Dr. Romantic Season 3 (2023) Episode 1

Episode 1 of Dr Romantic Season 3 starts three years after the end of Season 2 with a suspicious boat trying to enter the coast of South Korea. The Coast Guards arrive on the boat and find a few bodies of men who have been shot. The guards also rescue a woman and a young boy who reveal that they’re North Korean. The woman claims that her father was one of the men that had been shot and was bleeding profusely.

The naval doctor on the ship tries to revive the man but is unable to stop him from bleeding. He claims that other doctors were on their way there and we see Dr Seo Woo-jin, Park Eun-tak and Jung In-soo arrive on the ship using a helicopter. The three doctors sign a confidentiality agreement with the coast guards that allows the guards to court-marshal the trio if they were to leak any information about the surgery.

Meanwhile, Dr Cha Eun-jae rushes to find Teacher Kim / Dr Kim Sa-bu as his phone is out of reach. Teacher Kim is spending his evening by the sea, fishing in his spare time. On the ship, Woo-jin spots the young boy sitting in a different room with another injured North Korean man. The three doctors start operating on the North Korean patient and learn that a bullet was still inside his body and that his liver was injured.

They decide to operate on board and despite the lack of proper amenities, Woo-jin takes the decision to go ahead with the surgery if they were to save the man. Eun-jae finds Teacher Kim and connects him with Woo-jin who explains the condition of the patient. Woo-jin claims that the man has three gunshot wounds with two of the three bullets lodged inside his body.

The man’s daughter seems to be a medical professional herself and explains that her father had lost up to 1000cc of blood since he had been shot. The woman begs the doctors to save her father and just then a helicopter arrives to pick Teacher Kim up. Kim asks Woo-jin to open the patient up and hang in there for 30 minutes until he is able to make it to the ship.

Woo-jin starts the operation on the patient but the patient’s blood pressure starts dropping as he starts losing pulse when he suffers from a cardiac arrest mid-operation. Along with the help of the naval doctor, Woo-jin, Eun-tak and In-soo try to resuscitate him. Meanwhile, Teacher Kim and Eun-jae make it to the coast along with Intern Jang Dong-hwa. Teacher Kim finds that the daughter of the North Korean patient had coughed up blood.

Eun-jae and Dong-hwa try to help the woman and Teacher Kim asks the coast guard to prepare the helicopter for them to take the patients back to the Emergency Room. Teacher Kim goes to the operation room and joins Woo-jin and the other doctors with the surgery. Despite the constant CPR and surgery, the doctors weren’t able to revive the patient.

Teacher Kim takes over the surgery and inserts a plastic tube inside the man’s liver which helps the blood to flow normally and the man is back to being in a stable condition. Teacher Kim asks the coast guard to make the helicopter available to transport the man to Doldam Hospital. However, the senior coast guard explains that since these people were North Korean defectors and that a peace conference was taking place in Seoul between politicians from the South and the North, he could not let the defectors leave the ship.

Teacher Kim argues that the people are humans before being North Koreans and somehow manages to convince the senior Coast Guard of this fact. The guard lets Teacher Kim take the patients to Doldam unofficially. Meanwhile, Eun-jae and Dong-hwa manage to help the woman breathe normally from her right lung as her left is bleeding. She tries to strike up a conversation with the little boy but he seems very scared to talk to them.

The doctors get ready to take the father and her daughter to Doldam while the little boy and the other North Korean defector are taken along as well. The people at Doldam, Jang Gi-tae, Nurse Oh Myung-sim and Nam Do-il set the hospital’s trauma centre up for the secret operation, involving a refugee. Gi-tae is against using the new building without proper permission and the two decide to leave him out of the mission.

Both patients are taken to the Operating Rooms in the brand new building of the hospital, where the staff are shocked to see a technologically advanced Doldam. Nurse Oh joins Eun-jae and In-soo in treating the woman while Woo-jin asks Dong-hwa to join him, Eun-tak and Teacher Kim with the male patient’s operation.

Teacher Kim tells Nurse Oh that the little boy saw his father die on the boat and was very silent, asking her to keep an eye on him. Minutes before the surgery, Dong-hwa bails on the team and leaves the hospital to go back home. As a result, Teacher Kim, Woo-jin, Eun-tak and Do-il conduct the operation by themselves.

The next day, Dr Park Min-guk meets Dr Cha Jin-man, an old classmate and rival of Teacher Kim and asks him to join Doldam’s trauma centre as a cardiothoracic surgeon.

Dr Cha asks to visit Doldam and Dr Park takes him to visit the new building, not knowing that the centre was being used for the secret surgery of the North Korean refugees. Eun-tak asks Woo-jin to take a rest after successfully saving the man. He deliberates between sending a text to Dr Yoon A-reum stating that he was missing her but is interrupted by Eun-jae. She asks Eun-tak about Woo-jin and learns that he had gone home for a nap.

Nurse Joo asks if the couple had finished moving into their new home and asks Eun-tak if A-reum was doing okay. Nurse Joo wonders if Eun-tak and A-reum had broken up. Meanwhile, A-reum is on a flight with Dr Bae Moon-jung. Back at their house, Eun-jae and Woo-jin spend some romantic time together celebrating his successful operation. Back at the main Doldam Hospital, Dr Yang Ho-joon finds it odd that none of the doctors had come in that day.

He follows In-soo to the Trauma Centre and is shocked to see the staff there. Nurse Oh comes just in time and stops Dr Yang from entering the place by cooking up a lie. Woo-jin comes back to the hospital and finds a lot of people from the National Intelligence trying to interrogate the little boy. Just then, Dr Park Min-guk leads Dr Cha to the trauma centre.

There is chaos at the trauma centre where Ki-tae is shuffling around fearful of what the National Intelligence officers were unto. Min-guk is furious and asks Ki-tae what was going on in the hospital. Just then, the North Korean female patient wakes up in her bed and is relieved to see her father alive. Woo-jin chats with Teacher Kim and thanks him for coming to his rescue despite being on vacation. The two share a moment as Woo-jin praises Teacher Kim for his skills.

However, Ki-tae rushes to find them and informs about Min-guk making an appearance at the trauma centre. Min-guk asks Teacher Kim to explain himself. Teacher Kim is shocked to see Dr Cha alongside Min-guk, but offers to shake his hand all the same. Dr Cha ignores the handshake and meets Eun-jae instead. Eun-jae is shocked to see her father, Dr Cha, at the hospital as the episode comes to an end.

The Episode Review

While it is very fun to see the Doldam doctors back in action, I really did not expect the plot twist at the end of this episode. There is no way Dr Cha is not harbouring hatred for Teacher Kim after all these years. There is a possibility that their fight is a lot more than what Dr Cha made it seem and it will be interesting to see the two characters face to face.

That set-aside, the romance between Eun-jae and Woo-jin will turn so chaotic now that her father is possibly in the mix. I am praying that Eun-tak and A-reum haven’t broken up because our boy is very much still into her, judging by his phone background. As much as I miss Dong-joo and Seo-jeong in this season as well, I am hoping that the makers can find a way to get the main doctors from Season 1 back in this season, even if it’s only for a cameo.

Kudos to the makers for having Eun-jae and Woo-jin move in instead of getting married because it shows that the present generation is not all about marriage and societal norms. I would love to see how Dr Cha takes in the news of this and the dynamics between Woo-jin and Dr Cha, the father of his girlfriend but the enemy of his mentor.