Recap Korean Drama "Taxi Driver" Season 2 Episode 10

Episode 10 of Taxi Driver Season 2 starts where we left off, with Do-gi on the operating table, ready to be operated on by Dr Gong. Dr Gong is Dr Ahn’s junior and was doing the operation instead of the senior doctor. A phone call stops him from performing the surgery, where a nurse announces that the real patient was waiting outside the operation theatre.

Dr Ahn is surprised by the mistake and she asks the nurses to take Do-gi out of the room. Hours later, the taxi driver woke up after the effects of the anaesthesia had run off. Near his general ward bed, Do-gi finds Dr Ahn waiting for him. She apologises for the mix-up and promises to transfer him to a local hospital that would be able to better cater to his medical needs.

Do-gi disappears from the hospital in the middle of the night. Meanwhile, he spots a man run into the hospital using the rear exit. The person was going to the Meditopia unit which manufactures medical equipment. He gets a call from Dr Ahn and is called to the operation room from the back gate. Do-gi sneaks in behind the man and learns that he is Mr Gong Soo-ho, the sales intern at Meditopia.

Go-eun and Do-gi are shocked to see the number of surgeries Soo-ho had performed as he worked with Dr Ahn. Back at the Rainbow Taxi headquarters, Sung-cheol explains that Soo-ho was a ghost doctor – one who performs the surgeries for a small sum of money.

These doctors are usually residents or other, less famous doctors who perform the surgery while the actual doctor uses their time to book more appointments from consultations. Go-eun shares that Dr Ahn used to practice under a different name before working with the hospital.

She adds that Dr Ahn was a repeat offender and had gotten her practice temporarily suspended due to a similar ghost doctor racket. Soo-ho meets Dr Ahn at a bar where Kyung-goo is the wait staff. The revenge crew member observes how Dr Ahn was controlling Soo-ho and manipulating him into performing the surgeries by threatening to replace him with another surgeon.

She tells Soo-ho that he had to perform two surgeries that evening. Go-eun claims that she had been playing safe by using Soo-ho’s credit card to consume alcohol which is why her record was clean. Moreover, Do-gi is adamant he won’t let these two perform any more surgeries under the influence anymore.

Instead of letting Dr Ahn’s assistant pick Soo-ho, Do-gi picks the sales intern in his taxi. There, Do-gi plays video evidence of him in the operating room instead of Dr Ahn. He asks to be told the truth about So-ryeon’s operation. Soo-ho claims that after an accident in the operating room, So-ryeon started losing a lot of blood.

Dr Ahn arrived in time to save the day but considering that she was drunk, she was not able to correct Soo-ho’s mistakes. She asks for So-ryeon’s incision to be stitched without surgery and asks Dr Gong/Soo-ho to meet her outside. She forces him to take a drink with her and brushes off the incident with So-ryeon as if it were nothing. Do-gi confronts Soo-ho for staying silent about the accident for so long.

He claims that if he would be a whistle-blower, he would be destroyed which is why he had to do what Dr Ahn asked him. At the hospital, Dr Ahn is pissed that Soo-ho wasn’t there to perform the surgery that day. She tells her assistant to stop making any payments to Meditopia and asks him to look for a new equipment dealer.

Dr Ahh asks him to cancel all her surgeries for the day, frustrated that she would have to incur a financial loss due to the delay. Go-eun is curious about Do-gi still keeping up appearances at the hospital but the taxi driver is sure there is more to Dr Ahn, which is what he was at the hospital to see.

Ha-joon is at the hospital and acts concerned about Do-gi being admitted there. Do-gi asks him about their last conversation about befriending one’s enemy and Ha-joon claims that it would not be wise for him to do so. After the conversation, Do-gi realises that most of the patients who were getting surgeries from Dr Ahn did not have relatives and next of kin waiting for them.

Dr Ahn is doing volunteer work where she offers a free consultations to senior citizens that live alone. When one old man claims that he did not feel the need to get surgery, she forces him to get one done and books a slot for him. Do-gi concludes that Dr Ahn was only doing this to senior citizens who were under South Korea’s welfare plan in order to make money off of them.

He also claims that she selected senior citizens with no caring relatives in order to have a squeaky-clean record in the event of an accident. Meanwhile, Sung-cheol is in So-ryeon’s hospital room talking to Jae-duk about his love and dedication to his daughter. The father thanks Sung-cheol for paying her medical bills.

Dr Ahn is golfing when she meets with another Meditopia sales intern. She cracks the same deal with him as she has with Soo-ho and asks him to practice performing surgery on practice surgical kits. Dr Ahn rushes to the hospital when she gets a call about the old man being in critical condition after one of her surgeries.

She alleges that the man was unwell due to his age and asks her head nurse to take care of him. Dr Ahn also asks her assistant to prepare for the man’s funeral and asks for the medical records to be taken care of. When the assistant goes to the break room to destroy the documents, Do-gi follows him there and beats the man to a pulp.

The rest of the group also enters the hospital with Jin-eon playing the security guard, Kyung-goo playing a janitor, Go-eun playing a nurse and Sung-cheol playing a doctor. Sung-cheol manages to get the old man out of the hospital with the others’ help. Do-gi asks to be discharged and leaves the hospital voluntarily.

Dr Ahn is keeping busy owning to her book release and is on a TV show promoting it. The showrunner interrupts Dr Ahn and claims that they received a tip about the doctor donating all her profits from the year to the country’s welfare program. Dr Ahn is caught off guard and calls her assistant after the filming.

She is pissed that such a donation was made in her name without her permission but the assistant claims that the donor form was signed by the doctor and that it cannot be taken back. She gets another call from the hospital claiming that the health department was there to assess the hospital for an anonymous tip. The claims from the tip are proven to be true.

She claims that there’s CCTV footage to prove her innocence but the employee bites back that the footage is regularly deleted on Dr Ahn’s orders. The cops arrest Dr Ahn after Soo-ho surrendered himself and expose the truth behind Dr Ahn. Meanwhile, Ha-joon sneaks into Do-gi’s apartment and starts snooping around.

Dr Ahn plans on escaping the charges by paying a fine and changing her name. Suddenly, she hears the telltale alarm blaring when Do-gi comes into the hospital’s operation theatre and sedates her with an anaesthetic. He threatens to operate on her without any experience to give her a taste of her medicine.

She tries to get out of the situation by bribing Do-gi but is not able to get through to the taxi driver. At the same time, So-ryeon wakes up from her coma and Jae-duk finally reunites with his daughter. After the case is solved, Ha-joon gives the police chief a go-ahead to blow up Do-gi’s taxi.

Do-gi and the team are closing the taxi when they hear an alarming signal on the radio. He moves the taxi away from the one Kyung-goo was driving. The others follow the taxi and are shocked to see the taxi Do-gi was driving blow up into flames.

---

The Episode Review

Wow this episode really was unexpected. While I do think that Do-gi is alive and this was all part of his plan, the elaborate funeral scene in the promo to the next episode has me thinking otherwise. I think we needed more clarity on what happened to Dr Ahn in the end of the episode and if she was really punished for what she had done.

Moreover, it seems as though Sung-cheol and the others had not caught on to Ha-joon’s schemes. I wonder if the other members of the revenge crew are in on Do-gi’s ‘fake death’ and if all this is an elaborate scheme to one-up Ha-joon. Guess we’ll have to wait to find out.