Who needs the main characters?
What They Say:
Mochizuki General Hospital boasts some of the most well-trained (and well-endowed) nurses in town. But though these ladies spend much of their day battling sickness, their after-hours are spent fighting a very different sort of disease…Under the leadership of the hospital chairman, a handful of staff members and local teenagers form a group of mercenary assassins, targeting the “cancers” of society and excising those individuals before their wickedness spreads.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Triage X did some fun things the last time around for a bit when it came to Chikage and Mikoto’s relationship, but as the episode progressed it just kind of cratered for me in a lot of ways since it was just stupidly big in how it unfolded. Because of the nature of the show, I’ll admit that I have hope that it can recover and move forward without doing too much like that again, but at the same time I can easily imagine that it just becomes more of a thing with it. And when I add in the fact that we’re now at the halfway mark, it’s the kind of thing that I figure I can just power through in hopes of some decent fanservice and silliness mixed in to everything else.
Unfortunately, the episode here looks like the animation is even worse in a lot of ways once we get past the opening credits and things just have a simpler feel and slightly off model. There’s a lot of simple silliness going on here with the characters and the things they’re involved in, including promises of shabu-shabu, but attempts to humanize these characters simply doesn’t go well, mostly because they’ve been mostly ciphers for the first four episodes and what they try and do here is just done with an outlandish flair that contradicts getting to know them outside of work a bit. It does get silly from time to time, but it’s also hard to really care, particularly with the animation looking like it was done by the fill in team working off of notes. So when the show starts to turn serious towards its latest criminal element, it ends up falling short because it has a security guard getting killed by a group of people wearing circus type costumes. Bouncing back between that and an idol contest just undercuts the show completely.
With the supporting cast getting their chance to shine here, it’s a huge reminder that they’ve had little time so far and aren’t very memorable, at least outside of their appearance. Setting the action with a threat within Neo TV building in the middle of the city, that lets everyone have a range of costumes to work with while the hunt is on. There’s some decent tension once it starts getting serious, but without the connection to the characters it lacks a certain engagement with the viewer. Not that Mikoto’s an engaging character, but you realize that Oriha has little going for her at this point and she gets saddled with silly violence as her threat while protecting some idol friends. Mostly the episode just goes along predictably, but I have to laugh at the obvious pandering that goes on with a lot of the girls put out along the edge of the building at a blown out window where they’re stripped down to their underwear and are being threatened with being tossed over the edge of the villain du jour doesn’t get what he wants. It sets up the stalling tactic that’s needed to get away, but it’s just so blatant that you have to laugh at it, which I don’t think was the intended effect.
In Summary:
While the first couple of episode of Triage X wasn’t exactly high art or scripting, there was a kind of silly fun about it that could be built into something decent. Not that I expected that with just ten episodes. But as it moved into the middle arc of episodes, it revealed that the show is just trying to please the manga fans by showing the gang in the stories they know, just in animated form. And not even well. The last episode cratered my interest and this one just stomps on it a bit more as it works with the supporting cast, which one may not even remember there are any, and it looks like the supporting animation team is on it as well. Bah. This episode just left another bad taste in my mouth.
Grade: D
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Sony KDL70R550A 70″ LED 1080P HDTV, Apple TV via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.
