SBS’s “Doctor X” has set another series record. According to Nielsen Korea figures reported by Ilgan Sports, episode 6 of the Friday-Saturday drama, which aired on October 24, averaged 19.5 percent nationwide among households. That is a rise of 2.0 percentage points from episode 5’s 17.5 percent, and a new high for the series as it closes in on the 20 percent mark.
A second report, from ChosunBiz, put the episode’s peak rating even higher, at 21.3 percent. The same report said the episode recorded 19.2 percent in the Seoul metropolitan area and ranked first in its time slot, among Saturday miniseries, and among weekly miniseries overall. In the advertiser-coveted 20-49 demographic, the episode averaged 6.9 percent and peaked at 7.67 percent, a sign that the drama’s momentum is not limited to older viewers.
The ratings surge came with an episode built around one of the most sensitive chapters in modern Korean history. In episode 6, surgeon Gye Soo-jung, played by Kim Ji-won, reaches out to a patient, Oh Sang-beom, who has lived for 46 years with trauma from a gunshot wound to the head sustained in Gwangju in May. Ilgan Sports reported that the medical technology of the time could not remove the bullet fragments, leaving him to live with seizures, convulsions, headaches, hallucinations, and phantom sounds. Even now, the report said, the odds of a successful operation remain extremely low.
Gye Soo-jung nevertheless takes on the surgery, and works to open a heart that has stayed closed for decades. Oh Sang-beom still grieves a brother whose body was never found after he was shot at the time. According to Ilgan Sports, Gye Soo-jung tells him, “If we do nothing, there is no possibility at all,” a line that turns his mind toward treatment. The episode also opened by recalling Gye Soo-jung’s first meeting with the late boy Baraka during medical volunteer work in the war-torn country of Ragota, a flashback that ChosunBiz said deepened the episode’s emotional pull.
The episode ended on a cliffhanger. Late at night, Oh Sang-beom disappears from his hospital room, and closed-circuit footage shows him heading for the rooftop. Intern Park Tae-kyung and anesthesiology professor Jo Won-jin rush after him, only for a figure connected to that era to be airlifted by helicopter to the very same rooftop after collapsing, triggering the patient’s trauma all over again. Whether Gye Soo-jung can save a man caught between a decades-old wound and a present-day emergency is left for the next episode.
The 19.5 percent figure continues one of the steepest climbs of the current season. “Doctor X” premiered at 11.4 percent, then rose to 14.9 percent for episode 2 and 15.1 percent for episode 3, before jumping to 18.5 percent for episode 4. Episode 5, which aired on a Friday, recorded 17.5 percent, itself a strong Friday showing for the series, before the Saturday episode surged past the previous high. Friday episodes of Korean dramas typically draw less than Saturday episodes, which makes the Saturday rebound to 19.5 percent a clearer measure of the show’s growing audience.
The series, whose full title is “Doctor X: Age of the White Mafia,” is SBS’s medical noir take on the Japanese drama “Doctor-X: Surgeon Michiko Daimon.” Kim Ji-won plays Gye Soo-jung, a genius surgeon who takes on corruption and injustice inside Guseo University Hospital through surgery itself. The drama airs every Friday and Saturday at 9:50 p.m., and its rise has already made it one of the defining hits of the autumn season.
The reports carried no separate statement from SBS about the ratings. With the average now at 19.5 percent and the peak already past 21 percent, the question for next week is no longer whether the drama can approach 20 percent, but whether its average can clear that line outright.
