'Doctor X: Mafia in White' ratings dip 3 points amid May 18 controversy — medical strike arc next

"The rioters have been suppressed. Drop your weapons and surrender. Resistance will be met with lethal force."

Military boots move through a scene strewn with bloodied bodies. A sleek, angular luxury sedan follows, turning into a quiet residential alley. A wife and two children rush out to the yard to greet the man returning home. Beneath the boots he sets aside, blood pools and spreads, leaving crimson footprints across the floor. The man leans back in a rocking chair and slowly closes his eyes. Over his face — a face from May 1980 — the name of a VIP ward patient at Guseo University Hospital in 2026 is superimposed: Ji Du-seok.

That is the opening scene of Episode 7 of SBS Friday-Saturday drama series "Doctor X: Mafia in White" (hereafter "Doctor X"), which aired Friday. Ji Du-seok is a fictional former president modeled after Chun Doo-hwan. The story of Oh Sang-beom (played by Ha Seong-gwang), a victim of the May 18 pro-democracy uprising, which began in Episode 6 on Monday, concluded in Episode 7. Having spent two episodes revisiting the memory of Gwangju, the drama now turns to another charged real-world subject: the expansion of medical school enrollment and the resident physician strike.

According to Nielsen Korea, Episode 7 drew a nationwide household rating of 16.5 percent, with a per-minute peak of 17.5 percent. That marked a 3.0 percentage-point drop from Episode 6, which had set the show's record high at 19.5 percent. Even so, "Doctor X" held the No. 1 spot not only in its time slot but across all channels for the entire week.

The drama was embroiled in considerable controversy throughout the week. Its handling of the May 18 uprising in Episode 6 drew sharp criticism. After the episode aired, a petition calling for SBS to halt the broadcast was posted on the National Assembly's public consent petition board and gathered the 100 signatures required to go public within a single day. The petitioner argued that the May 18 material — absent from the Japanese source work — had been inserted by the production team, and called for the producers to be summoned as National Assembly witnesses and for the broadcast regulator to review the content. On Tuesday, a separate civil complaint was filed through the government's public grievance portal to Buk-gu district office, asking authorities to determine whether a bus stop sign the production team had installed in front of the main gate of the National May 18 Democratic Cemetery for filming violated road laws.

Pushback against the criticism also emerged. Ministry of Planning and Budget Minister Park Hong-keun posted on Facebook on Monday, calling the demand to pull the show "a narrow-minded, politically motivated stance" and praising the drama for centering on helicopter gunfire during the crackdown as a key plot element. Actor Han Jeong-su posted a message on social media the same day opposing the broadcast suspension demand. SBS issued no official statement. The only message that could be read as the production team's position was a brief post by Studio S chief producer Lee Ok-gyu, who wrote "no fear" alongside a drama poster on social media on the day Episode 6 aired.

The May 18 storyline aired amid the controversy did see ratings slip slightly from the previous episode, but attributing the decline solely to the backlash would be an overreach. "Doctor X" airs on consecutive Fridays and Saturdays, and Saturday episodes had consistently outperformed Friday episodes by roughly 2.0 to 3.5 percentage points. Compared with Episode 5 — also a Friday broadcast — at 17.5 percent, the drop for Episode 7 was just 1.0 percentage point. Still, it is worth noting that the upward trend in Friday ratings — 11.4 percent for Episode 1, 15.1 percent for Episode 3, 17.5 percent for Episode 5 — was broken for the first time.

Episode 7 focused on the effort to reach a patient who refuses surgery. Gye Su-jeong (played by Kim Ji-won) realizes that Oh Sang-beom had chosen a dangerous operation as a way to end his life, and searches for ways to change his mind. In one scene, Gye Su-jeong and fellow medical staff reenact, as a kind of play, the moment 46 years earlier when helicopter fire rained down on Gwangju at dawn. It was not only his older brother who shielded the young Oh Sang-beom. A restaurant owner, an uncle and the brother's night-school classmates all willingly put their lives on the line to save one boy. The scene laid bare the meaning behind the word "heavy" that Oh Sang-beom had carried throughout his life.

The episode was constructed to lend weight to the operating-table scene that followed. Oh Sang-beom had believed for 46 years that a bullet from the Gwangju tragedy was lodged in his head — but what was actually embedded there was a fragment of his brother's bone. The brother had thrown himself over Oh Sang-beom and taken the shot, and a piece of that bone had pierced the skull. Gye Su-jeong, judging that revealing the object was not a bullet could lead the hospital to withdraw support for the surgery, kept silent and brought the patient to the operating table. When Hospital Director Bu Seung-gwon (played by Son Hyun-ju) confronted Gye Su-jeong — "The surgery was approved on the premise that it was a bullet" — Gye Su-jeong shot back, "I never said it was a bullet," once again acting on personal conviction. Receiving the specimen container, Oh Sang-beom breaks down in tears: "Seong-a, let's go home now." Ha Seong-gwang's restrained performance carried the weight of the two-episode arc.

"Doctor X" had until now centered on the exploits of fee-based surgeon Gye Su-jeong as a medical drama, but this episode devoted a substantial portion of its runtime to the Gwangju storyline and the patient's personal history. In previous episodes, patients' backstories had served as a device to illuminate Gye Su-jeong's convictions as a physician and the justification for standing up to the hospital's power structure. This time, the patient's illness and surgery became a narrative conduit for drawing historical memory into the present.

With the May 18 storyline concluded, the drama moves squarely into the territory of the medical strike. Near the end of Episode 7, a news broadcast announces that the government has decided to expand medical school enrollment despite fierce opposition from the medical community. In the preview for Episode 8, resident physicians walk off the job in protest of the expansion, throwing the hospital into chaos. Gye Su-jeong snaps at those refusing to operate: "If you're a doctor, get in that operating room." The setup evokes the real-world conflict between the government and the medical profession in 2024, when resident physicians en masse abandoned their hospital posts over the enrollment expansion.

Friction between the drama and the medical community had already begun. Early in the series, Gye Su-jeong lashed out at fellow doctors, calling them people "who only studied to make money and get ahead," and the line "You guys are really pathetic" circulated among viewers as a satisfying moment. Among practicing physicians, however, there was pushback that the show demonizes and caricatures medical professionals. One internet user who identified as an orthopedic surgeon said a review request had been filed with the Korea Communications Standards Commission, saying the drama "depicts hospital rounds as unnecessary busywork and reduces medical staff to incompetent villains."

The drama's medical accuracy also drew scrutiny. Nam Gung-in, a professor at Ewha Womans University Mokdong Hospital who served as an on-site consultant for the emergency medicine scenes, posted on social media on Oct. 10 saying that if any medically incorrect elements appeared on screen, viewers should understand that the consultants' input had not been reflected during the coordination process with the production team. The production team has been displaying a disclaimer on screen stating that the drama is a work of fiction and that some scenes have been adapted or directed differently from actual medical practice and relevant regulations for dramatic effect.

Given that the show has already sparked debate with its sharp portrayal of the medical profession, how it depicts the real-life physician strike is expected to be yet another test. The physician who filed the review request said: "I think the likelihood of actual sanctions is low, but I felt it was necessary to raise the issue. As a professional, I could not simply stand by and watch as a distorted perception becomes entrenched."