Black Label moves in to save Suzue before it’s too late!
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)
With a seemingly mostly standalone episode the last time around that delved into the background stories and minor origin points of a couple of them, Triage X felt like it was trying to say a bit more than usual, but doing it as the show is close to the end, making it feel like too little too late. What did help the episode more than anything else though was that it had a decent bit of action to it throughout, allowing Arashi to get hands on with things, and it played up the fanservice about as well as could be expected. It’s still ridiculous, but it worked well to tell the tale that it wanted to tell, even if it was lackluster overall in the greater scheme of the season itself.
With this episode, the prologue serves up some fun fanservice right from the get go with Mikoto having one heck of a nightmare where she’s chained up in a well in a slave outfit while the others are up above all over Arashi, who is just a shadowed figure. If there’s a way to express unrealized desires within a character in a way to get her to realize it, that’s certainly it. And it catches the eye for the viewer right from the get go too. That gets her to start seeking him out a bit more at school, though that brings its own complications since she’s not been around much and he returned recently himself with a wound due to their recent operation. That has some of the girls wondering about her, particularly since she’s acting quite out of sorts and unlike herself when asking and talking about him a bit. It’s standard stuff, but it fits well and has its own kind of fun.
Where the show works its main story though is with Suzue being attacked by the twins that are part of the larger organization filtering its way into the city, though they get stymied by some yakuza that grab Suzue first and run off with her. With a transmitter on her that helps to set the stage, it doesn’t take long for Black Label to get involved, though they’re not the only ones hunting her up. There’s not much of a rush to rescue her though, as it would keep us from getting the torture scene which plays out comically as she gets her breasts whipped with some hilarious design done for it that just makes it stand out all the more. They have reason for kidnapping her for sure since she’s gotten close to the whole Platinum Lily thing, and trying to find out what she knows is important. But we also see just how far they go with the Platinum Lily for their master in the way that he has a little army of mindless sex dolls basically that comes from it.
The first half works the setup well enough and then naturally shifts gears in the second half to have the attack get underway with Black Label going all out. This brings the whole team in to deal with it and we do see them largely working effectively, which is always good to see since it makes for an engaging sequence. The spanner in the works though is that the redheaded twins make their way into it as well and are ready to fight just about anyone. A lot of it focuses on Sayo, now back to normal after the last episode, and it’s amusing as they fight amid a couple of raised platforms with stripper poles on them. It’s not an all out fight, as Sayo has to do a bit of personal story history lesson, but it provides for some decent action overall with a good sampling of fanservice as well.
In Summary:
Triage X lets the twins of Kaoru and Kaname play well here throughout as they get a couple of good scenes, show off well and provide some redheaded fanservice for the audience. The action component works a bit better here, spread to a few different parts of the episode rather than just the end, but it’s also a matter of it being too little too late. It feels like we needed episodes like this at the start that felt like it was part of something compared to what we got. The show plays to the torture side decently here, not going too far with the physical violence and instead focusing on the sexual side tied to the emotional, and it has a lot of costume related aspects it has fun with as well. In the end, it’s pretty straightforward with what it’s doing as it’s setting it up for the finale with Kyoji and those that work for him, but with him only really taking the stage fully in the previous episode, it doesn’t resonate well or feel like it has enough weight. The end result is that everything here feels pretty superficial, though it is at least fun to watch more so than some of the previous episodes.
Grade: C
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.
