Review of Monster

I really thought that this was going to be the series for me, before and during my run of the series. This is a series with such a brilliant setup, premise and promise, only for it to fall flat on almost all of it's promises in the latter half of the series. The first half of the story is truly where the writing shines the most, and honestly, the ending should've been during the Library fire, if anywhere in the canon. But still, this was the beginning of where the series began to stumble. Let me demonstrate the fatal flaw of this series by reiterating and explainingthe brilliance of it's premise. Dr. Tenma is a brilliant Japanese neurosurgeon, working at a hospital in East Germany, some time after the Berlin Wall fell. He is the head of his department, the most trusted in his Director's team, engaged to the Director's daughter. But the hospital, in the end, is a stage for politics over lives.

The series begins with Tenma learning that bc he decided to follow the orders of his politically motivated Director, he performed surgery on a patient, at the expense of another patient's life, who had been admitted to the hospital before the one he was ordered to save. He is distraught over this realization, and when a similar scenario arises soon after, he decides to save the lives of the patients in the order for which they were brought to him.

This time around, he decides to save the life of a boy who had been shot in the head, over the mayor of the city. Even if they'd come in at the same time, I think most people would agree that saving the boy's life would've held a higher priority. But Tenma doesn't realize until ten years afterwards that the boy he saved became one of the most terrifying serial killers out there. And with that, introduces a brilliant moral dilemma. And the setup that follows is also brilliant- that, feeling like he is responsible for those killed by "that Monster", Tenma has a duty, an obligation, to put his life on the line in order to put an end to him. Those that try to kill Monsters should see to it that they do not become a Monster themselves.

And up until the halfway mark, Naoki Urusawa continuously impressed me with the journey we were embarking on, and the characters we met. Up until the halfway mark, that is. But before I get into that... What exactly was so intriguing about the story up until the halfway mark? Well, Tenma was embarking on the journey of a fugitive, a cat and mouse chase, and he burdens his own mind with his false-noble ambition to save the many by killing just one. Meanwhile, we, as the audience, *know* that he can't kill anyone, he can only save.

Johan, the serial killer boy, is an intriguing and terrifying character up until the halfway mark. We don't see him for most of it, but when he does appear, he steals the show. And we are introduced to his broader ambitions. We learn that he is a product of an East-German/ Soviet Experiment masquerading as an orphanage called Kinderheim 511. At that orphanage, he instilled fear and darkness into the ticking time bombs that were the kids of that orphanage, and everyone in the orphanage, including the experimenters, killed each other. Yes. He was evil way before Tenma saved him. In fact, on the night he was shot in the head by his twin sister, Anna, he had killed both of their adopted parents. And he is also responsible for the deaths of Tenma's director and jackass colleagues after he was saved by Tenma.

But while he is a product of Kinderheim 511, a radical Fascist organization views him as the next Hitler, O' so eager to have him take the mantle as their new leader. During this time, we are taught two things about Johan, that while he is following in the footsteps of Hitler, even at his early age, by controlling the banks and amassing power- according to Tenma, he has "no cheap racial prejudices". And in an arc not long after, we see his plan in motion. He slowly kills off everyone related to a wealthy businessman, a billionaire, in order to slowly isolate him, drive him into despair, and control his inheritance... Controlling his business with massive spanning connections from behind the scenes. But it is after the climax of this arc that it became clear that Naoki Urusawa could not follow up on the brilliance of it's first half.

To demonstrate how he fails, let's look at everything I just mentioned. Dr. Tenma saving Johan introduced a fascinating moral dilemma. Tenma became a better person after saving the boy and losing his status in the hospital, but he is rewarded by the boy himself by him killing all of Tenma's superiors. Tenma lives for 9 years after the fact with a clean conscious, saving patients for the sake of saving them, until Johan kills one of his patients in front of him and incidentally frames him for murder for the second time. We know that Tenma was not wrong for choosing to save Johan over the Mayor. But for 74 episodes straight we know that Tenma cannot kill Johan, for he can only save lives. That's just the person he is. So why does the show wait 73 episodes to come to the same conclusion I came to at Episode 50-ish?

That conclusion being, that if Tenma cannot kill Johan, why not try to save him? Show him the light or something. This may sound cheesy, and blatantly common- and it really is. But if they decided to introduce that after the halfway mark instead of at the end, then we could've successfully followed up on our beginning premise, and Urusawa could've actually made use of all the plot threads and build up until that point.

What if- instead of what we got- the plot was that Johan was succeeding in his plot to become a Hitler-like dictator behind the scenes? But wait! -You shout. Johan's plot is actually a suicide mission- you cry! To which I would respond, yeah, but didn't Hitler commit suicide in the end, also? If only... If only Naoki Urusawa had decided to actually use the plot points built up in it's first half, the same concept he wound up carrying out would've been executed in a much more satisfying, thrilling, and fascinating way.

(Let me be clear. What I'm saying is if the the premise of the series is a moral dilemma, then it should be followed up with others. When Tenma confronts Johan at the Library and doesn't shoot him, it should've been clear that even if Johan managed to massacre a hundred people, Tenma wouldn't have the gumption to pull the trigger, for he could only save lives. So thus, the premise therefore should've been, if he was in the right to save him the first time, as he grows in power, the only way he can "put an end to things" would be to capture him, make him confess, show him the light or shine light on the darkness that is Johan. Thus, introducing another moral conflict. It's one thing to save Hitler before you know he will become Hitler, but can one save Hitler after you know he is Hitler? The answer in the context of Monster is, yes, because Urusawa says so in Episode 73. Also, Johan is a child that has only known how to be evil. A product of his upbringing and his mind. Why didn't we get this dilemma at the halfway mark? That way, the most sufficient way to raise the steaks is Tenma trying to figure out how to outsmart Johan, how to lure him into a trap so he can set him straight.)

Instead, the second half of Monster devolves. It gets lost in all of it's semi relevant side stories involving political experiments, espionage and trying to trace Johan's past back to his mother in Czechoslovakia. In the wake of the contrived mess of a story it becomes, it shafts all the good characters from the first half, including Tenma and Johan themselves. And it only delivers on a few of it's promises. At this point, Johan retains little intrigue. The more we learn about his roots, the more his character burns in the oven. The gravest offense against his character is learning more about his past than we already had known. Not because keeping details of him in the dark makes him more terrifying, though that's a plus, it's because his backstory before his time at Kinderheim demonstrates the utter worst aspects of Urusawa's writing.

It all starts with a Children's book written by a Czechoslovakian Author, called "The Monster Without a Name". It is a book that is tied to his and his sister's past... they both collapse in shellshock when they read it again during their respective quests. The next 30+ episodes are spent trying to justify this one book's existence in the story, whilst Urusawa tries to hammer it's relevance in like a shoehorn.

"Hey look! This children's book is just like the story! Look! Look!" Urusawa yells. "See, A monster splits in two, and they look for names, but no one is left to know their names!"... 'I'm so brilliant'- he thinks.

Obviously, I'm simplifying this particular plot point but with the introduction of this book, and the plot shifting towards Johan's past, he keeps trying to give this impression that everything is going according to some sort of sinister plan. Meanwhile, Johan throws away all of his plans to pursue his past, a move that is not completely incomprehensible, but for someone with a brain as big as Johan's, with his suicide mission unchanging, it is contradictory to say the least. But worry not! Because it actually is all going according to plan! Because Johan is actually planning a massacre where he plans to die at after killing everybody in a small town. Now his reason for this is to kill aforementioned Children's author, Franz Bonaparta, who was the chief of the OTHER experiment he was involved in in Czechoslovakia, and then have Tenma shoot him... but instead he is shot by a semi-relevant drunk and Tenma saves him.

But wait, there was ANOTHER experiment? Not just Kinderheim 511? As if that one experiment wouldn't have been enough to adequately explain why Johan is literally the devil himself, the series tries to shoehorn in another, less compelling, cheap, tragic, experiment in Czechoslovakia that involves breeding the ultimate genetic specimen, murdering a whole bunch of people and one that honestly struggles to adequately explain what's happening in the plot, or make the direction Urusawa decided to go in, compelling. This is what I mean by "Johan is overcooked". With this shoehorned experiment, all the flaws in Urusawa's writing start to reveal itself.

Now let's get into how Monster fell apart. First, it should be noted that Monster doesn't have very well written dialogue, even for it's first half. And it's not a translation error, it's more like how desperate it is to be cryptic, even in the Japanese words they are using. This is not a problem in the First Half because the setting and premise more than make up for- but actively complement the cryptic nature of the dialogue. But the second half is plagued by the cheesy cryptics, for the story tries to move into a more emotionally centered story, instead of one with broad political implications like it had in the first half.

When someone reads a beautiful poem to you, you expect it to be lush and descriptive. But there is little rhyme to the reasons given in the second half of Monster. It's head gets stuck up it's ass, in other words. Anyone who watched it probably can remember how many times Nina repeats the same phrases over and over again, how the same phrases echo to other characters, with additional information being given at the pace of a very slow drip of water, and not in a good way. "Cedok Bridge" "The Three Frogs" "Welcome Home" "I'm home" "Humans can be anything they want to be" and even "Monster". We are supposed to be satisfied when Nina (Johan's sister) faints or goes into post traumatic fits after recalling vague, repressed memories from her past. The problem is that this goes on for damn near 30 episodes and results in her character stagnating, with no purpose left in the story but to fill in those details for us.

Dieter, a child, a remnant of Kinderheim 511 for which Tenma rescues, starts travelling with him in the first half of the series, but is completely shafted in the second. His role was to stop Tenma from falling into his pit of despair and make sure he doesn't become a Monster. Eventually, Tenma jukes Dieter to continue his quest, leaving him with a German psychiatrist. But Dieter no longer plays any important part past that point, except to keep Nina company as she slowly uncovers her and Johan's past. Meanwhile, Tenma, while he becomes desperate and extremely worn down, never again finding a consistent person for emotional support, never becomes a Monster. So why did we need Dieter to begin with?

The first half really sold to us that Tenma needed someone like Dieter to keep him from losing himself. As soon as Tenma jukes Dieter, he (almost) kills Roberto, one of our antagonists... In self defense, mind (
you. But this is moments away from confronting Johan and pointing a gun at his forehead in the midst of burning flames.

None of Tenma's isolation does him in in any fatal way. What is the point of constantly telling us that he's not eating properly and that he'll drive himself insane, if none of that ever plays an important role in his life as a fugitive or in his game of cat and mouse? His character stays stagnant for 30+ episodes until the very end of the series.

Eva Heinemanm, Tenma's former fiance... While I like when unlikeable characters get development, the execution of her development was all over the place. She has a nice ending to her character arc in after Tenma left her at that secret inn in the first half, but then she regresses as a character when she is reintroduced in the second half. She finally develops again after caring for her bodyguard and meeting with Tenma after he breaks the news to her that he's dead. For most of the series, she wants Tenma behind bars for "ruining her life" (though she never realizes that it was her that ruined her life), but soon she is burdened with being the only one who can prove Tenma innocent and that Johan was the one who killed Tenma's patient. Her obsession with Tenma stems from her privileged upbringing and large ego. Tenma was the only man who really cared for her while they were dating, so she still longs for him after a decade of their relationship breaking off. She's an annoying character, and I questioned why they were still forcing her to be relevant after her reintroduction. She ends off the series finally recovering from her alcohol induced depression and starting a new life as an interior designer... Which is nice, but still, it left a bad taste in my mouth.

I don't want to get into too many details because so many of the side stories, while they all center around Tenma and Johan, they only serve to muddy the premise and intrigue of the series. Urusawa becomes obsessed with creating a way to end the story in a way that everyone can be happy, instead of letting things fall into place. The only motivations for side characters slowly dwindle to helping Tenma or Johan. In addition, Urusawa keeps writing reason after reason why characters exist or act the way they do, with very little rhyme.

After a certain point, I stopped being invested in any of the characters aside from Mr. Grimmer, and even he starts losing me on his "Magnificent Steiner" schtick.

And I really didn't need to be invested either. There was no collective effort by those investigating the existence of Johan that brought him to his knees in the finale... there was no outsmarting of the genius. The game of cat and mouse was just that, a game... that the mouse himself intended on ending. Which defeats the idea of cat and mouse.

There was so much potential, I can even offer so many alternatives to how they could've executed that second half of the series. But unlike other acclaimed manga authors, Urusawa is hesitant to make sweeping changes to the landscape and characters and break the status quo. All that we saw from Johan in the second half would've been more compelling were he more of a threat than he was before the Library Fire. He could've controlled the entirety of the Czechoslovakian secret police, the Radical Fascists, he could've also killed off and gained control of that billionaire's inheritance, getting all of the international corporations on his side and in his pocket. Leading everyone to hell, lining them up like sheep to the slaughter-- stepping over them like ants. Nina still could've been tracing her roots, Johan still could've been on a suicide mission. But instead we get semi relevant stories about spies, about another set of murderers that were controlled by Johan, for reasons not very well explained.

Let's see, the last arc of the series, for such unevenly cooked characters, is the most undercooked of all the arcs. We don't get much time to learn about the town and those who inhabit it before everything goes to shit in it. And people call this anime a masterpiece?

And lastly, what I want to talk about is the very beginning of the series. One of the biggest plot holes never answered.

How the hell was Johan able to kill the Tenma's superiors with muscle relaxant candies, while he was still bedridden? Where did he get them? I thought potentially someone was trying to kill him, potentially Franz Bonaparta, but it is literally never explained. There are many other holes in the series, but there it is... right in the beginning of the series, sticking out like a sore thumb.

Those are my thoughts.

Monster is a muddied gem that could've been a diamond. It could've been a social commentary that would've still been relevant today.