Monster S1E6-12 (continued more)

In exchange for the criminal doctoring (well, sort of. Kenzo needed a gun pointed at him before he'd go along with his side of the deal), Giovanni Skaven tells Dr. Tenma about the man he saw breaking into the mansion at the time of the double-homicide. The description sounds nothing like Johan, but it doesn't have to, the kid has no shortage of criminal lackeys to do his dirty work. Giovanni even tracked the killer to his home on that night, hoping to blackmail him, but was disappointed to find only a working class man in a cheap apartment and decided it wasn't worth it. Rather foolishly, Kenzo goes to the man's apartment, and - finding the door unlocked - comes inside to find the killer waiting for him.

Not waiting for intruders, or waiting for the people who he suspected were stalking him. Waiting for HIM. For Kenzo Tenma. He knows his name, and has been awaiting him ever since he shot the wealthy couple.

...

I'm starting to think Johan really does have psychic powers to go with the standard Superior Ability package after all, but they're less telepathy and more precognition. There is no amount of mere superintelligence that would allow Johan to predict that not only would Tenma come to investigate this, but also that he'd find the killer before the police could.

Granted, depending on how many agents Johan has within the police force looking into this case, he might be able to slow the investigation down considerably. Still though, there's no way in hell he could have known Tenma would get to him short of literal prophecy.

But then, "literal prophecy" would also handily explain a lot of the more unlikely details of the hospital poisoning back in episode 2. If Johan could foresee that the doctor(s) he wanted to kill would steal the candy, then it's all very simple.

...

The killer tells Kenzo and Giovanni his story. Or, at least, a story. If Johan put him up to this, then who the hell knows how much of it is true and how much is a carefully-crafted lie designed to hit Kenzo in the precognitively-scouted weak spots. Anyway, he claims to have met Johan in a bar and invited over to hang out at the wealthy couple's house, where he'd been living with them for the last year or so. He introduced him to them. Then, using the husband's removal of a flower patch that they both liked as a catalyst, Johan told the dude that he wanted to leave and erase the couple behind him. He also showed him evidence that the husband of the pair had a mistress behind his wife's back who he was exploiting badly. The dude's mother had been the abused chick-on-the-side of a rich guy once. So, the dude was inclined to murder the couple for Johan when he left.

And that's that, apparently.

Skaven informs Kenzo that this story can't be true, at least in its entirety. He'd been scoping the house out for almost a month before the murders, and he saw no indications of the rich couple having an adoptive son, nor did he catch a glimpse of anyone who looked like Johan. On the other hand, the killer has a framed photo of himself with the murdered couple, so he did know them regardless of whether or not it was really Johan who introduced them.

As the music gets tense and psychedellic, the killer tells Giovanni where to find the hidden safe in the house, and then waxes poetic about whether or not it is truly possible to erase one's own past and make it not exist anymore. And, adressing Kenzo by name, he tells him that his own fate has already been decided; something the two of them have in common.

Then he shoots himself.

Who knows who this guy really was, what Johan really did to push him into relaying a message-and-suicide for him, and how much of the account he gave was true. Or why he'd bother with any of this. Who knows.

Hell, at this point it seems as likely as not that Giovanni is also on Johan's payroll and was told to wait for Kenzo to come poking at he house. Who even knows.

...

If Johan really can see the future, though, then Kenzo's fate being "already decided" may not be something it's possible for him to fight against.

Then again, being able to see the future doesn't make him incapable of lying about what he sees, so.

...

When Dr. Tenma accompanies Giovanni back to the house the next time they feel like the police aren't paying attention - Giovanni to steal, Kenzo to look for any other hidden messages left for him - the "safe" location turns out to just be the site of a hidden message.

"My dear Dr. Tenma. Look at me! look at me! The monster inside of me is getting bigger!"

What does it mean? Why does he want Kenzo to read it? Who knows. Whatever it is Johan is playing at with this scenario, it's either a 5D precognitive chess technique that will only become understandable in hindsight, or it's just plain madness.

"Johaaaaaaaaaaaaan!!!!"​

Episodes 11 and 12, "511 Kinderheim" and "A Little Experiment," have Kenzo shaking free of Giovanni Skaven and following up on a lead that he probably should have looked into many episodes ago. Getting rid of the cartoon gangsters doesn't leave a more grounded, realistic story, though. Quite the opposite. "Monster" always had a kind of Kafkaesque nightmare-logic to it, but it's at this point that the floor completely gives way underfoot and sends the story tumbling down into the fairy-tale world hidden in the basement. From here on out, characters don't make rational decisions, and the setting doesn't actually work like late twentieth century Germany. We're in the realm of symbols, archetypes, and fables, even if it's still stretched and hammered into the shape of real world history and politics.

Kenzo, clean-shaven once again, has travelled to what was once East Berlin to research the Liebert family prior to their defection and subsequent murder. Specifically, where and how did they come by the Von Candystein twins who (briefly) took on their surname? A bit of poking around and interviewing old neighbours brings Kenzo to the mouldering shell of the abandoned orphanage 511 Kinderheim. This place has the most ominous introductory theme and most dread-inducing slow-panning over its abandoned hulk that I've seen outside of "'entering new area' cinematic in a horror game."

“You were almost a Kenzo sandwich!”

Definitely the sort of place that horrific transhuman research might have been conducted in.

After some more asking around, Kenzo is directed to a Mr. Hartmann, who was one of the orphanage's administrators back in the day. At first, Hartmann seems to be a devoted humanitarian after Kenzo's own heart. He welcomes Kenzo into his apartment and invites him to sit down and have some refreshments while he tells his remorseful tale of a man who tried to do the best he could to protect children from the abuses of the same authoritarian government he answered to. 511 Kinderheim wasn't just an orphanage; it was a special child re-education center for the children of criminals, political dissidents, and people who looked at a Stasi officer the wrong way. Conditions were at the "colonial residential school" level of atrocious, give or take, with terror, abuse, and corruption being the order of the day. Hartmann did his best to mitigate the damage, but it wasn't nearly enough.

As far as actionable intelligence goes: Hartmann remembers the Von Candystein twins well, as their stay at the orphanage directly preceded its sudden closure. He tells Kenzo that "Johan" and "Anna" Von Candystein were brought to 511 Kinderheim near the end of its era. They weren't the children of criminals or dissidents, but they were a pair of orphans who the East German army found wandering the wilderness along the Czech border, and from the government's perspective that put them in the same undesirable category. For reasons that Hartmann never understood, Anna spent only a very short time at 511 Kinderheim before being sent to a different orphanage, while Johan stayed there long enough to lead the other orphans in a bloody revolt that claimed the lives of many residents and staff members alike and led to the place being shuttered. He's not sure what happened to Johan after that, but then heard that he and his sister had *somehow* been taken in by the Lieberts not long after.

Uh. Huh.

After 511 Kinderheim's sudden closure, Hartmann and some likeminded fellows did their best to provide for the remaining children out of their own pockets, with one of them - a particularly young child at the time, by the name of Dieter - still living with Hartmann as an adoptive son.

Dieter turns out to be the same boy that Kenzo noticed nursing an injury on the street earlier, and coaxed into letting him help. It looked like an old wound that the boy had recently reopened, and that had gotten infected, and Kenzo bandaged and disinfected it. Seeing that boy return to Hartmann's well-furnished apartment to the man's warm welcome surprises Kenzo. It also strikes him as a little bit odd that, when asked what his dream for the future is, Dieter says "a soccer ball." Not "being a pro soccer player." Just owning a soccer ball at all.

Kenzo not understanding the implications of everything he's hearing and seeing until it gets spelled out for him later, and the way he acts on that knowledge after receiving it, is...definitely one of the contributors to this all feeling like a dream sequence.

The literal minute that Hartmann and Dieter are alone in the apartment again.​

The next important revelation comes when Kenzo visits the orphanage Anna/Nina was sent to, but the path that leads him there is not at all the one you'd expect. Instead, right after leaving Hartmann's place, Kenzo buys a soccer ball at a nearby toy shop and brings it back to them. And arrives in time to hear Dieter scream while receiving his latest beating. Leading to a standoff where Kenzo holds Hartmann at gunpoint, while Hartmann tells him that he already recognized the name "Kenzo Tenma" and called the police, who are already on their way. Because Kenzo didn't use a fake name, apparently.

Kenzo ends up grabbing Dieter and bringing him to a hospital, instructing the doctors not to turn him over to anyone until he gets back. Because he doesn't remember how child custody works, apparently. In the meantime, he run off to the nearest orphanage he can find, hoping to um...kidnap Dieter from Hartman and bring him here, without having to get the police involved. It just so happens that this is the orphanage Anna went to after her brief stay at 511 with her brother. And that the lady Kenzo talks to there personally remembers her and has a whole bunch more information to happily and immediately part with. Including the fact that Johan was the only survivor of the 511 Kinderheim massacre, so everything Hartmann said about how he cared for the other orphans (and about Dieter's origins) was a lie.

Also, it's an open secret among the former East Berlin social service workers that 511 was doing some kind of military research using unwanted children as test subjects, which is a big twist for people who haven't been paying attention to the last eight episodes.

Also also, in an only slightly less surprising rugpull, it turns out that Hartmann was not actually a minor administrator sidelined by the government enforcers trying to make 511 less horrible in any small way we could. He was, in fact, the man running the entire show, and a close collaborator with the military nutjobs behind the supersoldier project.

Cut to Hartmann getting Dieter out of the hospital, dragging him out into the streets, and making him repeat after him again that the world is terrible and always getting worse and that the only way to survive it will be to become strong through suffering.

Dieter is actually giving him some pushback now that he's been shown an alternative, though, which doesn't make Hartmann happy with him.

Meanwhile, after coming back to the hospital and making the surprised pikachu face when told that the boy's legal guardian was allowed to take him home after his injuries had been treated, goes back to Hartmann's house. They're not home, and it's left open. Because Hartmann definitely seems like the kind of person who wouldn't lock the door when he's away.

...

There's no way to summarize this without sounding snarky, but in context it really doesn't hurt the story. The sheer consistency with which things bounce Kenzo toward the next revelation or confrontation, and the weirdly obsessive priorities he seems to chase one after the next, all contribute to the sense that his is a dream. Kenzo chasing after a localized symbol of people in need of help, and being stymied by localized symbols of society's blind idiot institutions leaving him to discover the dark truths they won't acknowledge by himself.

If these two episodes were any less consistent on these fronts, it would just seem like bad writing. As executed though, it captures the altered state of consciousness of a nightmare. Particularly, the kind of nightmare where it's immediately obvious upon waking what your subconscious is trying to tell you, but that there's nothing you can do about. It works.

But...it's hard to not make it sound like just nonsense when describing the literal events.

...

Searching the apartment, Kenzo finds photos of Hartmann posing alongside a number of boys from 511 Kinderheim. And another man, old and wolfish-looking, posing alongside a young Munster von Candystein.

On a hunch, Kenzo then goes to the boarded-up ruin of 511 Kinderheim hoping to find Hartmann and Dieter there, which he does. Kieter has fresh bruises and cuts, right on top of the treatments he just got at the hospital. Hartmann has him sitting like...well, like this:

Apparently, this was the chair Johan sat in (or at least, a very similar chair that Hartmann brought in after the first one got removed) when he watched the uprising he fomented kill everyone in the building besides himself. Hartmann now reveals (assuming we can trust anything this guy says. He's a proven liar at this point, after all) that he entered the building while this was going on, just in time to see the tail end of the bloodbath and find Johan in his chair.

He asked Johan what he did, and the boy simply held up an oily bit of cloth and tossed it into a fire. "Wherever humans gather," the ten year old child said, "they will grow hatred." He just tossed it a little bit of extra accelerant.

He asked Johan why he did it, and Johan told him that he wanted to make sure he was the last man standing. That's all he ever wants. To be alive when everyone else is dead.

Hartmann then waxes poetic about how that child was perfection. Johan is what the supersoldier project had been trying to create, only he was better at it than they ever dreamed. More startlingly, Hartmann claims no credit for making Johan this way; he claims that the boy was already like this before they brought him here, and 511 Kinderheim only had a small additional effect at most. Ever since then, he's been trying to create another Johan. Dieter is his current, thus-far-disappointing, attempt.

...

Huh. So Johan and Anna weren't products of the secret East German supersoldier program?

Hmm. Well, hold on a minute here.

There must have been a reason that they chose to keep Johan in 511 Kinderheim and sent Anna on to a normal orphanage after keeping her with him for a short time. Like they recognized some quality in both twins, but that they later decided only Johan had in sufficient quantities.

Assuming Hartmann wasn't lying about this part as well, the two children were found wandering the wilderness near the Czech border, with no explanation of how they got there.

I wonder. Did they escape from one East Bloc dictatorship's supersoldier lab only to be snapped up by a different one's? Maybe. Or maybe their origins are more supernatural than technological, and the Khan-isms really were just a red herring that I totally fell for.

Anyway, on a more psychological note I think we have a good idea of what Munster's motives are now. An intensely paranoiac, zero-sum view of the world, where all human interactions inevitably become hateful (a belief likely reinforced by being put in situations like 511 Kinderheim), and anyone and everyone around him is necessarily a threat to be eliminated before they do the same to him. That definitely explains why he's trying to kill everyone who he's ever been beholden to, or who could recognize him from his past. What's less clear is why he decided Dr. Tenma is an exception to this. And also how he feels about his twin sister, at this point. I feel like she at least used to be another exception, but who knows if and how that might have changed over their decade apart.

Hmm. He was happy to let Anna kill him, after he killed the Lieberts, though. That doesn't really go with the "dark forest" motivation set. Unless, hmm. Maybe he's okay with his own death, but only on the condition that his twin can be as strong and survivable (read: murderous) as he is? Maybe? And, again, what makes Kenzo different from any other adult who had helped him?

Hmm. I take back what I said about his motives being clear now. There's still too much that doesn't fit. More information needed.

...

Kenzo tells Dieter to leave the psychopath who's trying to turn him into an even bigger psychopath even if it kills him, and to come with him instead. Hartmann just cackles like Palpatine gloating over how Darth Vader is his forever, and tells Dieter to go ahead and tell Kenzo how he really feels.

Dieter gets up and goes with Kenzo. Hartmann collapses to the floor and screams like he's falling down a generator shaft.

Before having his breakdown, Hartmann did tell Kenzo the name of the military officer who delivered the twins to 511 Kinderheim. The Czech border story may or may not be true, and this guy - a General Wolfe (presumably, the man from the photo who looks like an actual wolf) - will know. Why does he do Kenzo this favor? Because Kenzo defeats him in this scene, and that means he gets what he needs out of him. Like I said, this is pure fairy tale logic all the way through.

After patching Dieter up again, Kenzo heads off to look for this Wolfe guy. Dieter doesn't want him to go though. He wants him to stay and play soccer with him and be his dad.

My toddler just recently started getting into the ball we got him, so this scene hit me harder than it would have a few months ago.

Anyway, Kenzo is a wanted fugitive, and on a mission besides. He tells Dieter to go to the orphanage lady he made arrangements with, and that he'll come back to see him when he can. Just remember that the world doesn't have to always get worse, and you don't need to be evil to survive. Hopefully it'll go better for Deiter than it did for that newspaper guy.

And, that's the first 12 episodes of "Monster." It went a lot of places. Some of which I very much expected, and some of which I very much did not.


The thing that surprised me the most about this series is how political this got. Like, the subtext of this whole sequence...

Johan basically is East Germany as it was thought of in the west. Loud and proud authoritarianism, unabashed street murder and vicious psyops, secrecy and fake names and state orphanages. An easy regime to demonize. But then, what actually happened to the people living under it when liberal democratic West Germany came in to liberate them?

While researhing some historical background for this show, I happened on an interview with a former East German official talking about her experiences visiting the United States. She saw that there was more political freedom, less day to day fear of secret police etc, but...she also saw homeless people starving in the streets. She couldn't believe it. So much wealth, so much sophistication, how the hell could they just be letting this happen? She might have been fine with the Stasi disappearing people, but homelessness and starvation amidst wealth shocked and horrified her.

Germany isn't nearly as bad in the United States in this regard. East Germany didn't suffer as much under West German shock therapy as the USSR did under American shock therapy. But it did suffer. The show itself makes a point of acknowledging this, with those East German terrorists being portrayed as having totally legitimate grievances. How many German lives were ruined by western capitalism, and how many were ruined by the eastern police state? Even if one of them is better than the other, how big is that difference?

Also, getting back to an undercurrent that's been running through this show: which Germany allowed the most nazis and nazi-hangers-on to remain active in politics?

For all that the show has characters talking up Johan's monstrosity, the character who it took the most pains to portray as loathsome and hateable is still Director Heinemann (I said before that just those two episodes he was alive for made him one of the most effective anime villains I've ever seen, and I still stand by that). What were his crimes? Appropriating resources meant for the poor and vulnerable and redistributing them to the rich and priveleged. Stealing other people's creativity and labor and profiting from them. Luring his victims in with promises of the good life, and then leaving them out to dry while he makes idealistic-sounding speeches on TV.

Sounds sort of like a certain social and economic order you might be familiar with, doesn't he?

Maybe Johan is worse than Heinemann, but how big of a moral difference is there? When you have that amount of death and suffering on your hands, does it even matter who is technically responsible for the most?

Is one of them more of a monster that needs hunting down and shooting than the other? Are neither of them? Are both of them?

The moment that really threw this into relief, of course, was Kenzo's scene with the terrorists. He's decided that Johan is worth picking up a gun and going after, even though going to war runs the risk of civilian casualties. Now he has to condemn someone else for doing the same thing, and - while he held his ground at least long enough to make sure the terrorists regretted their carelessness - the question was clearly haunting him; what makes my white whale so much more important than theirs? In a world full of bad guys, what makes Johan Liebert beyond the pale?

Kenzo's comfortable position prevented him from interrogating his surroundings like this. Now, as a wanted criminal, he's lost that comfort and can see everything from an outside perspective. It hurt his self-perception when he found out he only had his success in life because of Johan's monstrous actions, but now he's realizing how many other monstrous things done by monstrous people he was unknowingly benefitting from, and how much his ability to save lives as a doctor is rooted in a social order built on them (hell, there was even an offhand reference in episode 11 when a realtor who Kenzo is interviewing just casually mentions how the houses he's reselling once belonged to Germany's extinct Jewish population).

Monster stories often reflect the guilty consciences of the people who tell them. This is a monster story about monster stories. This is what the horror genre at its best is for.

What the fact that this is a story by a Japanese writer about a Japanese character uncovering horrors in Germany means, in light of this, is...well, I think you understand what I'm getting at. At any rate, it's easily got the strongest opening dozen episodes of any Star Trek series to date.