Monster S1E2: “Downfall”

The next episode of "Monster" starts with Kenzo and his team performing surgery on the East German boy, in defiance of the director's cynical orders. The bullet has been successfully removed, and they're trying to reinforce the wall of the exposed artery without rupturing it. So far so good, but they're not out of the water yet. The tense, sterile tone of the scene is helped along by the lack of music and attention-getting beeps of the monitoring equipment, as well as the excellent voice acting for the surgical team. I'm watching the English dub (no good source for subs, despite that being my usual preference), and if the Japanese cast did even close to as well as the English VA's they more than pulled their weight.

Roll intro. The Gothic, choral quality of the music and the shadowy, monochrome visuals highlighted by the occasional crimson splatter are what you'd normally expect for a supernatural horror story. Which may or may not be the direction this show eventually goes in, but from what little I've heard about the genre it's considered to be a part of I'm thinking not.

After the intro, the sun rises over the hospital as the surgery is completed.

The patient's blood pressure is slowly climbing back to normal, and his breathing is stable. It's more the anesthetic than the head trauma that's keeping him unconscious at this point. The prognosis looks...well, as good as it possibly can for someone who was shot in the forehead.

An exhausted Dr. Tenma exits the operating room and sits down, looking ready to spend at least the rest of the day catching up on sleep. A minute after he sits down, a pair of other doctors come his way from the other operating room. They're glad to hear that his procedure was a success, but irritably inform him that their own patient, the mayor, wasn't as lucky.

On one hand, brain surgery is an extremely delicate process that always comes with a significant chance of failure. On the other, out of the four operations performed in the show so far, the hospital has a 100% success rate with Kenzo and a 100% failure rate without him. Very small sample size, sure, but this still feels fishy.

The orderly who relayed last night's orders from Director Heinemann arrives shortly after the others, and starts berating Kenzo for letting the mayor die. He had his explicit instructions, straight from the director, and because of his failure to follow them they were a man short during the operation.

Erm...wouldn't they have been a man short either way? If they don't have enough qualified people on hand to do two simultaneous neurosurgeries, then they'll be understaffed for one of the two no matter what. This guy is leaning into some bureaucrat moon logic to make it look like Kenzo's fault.

Anyway, he says he's going to be making a full report to the director, and warns Kenzo that the hospital's reputation has suffered a dire injury this morning. That's a good point; there's no way a media savvy director could spin them saving the child victim of a sensational political mass murder in a way that makes them come out ahead. Heinemann and his crony here are just salty about their funding hike, and/or some secret quid pro quo they had going on with the mayor.

One of the nurses congratulates Kenzo on saving the boy's life. It helps, but only a little.

That evening, after he's slept, Kenzo watches the news. The passing of the mayor is covered, and Heinemann makes another TV appearance. This time, he just gives a jargon-filled description of the mayor's brain hemorrhage and the complications that arose from it, and follows that with the assertion that there was nothing anyone could have done.

That may or may not be true, but either way he sounds convincing, so it doesn't seem like the hospital is likely to suffer too much bad press.

After Heinemann, the newscaster addresses the shooting of the defector couple and the survival of their children. For some reason, despite covering both these stories within the same two minutes, he doesn't draw the connection of the boy having been treated at that same hospital on that same night. Which seems weird to me, because Heinemann doesn't strike me as the type to let an opportunity for self aggrandizement go unused, but maybe he just wasn't able to call attention to that story yet.

Kenzo finally turns off the news and tries to stop worrying about this. The next day at work, while overseeing some ICU ward stuff and trying not to be too worried and preoccupied, he's approached by Dr. Becker. Becker asks him if he's heard anything back from Heinemann yet after the mayor's death. Nothing yet, Kenzo says. This slow, creeping, spooky-clown type music starts playing as Dr. Becker jovially tells him that he tried to warn him that the hospital is run by politics, and that now the two of them are on the same level of perceived incompetence.

From the beginning, Dr. Becker is drawn and animated with this big mouth and Neanderthalic facial structure that makes him look a little cartoonier than the other characters. That's not unusual for buffoonish or contemptible characters in anime. But in this scene, there's one shot where we see him at a profile whispering into Kenzo's ear, and combined with the music his art style suddenly becomes really disturbing. You only get the full effect if you see the two characters in motion, but.

Becker suddenly looks like this weird puppet flapping its mouth all over Kenzo's ear while leaning into his personal space. It's too unnerving to not be deliberate.

Meanwhile, a detective arrives at the hospital to interview the boy patient's twin sister as a witness to the shootings. Unfortunately, the girl's condition has only changed insofar as she's now escaping from her room every few hours no matter what measures they take. Still not responding when spoken too, just an escape artist. The detective asks what the fuck. Cut to the girl wandering through one of the hospital corridors like your archetypal anime ghost girl, whispering the word "kill" over and over as she moves toward her unconscious brother's room.

Kids these days, amirite?

Cut to an...event, I guess? Seemingly a few days later. The hospital staff are at some kind of formalwear-required venue, with some press also in attendance. Heinemann is giving a speech where he congratulates the doctors and other staff on their sterling performance and commitment to the hard work of healing the sick. He mentions the death of the mayor, but praises the efforts of the two doctors who led the team that tried to save him. No mention of the high profile shooting victim they saved, but I guess he's too salty about Dr. Tenma defying him to even want to acknowledge that.

After the speech, everyone mingles and sips champagne for a while. Kenzo stands alone off in a corner, watching Heinemann nervously. No one seems to be approaching Kenzo, which I suppose might be down to him trying to keep attention away from himself rather than the entire staff being mad at him over that incident, but who knows. After watching Heinemann congratulate some grad student on his excellent thesis being accepted (which has got to sting Kenzo, given Heinemann's dismissive attitude toward his own research ambitions), Kenzo approaches him and apologizes for the mayor incident. Heinemann reassures him that he doubts things would have turned out differently either way, and that he understands why Kenzo made the decision that he did. Kenzo is surprised. Relieved, but surprised.

Then the head of the surgery department is called to speak, and Kenzo starts toward the microphone, only for one of the two doctors who worked on the mayor to be named. When Kenzo asks what the fuck, Heinneman curtly informs him that he's been demoted.

Demoted. Chances of being promoted again very minimal. And, Heinemann says, he's never going to be presenting his research at any symposiums, and he's not getting a good recommendation if he tries to transfer to any other hospital. Heinemann is keeping him around because he's a good surgeon, but his career has stalled out here and isn't going to advance for as long as he's in charge.

He could have just said that when Kenzo asked the first time, lol.

Kenzo, almost unable to speak, wanders out of the venue and stands out on the sidewalk, trying to clear his head and assess his situation. He sees Eva arriving, and when he greets her and starts begging her to talk to her father for him she walks right past him as if she didn't notice. He starts panicking, calling out her name louder. She turns around, produces the engagement ring he gave her, and drops it onto the pavement while giggling like a high school bully.

She coldly tells him he's a worthless idiot, and - still smiling - walks into the venue and immediately starts flirting with Kenzo's replacement.

I'm starting to think that Eva is a robot built by Dr. Heinemann rather than his actual daughter. I'm not sure how the hell else to explain this behavior.

Well. All things considered, this is a blessing in disguise for Kenzo. Better that this happened now, before he got pulled in deeper. If I were him, I'd move back to Japan and resume my career there ASAP. The Japanese demographics didn't create *quite* as much demand for brain surgeons in 1986 as they do today, but it wasn't a terrible market either. But yeah, there's no way in hell that obeying Dr. Heinemann and marrying his homunculus wouldn't have ended in Kenzo being framed for some crime or another five years down the line at the very longest.

Later that night, Kenzo is sitting over his recovering boy patient in the ICU ward, talking to himself. It's funny; he first reached out to Dr. Heinemann after reading one of his published research papers and thinking he'd be a good person to work under. Throughout the months leading up to now, Kenzo had become increasingly suspicious that that paper was actually written by some other poor junior doctor that he'd groomed and exploited. Now, he's completely sure.

He thinks back to both the Heinemanns' creepy mask-off moments, and his bitterness turns to rage. He clenches his fists, and shouts out loud about how he can't believe what brazen hypocrites they are, trying to make him feel like his earnest desire to save lives is a character flaw of his own while they soullessly, greedily exploit the system. He shouts the word "bastard" over and over again, and wishes that the senior Heinemann was dead.

As he rages and rants, the camera zooms in creepily on the unconscious boy's face, covered in bandages, oxygen tubes, and a surgical cap.

...

Let me guess; the boy is hearing this in his sleep, and now he's going to telepathically relay the message to his spooky sister so she can murder Dr. Heinemann.

...

After he finishes venting, Kenzo calms down and sardonically thanks the unconscious child. Thanks to him, Kenzo's eyes were opened about just how bad a situation he was getting himself into, and so the two of them might have actually saved each other. Kenzo's thoughts seem to mirror my own on the subject. Well, it's good that he was able to see through the justifiable rage and panic this quickly and realize that yeah, he seriously got off lucky with this.

Kenzo leaves the bedside, and turns off the light behind him. A more emotional kind of spooky music plays as the camera lingers on the patient. Followed by a scare cord when the boy opens his eyes as soon as he's alone.

Looks like we're going in a mildly supernatural direction after all, then. Chances of the sister killing Dr. Heinemann approaching 100%.

The next day, that detective is trying to get a statement from the sister, named as Anna, as a pair of orderlies take her outside on a wheelchair. She's still unresponsive, and the staffers insist that she'll be able to talk later once she's gotten out of this semi-catatonic withdrawal. The detective is impatient, though. The obvious suspect for this crime means that the longer it goes unsolved, the more likely there could be serious political consequences. More to the point, the national government is getting on his department, and he really doesn't want another agency to steal "his" case. Careerism versus civic responsibility is a not-so-subtly recurring theme in this story.

The detective wonders if seeing her brother alive after surgery might help Anna calm down. The orderlies tell him that that could be a very bad idea. He insists that he needs to get his witness testimony ASAP, and asks to speak to the doctors in charge of Anna and her brother Johan's cases.

Meanwhile, Kenzo is tending to some other patients - with whom he seems to be popular - before being approached by Dr. Becker again. Once again, he's here just to waste Kenzo's time and take comfort in his fall from grace. And, I swear to god, Becker actually is getting slightly more stylized and deformed in each subsequent appearance.

Kenzo is saved from having to continue this conversation by his pager. Presumably, so he can be badgered by the detective instead. At least the walk across the building ought to be somewhat relaxing.

Cut to Johan's room. Dr. Heinemann is in there with a couple of underlings, including the guy who he promoted into Kenzo's old position. Johan's bed is surrounded by presents from well-wishers. The media has finally started really latching on to the twins' story in a way that Heinemann can exploit, though I imagine he'll have to downplay Dr. Tenma's role in it if he doesn't want things to get awkward. As he shamelessly opens one of Johan's presents and helps himself to the candy someone sent him (one of his lackeys takes a candy very reluctantly and awkwardly when offered. The other, Kenzo's replacement, takes his without hesitation or remorse), he's told about the detective's request, and how Kenzo refused it. Annoying, considering that keeping these children in the news cycle can only benefit them, and that getting a photo of the two together would be great front page and TV news material. Heinemann sighs, clearly tired of everything to do with Dr. Kenzo Tenma, and announces that he'll be taking him off the case and putting one of these two on it.

Cut to Kenzo hearing a scream. He runs over to see what's going on, and sees that Anna has fainted outside the door of her brother's room. Apparently, seeing his partial recovery wasn't helpful for her at all.

Kenzo furiously demands to know why she was allowed to see Johan. He's informed by his replacement that that's not his business anymore, as Johan is now his own patient. Kenzo sees the camera in his hand, and realizes what was going on here. He's been through too much in too short a time at this point, and he starts physically manhandling the prick.

The words "just following orders" are, once again, spoken in self-defense by a German doctor in this show. Yeah, I don't think this is just a coincidence born of localization.

Dr. Dickhead is able to turn the situation around on Kenzo, though, when he opens Johan's door and finds the boy halfway sitting up in bed and reaching toward the door. Ignoring the obviously negative effects on Anna, Dr. Dickhead just smugly goes on about how seeing his sister brought Johan to life, and he's now fully responsive thanks to the visit.

Of course, we know that Johan's been conscious since the night before. Presumably, he's been faking the coma since then, and probably at least some time before then as well.

Dr. Dickhead pushes Kenzo back out of the room, and tells him to go back to his general surgery patients in the ward. He isn't needed here, and he definitely isn't wanted.

Jump ahead to that evening, and Kenzo in his civvies wandering drunkenly through the nighttime streets. Babbling to himself about what a pathetic lot of vermin he's been working with, all either psychopathic opportunists or spineless worms who bend over backward for them. From the vibe he's giving off, I think it likely that he is indeed planning to leave the country, and trying to avoid seeing the time he spent in Germany as a waste. And yeah, he's so drunk he can hardly keep himself on the sidewalk.

He finally stumbles into an alley and collapses. Hopefully this isn't going to mean he'll lack an alibi when Events happen tonight.

And, yuuuup, Events inbound. Eva comes home to her father's palatial residence to find him unusually absent. That she still lives with him is unsurprising, given that she still needs him to immerse her in that vat of cow's blood and aqua regia on every night of the new moon. She steps further inside and calls his name louder, asking if he's feeling okay. No answer. The camera rises to bird's eye view from the top of the immense living room, in typical horror movie style.

Cut to the hospital, where a nurse comes into a dark break room looking for a pair of doctors who no one's seen since they went in there. She finds Heinemann's pair of stooges, including Dr. Dickhead, sprawled out on the floor of the dark room. Dead, with eyes wildly crossed.

Back in the Heinemann house, Eva taps on her father's bedroom door and asks if he's in there. When there's no answer, she opens it to find him in a similar state in his home office chair.

No blood or visible injuries. Just dead, with an anxious expression and his eyes pointed in different directions. The camera cuts away before we can see or hear Eva's reaction. I guess the sight of her removing her creator's brain and eating it raw would have messed with the show's age ratings. Instead, the final shot is of Kenzo, who has somehow made it home, writhing in bed and drunkenly mumbling about how he wishes they were all dead. End episode.


As far as predictions go, Kenzo is probably going to be a suspect in the murders of these three doctors. Assuming, of course, that the police can even determine that it is murder. If they've all been poisoned or the like, then yes. If they were killed by creepy psychic kid powers, though, the lack of any apparent cause of death might keep Kenzo safe at least until something else happens.

I'm kind of surprised that Heinemann bit it already, as he seemed to be setting himself up as a major villain. It's possible that he's not actually dead, but I don't think so. Well, if that's all we'll ever see of him, I guess it's hats off to a character who managed to make himself more loathsome in two episodes than most anime/manga antagonists manage in a season or more. Definitely makes you root for the creepy psychic kids.

Anyway, this was another great episode for all the same reasons as the pilot. The masterful evoking of paranoia and dread, the almost feverish surreal social horror, and the excellent art, music, and voice acting. Kenzo is also really growing on me as a protagonist, though I think that has at least as much to do with his VA as it does the script. Whether this goes in the weird crime drama or supernatural horror direction, I'm here for it.