Monster S1E6-12 (continued)

Eva Heinneman is a moron, but she's also smart.

She has nothing but contempt for the inspector who failed to solve her father's murder, and refuses to give him anything, but she actually does remember (or at least, is able to figure out from the date provided) who she bought that designer necktie for.

She might have only ever dated Kenzo because her daddy told her to. Maybe. It could just be that she broke off with him when her daddy told her to, and her interest in him before that point was genuine. In either case though, she DID try to get him back after her father's death. It's been three marriages and three divorces since then, but Eva is sure that all three of those men only wanted her for her family fortune (which is how she justified screwing them over in turn. Whether or not this was motivated reasoning on her part, I couldn't yet say). Kenzo was the last and possibly only guy who she felt didn't care about that. And also one of the few people to ever reject her rather than be rejected by her, so that's an old wound too. She's not young anymore, and she's depressed and anxious, and she's occasionally been wishing she didn't break up with Kenzo (or at least, she's been wishing that he didn't refuse to take her back afterward. That's probably more likely, as otherwise she'd have to realize that daddy was wrong about something).

Also? I had trouble finding these episodes subbed, but I was told the dub is very accurate so I'm watching that. And, Eva's English voice acting is incredible. All of the voicework for this show has been good, but Eva's actress just hits so many perfectly balanced flavors of malicious and manipulative, vulnerable and hurt, childish but grown-up, at the same time, and makes every nuance audible. Hell, just the way she changes the voice depending on how drunk Eva is at any given moment is impressive even without everything else it has going on.

The scene this culminates in is one of the most perfect explorations of a truly ruined mind that I've ever seen.

A short while after his return to work, Eva comes to the hospital to get ahold of Kenzo during work hours like the total narcissist that she is. After the initial rebuff, she breaks out the blackmail. First trying to be subtle about it, but then resorting to explicit threats.

...

The really amazing thing here is that Eva herself couldn't possibly know if Kenzo is guilty or innocent.

And then, at the end, when she threatens to accuse him of killing her father and the other doctors in addition to whoever this tie-associated victim is, well... did he kill her father?

She doesn't know.

She only has access to the same facts that made Lunge (very reasonably) suspicious of Kenzo at the time. Kenzo had the means, the motive, the everything. She's trying to blackmail the guy who very likely may have killed her father, and who may be in the business of killing other people who get in his way on the regular, into marrying her.

I don't think she sees it that way, though. I'm pretty sure that in her mind, it works like this:

a: people who make me happy are good.
b: people who make me unhappy are bad.
c: a bad person killed my father

a -> Nc
b -> c

If Kenzo takes her back, then that will make her happy, which would mean that he is innocent and she has nothing to fear from him. If Kenzo doesn't take her back, then that will make her unhappy, which would mean that he is (at least very likely) guilty.

Like I said. A brain *absolutely melted.* More a victim of her father than Kenzo himself ever was. On the bright side, there's a philosophy club I know of that she might make a good addition to.

...

Kenzo isn't swayed. If I were him, I'd probably submit to the blackmail and then start planning my first actual murder, but Kenzo is a better man than...well, almost anyone, it's kinda the point of him heh.

He does make sure that he's ready (or at least, as ready as a person reasonably can be) for the hammer when it falls, though. Lunge brings a veritable small army of cops to the hospital when the day comes, but Kenzo knows which ambulance driver to ask for a lift before they can establish their perimeter. Inside the hospital, Lunge and his men are slowed down by a crowd of patients who can't believe that Dr. Tenma is under arrest and refuse to cooperate with the search.

Slows them down in the short term. In the long term, unfortunately, this is probably just convincing Lunge that Kenzo has some really dangerous cult leader charm going on.

Meanwhile, Kenzo peers out from behind the curtained ambulance window at the hospital where he's worked for more than a decade of his life. Probably for the last time ever.

He thinks over the chain of events leading to this. At every step of the way, Kenzo was just trying to help what he thought (usually correctly) were innocent people. And look what's happened to him because of it. Time and time again, he wouldn't just stand by and let evil happen, and now he's being punished for that.

All because of one fucking malfunction in the human condition that he knows by the name of Johan Leibert.

...

As the memory slideshow plays, we get one of the best tracks in the series so far. Starting with solemn introspection as Kenzo muses, then the wild cymbals and drums slowly taking over more and more over the clips of Johan's crimes and the fallout thereof, then the solemn mood music again as Kenzo's thoughts reach their conclusion. At its climax, the middle part of the song sounds more like a Hammer Horror theme than anything else, like something from the soundtrack of an old black-and-white vampire or wolfman movie, only with an almost circus-like chaotic jingle mixed in there as well.

Something I really like about this track is that it isn't Johan's theme. We've already heard that, back in episode 4 when he killed Junkers. This song is for Kenzo's perception of Johan. Moody, thoughtful, and a chaotic "monstrous" interruption in the middle of everything. Which, heh, going back to the "possible definitions of the word 'monster'" thread from earlier, that definitely fits. An exception to normality. A disruption of the "order" of things.

...

Episode 9, "The Girl and the Seasoned Soldier," has our hero seeking out a master to train him in the arts of the warrior so that he may go out and confront the villain.

I never expected to type that sequence of words when describing Monster of all damned things, but this series is nothing if not surprising.

Retired mercenary Hugo Bernhardt runs a kind of private boot camp for paying customers at his house in the woods. Learning how to shoot a gun isn't enough for Dr. Tenma; he thinks he'll need to learn some actual guerilla warfare techniques if he wants to hunt down Munster, and Bernhardt is known to be both very good and very discreet. Kenzo was going to follow Nina's advice and go back to doctoring, but events preventing that were already in motion by the time she wrote him that note. Now, he's got little to do with himself besides rectify an old mistake.

Of course, I strongly suspect that he and Nina will end up tripping over each other as they both attempt to do this.

Well, anyway, Tenma learning to guerilla warfare. This might be my ignorance talking, but is jumprope actually something that gets used to train your balance for firearms training? I've never heard of this. Is it an actual thing?

Bernhardt has Kenzo practicing jumprope and running laps through the woods for some weeks before gruffly declaring that he's ready to hold a gun for the first time, and that tomorrow they will meet at the shooting range for the next stage of his training.

Lmao.

Kenzo spends five months in the woods learning the way of the European gun samurai. While there, he learns how Bernhardt came to adopt that little Burmese girl in the above screenshot. He was doing a gig in Myanmar, and had a panicked civilian pull a gun on him when he poked around in the wrong hut. He shot before she could, and only noticed the woman's terrified daughter hiding in the back corner after he'd done so. The girl, name never provided, had no one to take her in, so Bernhardt took her in and brought her to Germany for his prompt retirement. She hasn't laughed or smiled since her mother died, and he knows she hates him, but he has nowhere else to send her that wouldn't just be even worse.

During his training, Kenzo makes every effort to befriend the girl. It's frustrating at first, but he has a breakthrough when he runs into her on one of his forest-running sessions and finds her cradling a baby bird that's fallen from its nest. She seems to want to keep it, but he explains to her that raising chicks away from their nests from such an early age is overwhelmingly likely to kill it, and that it would be much better to return it to its nest. Which he then climbs the tree to help her do. Thematic resonance with her traumatic background and stuff. Anyway, she and Kenzo are chill now.

Bernhardt warned Kenzo, after telling him the girl's story, that if you're going to carry a gun, things like this are going to happen. Wars always have collateral damage. Civilians always get caught in the middle. You can only work to minimize that, not avoid it entirely. Is Kenzo sure he still wants to go to war, whoever it is exactly he's planning to fight?

Yes. Yes, he is. But every minute that he isn't sleeping or training, Kenzo does his best to make things better between Bernhardt and his unwillingly adopted daughter. Cooking Japanese food for them to break up the monotony. Giving her an opportunity to use chopsticks again, and to be amused when Bernhardt has no idea how to hold them. Tenma even gets her to laugh.

By the time he completes his training, Kenzo has helped them become something like a real family. The girl no longer hates her mother's killer, and might even be starting to accept him as a parent figure. Bernhardt, consequently, might be starting to actually forgive himself for that mistake he made by entering the wrong hut at a time when people were scared enough to shoot on sight. Maybe Kenzo will accidentally kill someone he didn't mean to with the training he's received, just as he's accidentally killed people by saving Johan, but he's still going to do as much good as he can along the way.

As a result of this, when Inspector Lunge interviews Bernhardt about Kenzo not long after the doctor's departure, Bernhardt gives him nothing. His daughter smiles at him.

Well, sort of. What actually happens is that episode 8 ends with a five month timeskip to a gun-toting Dr. Tenma traveling to the site of a potentially Johan-related murder that the wanted man Kenzo Tenma has been declared a suspect in. Then episode 9 fills in the timeskip and shows Kenzo's training, using Lunge's attempted interview of Bernhardt as a framing device.

I'm not sure why it didn't just go in chronological order. Maybe the resolve that Kenzo arrived at in the "Seeds of Time" sequence wouldn't have been as powerful without immediately showing where it leads him to. Still, it feels overcomplicated.

Things get weirder in episode 10, "A Past Erased." Weirder paced, and also more genre-bending, than what preceded it. I'll be honest, I'm not entirely sure how to feel about this episode.

We open on an...anthropomorphic rat? with an archetypal 1920's New York gangster voice?...running into Kenzo as they both sneak into the recent crime scene on the same early morning. Kenzo is looking for evidence of Johan's involvement (not sure what form that would take, but okay...). Giovanni Skaven is here to steal. They kinda sorta reluctantly escape together when they hear police sirens.

The setup here actually makes me think a lot of "The Living Shadow" from when I read it a while ago. The thief and the vigilante investigator tripping over each other in the cordoned-off mansion of the recent murder victim. Wonder if it's a shoutout, or just a pulp detective cliche that I've only happened to see once before now?

This episode ends up having two related subplot. One is the rat guy apparently having seen the murderer when he was scoping the place out a few days ago, and Kenzo using that to track him down. The other is the rat guy using this information to twist Kenzo's arm into being a mob doctor and giving him a cut. The second is a little silly, in the same way that the previous episode was silly, but still satisfying enough. The first...is just baffling.

The mob doctor part involves Kenzo being strongarmed into treating a terrorist who took a bullet wound while fleeing the scene of an attack on the GWE leadership. An attack that inflicted quite a few deaths, including that of at least one innocent teenaged bystander. The wounded terrorist, it turns out, was one of the masterminds behind the attack as well as an active participant in it.

Kenzo is undecided at first, but then he becomes resolute. He won't treat the man. Not that he's even sure of how much good he could do in these unsanitary conditions without proper tools, but even so, he just refuses.

Even when the other terrorist laying low in the apartment threatens to kill Kenzo if he doesn't treat him, Kenzo refuses. It's an empty threat anyway, of course. Kenzo *definitely* can't save the terrorist leader if he's dead.

As they wait, fearing all the while that the police will find the hideout, and Kenzo knowing that if the terrorist leader guy bleeds out then his underling WILL kill Kenzo in turn, Kenzo talks to them. It turns out that these terrorists are former German Democratic Republic public workers who saw their land and people suffer under post-reunification "shock therapy." GWE was one of the organizations that pushed the hardest for, benefitted the most from, and did the most damage with the privatization of East Germany, and in the terrorists' minds its executives all deserve death and then some. The injured man will not, no matter how Kenzo tries to appeal to his better nature, admit any regret or remorse for killing those guys, even if it means Kenzo letting him bleed out.

Eventually, Kenzo manages to get the man to shake when it comes to the topic of the teenaged bystander. No, he did not want to kill that kid. Yes, he should have been more careful to avoid collateral damage. Does that mean that doing the attack as a whole was wrong, though? Well, he finds himself no longer able to give a straight answer. Was killing the GWE execs worth also ending the life of an innocent youth?

He's not sure.

Kenzo waits until the man is losing consciousness before treating him. Using kitchen knives, rags, and a stapler in place of stitches. In his own words, he wanted his patient to understand inevitable death. To make him realize that this is what his victims felt, in their last moments.

Damn. Kenzo is definitely undergoing a transformation. His stated reasoning is all very idealistic, but the bitter look on his face, the cold venom in his voice. He's taken so much shit, and now he's enjoying the chance to give some back to someone who he can justify doing this to.

Kenzo hasn't fallen, per se. Not yet. But he's not the man he used to be, and I don't think he will ever be able to be that man again.

He leaves the terrorists with the warning that the leader guy will still probably die if he doesn't get to a proper medical facility soon, but Kenzo's improvised measures have at least bought him a day or so. He advises them to choose life, for themselves at least, and for anyone else they'd been planning to kill as well if they can find it in themselves. Much to the disappointment of Giovanni Skaven (who had just had the idea of tipping the police off on the locations of all three of these wanted men and wringing a reward out of them for it), the terrorists promptly go to the nearest hospital and turn themselves in in exchange for treatment.

Kenzo, meanwhile, is still on the hunt for Johan. Even knowing what that means for innocent bystanders. Even while discouraging anyone else from doing what he's doing.

Is it because Johan really is that much worse and more of a threat to humanity at large than the corporate executives who condemn tens of thousands to poverty and hunger to make themselves 1% richer than they already were? Is picking up a gun to go after Johan really that much more worth it than picking up a gun to go after the capitalist vultures?

I don't think Kenzo wants to have to answer that question. Unfortunately for him, the (bizarre) second subplot of this episode literally forces an answer into his face.


Next time.