Monster S1E5: "The Girl From Heidelburg"

There are a couple of young-ish women whose threads the story could pick up again in an episode with this title. Johan's sister Anna most obviously, but also potentially Eva Heinemann (we don't know that her family is from Heidelburg, but we also don't know that it isn't). It could also be a new character of course, but I'm thinking it's most likely Anna. Her role in the first incident and her whereabouts since then are probably the biggest questions hanging over the story at the moment.

Open on a college student hurrying late to class. We only see the back of her head in this shot, but it's probably safe to assume she's got toast in her mouth. Something that we can clearly see from this angle, though, is her distinctive shade of blond.

Anna Leibert. Or Fraulein Morderblutin von Candystein, as the case may be.

She's a law student, as it would happen. When she reaches the lecture hall, the professor is annoyed at her seemingly perpetual tardiness, but he lightens up a little when she answers a difficult question that none of her classmates could. He supposes he can't judge her too harshly for being late half the time; that pizza delivery job of hers must be exhausting.

Smart. Detail-oriented. Often late to her morning classes, with an explanation that she can pull out pretty much whenever she needs one without it straining credulity.

Also, the professor addresses her as Nina Fortner. Signifying that it's not just the brother who's been going through names since they were called Johan and Anna.

Mmhmm.

After class, "Nina Fortner" proves to be a popular girl as well as a smart one. Her classmates are glad that she always seems able to calm their grumpy old professor down before he can spitefully assign them extra work. Boys are all over her, but she doesn't seem much interested in the ones we see at least, politely and softly shooting down their date invitations. She then goes to the gym, where she dons her martial arts uniform and throws bigger guys around like ragdolls while the lightest, fluffiest slice-of-life music in the history of anime plays in the background.

She eats people, doesn't she?

Fluffy shojo music continues as we jump ahead to the afternoon. Turns out she really does deliver pizzas, whether or not that's actually the thing that has her sleeping in so often. If not, you wouldn't suspect it after seeing her work ethic.

Absent context, this is like the intro to the most wholesome porno ever.​

That evening, she comes home to her (adoptive?) parents. She still lives with parents, that's kind of surprising. Anyway, she compliments her mother on her new hair dye and tells her how much younger it makes her look, gently chides her father for not being more appreciative of her mother's new hair dye, and reminds them both of how much she loves them.

Holy fuck we're laying it on thick lmao.

She also mentions some children that she saw marching down the street in costumes for a minor festival. The conversation turns to childhood holiday traditions in general, and...oh god, the expression combined with the words:

I wonder how much they know about her life before whatever age they adopted her at. I wonder if she's told them anything true about it.

Then...huh. Okay. This is weird. This might change how I'm interpreting Nina/Anna and her behavior.

The parents start telling her that she DID dress up sometimes as a kid. And seem to be nonverbally prompting each other to volunteer more details. Back and forth. Very nonspecific details that give each other a lot of wiggle room. When Nina insists that she has no memory of this, they get out a family photo album and show her a photo of a kid in a big, baggy costume that obscures their silhouette, hair color, and face.

Okay. Now this is all starting to seem a little less "Dexter" and a little more "Serial Experiments Lain."

Did she lose her memory, somehow?

Are her adoptive parents in on some kind of conspiracy to prevent her from looking into her past? We know that Johan is killing people to keep his origins a secret. Might this be related? Either they're working for him, or he and they share an agenda.

Or maybe Nina is outsmarting their outsmarting this whole time, and just pretending to buy into their fake backstory for her?

Middle aged couples have been dying, but Lunge also specified that none of those middle aged couples had children still living with them. Hmm. There's a connection here. I just don't know what the connection is yet.

Anyway, Nina still might be another killer like her brother, but now it seems just as likely that the show was waving a red herring there. We'll see.

Nina stares blankly at the photo while a little scare chord plays, and then we follow her upstairs to her room. She's been getting a bunch of love letters by email, from schoolmates of both genders. Going by her reactions to them, this is just normal for her. One of the more poetic ones actually gets her attention for a moment, but only for a moment. As mentioned, she gets these a lot. Still, enough attention is paid to the unusually good love letter - which, notably, was sent from an anonymous burner account - that I think it might mean something even if she herself just assumes it's from one of the shier of her unsuccessful suitors.

The next morning, she has a therapy session. Okay, maybe we'll start getting some answers now!

Nina is happy to report that the night terrors have continued getting better. In fact, recently she hasn't remembered any of her dreams at all! The therapist is glad to hear that, and repeats his interpretation that the stresses of choosing and planning her career (she's only just now settled on public prosecutor, specifically) are giving her a minor identity crisis. It's normal for people her age.

The dreams about the monster stalking her through the darkness is just the kind of manifestation that those stresses might cause. No worries, as she continues to find out who she really is everything will get easier.

Hahahahaha ohhhhhhhh boy.

After the session, the therapist smiles as he writes down some extra notes. He usually finds himself smiling after a session with Nina, just like most people are left smiling after they interact with her. Still, he's beginning to wonder if there's something else going on with her, and if that idyllic cheerfulness might actually be linked to it. It doesn't feel like a defence mechanism, per se. It's more like...a reaction to something.

Hmm. When he puts it that way, and if we assume that Nina really is exactly what she presents herself as without any hidden torture shacks or anything, I wonder if maybe I was on to something with my old Jekyll and Hyde hypothesis. Not for Dr. Tenma, and probably not as literally, but if something caused the Von Candystein twins to make hard turns away from each other, this framing suggests that one of them took all the good that they once shared and the other took all the bad. Or maybe they were just like that from birth, a soul divided. Literally, or just thematically, depending on how supernatural this story ends up going.

Later that day, Nina sits down in the cafeteria and asks her most adorkably awkward suitor if he was the one who sent the unusually poetic anonymous email. He denies it, and it doesn't seem like it's just out of shyness; when she repeats some passages from it, he very earnestly says that he doesn't have that kind of skill with words. The sender is a mystery.

I mean, obviously it's her brother, but you know.

At her next class, the professor is lecturing about another precedent-setting case. This one was particularly gruesome; a family of four all murdered, the parents shot in the head and then the children strangled with a rope. Nina had no trouble answering questions about a murder trial in their previous class, but something about the details here does something to her. Tense, white noise music, with heartbeat and static-like sounds. When the professor calls on her to answer a question, she freezes up and starts shaking.

She puts a hand to her mouth against the bile. Her vision blurs. The students sitting near her have to help her out of the room before she outright collapses.

Once she's mostly recovered, the boy who's crushing on her asks if she thinks she should see a doctor. No, she insists, it's nothing like that. She's sure that whatever the hell kind of attack she just had, it was brought on by the story the professor told them. Romeo really, really awkwardly and insensitively pries into what life experiences she's been traumatized by. And assumes she must have seen an age-inappropriate horror movie when she was little or something.

It's the closest we've seen so far to Nina getting angry. She goes much softer on the dumbass than most people would even so. Okay, if this is what the local supply looks like I can see why she hasn't been interested in buying.

More informatively, she also clarifies what the episode already implied.

She has no recollection of anything before age ten.

How old were they in the prologue episodes, again? I thought they were already at least ten or so. If they were nine or younger, then that makes the twins of today younger than I thought. More like 18, rather than 21 or thereabouts. Nina might just be a freshman prelaw student, then. And...Johan has become some kind of crime kingpin before his twentieth birthday. Using the same kind of magic he (and she?) used to poison the doctors, I suppose.

That evening, Nina lays in bed staring at the ceiling. She's starting to wonder. Those missing years of her memory. How vague her parents always get about her life before that point. And now, she's having a trauma response to something that she can't ever recall having a traumatic experience with.

There's something in the darkness in her dreams. Is she really not dreaming about it anymore, or has she just managed to stop remembering it when she wakes up? How much of her life has she managed to stop remembering, and how much is it still doing to her?

She looks up with a start as she receives a new email. It's from that oh-so-articulate secret admirer again.

...

Heh, I just made a crack about how this is less like "Dexter" than I thought, but now it's actually looking MORE like "Dexter" than I thought. Specifically the first book/season.

It also tickles me a bit that Nina could have just as easily been our main protagonist, with this episode as the series' pilot. Kenzo even fits the role of wise mentor NPC who feels responsible for the villain's existence but has to pass the torch to the young hero in order to defeat them.

I'm not saying that would be better (I prefer things as they are, to be clear, for reasons I'm about to explain). Just that it would work perfectly. That, to me, is a mark of really good character writing. The story is everyone in its, and everyone can see themselves as the hero of it.

It also makes me realize what a breath of fresh air you can create just by sidestepping a couple of the usual Campbellian assumptions. By hero's journey logic, Nina actually should be the main character and Kenzo should be her guide to the underworld. The fact that she ISN'T makes "Monster" stand out from the crowd and lets it explore its themes from a less overtrodden direction.

...

Cut to Cologne, where Kenzo is taking a little leave from work and conducting a private investigation. He interviews some friends and neighbors of one of the murdered couples, and learns that they did adopt a son. Michael Reichmann. He moved out long before the parents were murdered, but he'd be at around the end of his teens by now wherever he is. Unfortunately, there aren't any school records or the like to look at; the building that they were kept in burned to the ground a few years ago.

Ah. Killing those who know his origins. He had a string of adoptive families, and at some point in the recent past he decided that they all just knew too much about him. Middle aged couples. None of them had children at home, but it's looking like all of them had at least one child for at least a certain length of time in the past.

Munster von Candystein is either suffering from really extreme paranoia, or he's got a more esoteric motive of some kind. None of these adoptive parents seem likely to know where he was from before he came to them, or to be in position to identify him in the future, after all.

He's also making me take back at least some of what I said about him in the last review. He is in fact much more "monstrous" than any of his victims. Given the tone and precedents set by this story, I'd be surprised if some of the foster parents he had Junkers and Co murder weren't abusive, but I also very much doubt that all four sets of them were.

...

And yet, something made him decide that Kenzo gets to keep on living, despite how much he knows. He even told him much more about himself than he could have ever learned on his own, and had a perfect opportunity to leave his body in the garage next to Junkers'. Those foster parents also helped him survive when he might not have without them. What puts them in a different category than Dr. Tenma, from Johan's perspective? There must still be more to this.

I wonder if there's some kind of test Johan is giving them? He chose to reveal things that he ostensibly shouldn't have to Kenzo. Perhaps he did the same thing to his foster families, and only had them killed when their reactions to that knowledge disappointed him? In that case, Kenzo might have already passed the test, or his judgement might still be in progress. It would depend on what it is that Johan wants to see.

Granted, even if that is indeed what's going on and Kenzo is already off the hook, that could still change if he makes himself enough of a nuisance for Johan. Even if Candyman Joe has some weird sense of honor about who he murders, it might not take much pushing before his self interest outweighs it.

...

As Kenzo returns home after conducting his Cologne interviews, he wonders to himself what he's even trying to learn, and why. Does it matter what Munster's real name actually is? Does it matter exactly who he's killed? Will Kenzo learning these things actually help stop him?

Since Munster seems to have burned his trail pretty thoroughly (and even literally for some parts of it), Kenzo decides that perhaps he should start looking for Morderblutin. The dead couple he was just investigating only seem to have had a son, but perhaps it might turn out that at least one of the others had twins?

I almost want to say that Kenzo has a deathwish, but I don't think it's *exactly* that. I think it's more that from his perspective, he's already dead. Munster's revelations shattered so much of who and what Kenzo is that his life can only matter to himself again if he puts a stop to the monster.

It's almost like Kenzo Tenma is the one who's had his name erased. He wants it back. If he can't get it back, then he doesn't want to keep living, and this investigation will lead him to one of those two things.

Meanwhile, Nina reads her new email. It just says that "I will be coming for you soon." I don't think he'd be sporting enough to warn her like this if he just wants to murder her, so her life probably isn't in immediate danger, but I also don't think it's possible to exist in any proximity to Munster without being in some kind of danger.

The next morning, Kenzo investigates another of the murdered couples. People are less willing to talk about this family. Kenzo is told that they just don't want to think about it any more, but something about the reactions seems a little too sharp. Have they been threatened, explicitly or otherwise? Could be. As Kenzo is turned away by yet another neighbour of theirs, an old man on a higher floor of the apartment building suddenly calls out to him. He looks like a trustworthy individual.

Seems legit.​

Kenzo comes upstairs and is invited to sit down while his host finishes making the tea. While he waits for the old man to sit with him, Kenzo idly examines the photos that he has hanging on the wall. There are a lot of them. All from the same ten-year period of history.

This slowly creeping sitar piece, just oozing with gradually-escalating anxiety, plays as the camera goes from picture to picture. Most of the pictures are centered on a specific young officer.

Just to remove any possible ambiguity, the resident also has his old uniform hat sitting on the mantlepiece, displayed proudly for anyone who enters his apartment.

Tenma's slowly changing expression and tone of voice is a masterclass of animation and voice acting. A still image can't capture it; it's the process of him slowly drifting from cautious optimism to disconcertion to horror and his breathing changing accordingly that really sells it.

Old Man Wehrmacht brings the tea over. Kenzo is very, very reluctant to drink it, and seems to be struggling with the decision of how openly contemptuous it's appropriate for him to be.

...

I really want to know how this scene was received by Japanese audiences.

Like, there's no way the author isn't pointing his finger at Japan by way of using Germany as a mirror with scenes like this. The detail that really cinches it is that we have this Japanese man who's just had his own moral certitude shattered and is suffering an identity crisis because of it shifting around in his seat and sweating nervously while he struggles with himself over accepting the hospitality.

...

Things don't get any less uncomfortable when Old Man Wehrmacht suddenly addresses Dr. Tenma by name, and tells him that "the boy talked about you a lot."

This show really walks a fine line between gritty realism and nightmare psychedelia.

Back to Nina. She's telling her friends about the mysterious emails, and one of them mentions that there's actually been a strange guy showing up to their classes recently. He looks their age, and he never says anything, so she just assumed he transferred into the class midsemester for whatever reason. Now that Nina is telling them about the emails though, it's reminding her that she thought it was weird how his eyes always seemed to be on the back of Nina's head whenever the friend happened to look at him.

Hmm. Wonder what he's been waiting for?

Back to Dr. Tenma and Old Man Wehrmacht. As the latter tells it, preteen Munster considered Tenma to be more of a parent to him than his actual parents. Again, I wonder why it is that Kenzo is in a different category from the other adults who went out of their way to help him. Is it just the fact that there's no plausible deniability? Munster might be able to tell himself that he could have still survived without any of his adoptive parents' intervention, but he can't do that for Kenzo? Or maybe it was to do with him having murdered those people on Kenzo's behalf, thus creating a special murderbond with him, which none of his adoptive parents ever gave him an "invitation" to do? Don't know. It really is strange, though. Anyway, Kenzo asks what the boy was named, and Wehrmacht replies that he went by Franz at the time, but that he told him that that wasn't his real name.

He was surprisingly open with Old Man Wehrmacht, considering how (murderously) cagey he is about his past with everyone else. That puts Wehrmacht on a very short list of people along with Kenzo and maybe his own twin sister. What this suggests about Kenzo, or at least about what Munster decided he saw in Kenzo, is of course not very comforting to the doctor.

...

We just need to give Munster an Italian confidante too, and we'll have a full hand.

...

So. "Franz" existed for a little over one year. He was adopted, and then after a while he just vanished. He either ran away, or his then-parents sent him somewhere else and never told any of their neighbours the details.

While he was here though, "Franz" came to visit Wehrmacht almost every day after school. In addition to doing his homework in Wehrmacht's apartment, he also asked the old man to teach him languages. The old nazi is fluent in English and French, and within that fourteen month period this early middle school aged kid became equally fluent in them. Wehrmacht had never seen anything like it. The boy's ability to absorb and then immediately and persistently apply information - linguistic, historical, you name it - was downright unearthly. He also liked hearing the old man's war stories, which Wehrmacht appreciated since it was getting harder and harder to find people who properly appreciated those with every passing decade.

That said, if Old Man Wehrmacht were any less lonely and had any more freedom to choose his audiences, he might have rethought their friendship after a few of Franz's reactions. For instance, the details he always wanted to hear the most about in his favorite war story. The one about the time Wehrmacht's u-boat was damaged by an Allied destroyer, and they had to limp back to base while staying deep underwater, fighting leaks and running out of air, closer every passing minute to dying choking, agonizing deaths in the crushing deep far away from the world of mankind above. Franz didn't like this story because it was exciting and engrossing though, like you'd expect a kid to. He liked it because of the window it gave him into the mind of a human being absolutely terrified, sure that they were about to die horribly and that there'd be nothing to do about it and nothing even left for family members to mourn.

Wehrmacht thinks the child was probably smiling, when he had the old man tell him about the despair and terror in minute detail, over and over again. "Probably" smiling because Old Man Wehrmacht has been blind since before he ever met the kid.

What? You think he would have opened up so much to an adult who'd be able to identify him afterward? Come on doctor, you know he would have been smarter than that.

Heck, "Franz" probably wasn't even the name his foster parents and classmates at the time called him by.

...

The music that played for that story was another great track, btw. This show really knocks it out of the park with the atmospheric background pieces.

...

Wehrmacht says that the only person that "Franz" ever seemed to actually TRUST, at least taking his own word for it, was his twin sister. Dr. Tenma immediately jumps on that and asks what he knows about her, and Wehrmacht says that she lives in Heidelburg and that her brother had planned to reunite with her when they turn twenty.

He volunteers that last bit without direct prompting from Kenzo. And...he actually swerved the conversation topic to mention her in the first place.

Okay. Yeah. No. This is bullshit. Munster found out that Kenzo was poking around at his previous lives, and instructed his old nazi friend to receive him and pass on a message when he shows up. Obvious bait is completely fucking obvious. Kenzo is just too frazzled to think about it.

...hah. I just realized that Old Man Wehrmacht might have not even lied at all. He never specified WHEN Munster told him all of those things about his plans for his sister and his thoughts about Dr. Tenma.

Flash back over to Nina "Morderblutin" Fortner, as she takes off on her motor scooter (of course she has a motor scooter. Of course. She probably added an inflatable boat hull and rocket engines to it as well) to meet up with some friends. As she drives away, her parents stare morosely after the vehicle. Should they tell her? She is almost twenty, after all. They said they'd tell her when she turned twenty.

So, her (and Munster's) twentieth birthday is coming up. They're closer to the age I originally thought, then. Although...well, I guess if she had her amnesic event and was separated from her brother just very shortly after the hospital incident, the timeline still works. But it had to have been right afterward.

Was the shooting of their parents (regardless of whether or not they were their initial set) and the traumatic fugue it sent her into the thing that wiped out her memories? Did the twins not escape from the hospital together after all? Did they escape separately?

Was he chasing her? Not even had time for his skull to heal shut, and already pursuing her with possibly murderous intent? That doesn't square with what the nazi dude said about their relationship, but we're only hearing what Munster chose to tell him about it.

The commonality of everyone having plans for her on her twentieth birthday, specifically, also can't possibly be coincidence. Someone stole or shared the idea from someone else. Either cooperatively or competitively.

Like I said. Nina's family situation is very reminiscent of SEL, and that might even extend as far as the parents being in the employ of a sinister mastermind. Though they at least do seem to have come to genuinely care for Nina, so that's one important difference.

Nina motorscoots over to campus, where those two friends of hers inform her that they've told the mystery boy from the seminar that they're arranging a meeting for the two of them. Nina is...nonplussed. The friends are totally oblivious.

Also, they abruptly turn and leave her there alone for the guy to find.

These friends are not the sharpest tools in the shed. It's a public place with a fair number of people around, sure, but even so...this is really dumb and reckless of them.

Well, maybe they're still watching from behind a corner or something. Though they at least should have told Nina that that's where they'll be before leaving her, if so.

As Nina stands there nervously, perhaps starting to realize the possible dangers of this situation, a slim male figure starts crossing the walkway toward her. Watching from behind a column (oh thank god they at least ARE still watching if nothing else), the friends excitedly babble that they see him coming. The figure strides up to Nina, and introduces himself.

Nina introduces herself back. They start chatting, but a sudden gust of wind happens to blow Nina's hair in her eyes. When she turns her head to clear it out again, she happens to spy another unfamiliar boy leaning unobstrusively against a different column across the way. He's facing the door of the building, as if waiting for someone to come out, but his eyes are not pointed in the same direction as his face. They're on Nina.

Upon seeing him, Nina freezes up.

Munster, in turn, notices that his sister has noticed him, and gives her an extremely small, extremely quick, extremely subtle little smile before stepping back around the pillar and walking away. The camera lets his retreating back shrink away and disappear behind the many other students walking around, in what is almost certainly a direct shoutout to the final shot of "Silence of the Lambs."

Heh, and I was just about to compare him to Hannibal Lector on my own. Well played, show.

Nina knows she recognizes him. And she knows that that recognition is giving her the same reaction that she had from hearing about that mass murder in class, only much stronger. She collapses.

The episode ends with her friends and a very confused and horrified Otto kneeling over her trying to figure out what just happened.

The Nina reveal was really a rug pull for the story. Whatever the missing sister ended up being, I was not expecting this.

There are definitely a few stretch marks around this episode. As I noted previously Dr. Tenma devoting this much energy to tracking the twins makes sense in context of the type of melodrama "Monster" is going for, but it's one of those things that gets less convincing the more you actually think about it. Additionally, his sequences felt kind of flat. Like he's just peddling the wheels of the plot to get himself into position for his next actual thing. His wonderfully nuanced uncomfortable reactions to the nazi were the one standout bit of characterization for him in the episode; outside of that scene though, I felt like he wasn't given enough chances to really *be* Kenzo Tenma.

But, that's balanced out by Nina's very strong introduction filling more of the screentime. She hasn't gotten to do much of anything yet, unfortunately, but just following her through this bit of her day-to-day life and her forgotten past's sudden intrusion upon it has really let the audience get to know her, and she's worth knowing.

"What if archetypal teen girl Mary Sue straight out of circa-2005 fanfiction.net, but taking all the implications seriously and following them to a logical conclusion?"

There's something seriously wrong with being that perfect, and she's starting to realize it. It's not a DIRECT parallel for Kenzo grappling with the secret moral cost of his pure-as-fresh-snow thoughts and deeds, but it's only a couple of steps removed. If this were a hackier story, I'd be afraid that this was all leading to an empty "everything that seems good is actually secretly bad" edgefest, but the quality of the writing and plotting in general is high enough that I don't think that's where we're headed.

I might be jumping the gun here, but something occured to me that might end up centering both the plot and the philosophy. The first couple episodes telegraphed that real world German history would be playing a role in the story with the East German defectors, and gave a not-so-subtle nod toward the nazis with the "just following orders" and "not all humans are created equal" bits. Now this episode introduces an actual nazi, and makes a point of reminding the audience that a lot of people who played active roles during the WW2 era were still alive in the 1980's and 90's. And even more of them were even more alive in the 1970's. Finally, we have a pair of blond, blue-eyed superhumans of highly secret origins at the heart of the plot.

Like I said, this may be a premature hypothesis. But right now, it's looking more likely than not that some Aryanist mad scientists grew the Von Candystein twins in a lab. We'll see. This is the last episode of this set, but someone else has already comissioned a bunch more. So, I'll be continuing Monster eventually, one way or another.