Emergency Couple: Episode 6

by Slappyunni

It’s “out with the old, in with the new” in this episode, as our heroine shifts into action and makes major leaps towards personal revelations and self-affirmation. Luckily, she has a wise mentor to guide her on her journey. Find out how our heroine discovers her true self through rash acts of selflessness…

EPISODE 6 RECAP

Jin-hee needs to give Chang-min’s mom a shot, but Mom is having none of it. She’s spooked enough to think that Jin-hee has plans to kill her, and if that’s not the kind of thought that should make a person self-reflect on past behavior, I don’t know what would be. Not one for self-reflection, Chang-min’s mom threatens to have Jin-hee fired and her tantrum escalates until she slaps Jin-hee in the face.

Chun-soo and Chang-min run into the room just in time to see Jin-hee get slapped, and both men are shocked. Chang-min sends a look of mortified apology Jin-hee’s way. Chun-soo calmly asks Chang-min’s mom to explain herself. She demands that Chun-soo send Jin-hee away and assign her a different intern. “How dare you hire an unqualified girl as an intern and get my blood pressure up?” she asks. The interns leave the room at Chun-soo’s request.

Chang-min’s mom demands again that instead of the clumsy, ignorant Jin-hee, she wants Ah-reum to be assigned to her for the duration of her hospital stay. Chun-soo explains that Ah-reum’s schedule is already determined, and that such requests from patients cannot be accommodated. Chang-min’s mom calls her brother and asks him to pull the needed strings.

Jin-hee is back in the kitty cat stairwell, standing in a corner, eyes closed. Chang-min offers her a cold drink and tells her to use it to cool her face. She cracks open her eyes and brushes past Chang-min. The can crashes to the floor. Chang-min apologizes, as Jin-hee walks away. She stops, and says, “I see nothing’s changed even though I’m now a doctor. At least before, I didn’t get slapped. Life sucks.”

Ah-reum joins Chun-soo in Chang-min’s mother’s room. An irritated Chun-soo can do nothing, since the hospital director himself told Ah-reum to see to the VIP patient. Chang-min’s mom fawns over Ah-reum, and she asks Chun-soo to leave so that she can clear up a misunderstanding. Chun-soo sticks around long enough to hear Chang-min’s mom apologize to Ah-reum for not recognizing her back in Chang-min’s apartment. Chun-soo leaves, and she fawns over Ah-reum some more.

Chun-soo meets with his boss, the head of ER, to discuss Jin-hee’s dismissal notice and pending budget cut. Chun-soo asks the head of ER to buy him some time. He thinks one reprimand should suffice, and that if Jin-hee quits, the ER should be spared the budget cut. The head of ER expresses surprise that Chun-soo seems so willing to let Jin-hee go. Heck, I’m surprised too. He asks, “Why have you changed so much?” Chun-soo replies, “If I don’t change, I wouldn’t last a day here. What, you want me to quit again and spend my time fishing?” Must be that in this dramaverse, doctors who aren’t doctoring are all out fishing.

Chun-soo eats dinner by himself at a restaurant, where Jin-hee comes in and orders a bottle of soju. As Jin-hee steadily gets plastered, she drunk-dials friend after friend. (These drama people seriously need phones fitted with a breathalyzer lock.) Her bragging about having become a doctor starts off with claims that she could model—because that’s just how good she looks in a doctor’s gown. She’s three sheets to the wind when she reminds another friend about how she was the best at dissecting frogs. It’s hilarious and poignant at the same time, because we (and Chun-soo) see how much being a doctor means to Jin-hee.

Jin-hee passes out at her table, and Chun-soo’s “What do I do?” face is priceless. Someone must have called for a driver to take Jin-hee home, because here’s a cameo from rapper Gary (one-half of Running Man’s Monday Couple with Song Ji-hyo, which explains his line, “I think I might be seeing you on Monday…”). He helps Jin-hee out to the car and she calls him “Gary ahjusshi!” He says, “Who’s Gary? I’m dae-ri! [driver]” Haha. She hits on him from the back seat, babbling, “You’re really my style.”

A hungover Jin-hee sits down for breakfast with Mom. She reports that she got a call from younger sister Jin-ae and confirms that Jin-ae did indeed take and sell her wedding ring. Irate, Mom demands that Jin-hee bring her sister home. Jin-hee thinks that Jin-ae left home because Mom was too hard on her. “Jin-ae acts that way because you’re always favoring me. What’s so great about me?” she asks.

Mom sharply reminds Jin-hee that completing her residency and becoming a specialist will change her life. Jin-hee muses, “I thought my life had changed already. But it doesn’t seem like it. Even if I were to die and wake up, I think I’m just Oh Jin-hee.”

Ah-reum reminds Chang-min that tonight is the night of the indie band concert. He agrees to meet up with her after he helps get his mom discharged.

Jin-hee sits in the park and contemplates her resignation letter. When she gets to the hospital, Chun-soo barks that she is 37 seconds late, adding, “If you can’t come to work on time, maybe you shouldn’t drink so much.” Ha. Jin-hee wonders how he knows.

Resignation letter in hand, Jin-hee solemnly walks into Chun-soo’s office. She hands over the letter and glances down, only to catch sight of Chun-soo’s toes wriggling madly in a pair of very holey socks. She starts to laugh, and Chun-soo is astonished. “Are you laughing? What’s so funny about handing in a resignation letter?” He has no idea why she’s laughing but she just can’t help herself, looking down again to confirm that yep, those are some mighty squirmy toes playing peek-a-boo.

Chang-min walks into the office to discuss a case with Chun-soo while Jin-hee tries heroically to stifle her giggles. Chun-soo leaves the office with one last “Don’t you laugh. We’ll talk later.” Jin-hee finally breaks down laughing. Incredulous, Chang-min says, “Every time you’re in here, you’re in his arms and now, you’re even selling your smiles.” Jin-hee somehow refrains from punching him.

Ah-reum explains to Chang-min’s mom that her family keeps setting up blind dates against her wishes. Chang-min’s mom asks Ah-reum whether she finds Chang-min attractive as a man. It’s just way too…direct to be appropriate. Ah-reum hedges by saying she’d need to see more of Chang-min to know, and Chang-min’s mom encourages them to date. She’s thrilled when Ah-reum informs her that they already have plans to attend a concert that evening.

In the ER, Ji-hye and staff treat a woman’s arm wound. The woman’s husband is concerned about payment, but a nurse reassures him that worker’s compensation should cover the hospital bill since the woman, Emma, was injured at a work site. As the husband helps Emma down the hall, however, she suddenly collapses in abdominal pain. Jin-hee runs over and advises Emma to get examined, but her husband explains that while the arm injury is covered by workers’ insurance, they have no money to pay for another examination.

Jin-hee escorts the couple into an empty room. She realizes she’s going to need an ultrasound and explains to the couple that an ultrasound isn’t expensive but that a surgery would be, should it be necessary.

Chang-min asks Chun-soo whether Jin-hee has tendered her resignation. Chun-soo confirms it. Chang-min also wants to know why she was laughing back in the office, and Chun-soo gruffly replies, “How would I know? And why are you so curious?” When Chun-soo brings up the tracheotomy, Chang-min gets fired up, saying the patient’s death was not his or Jin-hee’s fault. He can’t believe that’s sufficient reason for Jin-hee to quit. When Chun-soo mentions the dismissal notice he received from the higher-ups, Chang-min blows up, “You call yourself a chief?” I’m with Chang-min on this one.

Chang-min can’t understand why only Jin-hee is facing dismissal when he was also involved in the tracheotomy. An exasperated Chun-soo says pointedly, “You should know better than anyone else why.” Chang-min eventually realizes that his family connections have kept him immune from dismissal, unlike Jin-hee.

Meanwhile, Jin-hee’s busy going rogue. Wearing a surgical mask, she sneaks through the halls with an ultrasound machine, insofar as you can sneak around with a big piece of machinery. When she sees that Emma has gallstones, she immediately runs to Chun-soo for help.

Chun-soo looks at the ultrasound and it’s even worse than Jin-hee realized. He tells her to book an operating room right away. When she hesitates, Emma’s husband explains to Chun-soo that they have no money. Chun-soo grasps the full implications of the situation, and he barks at Jin-hee, “What the hell are you doing?”

But Chun-soo can’t help but be awesome. He stands, somewhat sheepishly, as Ji-hye scrubs up in preparation for surgery. Ji-hye points out how similar he is to Jin-hee in that they both think only of the patients, paying no regard to extenuating circumstances.

Chun-soo says, “I’m not like that anymore. I’ve changed a lot.” Yeah, keep trying to convince yourself of that, dude. Sure enough, when Ji-hye asks him whether he’s footing the surgery bill, Chun-soo smirks in guilty silence. Awww. Ji-hye sighs, “And this is why you still can’t get married.” Ahaha.

Yong-gyu places a can of soda in front of a perfectly back-lit, sleeping Ah-reum. He’s about to sneak in to steal a kiss when Chang-min interrupts. Yong-gyu leaves in embarrassment, and Chang-min likewise walks off. Ah-reum wakes up to see Chang-min leaving and smiles, thinking that it was Chang-min who left her the soda.

Jin-hee finds herself once more standing in front of Chun-soo’s desk. Chun-soo says, “And I’m to believe you want to quit being a doctor? You steal an ultrasound machine, get slapped by a VIP patient, get roaring drunk, call your friends to brag you’re a doctor who can deliver an instant diagnosis as soon as you put on a stethoscope?” Ahaha, he’s quoting her drunken phone call conversations word for word. Jin-hee is thoroughly rattled.

Chun-soo continues, “Why? Are you embarrassed? So why do you do embarrassing things? Now that you’re about to quit, have you decided to just do anything you want?” Chun-soo rips up Jin-hee’s resignation letter, to her shock, and she starts to cry. She explains that she didn’t become a doctor out of a sense of duty or some noble respect for life: “Because of the people who stepped on me and looked down on me, I wanted to see what was so great about being a doctor.” She continues, “It was wrong to begin with that mindset. My motive was ill-intentioned and bad. Just as you said my first day, I don’t have the qualifications, skills or attitude to be a doctor.”

Chun-soo replies, “So you started with bad intentions. Does everyone become a doctor to cure sick people and save the world like Jesus? Are you saying that only people with pure intentions can become doctors? And are you saying that those pure intentions are never, not once, ever swayed in a course of a lifetime? That kind of perfect idealism doesn’t exist. That kind of doctor? It’s a fantasy that exists only in dramas.”

Chang-min’s mom refuses to leave the hospital until her husband shows up, while Chang-min tells her that’s not likely to happen. Mom doesn’t want Chang-min to be late for his date with Ah-reum and goes so far as to encourage him to spend the night together in a hotel. At his shock, she counters, “What? I hear everyone starts off by sleeping together these days.” Um. Ick. Mom thinks she’s got the 4-1-1 on modern dating. In fact, she’s so hip and down with the young folks, she thinks Chang-min and Ah-reum are going to a classical music concert.

In Chun-soo’s office, Jin-hee spots her employee dismissal notice on a desk. The phone rings and the news is bad: Chang-min’s mom has lost consciousness. Jin-hee calls Chang-min, who runs into Yong-gyu long enough to hand off the concert tickets, telling him to take his place on his date with Ah-reum.

The electrocardiogram indicates that Chang-min’s mom has a serious heart condition. They connect her to a pacemaker but her pulse still drops, and Chun-soo resorts to CPR and defibrillation. They finally get her pulse back, to everyone’s relief, and Dr. Ahn points out that Chang-min’s mom would be dead had she not been hooked up to an ECG. He asks who thought to do so when she was about to be discharged, and when he sees that it was Jin-hee, he gives her grudging props.

Chun-soo asks Jin-hee why she thought to hook up the ECG too, and she says that she suspected Chang-min’s mom may have heart issues. Chun-soo makes it clear to Chang-min that Jin-hee has effectively saved his mother’s life, and wonders how she could have suspected a thing when there was no mention of heart problems on the patient’s chart.

Chang-min tries to impress on his mom that Jin-hee saved her life because she remembered her previous bout of heart failure years ago. Mom is unswayed. By her logic, Jin-hee was the reason that she suffered from heart problems in the first place. Sigh.

Chun-soo tells Chang-min’s mom that she could at least thank Jin-hee for saving her life. Like Chang-min, Chun-soo fails to evoke even the smallest shred of gratitude from Chang-min’s mom.

Jin-hee admits to Chun-soo that she saw her dismissal notice and asks why he ripped up her resignation letter if she’s to be fired anyway. Chun-soo counters, “You suffered all sorts of humiliation but you tried your utmost to save that VIP patient to the very end. Why?” Jin-hee replies that she doesn’t know.

Chun-soo tells her that it was her doctor’s instinct: “Do away with the weak mindset that wrote the resignation letter. And the tracheotomy patient’s death was not your fault, so don’t blame yourself. No doubt there will be events in the future for which to blame yourself. It won’t be too late to blame yourself then.”

Ah-reum waits at the bar for Chang-min, only to have Yong-gyu arrive instead. He’s obviously more thrilled with her company than she is with his, and Yong-gyu good-naturedly says that something must have come up with Chang-min, and that he can join them next time.

Chang-min waits in his dad’s office and spots Jin-hee’s gift on the desk. It’s a stethoscope, but before he can open the enclosed card, his dad walks in. Chang-min tries to convince him to come to the hospital but Dad knows Mom too well, suspecting that she’s exaggerating her ailments as usual. Chang-min leaves in disgust and starts to head back to the hospital, but his mom urges him to meet Ah-reum instead.

Chun-soo offers to treat Ji-hye to dinner, to her pleasant surprise, and they end up at the same bar as the other two, where Ji-hye says the scene reminds her of “the old days” together. I don’t get the vibe that these two were involved romantically in the past, for they’re just far too comfortable with each other… but I’m beginning to suspect that Ji-hye might want to start something now.

Jin-hee calls up one of Jin-ae’s friends to get information about Jin-ae’s whereabouts, and by the time she arrives at the bar, the band is in full swing. Chang-min arrives and searches for Ah-reum, just as Jin-hee spots a familiar mane of platinum blonde hair on stage, which belongs to the lead singer of the band… who is Jin-ae!

Jin-hee beelines right onto the stage and grabs her sister mid-performance, stopping the show. Yong-gyu, Ah-reum, Chun-soo, Ji-hye, and Chang-min all recognize Jin-hee and gape in astonishment.

Intent on dragging her sister home, Jin-hee gets into a physical altercation with the other band members. Jin-ae makes a break for it and sprints for the exit. Jin-hee tries to shake off the band members, but as she twists away, she sails off the stage and the episode ends with Jin-hee frozen in mid-air, about to take a nasty spill.

COMMENTS

This episode had a sprinkling of everything: some nice comic moments, major character development for Jin-hee, and a set-up for a new secondary storyline in Jin-ae.

After getting slapped by Chang-min’s mom and facing dismissal at work, it’s easy to see why Jin-hee thinks that nothing in her life has changed. She thinks that she is the same old Jin-hee. What I find most satisfying about this episode is that she spends the entire hour showing us that she is wrong. If we are to believe Chang-min, the Jin-hee of old would have wallowed in her self-pity and depression. The old Jin-hee may have been so paralyzed by her negative emotions that she was unable to take action to save her failing marriage. The Jin-hee 2.0 who we see today puts aside her own emotions as if they were yesterday’s news and springs into action to save Emma’s life. For the new Jin-hee, her genuine desire to help people trumps any thoughts of self-doubt or really, any thoughts of self at all.

Her motive for becoming a doctor was born of ill intentions, she confesses. So what? Her motive for BEING a doctor has morphed into a selfless, noble desire to help others. It is Chun-soo who points out to her the changeability of a person’s intentions and motivations over time. When Jin-hee cannot voice why she worked so hard to save Chang-min’s mom despite suffering such humiliation, it is Chun-soo again who tells her that it is her “doctor’s instinct.” What he doesn’t spell out explicitly is that a doctor’s “instinct” is to place the well-being of a patient above all else. With Chang-min’s mom, Jin-hee never wavered from delivering the best care, despite her past personal issues and despite Chang-min’s mom’s ongoing spitefulness. Same with Emma: Jin-hee prioritized saving the patient, with little regard to what financial, legal, or disciplinary issues might result.

However, Chun-soo also notes that such selfless, noble idealism doesn’t exist. I wonder if the truth is more that such idealism CANNOT exist over the long run. In this episode, Chun-soo is accused by the head of ER of having “changed so much” when he casually mentions letting Jin-hee go, yet later accused by Ji-hye of having changed not at all. His response to the head of ER indicates that he knows he needs to change if he plans to have a viable career.

Chun-soo half-heartedly tries to convince Ji-hye that he’s “changed a lot,” then promptly negates his words by paying for Emma’s surgery out of his own pocket. I suspect that a younger Chun-soo sported a brand of passionate idealism similar to Jin-hee’s which led him to leave or to get driven out of the hospital. With Chun-soo, we’ve already seen him place a patient’s well-being over hospital politics, for instance—he does not defer to senior doctors when he thinks they are wrong, incurring enmity from Dr. Ahn and others. His decision to rejoin the hospital was clearly accompanied by the awareness that he had to compromise some of his ideals. Hey, I can respect someone who chooses to conform to a flawed system in order to effect change from within. Certainly, that would be a more accurate reflection of reality. But will he, and can he, make those compromises? And do I want Chun-soo to become an accurate reflection of reality, or do I want him to remain the fantasy that only exists in dramas?

I’d feel remiss if I neglected to mention Chang-min in my comments. Frankly, there has still been so little movement towards the potential reuniting of our two leads that I’ve given up twiddling my thumbs on that front only to spend my time cooing over Chun-soo. Let’s see. Chang-min lobbies (unsuccessfully) to eke out of his mom one lousy “thank you” for Jin-hee, while Chun-soo shows Jin-hee that she has found her true calling in life. Chang-min, you’ve got 14 episodes left to bring your A-game, and you’d better bring it soon.

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