Medical Top Team (Episodes 1-2)

The English teacher in me angsts over the title. The glaring misuse of adjective order has been driving me to distraction. I know, I know... it's interlanguage... Who cares... it's a kdrama title afterall? Nonetheless it grates...

The show, on the hand, is off to a flying start. At least I think it is and I approve. Mostly anyway. It's rare for me to like kdrama off the blocks but so far everything looks promising. While I'm completely sold on the two main male leads, the female lead leaves me cold. Still, it's early days yet and kdramas can sometimes go off in unexpected directions. What's not so unexpected are the hints of UST and a love triangle in the winds. I suppose there's a certain demographic that needs to be catered to which consume this stuff for breakfast.

Once again we have ourselves a genius doctor/surgeon (Park Tae Shin played by Kwon Sang Woo) in the lead. But on this occasion, our resident genius is actually a genuinely nice guy with bedside manners to die for. Like Sagara from Doctors, he too, lives by the mantra that the patients come first. Having the courage of convictions in spades, our good doctor spends his waking hours at a free clinic which, unknown to him,  is on the brink of bankruptcy. Our country doctor, however, is much sought after, has something of a world reputation and as we see in the first episode, is being headhunted by a hospital from the US.

While Park is in negotiations with an agent of the US hospital at a flash hotel, a private hospital is holding an event announcing the advent of a new initiative called "Medical Top Team". It's the brainchild of Chief Han Seung Jae (Ju Ji Hoon) who seems to be the illegitimate son of the hospital-owning family. He's recruiting internally and well...  as with such things, there's a power struggle by different factions to have their people in this team of elite doctors.

So far most of the elements work. My only reservation so far is the brilliant thoracic surgeon who doesn't quite feel as brilliant or ambitious as one might expect. She's set up as a foil to the free-spirited Dr Park and probably the lynch  pinch of a potential love triangle. Her first encounter of Dr Park isn't a happy one and quite likely she's disturbed by how unencumbered by pride and ambition he seems to be. Idealism in medicine sees to be a foreign concept in her neck of the woods apparently.

So yeah... Dr Park is a good bloke... down right charming as he does his Florence Nightingale shtick. If he isn't already perfect, he's also a caring diagnostician. What more could his patients want? In one episode we see him perform two emergency maneouvres, diagnose a stranger's limping motions  and perform not one but two emergency surgeries.

No wonder Chief Han wants him on his team.