Monster S1E1: “Herr Dr. Tenma”

This review was commissioned by @Baron Ouroboros.


I honestly can't say if I've heard of this one before or not, because there have got to be at least three or four crime dramas called "Monster" that have been adapted into various media. This particular one started as a seinen manga written by one Naoki Urasawa throughout the late nineties, and got its anime adaptation in 2004. If I've heard anything else about this particular "Monster" rather than one of the others though, I won't know it until I recognize it.

So, "Herr Dr. Tenma." Good sub was hard to find, so I'm watching the dub for this one. Let's start.


Start with a passage from Revelations regarding the beast whose number is 666. Well, as "monsters" go that devil-appointed hydra boi is a pretty big attraction, at least in the western literary canon. Then, the camera descends into a hospital, where Dr. Kenzo Tenma is being congratulated by his peers for the difficult neurosurgery he just performed. He takes the praise with somewhat performative-feeling humility, reminding them all that he couldn't have done it without his team.

He's a young, handsome looking guy, for an apparently accomplished neurosurgeon. But then, it's anime, so who knows what his age is actually supposed to be.

It's been a very long and difficult procedure, though, and there are no more urgent patients, so he's told to head home and get some rest. Before he leaves, he sees a crying mother trying to explain the state of her husband to their young son. There's a silent, trenchcoat-and-hat wearing man on the bench beside her. Dr. Tenma watches this strange group in silence before nervously turning away and leaving.

Was that supposed to be him having a childhood flashback, or something? It kind of felt like it, but I'm not sure. The kid doesn't look all that much like the adult Dr. Tenma, and anime is usually pretty heavyhanded about that kind of visual association, so maybe not.

The framing and cinematography is surreal in a flashback-y way though. Hmm.

Roll intro. The OP is a very low, tense, atmospheric piece that mixes vaguely choral and organ-like sounds with techno-ish beats. The accompanying imagery is mostly Dr. Tenma crossing a ghostly, gloomy city, with the occasional flashes of blood splatters and other disturbing glimpses. In short, it's very horror movie like, and I suspect that Dr. Tenma might be the titular monster. The whole thing, with both the OP's framing of him and the teaser's, gives me "Dexter" vibes.

After the OP, the time and place are given as 1986 and Dusseldorf, Germany. A woman named Eva who seems like she's supposed to be Kenzo's wife, but who addresses him as "Dr. Tenma" in a weirdly formal way, kisses him awake.

Apparently they're dating, rather than married. And he forgot a date of theirs the evening before, on account of work related exhaustion. I guess he gave her a key to his place, or something. As he wakes up, the TV news reports a story about an East German official and his family smuggling themselves across the Berlin Wall and defecting. Good for them, I guess. Eva shakes Kenzo awake more energetically when the political refugees are followed by a story about himself. Apparently, that patient whose brain aneurysm he treated yesterday was a celebrity opera singer, so the successful surgery is a feather in the caps of both the hospital Dr. Tenma works at and the doctor himself. Good for them, I guess.

Or...maybe I spoke prematurely. The hospital's chief surgeon, a Dr. Heinemann, seems to be hogging all the credit, despite not being the one who actually did the operation. And apparently, Eva is Dr. Heinemann's daughter. And Kenzo Tenma, a Japanese immigrant, is only able to work here in Germany due to some strings that her father pulled.

So, this guy's dating the daughter of a boss who he's deeply indebted to. That's a rather brittle socioeconomic position to be in.

For now, Eva is just reassuring him that her father's going to get promoted out of the department, and that when that happens Kenzo will have more freedom and more ability to get recognition outside of his professional circle. Kenzo, for his part, claims to not be jealous or disgruntled by this to begin with, but he's not terribly convincing.

Jump ahead some time to Kenzo completing another surgery, and being congratulated by a coworker afterward. Only, this time the congratulations are much more double-edged. The other doctor, Becker, implies implications about Kenzo's romantic and work lives and their dangerous overlaps.

His angle is less that Kenzo is sleeping his way to the top (though there's a little of that insinuation in there) and more that Dr. Heinemann is exploiting him. Which, well, sure seems to be the case. Eventually, Dr. Becker leaves. Though first he tells Kenzo to please remember his old pal Dr. Becker when he becomes the new head honcho around this place, and window dresses it with the acknowledgement that Kenzo must at least be "pretty sharp" for Heinemann to be able to exploit his skill.

What a lovely, supportive coworker.

As Kenzo goes his own way, he passes the mother and son pair that he saw the other day. Taciturn trenchcoat guy isn't around, this time. The framing is much less ethereal now, so they seem more like actual people who are actually here than ghosts or flashback figments.

As he passes them, he notices the mother glaring at him in what looks like abject hatred. He stops, and asks her if she needs anything. No indication that he knows who she is, so I guess the creepy camerawork surrounding them in their last appearance was just foreshadowing or something. In response to his asking, she starts losing her shit and demanding that he bring her husband back before physically assaulting him. When Kenzo asks her what the hell she's on about, she shrieks miserably about how her husband was in queue for surgery long before "that opera guy."

Kenzo remembers now. He'd been gearing up to perform a time sensitive operation on a working class Turkish man, when suddenly he got a memo from chief Heinemann telling him he was being given another patient. Kenzo was rattled by the abrupt reassignment, but his operation on the opera singer was long and stressful enough that by the end of the day he'd totally forgotten about this.

So, Heinemann threw a poor immigrant under the bus to make sure he got a press conference for saving the national celebrity. And then left Kenzo to deal with the former's grieving family.

Lovely chap.

Cut to Kenzo and Eva at a restaurant, with her prattling on about some stupid shopping anecdote with her friends while he just sits in silence and nods his head every once in a while.

When she finally notices and asks him what's up, he tells her that - because of her father's orders (though he doesn't name him specifically) - the Turkish man had to wait to get operated on. And, when he got the attention he should have had well before, he got Dr. Becker. Who - unsurprisingly, given his bitterness toward Kenzo - isn't the most competent neurosurgeon out there. Now, granted, even the bottom 5% of licensed neurosurgeons are probably in the top tier of general surgeons, so that's not to say that he's incompetent, but still. The first patient should have had earlier *and more skilled* treatment, and didn't.

Eva tells him to just lighten up about this already, it's been days. He can't get it off his mind though, and finally asks her to reassure him that he shouldn't feel responsible for the immigrant's death. She smiles, and tells him that of course he isn't responsible. It's not his fault that not all people are created equal and that some human lives are inherently more valuable than others.

She smiles like a lizardman in a human suit, and takes a slow motion bite of her rare steak that evokes "Dexter" about 300% more strongly than the intro did.

Kenzo kind of stares in horrified disbelief, as if trying to convince himself that he just hallucinated her saying that. Then she moves the conversation back to her frivolous anecdotes as if nothing happened.

Later that night, the Dusseldorf police respond to reports of gunfire in a residential neighborhood. It turns out to be coming from the new house of that East German official who defected with his family. By the time the cops arrive on the scene, unfortunately, it's too late.

Two perfect headshots, one bullet each for the former official and his wife. Stasi op? Probably a Stasi op, or else someone trying to make it look like one.

The cold silence gives way to creepy, haunted house-ish music as the police explore the rest of the house. In a back room, they find the family's two children. The son has been shot through the head, just like his parents. His sister is alive, seemingly unharmed, but just standing there staring blankly, as if catatonic. The scene fades out with the cops reporting their findings over radio; the boy, apparently, isn't quite dead yet. Which makes this an urgent job for a top tier neurosurgeon.

Okay, looks like this might be Kenzo's chance to make himself feel a little better again. Though I suspect there will be something weird and spooky about the case that makes it a lot more complicated and difficult for him than that. At home in bed, Kenzo is woken by his pager, and starts moving.

Cut from there to...Kenzo and Eva arriving at her father's house for a leisurely cup of tea, with Kenzo showing no signs of impatience or urgency. I guess this is a flashback, or flashforward, or something.

The Heinemanns start with pleasantries. Dr. Heinemann asks if Kenzo has made any progress on finding a wedding date that his parents can make, with Eva reminding him that the Heinemanns are going to be paying for their roundtrip flights from Japan in any case. Flex, flex, flex. Though from the sound of things, the Tenma family isn't exactly poor; both of Kenzo's parents are doctors, and his dad seems to have an important position at the Japanese hospital he works at.

Eva also throws in a comment about how when she first met Kenzo, she thought he was a teenager. It's...really only a matter of time before we see this lady unhinge her jaw and swallow a passing kindergartener whole.

Dr. Heinemann abruptly changes the subject, probably because that comment of his daughter's made even him a little uncomfortable, and asks Dr. Tenma about his independent research. Apparently, Kenzo has been coming up with a new approach to brain hemorrhage treatments. Dr. Heinemann tells him that he'll have to stop that for now, because Dr. Heinemann will be speaking at the European Medical Symposium soon and he wants Kenzo to compile his presentation for him. Which is basically weaselly academic politicalese for "I want you to do all of my homework." When Kenzo protests, Dr. Heinemann suddenly mentions a protest that took place outside the hospital today and very nearly turned violent. Apparently, some immigrant rights activists have got it into their heads that a Turkish man who died during surgery was kicked down the queue to make room for a German opera singer who needed attention less urgently. That's ridiculous, of course. The hospital records show that the Turkish guy was operated on first.

This is obviously supposed to be a threat to pin the malpractice on Kenzo if he doesn't do whatever his soon-to-be-father-in-law says. I'm looking at this a little askance, though. I don't know how German hospitals work, but it seems to me like the guy who runs the surgery department and who glory-hounded about the operation on TV afterwards would come out looking a hell of a lot worse than the guy who did the surgery. Like, does the surgeon himself actually have that much power over who he sees and in which order? I don't know, it just seems to me like Kenzo could be blackmailing Heinemann with this more easily than the reverse.

When Kenzo just looks submissively downward and doesn't say anything, Dr. Heinemann leans back, smiles, and goes on a spiel about how people need to stop thinking of the medical profession like some kind of charity. He goes on to say that a doctor's primary goal is and always will be career advancement, and with the skills they provide society with they're owed as much. While making a face like Zouken Matou's.

This is almost starting to feel less "Dexter" and more "Get Out." Just with European nativism instead of American racism.

Cut to Kenzo racing to the hospital, and nearly having a car accident because of that conversation from earlier this evening haunting him so much while he was behind the wheel. Okay, so that was just a few hours' achronality. Seems like it would have been easier to just switch those scenes around. Maybe it made more sense to do it like this in manga format; I notice that anime adaptations tend to do this kind of seemingly pointless temporal mixup a lot. Anyway, Tenzo makes it to the hospital and hurriedly changes into his surgical gown as the child patient is wheeled in.

The surviving sister, now identified as the boy's twin, has also been brought here. Probably just in case she had any injuries that the cops missed. Tenzo briefly tries to comfort her on his way to the operating room, but she's still semi-cataonic. In response to his attention, she just laboriously stammers out the word "kill."

Well, that's good for the old nerves before doing brain surgery.~

According to the X-rays, the bullet is lodged in the boy's brain, practically resting against his middle cerebral artery. Even the slightest shaking of the bullet is liable to rupture the artery and cause a near-instantly fatal hemorrhage. This is going to be one of the hardest operations of Kenzo's career, but he thinks he might just barely be able to pull it off.

As he fills his assistant surgeons in on his plan, Dr. Becker shows up, still in the process of tying his cap around his head, and makes a chuckling apology about being late. Despite having supposed to have already been on duty tonight, whereas Tenma woke up and drove all the way from home and yet still got here first. Somehow.

What is even this Becker guy's deal?

Kenzo and his assistants put on their masks and gloves and enter the operating room. Just as they're about to start picking up the tools, an orderly barges in and tells Kenzo to drop what he's doing and report to another operating room to handle another patient.

For the second time in...three days? At most?

Apparently, the mayor of Dusseldorf had a cerebral blood clot, and is being brought to the hospital by helicopter. He's expected to arrive in ten minutes. Kenzo says that it sounds like he'd best start on the boy whose chances are worsening by the minute now, then, and hopefully get to the mayor afterward, assuming another surgeon can't handle him themselves.

In response, the orderly just hands him a phone with Heinemann on the other end. Heinemann tells him that the mayor has promised that he'd give their hospital a funding increase next year, and that if he dies there's no guarantee that his successor will do the same. So, Heinemann wants to make sure that the mayor has their very best surgeons operating on him. The East German boy will be operated on by Dr. Becker, the same guy who killed Kenzo's last would-be-patient.

...

Okay, add a little Franz Kafka to the Jordan Peele why don't you.

Or maybe William S. Burroughs. This sequence could have been a "Naked Lunch" vignette if you just made it gayer.

...

Dr. Kenzo Tenma starts walking off to wait for the mayor, zombielike, haunted. The deranged sentiments of his fiance and her father echoing through his mind, along with the grieving cries of the Turkish widow.

Then, at the last second, Kenzo turns around and rushes back into the boy's operating room. Fuck his marriage, fuck his career, he's going to save that fucking kid from that fucking clown of a coworker.

...

I also think that he might have quite a bit more political clout on his side with this one than he did with the Turk. That East German politician's defection was a big news story, and the cold blooded murder of him and his wife is likely to be a much bigger one. If word gets out that the hospital bungled this one, there's going to be a LOT more people paying attention than just some poor immigrants who nobody cares about.

Honestly, doing as Heinemann instructed might be more hazardous to Kenzo's career than the opposite, with this one. Even if Heinemann plays dirty tricks to smear him in retaliation.

...

Spooky scary drumbeats play as Kenzo rushes back in to perform the surgery on the boy. Cut to his sister, laying in bed elsewhere in the hospital, who suddenly starts twitching and making creepy breathing noises.

Either she's coming back to her senses and has something important about the attack that she needs to get out quickly, or there's some twin telepathy thing going on. Also, she has an IV in her arm, so maybe it turned out that she had some physical injuries of her own after all. Or maybe they just needed to get water into her while she was catatonic, that could also be. End episode.


That was one of the best anime pilots I've ever seen. The subtle misdirection at the beginning, making Kenzo seem like the creepy one when really he's just keeping a lid on what other people around him have been doing, was extremely well played. The slow escalation was excellently paced, and the music and cinematography worked with the script to create a constantly rising sense of paranoia and dread.

I'm not sure where the story is going, yet, but the pilot is already getting pretty deep into politics. The choice to have the main character be another immigrant (just from a more privileged country/background than the first victim) trapped in this bind has to be intentional. That's part of what gave me the "Get Out" feeling in those scenes with the Heinemanns. The surprise mask-off line from Eva in the restaurant was particularly effective, especially in how the sheer, brazen nonchalance of her delivery made Kenzo second guess his own eyes and ears. It definitely hit hard, watching this in 2021.

I also wonder if the author is trying to do something with Japan and Germany's rich innovations in the field of medical ethics when the two have worked together. The phrase "I was just following orders" is repeated or paraphrased at least twice in this pilot, either by Kenzo or someone else following Heinemann's instructions. I might be barking up that tree a little too early, but it's a thought that occurred to me.

Anyway, this is the first of three episodes in queue, and I don't think I've been this excited to continue an anime review since I started FMA:B.