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Dr. Romantic Season 3 – Full Review
Welcome to Doctor Romantic Season 3 – Full Review. Our favorite doctors and staff are back at Doldham Hospital, and this season they will open a brand new trauma center that will bring in new cases and old doctors. If you haven’t watched this drama yet, I recommend checking out my unspoiled review here.
Dr. Romantic Season 3
♥ Aired: April 28 – June 17, 2023
♥# of Episodes: 16
♥Where to Watch: Hulu
♥Genre: Medical Drama
♥Starring: Han Seok Kyu, Lee Sung Kyung and Ahn Hyo Seop
The Story
Doldham Hospital is opening a brand new, state-of-the-art Trauma Center. But specialty hospitals like this come with their own complications. From working with self-serving politicians to raise financial backing to finding the right person to act as the center’s Director, Master Kim will try to manage it all, while still treating the ER patients who flood into the hospital. But beyond just opening the center, Master Kim dreams of creating a super team of doctors, surgeons, and staff from those he has spent his career mentoring.
The Leads
Han Seok Kyu as Master Kim
Master Kim has finally achieved his dream of opening a state of the art trauma center that is connected to the original wing of Doldham Hospital. Now he just needs to find the right person to take over the Director position, so the new director and Director Park can secure financial funding and finish staffing the facility. But filling the job is trickier than he hoped and he will find himself caught between the new directors, who each have their own vision of what their center should look like, and the doctors and staff he has spent years training for this day. And in the midst of all this stress, he and his Doldham family are carefully monitoring the onset of his MS symptoms.
Master Kim has spent years training bright, talented doctors. And now, with the trauma center ready to open, he hopes to finally bring all of those great students under the same roof to create a medical dream team. But as he watches each of them, he begins to examine his own legacy, both positive and negative, and question whether he really wants those he cares about to take the kind of extreme risks that he has built his career on. I love Master Kim and this season only made me fall more in love with his quiet humor and deep affection for his staff. The world would be lucky to have such a caring and dedicated Doctor!
Lee Sung Kyung as Cha Eun Jae
Cha Eun Jae has come a long way from the delicate doctor who fainted at the sight of blood. Under Master Kim’s wing, she has grown and become an amazing surgeon. But when her father takes the job as the new Director of the Trauma Center, she will be caught between his severe approach to medicine and the empathetic skills she has learned under Master Kim. She will also need to learn how to navigate her romantic relationship with Woo Jin under the watchful eye of her judgmental parents. Luckily, the skills she has learned over the past few years as a doctor will help her learn to advocate for her own happiness.
Ahn Hyo Seop as Seo Woo Jin
Seo Woo Jin has always had the skills to be a great doctor, but he needed a mentor like Master Kim to give him confidence and to channel his energies into the patients and their treatments. But he still has a desire to prove himself and to show the same kind of dedication to the job that Master Kim has over the years. And when that desperation leads to a serious accident at a disaster site, he wil suffer the consequences. His own traumatic injury to his hand will threaten his whole future as a surgeon. But it will also remind him of the amazing people he is surrounded by every day and how thankful he is for the Doldham family.
Supporting Characters
So Ju Yeon as Yoon Ah Reum
Yoon Ah Reum is an ER resident. This season, with the other doctors moving over to the trauma center, we see Ah Reum get an opportunity to step up as a leader in the ER. But her bright and outgoing pesonality is dampened by her growing suspicions that her boyfriend, Eun Tak, doesn’t care about her as much as she loves him.
Kim Min Jae as Park Eun Tak
Park Eun Tak is a nurse practioner. He has worked hard to become a nurse, often doing double duty with work and his studies. He is quiet and dependable, and because of this, many of the doctors at Doldham turn to him for assistance during stressful emergency situations. But unfortunately, his reserved manners make him a better nurse than a boyfriend, and Eun Tak is brokenhearted to find that he is losing Ah Reum and he has no idea how to stop it from happening.
Lee Shin Young as Jang Dong Hwa
Jang Dong Hwa is a new general surgeon at Doldham this season. Unlike all the other doctors, Dong Hwa has no problem leaving the hospital behind as soon as his shifts end. He is good at what he does, but his lack of passion keeps him from progressing beyond that. While working at Doldham, he will be forced to examine his own reasons for becoming a doctor, and what will be next for him once he finishes his brief rotation there.
Things I Liked
♥ Established Characters
I have grown to love these characters over 3 seasons. The writers do such a nice job of creating complex characters. I enjoy watching them develop from season to season, while also still feeling like they are old friends that I know and understand. The continuity in casting for this series is one of the things that I think make it so well done. I think it also makes it possible to have lots of characters who have at least some backstory, like the short story arc this season with In Soo and his wife and daughter.
♥ Dong Hwa
Dong Hwa was a fun addition to Doldham Hospital this season, and they gave his character lots of interesting development. You see him slowly drawn into the intense culture of Master Kim and his trainees. And as that light of passion slowly starts to flicker, we see Dong Hwa begin to embrace that magical element that Master Kim calls “romance”. I was thrilled that he decides to stay on for another rotation and I would love to see a Season 4, so we can continue to see Dong Hwa grow.
♥ Proposal
So, I’m kind of a stickler for overly-dramatic proposals. The more fanfare, the better in my book. And usually the couple has earned it after overcoming numerous dramatic obstacles by the end of the series. But Woo Jin’s subtle proposal to Eun Jae was absolutely perfect for their characters. It was sweet and understated, just like their relationship. And the way he just left her to chase after him had me giggling like a crazy fan! Big points for the creative team on this one!
Things I Didn’t Like
Sun Woong Development
I really enjoyed both of the new doctors this season. But while I thought they did a great job developing Dong Hwa’s character, Sun Woong is another story. He started off strong, having come to the hospital as a military doctor who seemed to always be suspiciously lurking close by. But then the only real back story he got was a short scene where we find out he is colorblind. Not to underplay the challenges he had to overcome, but the story itself fell pretty flat. And that was his whole development. Other than that, he was just there to support Dong Hwa instead of getting his own storyline.
Woo Jin
After watching this season, my first question is did Ahn Hyo Seop do something to make the writers mad, because they really put Woo Jin through the emotional wringer. Woo Jin was held hostage by a crazy escaped soldier, trapped in a collapsed building, insulted by Eun Jae’s mother right to his face, watched his mentor start to display symptoms of his progressing MS, was challenged by Dong Joo’s leadership, and then to finish it all, he lost mobility in his hand. What a rough journey this was for him. But I’m relieved to say that he handled it all like the trooper he is.
Cafe
I love Nam Da Il’s quiet, steady personality. He is a constant support to both Nurse Oh and Master Kim. And I love the idea that he is a completely average cook who runs his own cafe. I always look forward to the quiet gatherings after shift in the cafe and I missed them this season. There were a couple mentions of the cafe, but there were no after work parties there, like we had in previous seasons. I guess I just like the fact that the cafe scenes give us a chance to see Da Il out from behind all that medical equipment. It makes him feel more accessible, and I like that.
The Ending
“Dr. Romantic 3” ends with one last natural disaster as a forest fire blazes out of control just a few miles from the hospital. Things are tense and patients are evacuated before a miracle rain shower ends the threat. Eun Tak and Ah Reum finally clear up their misunderstanding. Eun Tak promises to do better, and later we see the couple timidly start to talk about their hopes and dreams for the future, hopefully together. Dong Hwa announces that he plans to stay on at the hospital for another rotation. And Woo Jin finally takes out the engagement ring he bought Eun Jae and slips it on her finger while she is asleep. She wakes up and chases after him for a sweet kiss. Obviously she accepts. The letter announcing the trauma center’s grant money finally arrives, in their favor. And with that hope for the future, the final scene shows a mysterious woman arriving outside the hospital with her luggage. A quick flash on her luggage tag reveals the name Yoon Seo Jung. Now everyone is home! The door is open for a season 4, but with such a large cast to schedule around now and Kim Min Jae off to the military, we will have to see. For now, the producers are keeping it vague.
Should I Watch
“Doctor Romantic Season 3” is a medical drama that follows the doctors and staff of Doldham Hospital. The opening of a new trauma center gives this season a slightly different flavor from the first two. But for those who have followed the series all the way through, we are already invested in these familiar characters and their continued development. The trauma cases are a bit more intense than most of the past stories and there is a lot of interpersonal drama this season. Their years of working together give this cast an amazingly smooth chemistry that never feels forced or fake. This series have been a favorite of mine over the years and this season didn’t disappoint. Sequels are hard, and this one isn’t perfect, but the series and its characters always delight my heart. I give “Doctor Romantic Season 3” a 9 out of 10 ramen.
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