Gimme that TV-MA anime.
What They Say:
With the Demon Lord defeated, Keyaru’s revenge begins. The first step is to rewind time. Followed by planning…
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Based on the light novel series of the same name by Rui Tsukiyo, Redo of Healer caught my eye when it was first announced because it had some sexy covers for it. I have little time for the stack of books I have so it wasn’t something I was pursing – not that they’re licensed anyway – but it had me keep an eye on the anime adaptation that landed as part of the winter 2021 season. The series, animated by TNK, had rolled out its first couple of episodes and then the buzz started to flow about it within the casual community, which got me to take a look at what they were saying. The show was being referenced to things like Interspecies Reviewers and the like as something that was turning off a lot of people from watching it and then a good friend said it’s going to be as reviled, if not more so, in some ways like Rising of the Shield Hero was for its issues. And considered I loved that series because it showcased some dark shit, well, here I am.
Redo of Healer, show me your dark shit.
The series focuses on Keyaru, a young man who is a pretty talented if not gifted master of the healing arts of magic. While the show opens with the tease about how things have gone horribly wrong for him and that he has to go back to the past to fix it, to get his revenge, that’s just a brief blip and I almost wish they hadn’t bothered with that and to just let it go forward. While drawn out into the night one evening, he ends up being gifted a wish by the Spirits, which see into him and his true desires. It’s like a special sight that he gets that lets him see the true nature of things, which certainly helps with his plan now that he’s come back in time. With his healing skills, there’s the problem where it has a real downside to it. He sees the past and history of those that he heals in terms of their pain and it can drive him pretty insane. Through a bit of a flashforward showing how his life went from there, being drugged and craving said drugs by a heroic style adventurer party, it wa what would help him maintain stability and stay alive with what they gave him, even with the cost of it all. It’s not an unfamiliar situation in storytelling within the superhero side and it’s nicely applied here as we see how Keyaru waited for the right opportunity to take advantage of things.
During one such adventure, when the team is pretty much decimated and dying, he doesn’t help them with his abilities – for which they berate him about in general – and he goes on the offensive himself to use his abilities because he can use them in reverse as well, allowing him to eliminate the big bad, effectively turning her into an imprisoned jewel, a philosopher’s stone in fact. Even more amusing is that the leader of the group he’s with, the daughter of the king in fact, wanted this stone in order to turn the world to be under her subjugation. So we get that wonderful moment where Keyaru is doing the right thing in a pretty bad way while being betrayed. And his biggest decision is to rewind time using the stone, to redo things, and to ensure that she can never get anywhere near the stone in this revamped timeline. It places Keyaru as the hero but in that “would you kill baby Hitler” kind of way as he’s going to have to do some dark things.
With that cycling back to when he was gifted the eye and able to see forward and backward, it’s almost like the villain is born and even sounds like one. History plays out as he knew it, where the symbol appears on his hand highlighting that he’s a hero of the land, but he does what he can to manage the pain of it all and to try and hold onto himself until Flare enters his life with her little adventuring party looking for this new hero that has been gifted to the world. Knowing that he’s acting at this point definitely makes for a lot of fun as his life moves forward, knowing what he knows, and that he has cobbled together some sort of plan to change events. When they arrive at the kingdom where everything is grand, he knows the darkness that it took for her father to become king and the conquests that were done, the people bound to slavery because of it, yet continues to play the game so that things continue on as they did in the original timeline. Seeing him go through that, and become a healer that the country needs but also one that Flare needs, is fun to watch because of the greater knowledge we have.
One of the things he does, after several nights of enjoying the company of various women coming to curry favor with the new healer, is that upon meeting Kureha, a swordswoman who lost her arm previously, he ends up using his powers on her and returns her to form. But it comes at the cost of seeing her dark past and understanding a whole lot about her. Since it takes such a physical cost for him, he gets to hear clearly just how little Flare thinks of him and how she sets him up to be drugged and more to be used properly so he can be of use to her on the larger stage. The confirmation that she’ll do that once again, something he’s already prepared himself for, leaves him in the position of being ready to exact his revenge. Everything has gone as it has before and knowing what Flare will do in the future, what he true goals are, places him as a dark anti-hero to be sure.
With Keyaru now refusing to his abilities because of the cost of it, he finds himself being beaten just as expected and being given the way to freedom through the drugs that will ease that pain. And through the nightly ritual of abuse, drugs, and pain, day by day he’d heal so many people. But what he did different this time around, in addition to being resistant to the drugs, he used his imitation healing ability in order to essentially copy the skill or power of the person he was healing, gaining himself a lot of new abilities along the way. All while playing at being weak, scared, and even crazy to some degree so that he would get closer to his revenge. When the reality of what was going on would slip from his mind in a haze, something always brought him back around to it and the target of his vengeance was always clear as her cruelty was constant.
So, at the halfway part of the second episode when Keyaru begins his revenge, it’s definitely not going to play into the heroic side. Hell, even anti-hero might not be right and we could be operating with a villainous lead, which would be a nice change of pace. Taking on the appearance of one of Flare’s most loyal soldiers, he ends up accosting her and threatening her, though she doesn’t quite understand why since she doesn’t know what he knows. But with years of pain and suffering in his own past, revenge comes sweet to him as she’s stripped down and he begins breaking her fingers one by one to exact it as she falls apart on him. The cruelty is the point and from his perspective completely deserved. Of course, the real torture is that he can then heal her fingers and do it again and against and again. This ends up taking on a heavily sexual tone because of her outfit and how into it he gets – which means most of it at times is blacked out with censoring, but the fear is there and Flare’s voice actress delivers in making it clear that Flare is in a dark place.
I can’t imagine how many people will have noped out of the show just with the start of this sequence, but that it goes even further with a hot iron with Keyaru able to bend her to his will, it really is the birth of a villain. And as someone that has watched countless shows that have played out in light, silly, and empty ways, something like this is decidedly engaging much for the reasons that Rising of A Shield Hero was, or Interspecies Reviewers. Here, we get to see something we rarely do see in anime (but is a part of many other mediums of entertainment) and it’s well-executed. That said, some of the darkest stuff is done off-screen and without sound which is going to be interesting when it comes to home video releases if they really did animate more of it, but it’s made clear over and over in this episode just how far Redo of Healer is willing to go on-screen with its depravity. And this is just with the first instance of dealing with Flare, nevermind the many others that have likely wronged him in the years that he wiped away by traveling back in time.
In Summary:
The first two episodes of Redo of Healer are a trip and I’m basically counting down the days until the show is canceled in all sorts of places beyond the German distributor who already dropped out after the first episode. This is not a show for everyone but not every show should be made for everyone. And liking a show like this doesn’t make you a bad person as otherwise anyone who watches all the dark police/legal dramas would be considered bad as well considering the darkness that exist in those. The problem is that anime, which has always been corporate – make no doubt there, has become incredibly safe and less daring over the past two decades. That’s not to say this is a daring show, it’s pretty standard in a lot of ways in a lot of other mediums, but the reaction to it makes it clear that the medium has been one that is incredibly protected. There’s still a lot of manga and light novels that go down non-standard paths and it’s rare to see them make the leap to anime because of reactions like this. Redo of Healer is a show I can see being ostracized and shunned by many, and even its fans getting the same treatment, but like the darker elements of Rising of the Shield Hero, it’s why a series like this becomes so interesting because it’s not a case of “seen it all before, can map out twelve episodes based on the first five minutes” that so many shows actually are.
Grade: A-
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.
