciation of the love and care her family gives her. She gained more self esteem and self worth and rediscovered her love for her job. This time she is smiling broadly while racing to work and her uncle is also smiling broadly at her when he hands her back her shoe.

I don’t believe the message is true love conquers all but self love is needed and family love even if it’s not blood family but your made family. Healing can only really come from within by forgiving and loving yourself and letting yourself be vulnerable and open up to others.

Long post alert.
@lovepark: Your recap is beautiful, and your note at the end pretty much says everything I have felt about this show, and in words that are almost melodic in their beauty.

These two episodes solidified what this show has meant to me: Getting well means different things to different people. Nothing comes easy, not even being angry at someone who has caused you a grievous injury. In the end, a lot of what happens in our lives is also about closure. Nothing is more painful than not knowing what caused something. And as shown in these two beautifully written episodes, there is no answer.

The scene that stood out for me was the deathbed scene of Kyung Min and Jeong Woo, not because of the guilt-ridden ass's confession of being an asshole throughout his life without any concrete reason, but Jeong Woo's outright rejection of that apology.

KM : I was sincere in helping you when you needed it.
JW : Your sincerity means nothing to me now.

Even before he knew KM had put in the screws for his ruins, JW had decided to cut him off for doing what he did to Han-nuel and the tangible suspicion of KM once trying to harm him as well. Despite knowing KM was struggling in ICU, JW didn't visit him or try to know how KM was doing because JW - quote: 'didn't want to pity or forgive him when he didn't deserve it.' (Park Hyung Sik and Oh Dong Min are terrific in this scene. These two episodes showcase PHS's acting scope flawlessly).

Kyung Min's layers fascinated me more because the writer made absolutely no effort to justify his actions (this writer is gold). You can empathise with him, and yet, in the same breath, you reject his actions, and not for once do you feel he didn't deserve what came to him.
JW's mother was a bitch to him? Sure. But guess what - his parents were already off-putting to him, and his thoughts were not charitable towards them to begin with. You can clearly see that some of that hatred towards JW's Mom came from a hurt ego and a rage of helplessness over his father's death - a father whom, in KM's own words, he didn't think much of.
So, trying to hurt JW to get back to his parents was as much of a power trip as anything else.
About the claim that KM tried to save JW by making a half-assed effort to divert the patient to die on someone else's table? Well, he was still culpable in that murder, not to mention he made no other effort to save JW. Dude, that Ambien you were so fond of carrying around? A bit of it in JW's coffee would have kept the poor guy away from the clinic and the eventual disaster and perhaps would have kept you alive in the long run.

Yet, deciding to cut someone from your life is different from having death cleave off that relationship for you before you are ready. That finality can be very hard for someone emotionally engaged in that relationship. Moreover, the onus of letting go because the person is now dead is on you,...

I also liked these two episodes a lot more than the last ones! After I didn’t even feel like hitting Play, I finally finished these and was pleasantly surprised to find the overall vibe “back on track”.
I found Jungwoo’s conflicting feelings about KM believable, and I just loved how Haneul ‘s mom comforted him about it. Plus Lambada finally getting a grip. I’m a bit concerned about Haneul slipping back into her old and unhealthy work ethic, but I’m happy she received the appreciation she deserved. (Unsure if it had to be at her old hospital, but that’s dramaland.)
Loved lots of the moments between our leads again, and am warily hopeful for the wrap up next week.

Ps: that car ride with the family? HILARIOUS! Reminded me a lot of vacation trips my family took back in ye day. I didn’t bathe in makgeolli, to be sure, but potentially apple juice. Alas, nobody bought me an interim “kendo outfit”, which actually feels like a wasted opportunity now!

Oops apologies @attiton. Did not see your comment until after I had commented. Just wanted to respect your request by acknowledging it.