10/10 is my rating. This is a 2022 South Korean paranormal mystery medical drama with 16, 60 minute episodes.
Cha Young-min (Rain) is a highly skilled cardiothoracic surgeon who suffers no idiots. He is a professor at the teaching hospital and is mentoring a cadre of residents when an unexpected accident leaves him in a coma and wandering the hospital as a coma ghost. One of his mentees, Go Seung-tak (Kim -Bum) was a dislike at first site situation. Seung-tak is the heir to the hospital and is pursuing medicine at the direction of his grandfather who wants his grandson to know the business from the ground up. The thing is Seung-tak is book brilliant but adverse to doing anything hands on and his plan was to coast through on his brains without doing any hands on practice. When Young-min becomes a coma ghost he is able to take over Seung-tak but no one else. Since he was the only doctor of his skill at that hospital and many complex cases come in he finds that he needs Seung-tak's body to be able to save patients with the need for complex surgery. As things go along it seems that Young-min's injury may not have been an accident. Someone wants both him and Seung-tak out of the picture. These two who are so at odds with each other find they must work together to save patients and also to figure out who is trying to eliminate both doctors.
This was really the perfect drama that avoided all the tired tropes that are somewhat annoying. It had heart warming relationships, all major aspects were well finished, interesting cases, great chemistry between the leads and among all the cast. I loved the bromance. The friendship and interaction between the two male leads was super cute. Spoilers* I wasn't sure how they were going to carry off the whole "ghost doctor" angle but it made sense within believing that comatose patients are a special type of ghost. They did such an excellent job of showing not only how and why Young-min became the hard, seemingly uncaring, doctor that he was but his evolution into a doctor that not only cared deeply about the patients he knew he could save but all of the patients. Young-min and Seung-tak took the best qualities of each other and blended them together in a mentorship/friendship that was durable and made them both better people. I liked how both men had love interests and that was an important part of both of the worlds yet the central relationship was theirs. All of the ghosts in the story were interesting and complex and went through their own evolution. I liked how, while they were able to solve some of the cases of the comatose patients, there was that one they were not able to solve as that it made it more realistic. The only thing I thought was odd is you had a whole cardiac specialty section but none of the other doctors seemed capable of performing any but the most simplistic surgeries. Talk about putting all your eggs in one basket. That seemed a bit of a stretch to me but it wasn't a story killer. They let us know, for all the main characters, why this one or that was able to see, hear and/or interact with ghosts. The parents were not overbearing and the "children" held their ground and made it clear that while they respected their elders, they planned to live their own lives their way. So there was no bullying parent trope and there also wasn't a long separation trope. I mean Young-min and his girlfriend did have a long separation but that happened before we were introduced to the story so we didn't have to "live it" so that was a better way of doing the whole separation thing (which I still don't understand as being a necessary element but those who write these dramas seem to think it is). They also did not break up during the active story line (again that happened before the story started) another trope I am not a huge fan of. I fully expected him to wake and not remember anything that happened while he was in a coma but they found a way around that overused amnesia trope by making it so he left a film for himself and also that the heavens or gods or whomever allowed him to cheat the odds and actually remember (perhaps as a reward for saving so many lives). I worried that they would rush some of the romances but they didn't. They gave just enough detail to know what direction things were headed in then just left it there. Sometimes that can be frustrating but, in this case, it was actually perfect. I highly recommend this drama, would watch it again, and it is one of my new top favorites. It's a great medical drama, has the romance but it is not the only driving force, and has some complexity to the plot and some surprises as well.
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