Monster S1E6-12

This review was comissioned by @toxinvictory


Last time, we left off "Monster" at a very interesting point. It turned out that Nina Fortner, aka Anna Leibert, aka Morderblutin von Candystein, has been living a diabetically wholesome middle class teenaged life during the entire time that her brother was building his criminal empire. It's okay Nina, you may be getting off to a late start but you can still catch up to him if you set your mind to it, I believe in you. Johan has started stalking her in preparation for her twentieth birthday, when he apparently plans to reunite with her, though what exactly his intentions for her are is unknown. He's had all of his previous foster parents killed though, so I doubt hers are going to fair well.

For now, Episode 6, "Disappearance Report," starts with Nina talking to her therapist again. The fainting incident when she got a look at Johan is obviously the focus of this week's discussion.

He's not really sure what to make of this. It doesn't fit the profile that he'd been forming for her anxiety issues. She's sure that seeing that boy brought that dark, sharklike presence from her nightmares to the forefront of her mind, and that the feelings she experienced before fainting included terror and shock, but also a strange kind of nostalgia. The therapist is a little sceptical that a suppressed memory of her got triggered, but she strongly suspects it regardless. Her curiosity about that boy is intensifying, even if it's tainted by fear.

Later, she finds out that the boy who her friends set her up with wasn't actually the one who sent those emails like they'd all thought. He was just a new transfer student who was into her, who happened to arrive around the same time that the emails started; it doesn't seem like he was even put up to this, just a random coincidence. Which, well, half the student body seems to crave Nina's genetic experiment ass, so it might have even been an inevitable coincidence lol.

Anyway, she becomes convinced that the boy who triggered her from the background must be the one actually sending the emails. So, when she gets another one telling her to meet him at Heidelburg Castle on the evening of her birthday, she accepts.

...

This is a great piece of subtle characterization, by the way. Unknown, scary person invites college girl to meet them alone in a secluded place at night. She accepts without hesitation or worry.

Nobody does that (at least not without being much more actively groomed beforehand). An exceptionally smart, exceptionally socially astute, girl is even less likely to do that than most.

Nina Fortner isn't normal. She's never been normal. She's not afraid of the things normal people fear. She isn't threatened by the dangers that everyone around her has to worry about. I suspect a good portion of her mental energy over the years has been spent convincing herself to avoid the obvious.

...

Meanwhile, when we last left off our primary protagonist Dr. Kenzo Tenma, he was taking time off from work to deal with his existential trauma by obsessively researching the boy he once knew as Johan Leibert. His search has taken him to an old ex-nazi friend of Munster's, who in turn (possibly on instructions from Johan, possibly not) pointed Kenzo toward Nina's home city of Heidelburg. He's, uh, not doing well. Episode 6 starts off reminding us of this fact, as a dishevelled, unshaven Dr. Tenma stumbles into a Heidelburg newspaper office and starts saying things that sound like crazy-talk.

A newsroom guy named Maurer lets Kenzo persuade him to grant access to some old files. Kenzo suspects that the Von Candystein twins didn't part ways until after the girl's adoption, and that there should probably be some coverage of an adopted boy going missing from that time. Maurer tells Kenzo that he just needs to be out of the archives before work starts the next day. Cue Maurer's irritated coworkers showing him the unconscious Kenzo sprawled across the archive floor come morning.

The "Monster" anime is supposed to be a very faithful adaptation, but here I wonder if something was left out to save time. Maurer is characterized as a grumpy, short-tempered man, and Kenzo has acted entirely like a random mentally ill homeless person so far. I could see a "grumpy guy with a heart of gold" type maybe trying to give Kenzo some money, or trying to connect him with social services (since unlike some liberal democracies that shall go unnamed, Germany actually has those).

Taking him to a restaurant, eating with him, and giving him a chance to talk about his ostensible delusions at length, though? Yeah, I feel like there's something missing in between these two scenes.

Somehow or other, Kenzo convinces Maurer over lunch to help him look up more information. They find an old story covering the unsolved disappearance of an adopted boy from that time. Looking up the names, they find that the Fortners have a daughter the same age as the boy that vanished on them 9 or so years ago. And also, in a rather silly dramatic coincidence, they find that today is Nina Fortner's twentieth birthday.

Maybe Kenzo is supposed to have been the one treating Maurer to lunch, as an apology? that would make at least a little bit more sense, though not a ton. Kenzo does also encourage Maurer to stop chain-smoking and maybe try to reconnect with his estranged wife and daughter instead of smoking himself to death to hide from the pain, but that happens after they're already at lunch, not before it.

Anyway, Maurer (again, for some reason) accompanies Kenzo to the Fortner house. The middle aged couple slam the door in their faces and refuse to say or hear anything when asked about the adopted son who went missing years ago, in a way that makes me suspect more strongly than ever that Johan has been threatening them. When they mention Nina being in danger though, the Fortners start talking.

When it turns out that Nina just left home to meet someone whose name she doesn't know at Heidelburg castle, they decide to split up. Maurer remains with the parents to call the police and talk to them when they arrive, while Kenzo drives off to try and rescue Nina before her brother gets to her (whether he's planning to kill her or just reunite with her, it would probably be best to prevent it. Johan definitely seems like a person you're better off having nothing to do with if you can help it at all).

As Kenzo drives away, Maurer - using the new perspective on life that Kenzo apparently talked into him by telling him not to smoke - asks the Fortners about their own plans for their daughter's birthday night. The fact that they had also planned to tell her the truth about her being adopted on her twentieth birthday, and that they DON'T seem to have been instructed to do so after all, is another really weird and cheesy coincidence. Now that Maurer is talking to them though, they decide not to do it. Nina is their daughter, and that's all there is to it. No reason to rock the boat unless she herself asks. They'll keep their happy, healthy family the way it is.

Pffffft. Okay. When Kenzo got Maurer to try to turn his life around, I was 50/50 on whether this would be the start of Kenzo helping and redeeming people as Johan murders and corrupts other people to create a rising clash of ideals, or if Maurer was going to die within the episode. After this scene with the Fortners though, well...it was nice knowing the three of you.

We leave them off with them trying to call the police as Kenzo told them to, and finding that the phone line's been cut. Two weeks from retirement. Engaged. Etc.

Kenzo arrives at Heidelburg castle just as Nina is starting to get tired of waiting for her post-traumatic secret admirer. When she starts walking away though, a gardener who'd been tending the ivy nearby tells her that she can't leave until "he" gets here. Which freaks her out not a little. When the next person to show up is some haggard-looking Japanese guy that she's never seen before, her trepidation gives way to confusion.

Kenzo tells her they need to get her back home with her parents and get the lot of them into police protection. Which gets a "huh?" from her and a roar of fury from the gardener. She cannot leave until he gets here. When his demands are ignored, the gardener throws himself at Kenzo and tries to stab him in the neck with his gardening shears to stop him from rescuing Nina.

Between the gardener's wide, blank eyes, his shrunken face, and his shaking hands, it's pretty self-explanatory what Johan is paying him in.

He knock Kenzo down, pins him, raises his sheers, and promptly gets hauled off of him and handled like a misbehaving child by Nina.

Kenzo is about as shocked to see this petite young woman do what she just did as you'd expect. Nina doesn't seem to register his surprise, and just asks for his help tying the tweaker up.

.............

waaaaaaaait a minute.

So, Nina has enhanced strength and probably intelligence, but seemingly not to the "figure out how to conduct a perfect poisoning at short notice at age 11" degree. And she's nice.

Johan is probably the smarter one, then. He may or may not turn out to be physically stronger as well (the way things are going, I suspect that he will). And he's a psychopathic megalomaniac.

Partial augments don't necessarily have the superior ambition problem. And this is all taking place in the early 1990's.

Hahaha, okay then. I wasn't expecting this, but yep. "Monster" is the first chronological Trek series. If Kenzo ever happens to watch the news, I'll bet we'll see coverage of that Khan guy cementing his rule over India right about now.

Well, good luck surviving the next few decades if Johan doesn't kill you first, Kenzo and Nina. You're going to need it.

...

They're unable to get anything out of the tweaker besides a "him" having hired him to make sure Nina made their date. They leave him with his wrists tied up with Kenzo's necktie for now, and speed back to the Fortner house where they can tell the police to go pick him up (cell phones aren't really a thing yet, unfortunately, and they don't want to stick around looking for payphones when Johan or other catspaws of his could arrive at any moment). After the gardener's actions, Nina is inclined to go with Kenzo far now.

Their return to the house is shot so damned well. The high overhead shots over the dark neighbourhood really sells the vulnerability and fear, and turns the formerly comfortable setting into something mysterious and haunted. The music is also on point.

All three of them are dead, of course. Far beyond Dr. Tenma's ability to doctor. I do like the detail of him reflexively going for Maurer first, though. He's the one that Tenma has built a rapport with and gained some investment in (with the "quit smoking and reconcile with family" plan). Even though it would make more sense to try to save Nina's parents first, since she's standing right there and watching all this, it makes sense that Tenma's gut instinct would be to try to resuscitate Maurer first.

No dice though. Johan and his agents are nothing if not thorough.

Nina just bluescreens. Not moving. Not talking. Perhaps not even having coherent thoughts. Thus, Kenzo has to do the talking on his own when Episode 7, "House of Tragedy," opens on the police arriving.

Nobody called the police, though. And it doesn't seem like Johan used anything as noisy as a gun to do the killing, or else there would have been a lot more commotion around the neighbourhood when we saw Kenzo and Nina drive back to the house.

If Kenzo wasn't so shell shocked at the moment, he probably would have realized that the two "detectives" seem a little too friendly and unsuspicious when they ask him and Nina to get into their cruiser. And also that it's a bit odd for the police to not wait until reinforcements arrive to secure the crime scene before driving the witnesses away. It's not until he notices that they're being driven out of the city that Kenzo realizes what's going on.

It gets even worse when they reach a police checkpoint (turns out the cops are looking for a suspect in an unrelated crime at the moment). The officers at the checkpoint recognize the pair of detectives, and ask them what the heck they're doing out here, they're supposed to be back in Heidelburg aren't they? The detectives (quietly, doing their best to talk without letting the passengers hear) explain that they're off-duty, and that the man and girl in the back of the car aren't in any trouble, they're just going to a place for a thing.

Well that's just great, isn't it?

Kenzo grabs Nina and makes a break for it. And then makes a break for it even harder when one of the dirty cops slips up and calls him "doctor" despite Kenzo never having told them he was one. Knowing that the other cops are unlikely to side with the rando dragging a catatonic girl behind him and leaving a trail of corpses in his wake over their own comrades, Kenzo is forced to pull Nina off the bridge and into the river below to escape.

We next see them squatting in a little abandoned shack in the forest, with Kenzo surreptitiously buying food and dry clothes at a nearby village and Nina still being too traumatized to accept any of it. She won't even change out of her wet clothes.

He does manage to get some words out of her, eventually. It turns out that seeing the corpses and hearing Kenzo talk about her apparently having a twin brother has caused her to recover some of her memories.

She doesn't remember where they were from. She doesn't remember what they were named. She remembers wandering, though. Alone, just the two of them. People helped them, and were kind to them, but anyone who tried to get too close to them would die. She claims not to have known how it was happening, until their adoptive parents - the Lieberts, who took them in shortly before skipping the border to West Germany - were murdered, but I'm sceptical that that isn't just an invented lens for herself to hide from what she knew in retrospect. In any case, Munster killed the Lieberts with a gun that he got somehow. She took the gun he had used, and aimed it at her brother. He...at least, according to her memory...smiled at her, and told her to aim for his head and hide the murder weapon afterward.

She did as he asked. That should have been the end of it. But then Kenzo brought him back. Why did he have to bring him back?

Her horrified reaction to seeing him alive in the hospital was just that; horror at seeing him alive. Evidently, she fell back under his sway when he twisted her arm into fleeing the hospital with him shortly afterward. The circumstances of him leaving her behind after the Fortners took them in...she either doesn't remember, or doesn't say.

...

Wait, so Munster did the entire poisoning by himself? Within 72 hours of having a bullet removed from his brain?

Well, Morderblutin did end up running away with him after that. So, even if she wasn't thrilled about any of it, she might have been sufficiently browbeaten by him to help carry out the poisoning when ordered to. Like she might have tried to kill him, but she also followed his exact instructions when it came to how she went about it, so he definitely knew how to control her at least some of the time.

Either that, or he really does have super-strength and toughness exceeding her own.

I really want to know where he learned about the nuances of medical tranquilizers, though. Maybe it's something one or both of them picked up at the lab they were spawned in? That could make sense, I guess?

...

Kenzo lets her berate him for saving Munster for a while, before deciding to try going to the police. Or the press. Someone. Nothing better for it, at this point. Unfortunately, when he gets to town he catches a morning press conference, and learns that the man he and Nina left tied up at the castle was also murdered, that a suspicious foreign-looking man was seen at both locations and in the company of at least some of the victims, and - most importantly - that the two detectives assigned to the case are the two who tried to abduct him and Nina last night. They managed to finagle their way into the investigation for real.

The news, meanwhile, won't listen to anything he's trying to tell them by anonymous phone call, and going into the office in person is just going to get the police called on him.

So, Kenzo returns to the shack that afternoon. A wealthy, celebrated doctor, now reduced to a refugee hiding in the woods. He initially panics when he finds Nina missing, but then he sees the note she left for him.

She apologizes for exploding at him earlier. He did nothing wrong. He should go back to saving lives and not involve himself in this sordid tale any further. Thank you for saving her.

The letter doesn't outright say that she's going to try and kill Munster again, but it sort of implies it. Leaving Kenzo to feel tormented about this poor serially orphaned girl having to go off and face the monster again because of his own actions. He (understandably, I think; he's mostly just seen her be vulnerable and traumatized for the day or so since then) doesn't seem to be connecting what he saw her do to the tweaker with their respective odds at actually being able to take down someone like Munster. This injustice, along with all the other existential anxiety he was already struggling with, still haunts him as we move into episode 8, "The Fugitive," as he returns to Cologne and tries his best to go back to work like nothing ever happened and hopes that his involvement in the Heidelburg events doesn't get connected back to him.

Naturally, we now return to Inspector Lunge. The murder of a middle aged couple - even if the MO differed, even if the dead reporter and missing daughter make this incident different - still seems close enough to that serial murder case for Lunge to want a look. Hearing about "unidentified Japanese men" being connected to both the Fortner murders and another homicide that took place at the castle, he looks at both crime scenes.

The body at the castle is found to have had its hands bound together before being killed, but the bonds were never found. Sounds like Munster might have actually done Kenzo a solid by removing the evidence that might have implicated him. Unfortunately, he didn't remove it enough. Lunge finds the tie in some bushes along one of the probable escape routes from the scene.

The story then returns to a person who I hadn't been expecting to turn up again just yet.

Eva Heinneman's life has taken pretty much exactly the course you'd expect, considering how she was raised and the situation she was left in after her father's murder. There's no malign intelligence directing her actions anymore, but she's still a spoiled womanchild who was brought up to worship and depend on her father for everything, never learned any life skills, and was actively discouraged from developing empathy. She's been divorced three times in the last nine years. To her credit, she managed to end each marriage with a little bit more wealth than she had beforehand, so she at least has some low cunning and legal finesse of her own. On the other hand, these divorce settlements appear to be her sole source of income, and in between marriages she seems to be eating through money fast.

We're introduced to her drinking herself into a stupor at 10 AM, framed in a way that suggests this is pretty much normal for her. She still lives in her father's house. It looks exactly the way it did a decade ago, only with some additional ultra-tacky decorations mounted here and there. Her butler tries to persuade Inspector Lunge to leave her ladyship alone, but is unsuccessful.

It turns out that tie was a super expensive one. They traced it back to the designer shop it came from, and from there determined it had been sold to Eva Heinneman about twelve years ago. Does she perhaps remember who she might have gifted this tie to? It's very important.


Splitting it here. This show is like descending into a nightmare in slow motion, in the best possible way.