As I mentioned elsewhere, I like how this kdrama assigns each major character a catchphrase to give a sneak peek of his behavior.

Take for instance, the male lead, Doctor Ye. His catchphrase is obviously, “May I give you an advice?”

His habit of giving unsolicited advice creates the impression that he’s an annoying Mr. Know-It-All. Seriously, some of his advices are passive-aggressive and insulting.

Case 1.

Case 2.

See those? To me, there’s not much difference between his rebuffs of his colleagues here and MinHo’s rejection of BoYoung. They both acted like jerks. 

It doesn’t help of course that he’s reputed to be one of the best in his field, a graduate of NYU, and an author of several research papers. Even the hospital directors seem to kowtow to him. But to his department colleagues, he remains aloof and distant. For somebody who only recently joined the department, he’s high-handed. While reassigning duty rosters and staff lectures, he scolded his colleagues. A little diplomacy wouldn’t have hurt when he made those changes. As a result, the others feel intimidated by him, gossip behind his back and remain guarded, even hostile.

However, his saving grace is that he roots for our heroine, BoYoung. He doesn’t berate her when she gets in trouble and he’s the only one who appreciates poetry like she does.  If it weren’t his kindness he’s shown towards BoYoung, not to mention his boy-next-door looks, I’m sure viewers would have called out his pompous and supercilious behavior. 😀

The other characters have catchphrases attached to them, too.

Paradoxically, while these taglines DO box in the characters into stereotypes (i.e., Dr Ye = condescending, DefCon = indecisive), these taglines also humanizes the characters. My guess is each episode will be devoted to exploring one character and what makes him/her tick.

For instance, in Episode 3, we focused on Doctor Park who foisted his work on others. He weaseled out of his work. If he had a catchphrase, it’d be “So do this for me.”

But it was Dr. Ye who called attention to Dr. Park not pulling his weight. He questioned the uneven work allocation and ridiculed Dr. Park’s excuse that harder cases made BoYoung better. As a result of this public censure, we were left with the impression that Dr. Park slacked off because of laziness.

Moreover, instead of approaching Dr. Park PRIVATELY with his concerns that he delegated the research work to BoYoung, Dr. Ye opted to confront and castigate Dr. Park before the rest of the staff members. Since the Department head, Dr. Yang, so highly esteemed Dr. Ye’s good opinion, he too began to adopt an accusatory tone toward Dr. Park, that is, Dr. Park was too lazy to do his job.

Fortunately, Dr. Yang overheard Dr. Park’s conversation with his wife and discovered the real reason for his slacking off. Context matters. In Dr. Park’s case, he was struggling to take care of his family and his sick mother at the same time. But despite having a hard time, he didn’t want to use his family’s woes as an excuse for his poor work, so he endured the hardship in secret. As Dr. Yang said, “What else could he do? You’re the head of your household.”

To me, that’s the major problem with Dr. Ye’s unsolicited advices. He relies too much on his powers of observation and intellect, and relies too little on the power of empathy and conversation, like Dr. Yang, to solve problems. He was bent on teaching Dr. Park a lesson and imparting his solution aka advice, that he became inflexible.

The catchphrase of MinHo’s best friend, Nam Won, is also interesting.  

He loves to talk about “10 years ago, before my family became bankrupt and fled the loan sharks…”  And he often tells MinHo to be careful manhandling him as he can’t afford to lose the alligator on his name brand shirt.

I don’t know if there’s a similar Korean idiom, but I find it funny that he fiercely protects his shirt because it’s his last one from his old collection of Lacoste shirts. You see, in English, to lose your shirt is to really lose all your possessions.

NamWon never fails to bring up how rich he used to be that he’s beginning to sound like an annoying broken record stuck on self-pity.

However, I was moved to sympathy when he called up his mom on the phone. To see his mom reduced to working at a restaurant as a dishwasher was heartbreaking. I realized then how traumatic their family’s riches-to-rags story must have been to everyone and how admirable he truly was. His mom, too, expressed longing for the good old days when NamWon would eat beef with every meal. But both mother-and-son, show no resentment about their current situation, and NamWon reassured his mom by lying that he was doing well. He put a brave front on so his mom wouldn’t worry about him.

Sure, he whines about their poverty to his friends. But he isn’t one to moan and do nothing to alleviate his predicament. He aims to work hard to regain their family’s wealth. He neither blames his fate nor his parents for their change in fortune. I like that he’s determined to EARN back their former life, and not mooch off his rich friend, MinHo. He may not have much but he still has his pride … and the white Lacoste shirt.

I hope he has a happy ending in this kdrama.

The other characters with memorable lines are:

Defcon: Park Bo Gum? Lee Jong Suk?
lol.

I find it amusing that Defcon’s character is patterned after things he does in his variety show, 2D1N.  Like this indecisiveness of his. He’s called the “anxious pig” in 2D1N precisely because he worries too much about the little things during the broadcast. Also his lack of a girlfriend. He gets teased a lot in 2D1N because he’s never had a girlfriend before (well, according to their jokes). His girlfriend is an imaginary cartoon character, if I remember correctly.

But Defcon is truly well-liked by the old people in the countryside who are often featured in 2D1N. He has this easy going rapport with the older generation, and he knows how to give them a good time, without tiring them to death (literally lol).

Also, his character is only indecisive for inconsequential things. But for matters that are important and require his immediate response, i.e., when the doctors looked down on the radiologists or when the grandpa thought he was the long-lost brother and dead father, he has absolutely no trouble acting decisively.

MinHo: “I’m just kidding.”

credit: dramabeans

Dr. Kim:  Dr Park teases her with “When I do it’s, it’s romance. When you do it, it’s adultery.”

We know that Dr. Kim’s a divorced woman. It will be interesting to see how she figures in Defcon’s adulterous romantic life. lol.

BoYoung: She gets emotional and flaps her hands to dry up her tears because I think her tagline is “a flower that blooms when shaken.”

It’s taken from the first poem of the drama.

Flowers That Bloom When Shaken
by Do Jong Hwan

No flower blooms without being shaken
The most beautiful flowers in this world
All shake as they bloom
As they shake, their stems straighten
In an upright position.

That’s the reason she’s shaking her book of poems here.

Her body brings to mind the image of a flower shaking as it straightens up to face the skies.

To me, that’s also the reason she looks up and then flaps her hands whenever she cries. She’s like a flower with two leaves fanning itself. She blooms whenever deep emotions move her to tears.

These catchy attributes are only a shorthand method of telling the audience to closely observe the characters.  There’s more to them than what is expressed by their punchlines. 

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Edited to add this:

For now, I’m filing this catchphrase, “When I do it, it’s romance. When you do it, it’s adultery” under Dr. Kim, but I have a sneaking suspicion that this double standard applies to everybody in the story. There’s a different standard for one who’s admired, and one who’s not; one standard for you, and one standard for me.

Take for instance, Minho and Dr. Ye. As I’ve written early, both of them behaved like jerks. (Not all the time, of course, but on occasions.)

Minho: when he rejected BoYoung’s unwanted attention and one-sided love,
and Dr. Ye: when he rejected Dr. Park’s and Dr Kim’s unwanted attention and one-sided admiration.

It would be unfair to criticize one character’s misbehavior while ignoring the other’s similar misbehavior. That’s what fangirls do.  😀  We, smart bitches, know better and we call out both.

That’s why Dr. Park’s comment, “When I do it, it’s romance. When you do it, it’s adultery” is an astute observation, applicable to all the characters.

Pretty clever of the script, eh?