Monster S1E4: "The Night of Execution"

This review was comissioned by @HolyDragoon. Special thanks to @illhousen for the thumbnail.

"Monster" is one of the things I've sampled for my reviews that I've most wanted to get back to. In fact, sorry to say, I actually went ahead and watched one or two episodes further into the series on my own when it didn't look like anyone wanted to commission more episodes, which is something I don't normally have the time or spare brainpower to do.

In this case it kinda came back to bite me, because someone commissioned more Monster literally right after I started watching onward. So, I stopped, but at least some damage has already been done. I don't remember if I saw one episode ahead, or two, but either way at least some of these next couple reviews will not be blind. As always in such cases, I'll do my best to compartmentalize my knowledge and react to everything as if coming in fresh, with any commentary that breaks that rule being clearly marked as such.

It's been a while since I reviewed episodes 1-3, so here's a recap. In the early 1980's, idealistic Japanese-German brain surgeon Dr. Kenzo Tenma got fucked over by his hospital's corrupt overseer, Director Heinemann, for choosing to prioritize patients with the most urgent need over ones with political connections. Heinemann was in the process of spitefully destroying both Dr. Tenma's professional ambitions and his personal life when he and his bureaucratic flunkies all suddenly ate poisoned candy and died. This candy appeared to have been taken from the "get well" gifts sent to the little boy whose life Tenma chose to save over that of Heinemann's politician friend, and poisoned with extra-high doses of a soporific that is often used in surgery.

Dr. Tenma was, naturally, investigated as a suspect in these murders as he had both the means and the motive, but he had a solid alibi and no real evidence pointing to him. It also helped him that the child whose life he saved was the son of a pair of East German defectors who was shot in the head during a home invasion just like his parents (who, unlike him, were not saveable). In light of that, the most obvious explanation for the candy incident is that the East German assassin tried to remove the surviving witness to his operation by sending him poisoned candy, and the corrupt doctors just happened to steal candy from the wrong unconscious child this time.

Even more eerily, both the child patient (who had just been operated on a couple of days before the deaths) and his sister (who was being kept at the hospital with him, and who was physically uninjured but too traumatized to speak after watching her whole family get gunned down) both vanished without a trace on the night of the poisoning. No one's been able to find them. Either the assassin finally managed to nab those last two witnesses without leaving evidence, or there's something much weirder going on.

From there, the story jumped ahead to 1995. The police investigator who failed to find the culprit behind the hospital poisonings - a prickly eccentric genius type by the name of Inspector Lunge - is chasing a serial killer who seems to target married couples in their homes. When a key witness is injured in a chase and needs brain surgery, fate sees Lunge and Tenma - now one of Germany's most celebrated physicians, his career having been saved and even advanced by the deaths of his corrupt superiors - crossing paths again. Lunge, it seems, never stopped suspecting Dr. Tenma of poisoning his colleagues, and this recent spate of murdered couples also serve to remind him of the circumstances surrounding that old unsolved case of his. Tensions run high between Dr. Tenma and Inspector Lunge, as the latter pries into the former while also counting on him to save this key witness.

Episode three ended with the witness regaining consciousness after the successful neurosurgery. The only words anyone can get out of him, unfortunately, are "The monster is coming."

What's really going on with these bizarre, interconnected murders that span 15 years of Dr. Tenma and Inspector Lunge's lives? A bloody domino-chain catalyzed by the fumblings of a political conspiracy? Something supernatural centered around those two disappearing orphans? Dr. Tenma's murderous alternate personality that he doesn't know about? Could be anything! Let's start episode four.

Following a teaser that just repeats the final scene of episode three ("the monster is coming"), the episode opens on Dr. Tenma, Detective Lunge, and some no-names standing over the patient's hospital bed. The patient still hasn't said anything since his ominous post-awakening portent, but Lunge is sure that he's just holding back on them. So, both to goad him into cooperating and to recap for the audience, Lunge tells him why he was the choice of being either a witness or a suspect. Basically, four middle-aged couples were murdered in their homes in recent times. In the majority of those cases, this man - a convicted burglar and lockpick specialist named Adolf Junkers - was seen nearby shortly beforehand.

Junkers has no history of violent offenses, so Lunge would like to believe that he didn't know he was being hired by a serial killer to do the lockpicking for them, but if he doesn't start talking then Lunge will have to make the only assumption left for him to make. Nobody wants that, right? So, in the interest of preventing such an unfortunate outcome, Junkers should really start talking.

Junkers' reaction is one of abject terror. Gripping his bedsheets. Shivering. He doesn't seem scared like a murderer who's afraid of being caught out, though. He seems scared like an intimidated witness who fears the perp more than death itself.

The monster is coming, and now it also seems like the monster won't be very pleased with Junkers if it learns that he talked to the police.

When Junkers is pressed further, he starts screaming and trying to flee the room, not that he's able to in his condition. Dr. Tenma finally steps in and tells Lunge that he's not going to let him ask the patient any more questions today. Lunge gives Tenma a long, suspicious look, but doesn't have a choice. He and his officers leave, telling Tenma that he'll be back tomorrow; just make sure nothing happens to the patient before then.

Oh. I see.

Tenma's life is about to get very, very unpleasant, starting tomorrow morning.

Later that afternoon, Dr. Tenma wheels Junkers out of his room to get some fresh air. The cop who Lunge left guarding the hospital room protests, saying that Junkers isn't supposed to go *anywhere* without the department's permission, but Tenma just tells him that his patients always get air and sunlight after surgery and that's non-negotiable except for other health reasons. The cop can come with them and keep his eye on Junkers if he wants, but Tenma isn't keeping him locked in his room all day every day.

This will, of course, end in catastrophe of a sort that directly implicates Tenma.

So, the guard lets them go. It's not clear if he follows them outside as Tenma invited him to; if so, he's keeping himself just out of frame in the ensuing scene. Tenma parks Junkers' wheelchair on the grass, sits down beside him, and starts just asking for it.

Dr. Tenma. Kenzo. Come on man. You don't know what genre of story you're in, of course, but I'm not even a fictional character at all and *I* wouldn't say that out loud while looking across an idyllic sunny green park. At this point you might as well just mention that you're one week from retirement and engaged too, it's not like you can make things any worse.

Continuing to speak aloud, Tenma - reminded of that old event by meeting Lunge again, just like Lunge was reminded of it by meeting Tenma again - muses that seeing so many people die and grieve so often might be why many doctors end up shutting out the human element of their work and becoming cynical careerists. He used to be like that himself, until that incident over a decade ago.

Heh, man, Tenma is being really uncharitable to himself. He only ever put his career ahead of patients' wellbeing when his old boss manipulated him into it, and he was haunted by it as soon as he found out. I guess he might have been *tempted* to comply. Or at least, he may not have realized until then how precarious a doctor's ability to care about their patients actually was, and that if not for that extreme case in point he might well have let it happen to him in the years since.

He concludes with a reassertion of his belief that all human lives are, at least to begin with, of equal value, and that it's not too late for Junkers to start his own anew with a fresh beginning of that same value. And then helps a child patient playing across the yard recover a ball that he tossed out of bounds. Oh my god Tenma is going to summon a literal meteorite down on his own head I swear.

Junkers finally speaks up. All this talk of childhood, life-defining decisions, and fresh starts has made him think of how he began his own criminal career. As a young teen, he wanted a cuckoo clock that was too expensive for his parents to get him. He stared at that clock in the shop window, day after day, before breaking into the store.

He got caught almost immediately. Never even managed to get away with the clock. Some local delinquents heard about his lockpicking skills, though, and shortly thereafter offered him money for his help with an operation. Easy money. He took that job, and then another, and then another, and then just never stopped. He didn't start thinking of himself as a criminal until long, long after the fact, when he was staring back at his multiple convictions. He never planned to be one. When he started doing this, he merely wanted a cuckoo clock, and he just took the path of least resistance from there.

He and Dr. Tenma are around the same age, but this conversation almost makes Junkers feel like a child being counselled by his parents again. As he tears up, Tenma advises him to cooperate with the police, take the amnesty deal Lunge is offering, and then start his life anew while he's still not too old.

When the topic of the investigation is raised, Junkers starts panicking again like he did back in the room. He clamps his hand over his mouth, as if afraid he might say too much by mistake if he doesn't cover it, and just muffles out the following:

Hmm. Killed because they blabbed? I imagine so. If they were killed even when they DIDN'T blab then Junkers has no reason not to do so himself. Well, anyway, now that he's thinking about the monster again Junkers won't say another word. Tenma is forced to bring him back to his room without being sure if he's helped the man or not.

Well, nobody killed Junkers during this outing that the cop was reluctant to allow, so we're doing better than I expected so far. We'll see if it lasts though.

...

As a sidenote, the amount of time and attention the episode spends on Junkers' backstory feels very meaningful. Thinking about the patterns of behavior he went over, and the sort of themes he touched on...hmm. I think we might have just gotten a lighter-and-softer analogue to how "the monster" came to be. A first monstrous act, motivated by a pedestrian impulse that anyone might reasonably feel, btu which left them in a situation where more monstrosity was now the path of least resistance.

It's a thought, for sure. I'm not 100% on this, but I do have a *feeling* that that's what the story is foreshadowing with Junkers' tale.

In a way, it's also analogous to how Dr. Tenma sees the course of his own adult life having gone (even if I don't much agree with his perspective here). He feels like walking the righteous path just came naturally to him, once he'd made that first decision to risk his marriage and his career to save that East German boy. He'd set a precedent for himself, and his continually virtuous life since then could almost be him acting on a kind of sunk cost fallacy. Again, I don't think that this interpretation of Kenzo holds up to how we saw his younger self behave, but I can believe that it's something he himself might wonder about.

...now I'm also thinking about the late Director Heinneman's even-more-fucked-up daughter who Kenzo dodged a real bullet in being dumped by. If this story does end up being about the thing that I think is being pointed to here, then she might have a very interesting role to play in it.

...

Jump ahead to that night. Dr. Tenma is having a night out with his misshapen slob friend Dr. Becker. Becker is trying to set him up with the daughter of a rich, influential family, and Tenma seems less than enthusiastic about it.

Dr. Tenma...well, on one hand Becker is right (unusual for him, but it happens every once in a while) that it's high time he settled down. On the other though, Kenzo has got to have some serious, SERIOUS intimacy issues after what happened with his ex-fiance, so I don't at all blame him for avoiding the dating scene for a decade.

And, um. I don't think that Becker is doing himself any favors by emphasizing the specific traits that this girl has in common with Tenma's deranged ex. Eh, he might have a good point once in a while, but ultimately he's still Becker.

Suddenly, Tenma notices something in a store window that draws his attention away from Doctor Lumpy. It's a cuckoo clock that has a nutcracker-like wooden soldier (a la the "Nutcracker" ballet) instead of a bird, just like the one Junkers described from his first attempted theft. He knows immediately that he needs to get it for his patient, to mark the occasion of his fresh start on life from that first critical point. He promptly loses all interest in Becker and the woman he wants him to date, and starts back to the hospital to bring Junkers his present.

Hmm. Definitely seems like Tenma was just looking for an excuse.

Cut back to the hospital, while Tenma is still out with Becker. Oh no, here it comes. Junkers is laying in his bed thinking about his outdoor conversation with Dr. Tenma earlier that day, and he makes a decision. Staggering to his feet, Junkers manages to walk out into the hall to tell the guard that he's ready to testify. He just requests that Dr. Tenma be present in the room while he spills everything, and that he gets the immunity he was promised in exchange.

There's no reply from the guard, who is leaning silently, limply, against the wall. When Junkers approaches him, the vibrations of his footsteps are enough to make the body slide free of its precarious tilt and slump to the floor. Eyes open, but blank.

Guard dead, but no sign of the killer. Junkers is still undisturbed inside his room. Nothing's jumping out at him. The monster works in mysterious ways, it seems.

Well, however mysterious its methods (and means) might be, Junkers recognizes this as the monster's doing. And, understandably, has an even bigger freakout than his last couple.

Cut back to Tenma, as he returns to the late night hospital with a gift-wrapped nutcracker cuckoo clock in hand. He reaches the ward, and sees the dead cop crumpled against the wall. He also, on closer inspection, sees something else. Something much weirder and (even) more foreboding.

The dead guard's mouth is full of froth, and laying on the floor beside him is an empty candy wrapper.

What.

The.

Fuck.

How did...what...this really is like something out of a surreal fever-nightmare, for Kenzo. The show's also done a good enough job getting the audience invested in him for me to share in that experience.

So...the last time this happened, the poisoned candy was taken from the kid's get-well presents. Or, alternatively, the candy was taken from there, and then poisoned using pilfered hospital drugs before being given to the sketchy doctors. We did see the three of them helping themselves to the boy's candy the day before they were all found dead, so the former seemed much more likely at the time, but I guess Herr Monster could have taken more of the candy after they left, poisoned it, and then planted it on their office desks or whatever since it knew they liked that kind of candy. It's possible, at least. But...why use candy again NOW, when there both isn't any onhand and there's nothing to suggest that this particular cop would be likely to take that bait?

Is it doing this specifically to taunt Dr. Tenma? To taunt detective Lunge? Of the two, the latter seems more likely, but who knows.

Well. I think we can pretty confidently eliminate "Stasi assassin" from the list of suspects. That leaves two options, and - now that I think about it - one additional option.

1. Creepy Psychic Kids.

Evidence in favor: Those two little East German kids were framed in the absolute creepiest possible way during their early series appearance. There was some weird behavior from the girl that might have been hinting at a psychic connection with her brother. The brother, meanwhile, was shown to have been feigning unconsciousness when Tenma collapsed on the floor of his hospital room and went on what he thought was a private rant about how much he hated Director Heinneman and his cronies. He might also have been just pretending to be asleep when those same individuals stole some of his candy.

If this show is going the supernatural route, I could easily see the boy having telepathically instructed his sister to do the doctor who saved him a solid, and to teach those three pricks a lesson about candy ownership while she's at it. That would explain why they ran away right after the incident, and it might be in-character for a pair of psychic feral teenagers who have been on an itinerant killing spree since they were ten to still use things like poisoned candy as a default murder weapon.

Additionally, the murder of couples in their homes mirrors the deaths of their own parents. Which could make sense if they were a) inspired by that event, or b) responsible for murdering their own parents with there never having been a political assassination at all.

Evidence against: even if they're all psychic and creepy and Japanese horror-y, I have trouble imagining these kids identifying the right drug and knowing how much of it you need for a fatal overdose. That seems to require knowledge that these kids just couldn't have.

Unless they can read other people's minds in addition to one another's, in which case one or both of them could have scanned the mind of a nearby doctor to learn what they needed to know about the hospital's drug selection. That is a possibility, if we're already granting that psychic powers are a thing, but it's still much more of a stretch.

2. Dr. Tenma's Evil Dissociative Identity.

Evidence for: as the detective noted, Tenma had more than enough reason to want those doctors dead, and he had both ready access to and extensive knowledge of the hospital's surgical drugs. Some of the details of his private interactions with the Heinnemans were so bizarre that they'd be more believable as schizophrenic hallucinations than actual conversations. If he was already losing it, and then suddenly faced with the stress and trauma of the Director's spite, well...I'm not sure if that would be a realistic portrayal of DID and how it develops, but I'm also not sure how realistic this story is trying to be.

The kids' disappearance...well, he definitely had access to them. And reason for his evil alter ego to resent them, given the role they (innocently) played in imperilling his career. Alternatively, he could have thought he was saving or protecting them in some weird way.

There's also a lot of metatextual signaling that points to Dr. Tenma being the titular monster. The intro consists of him running and hiding throughout urban and rural landscapes while creepy music plays, but we never see what he's running or hiding from. Usually, when the title appears onscreen during the OP, it appears when Dr. Tenma and pretty much nothing else is also onscreen. The whole conversation with Junkers about how the same person could be multiple different things, as well as the implication that Tenma almost purged himself of his more cynical impulses during that incident...well, it definitely would go along thematically with a Jekyll-and-Hyde sort of plot.

Evidence against: I'm not sure why Dr. Tenma's evil alt-persona would be killing middle aged couples across Germany. It's possible that his Tyler Durden has been getting itself involved in all sorts of sordid drama and making lots of enemies that it then needs to deal with, but...always middle aged couples? That's just too specific and too random for the story to do without first giving us some hint about what might make Tenma want to target them. It's too well written in general to NOT do that. The timeline also doesn't work out for him to have been responsible for the deaths of the East German defectors, though to be fair we don't know if they were actually monster victims or not.

It would also require an explanation for Junkers not recognizing Dr. Tenma as the monster. This is possible, if evil!Tenma only ever interacted with him in disguise or over the phone or something, but it's a stretch.

3. Inspector Lunge.

Evidence for: there's only one other common thread between these incidents, and it's a thread that happens to be both highly intelligent and extremely knowledgeable about criminal methods. The killer arranging to have himself be the investigating detective for his own murders is a genre classic. If he's decided to turn Kenzo into a patsy for the murders of both Junkers AND the deaths of the only other victims of his who he was never able pin on someone else in one fell swoop, then reprising the murder method from back then would make perfect sense.

It would have been very easy for Lunge to hand one of his own underlings a candy and make sure he ate it. Likewise, making those kids disappear from the hospital and ensuring they're never found would be something a detective could easily manage, especially if he's, eg, running a gang that other cops are also members of. In this case, he may or may not have also been responsible for the deaths of the defector parents, and if so it could have been a contract killing or just a moon logic serial killer motive that was incidental to the politics. If he DIDN'T kill the parents, then he might have just targeted the kids after poisoning those doctors because he realized they were probable witnesses to what he did.

As for why he'd kill those three doctors, well. If he's more assassin than serial killer, Heinemann definitely was a man who made enemies, some of whom were probably wealthy. If he's more serial killer than assassin, then it could have just been moon logic victim selection just like the couples.

Evidence against: the variety of methods and targets chosen for all these murders seems weird for an outsider to the situation to choose. Serial killers tend to be very specific about how they do what they do. Assassins...less so, but planting poisoned candy on the doctors is just such a weird thing for someone to do if they already have a different preferred murder method that they use is just...idk. It feels wrong.

Once again, there's also the problem of Junkers not appearing to recognize "the monster," though there are also still the same ways around it. I guess you could interpret his unwillingness to speak during the scene with Lunge in the ward as him recognizing the monster and making a big show of not snitching in the hopes of appeasing him, but...if that were the case, he also wouldn't be telling a cop who came into the building accompanying Lunge that he wants to testify.

Right now, overall, Lunge seems like the most likely suspect, but I'm not nearly ready to make any bets yet.

Anyway.

Dr. Tenma hurries into Junkers' room, and finds it empty. No body, no blood, just empty. However, he also happens to look through the window and notices Junkers fleeing away across the hospital grounds.

Man, Kenzo really came back just in time. Of course, given that he drops the clock and runs after Junkers before he can even think to call the cops or anything like that, it might end up working out very, very badly for him. Can't blame him for not being sharper, given the circumstances, but...if he ends up finding Junkers' freshly dead body, alone, with no one to vouch for him, well.

Kenzo chases Junkers out into the night, calling after him, but Junkers just keeps running. I'm not sure if calling the cops now would be the best thing Kenzo could do, or the worst. Ironically, if Junkers is killed and Kenzo was demonstrably still in the hospital using its phone at the time, that would be the best outcome for the doctor. Too late for that though.

To be fair, as Dr. Tenma's own inner monologue points out, he also does NOT want a complete repeat of what happened a decade ago. A poisoned candy murder, and one of his patients disappearing without a trace that same night. I feel like having that happened to him twice and never knowing the truth behind it might actually be worse for his mental health than making himself a prime murder suspect. Assuming, of course, that he is both sane and NOT the murderer to begin with. There's still a nonzero chance of the alternative.

Huffing and puffing, Tenma manages to track Junkers to an abandoned-looking parking complex. That wouldn't be my first choice of where to go to avoid being murdered, but Junkers is both a) in a blind panic and b) within 72 hours of a major brain injury. I don't think one can expect quick thinking from him, in these circumstances. When Tenma follows him in, still calling out to him, he finally hears Junkers shout back to him from an upper floor. Warning him not to put himself in harm's way.

The monster will not permit anyone who can identify him to live. Junkers doesn't want Dr. Tenma to be thus imperilled. More implicitly, he doesn't want *anyone* else to be thus imperilled. Junkers didn't just come here to hide from the monster; he came here so that, if the monster does find him, he at least won't have to kill anyone else in the process of eliminating Junkers.

Well, that's noble of Junkers. And it explains why he didn't want to stay closer to the hospital, in particular; having the monster rampage through a hospital could have gotten very gruesome very fast.

Also, Junkers is now identifying the monster as a "he." That doesn't eliminate anyone off my suspects list, but it does mean that if it's the creepy psychic kids kids then Junkers has only encountered one of them in person and thus doesn't know that there's a "she" as well.

Tenma ignores Junkers' warnings, and follows his voice to its source. He finds his patient crouched on the ground, his face despairing and defeated, while the shadowy silhouette of the monster looms out of the darkness behind him.

That little bit of electric lighting that falls on the monster's head reveals him to be blond. Not Lunge, then. Wrong shape of the head too. It's got to be the boy who Tenma saved, now ten years older and with many more homicides under his belt.

Well then, I guess creepy psychic kids it was!

The shadowed young man - Johan, right, I looked back, the boy is Johan and his sister is Anna - hails Dr. Tenma in a quiet, eerily soft-spoken voice. He still recognizes him, after these last ten or so years. When asked if he remembers him in turn, Tenma realizes - with a horrified gasp - who this is, and answers him by name. Johan seems pleasantly surprised by this.

Pleasantly surprised enough to not kill Dr. Tenma? Maybe. He and/or his sister did kill three guys FOR him (at least partly; I guess it could have just been over them stealing his candy, but I don't think so) a decade ago, which implies some degree of appreciation and goodwill.

Granted, if Johan is also paranoid about people identifying him as Junkers claims, then I'm not sure *why* he'd be helping prompt Tenma to put two and two together unless he's already decided to kill him. So. Yeah.

Junkers certainly thinks that that's the case. He screams at Tenma again to run, try and get away if he can. Presumably, Johan has a ranged weapon onhand in addition to just poiso...

...

I swear to god if he starts shooting people in the mouth with a poisoned candy launcher it would make "Monster" the best piece of media ever created by any person. No joke. Unironically.

...

Johan pulls out a gun. Please be loaded with candy come on show I know you can do this come on. For some reason, before shooting, Johan lets Junkers speak his final words to Dr. Tenma, although...okay, this is the first bit of really unconvincing dialogue in the show so far. Junkers has no reason to spill all this detailed information to Dr. Tenma, even if Johan gave him enough time to spill it. This is just nakedly exposition for the audience's benefit. Oh well, as long as the series doesn't keep doing this then I can forgive the occasional concession of verisimilitude for storytelling.

Anyway, it turns out that Junkers isn't nearly as innocent as he seemed. Like Kenzo, I had been under the impression that Junkers was just ignorant (perhaps willfully so after the first couple of times, or perhaps legitimately so if he moves around a lot and doesn't watch the news) of what his break-ins were being used for. Nope. That cuckoo clock sent him down a much darker path than the one he made it sound like earlier.

In the interrogation scene, Lunge mentioned that the forensic evidence pointed to three culprits working together. Turns out he was exactly right. Junkers was part of a little gang, and he knew what they were being hired for. He picked the locks, Fritz slit the throats, and Boris stood guard and hid the evidence. Their mysterious employer wired them a large sum of money after each hit, and they divided it among themselves. Even if Junkers didn't know what they were doing before the first mission, there's no possible way he couldn't have for the second, third, or fourth.

There might have even been a fifth too, if Junkers hadn't gotten his dumb ass spotted near several of the crime scenes and brought the police's attention down on him AND his known associates. Johan obviously prefers to have others do his dirty work, but in this case time was so short that he had to dive in and silence the trio himself. When Johan turned on them, Junkers babbles, the late Fritz declared that "we've been hired by a monster!" That's what Johan is. Human lives are nothing to him.

You know. Unlike the guys who murdered eight ostensibly innocent people for cash. :/

It's honestly pretty satisfying when Johan points the gun down at Junkers and tells him - with very understandable contempt - that he's getting tired of hearing his voice. Johan certainly isn't better than Junkers, of course, but at least he's not such a weasely little prick about it.

Tenma tries to talk Johan down from committing yet another murder, but he doesn't take the best approach. In fact, he might actually be taking the literal *worst* approach. He just starts saying everything he knows about Johan - his last name, the year of his family's escape from behind the iron curtain, etc - in some kind of effort to demonstrate that Johan won't be able to keep himself a secret forever so he might as well stop making things worse for himself. Erm. Kenzo? The *only reason* you realized this is Johan was because he helped you put it together. And, when you say that "we" know too much about him, who the hell is even covered by that besides yourself? You're just giving Johan more and more reasons to kill you.

Well, Johan isn't ready to kill anyone just yet. First, he corrects a mistaken assumption of Kenzo's. Yes, Kenzo remembers him. Yes, Kenzo knows a few things about him. But he doesn't actually know who he is. You see, his name is not actually Johan Liebert.

He's had others. "Johan Liebert" means no more or less to him than the rest.

Huh. Was Johan not his original name, though? Well...from what he says next, it seems like maybe it actually wasn't. No one, he explains, can be allowed to discover his true origins. Not the four couples he had Junkers and Co assassinate, and not the Leiberts either.

Huh.

Is...is he implying that he arranged to have his own parents - or foster parents, or whatever - shot? But...he also took a bullet in the head during that incident himself. Something went wrong, I guess? Or...wait, no, how the hell could he have arranged their deaths at that age? I could see him having gotten his hands on a gun and shot them himself, but...he tried to commit suicide afterward? If he wanted to die, why did he take measures to preserve his life after the surgery saved him? What made him change his mind?

Hmm. I think there must be something bigger going on here than just a hyperintelligent murderchild. He could not have been the only actor, and I don't see how his sister's involvement could make this make any more sense. I don't think this guy is *the* monster after all. Just a part of it.

Well, anyway. He's been investing a lot into burying the trail leading to whatever set his career into motion. He also has enough money to burn, and enough ease and experience working through black market underlings, that he's functionally (if perhaps not technically) some kind of crime lord. Easy enough to believe, if he and/or his sister really do have mind powers.

An ethereal, creepy, but also - in a weird way - touching theme begins playing as Johan then explains why he will NOT be killing Dr. Tenma even though he probably should. Is this music going to be his leitmotif? I hope so, it's good. I digress though. Johan says that Dr. Tenma brought him back into the world when he was essentially dead. A new life, a new beginning, was given to him, and it was entirely thanks to Kenzo's decision to go above and beyond the call of duty and take selfless personal risk. As far as Johan is concerned, Kenzo might as well be his parent. He brought him to life and protected him. Johan will not harm the closest thing to a real father he ever had.

I'm not sure if Johan is deliberately trying to torture Doctor Tenma with these words, or if he's just being brutally sincere. I guess it depends on how much he happens to have researched Tenma between their last meeting and now (or how much he's gotten out of Tenma and Junkers' brains, if he actually can do that. I'm starting to think maybe we're NOT going in a supernatural direction after all, though in that case I really have no fucking clue how these two kids were supposed to figure out the delicate nuances of tranquilizer misuse). But anyway, this is more than just a viciously close parallel to Tenma's conversation with Junkers earlier in the episode. It's also, intentionally or otherwise, an attack on Tenma's entire identity. Not just his ideals and worldview; his actual identity.

Tenma sees himself as, primarily, moreso than anything else, someone who saves lives. As many lives as possible. All lives being equal as far as he's concerned. Every life saved a chance to start anew.

How many murders has the boy who was once known as Johan Liebert committed since that brain surgery? Either by his own hand, or acting through others. How many human lives ended when they would have otherwise continued if you took away the one single factor that is Johan's existence? Three doctors. Eight middle aged spouses. Three criminals. One cop. That's fifteen people that we know of. Considering the methods, motives, and EASE that we saw from Johan in some of these cases, it's virtually impossible that these fifteen are the only ones. They're probably just the tip of the iceberg.

In living the life that he chose, doing the things that he does, has Dr. Tenma actually saved more people than he's killed? All other factors being the same, removing the existence of Dr. Tenma and changing nothing else, would there be fewer people alive today or would there be more?

Ethically speaking, nothing has really changed. Doctor Tenma didn't know anything about that kid before he saved him, and statistically it was overwhelmingly likely that he would not become a serial killer if saved. We're not working on that rational, philosophical level, though. We're talking about IDENTITY. Tenma saves lives and gives people more chances. It's what he is. It's what he brings to the world. Except...thanks to Johan, he actually isn't and doesn't. This is gut level. There's no logicking his way out of it.

Impressively, given the circumstances, Kenzo kind of manages to turn this around. It was his choice to save Johan's life that made Tenma really internalize how important and precious every individual life is. Maybe it was Johan who enabled Tenma to save so many people, rather than it just having been Tenma who enabled Johan to kill so many others.

So, Tenma says, if Johan really does look up to him in any way, then please. Believe in the thing that his own "rebirth" brought about for Tenma, just this once if not permanently. Don't kill this other man who Tenma brought back and gave another chance at life to.

Johan laughs.

A miserable little pile of secrets, of course.​

And then, after thinking out loud for a few meandering sentences, he drops the real bomb on Kenzo's position.

Tenma thinks that saving Johan was the event that allowed him to go on saving so many other lives in the time since then? Well, he's right. Extremely right. More right than he'll allow himself to realize, even though he has all the pieces and is easily smart enough to put them together on his own if he was just willing to. Since he's not willing, though, Johan is just going to spell it out for him.

Tenma wouldn't have been able to do nearly as much good if Director Heinneman and his buddies weren't murdered. It's not just saving a boy that allowed Tenma to go on doing good. It's specifically saving a murderer, because he murders, that allowed it.

...

It's almost as if the story knows it's set in a peaceful, progressive society that keeps its own hands fairly clean on the international stage...by being a junior member of NATO.

Notably, it used to do things a little differently before it could count on America for the dirty work. But somehow, despite being historically literate, European liberals seem to have trouble keeping all these facts in their heads at the same time.

...

A rainstorm begins. Wet, heavy droplets splattering across the pavement behind Johan. Thunder. Ah, that's why Johan was just standing there letting people talk for the last few minutes. The weather report promised a lightning storm tonight, and thunderclaps are perfect for masking a gunshot. Junkers cries and begs for his life, repeating over and over that he doesn't want to die, please don't kill him. Johan doesn't credit this with an answer; he just waits for the next thunderclap and shoots.

Kenzo is too shocked and horrified to move or say anything. Just watches helplessly as his most recent patient whose life he thought he'd turned around slumps to the damp cement, in a pool of his own blood.

Johan leaves the body where it fell, and walks out of the parking complex, passing right by Kenzo in the process. A heavier version of Johan's theme plays, this time accomponied by churchbell-like sounds. Kenzo follows him with his eyes, frozen in fear. Junkers had warned him not to let himself see Johan's face well enough to identify it, but there's no way to make himself more of a target than he already has at this point. He looks at Johan. Johan smiles back at him as he moves on by. I know some of you might have trouble believing this, but this anime villain is a golden-haired pretty boy.

Shocking, I know. The character design here pulled the rug out from under me.

The young man who Kenzo knows alternatively as "Johan Liebert" and "the monster," but whose true identity might be something else altogether, vanishes into the rain. Dr. Tenma is left alone with a corpse.

...

So, we've met our titular monster, or at least seen one of its faces. More questions raised than answers provided. Not the least of them being whether or not Johan is really more "monstrous" than the people he often finds himself surrounded with. Sort of a corollary to the moral challenge the story just posed to Kenzo.

As for his motives, well, that's probably the biggest enigma of them all. He's determined to wipe out anyone who knows about his past, but Kenzo is an exception. He claims that it's because he sees Kenzo as a father to him, but he also doesn't seem to care about the death of his East German father (biological or otherwise) all that much; regardless of how complicit Johan was in that shooting, he seems to regard it as having been neccessary. So, how much DO parents mean to Johan? What makes Kenzo matter to him more than the people who actually raised him, at least for much of his childhood?

There's much more to the Johan Liebert story than the show has directly hinted at yet. Too much of what he said just doesn't add up without additional context that could potentially reframe everything.

What happened to his sister though, really? Is she still around? Did he kill her? Did they part ways? Is she on a rooftop across the street with a sniper bead on Kenzo in case he makes a move? All possibilities.

...

The next morning, Inspector Lunge looks out over the dampened city, grumbling about what rainwater does to evidence, and what an unfortunate situation that puts himself and Dr. Tenma both in. Turning to the suspect, Lunge goes back through the story he told him. He doesn't rephrase it to make it sound sillier. He doesn't say it in an overly skeptical or sarcastic tone of voice. He just repeats it back to Kenzo, faithfully and matter-of-factly, while letting his expression ask Kenzo the obvious question.

"Do you seriously expect me to believe this insane bullshit?"

Dr. Tenma's own expression, growing ever more despairing as Lunge talks, also speaks for itself. No. No, of COURSE he doesn't expect anyone to believe this story. He wouldn't believe it himself if someone else had told it to him.

At the end, when Lunge neutrally asks him if he has anything else to add to his account, Tenma looks like he's ready to just kill himself now and save the state the trouble.

There's a long, horrible pause. Then, Lunge gives the order for Tenma to be released.

Surprising. But I don't think he's letting Tenma off the hook entirely. Or, well. Maybe he sees something that's clued him in on the truth, but he's going to keep watching Kenzo for now to see if the monster makes another move in his vicinity. Not sure. In any case, Lunge lets him go for now. After he leaves, the other detective in the room thinks aloud about Dr. Tenma's alibis, his general character, the lack of connection between him and any of those murdered couples, etc. Lunge just silently glares at the door. Not all of the arrows point to Dr. Tenma, sure, but way too many of them still do.

As he walks out of the station through the ongoing rain, Dr. Tenma looks down at his reflection in the water-covered pavement. He starts crying, and sinks to his knees on the damp, lonely sidewalk.

Even if he never heard from Detective Lunge and his colleagues again, Kenzo might just be falling apart on his own at this point.

The music over the creepy children's drawing of a monster in the outro is, like Johan's little leitmotif, simultaneously eerie and touching. Almost tender, somehow. It sounds heavy and dark, but somehow not quite like a horror theme.

Once again, it gives me the impression that the "monster" might not actually be quite as bad as everyone thinks. Or, if it is, then Johan Liebert or whatever his true name is - Munster von Candystein, sure, I'll go with that - isn't actually *the* monster the title refers to. That's not to undersell his evil. He's definitely an extremely bad dude. But is he that much worse than Junkers, or Heinemann? Where's the line?

End episode.

I think I'll have a lot more to say at the end of the following episode. For now, just two closing thoughts.

First, a question asked by one of the characters in the Jordan Peele movie "Nope." Weird swerve, I know, but humor me for just a minute. "What do you call a bad miracle?" The movie never answers that question, but I've seen some analyses point something out that, considering where that film goes by the end, is probably what the writers intended to get at.

Going back to the Latin roots of the word, "Miraculum," there's another, rather surprising, word that sometimes acts as a synonym for it. "Monstrum."

Dr. Tenma is a miracle worker. The continued life of Johan Leibert is one of the miracles that he worked. And really, thinking about what both of them do, and how they do it, there are some startling similarities. They work with incredible precision that leaves rivals frustrated and pursuers stimmied. Normal people can't understand how they're able to do it; their delicacy is nigh supernatural. Johan's line of work just draws more attention and raises more pressing questions than Kenzo's.

I commented on the impossibility of some of the shit Johan supposedly pulled off (especially as a kid), but is what Dr. Tenma does - seemingly uniquely, out of all the other brain surgeons around him - any less impossible? Maybe not, but also maybe.

So, maybe they're two sides of the same karmic coin, in some weird way? That sounds really bizarre, but somehow it also just feels right to me.

Second, while Dr. Tenma is a pretty darned sympathetic protagonist in general, there was a moment during the confrontation scene where he lost me.

"No one has the right to take another's life!”

That's a very extreme position to take. Extreme, and to my mind highly disagreeable. If Kenzo really is that kind of absolute pacifist, then Johan's position actually becomes hard for him to argue with.

Because, well, yeah. If Heinemann had his way, Kenzo wouldn't have been able to perform any of those subsequent miracles of his. Maybe there was a better way of solving the problem than Johan's approach. In fact, I'll go further to say that there certainly was. But Kenzo didn't have any solution before Johan intervened. Is this timeline, where Johan killed Heinemann and the other two, better than one in which he didn't and Kenzo's career was choked in its crib?

Frankly, I think killing Heinemann might have made the world a better place even if Dr. Tenma didn't exist at all. How many lives was he ruining? How many patients was he essentially murdering by inaction, by denying care to those who most need it in favor of those who he could get something from? How many other promising doctors - with all the lives that they could potentially save - got destroyed by Heinemann's machinations?

The other two asshole doctors who got poisoned are much harder to justify, of course, but they're also not the ones whose deaths really gave Tenma his reprieve.

But anyway. Getting to the point now.

It's basically the Kill Six Billion Demons sidestories all over again. Sheepdogs and wolves are the same species, and if you rely on them to do violence for you then you're not really such an innocent sheep yourself either. Sometimes, you have to employ violence. In some situations, that can include lethal violence. The idea that performing that violence takes "a special kind of person" or that enacting it "sullies" a person regardless of the circumstances is a brutally authoritarian one that elevates the violent to a position of absolute dominance.

If Kenzo wasn't a strict pacifist, he'd be able to denounce Johan. He could point at specific murders Johan committed and say that he was wrong to do that and that and that and give reasons based in whatever other moral systems he happens to subscribe to. But he's a strict pacifist, so he can't do that. His only argument against the monster is one that he cannot reconcile with his own existence.

He's facing the most obviously evil person he's ever likely to meet, and he's got nothing to condemn him with.