This episode in the end, ends up being sort of feel good ending. The episode itself, is high drama. high stakes, and a little freaky. I mean, when it comes down to do a heart transplant to a creepy cult leader or be murdered by his followers. That’s scary, that’s one of those life choices where you sit and go “wait a second….what has my life become?”
Let’s go back to the beginning, where we open up the episode with Hazama, Yabu the doctor who is afraid of blood from the last episode and various other men chained up in a room. We find that they’re all people who owe a large debt and their time had come to pay up. Through giving an organ, which organ? Their heart. Fortunately for Yabu and some of the others, they aren’t matches for the person in need of the transplant. Only Hazama and a guy known as Raymond are a match. At first, the one who is going to have to donate their heart is Hazama.
However, when the Doctor that they were going to have do the transplant is forced to go into hiding. Well, you can’t do a transplant if you have no doctor…but wait. They do have a doctor, a doctor that just recently performed a surgery that the doctors at the big hospital had deemed impossible.
So taking Raymond’s heart, they plan to go through with the transplant. Raymond says it’s alright, that he wants to give up his heart. He needs the money to save his daughters life after she was diagnosed with cancer. Yabu insists though that Raymond doesn’t really want to die, he only chose this because he has no other choice. That nobody truly wants to die.
So as the surgery goes to begin, the person the heart was going to be transferred too goes into cardiac arrest. They use the defibrillator on him multiple times in an attempt to get his heart beating again. In the end, it was a failure. The scene ends with Hazama saying to begin the surgery.
In the next scene, we discover the ‘surgery’ he said to begin at the end of the last scene was a cosmetic surgery. He made Raymond look like the cult leader, saving everyone in the end of things. Well everyone except for the guy who was going to die anyway and was a horrible person to begin with. I mean seriously, he honestly thought that money was the end all to the problems of the world. Even getting someone to give up their life for it.
My point of interest here comes from this, Raymond is actually a nice guy. Wouldn’t the cultist like, know something was wrong if their leader went from being a jerk to being kind? Not to mention the change in voice. I mean, the physical appearance is almost perfect. I just think the sudden shift in personality and speech would be a tip off of sorts.
Not to put down the happy ending, but it’s just the kind of thing that you think about in situations like this.
I liked this episode, it gave us a lot more on Yabu then last episode. I’m also curious about the failed surgery that Hazama did that put him in debt in the first place. Though, we did get more on Yabu this episode. Seeing him as a war doctor, seeing that he couldn’t save everyone and how he’s haunted by it. That’s interesting, but what about his fear of blood? Was that always a thing? Even when he was a war doctor or did it come later? When he became a drug addict?
Also, as much as I nitpicked the complexities of it. I did like the answer that Hazama came up with, doing a cosmetic surgery saved both a good person, his daughter, Yabu and himself.
I can’t help but wonder if Dr. Joker. The doctor that was originally going to do the surgery before having to go into hiding will become more of a major character later. I feel like they name dropped him a few too many times in this episode and built up what an impressive underground doctor he was to never actually reveal him in the series.
Well anyway, it seems for now Hazama has yet to perform any illegal surgery and can still get a proper medical license so this episode has yet to answer for us why he acts as an illegal doctor in the Black Jack series. Unless, once again, if that was explained in the series and I just don’t know because of not seeing it before I watched this. Either way, it’s looking as if we’re working on a ‘patient’ of the week formula for now at least. Which is fine, i can’t wait to see what next week has to hold. The preview shows the girl from episode one making a reappearance. Perhaps we’ll learn some more about her next episode.
~Midnight