Content Warning: Medical gore
What’s it about? Dr. Ameku Takao is the brilliant, baby-faced director of Tenikai’s Department of Investigative Pathology. But her thirst for intrigue also often leads her (and her hapless protégé) to become entangled with many a murder case.
It’s been a minute since we had a well-executed procedural anime, and longer than I can count since there was a medical-related one. It makes me tempted to recommend Dr. Ameku for its baseline competence alone, though I was left with some lingering annoyances.
Releasing two episodes at once was a smart move on the show’s part. The opening scene of the premiere is overlong and slightly stilted, going heavy on medical terminology right off the bat so that Takao can slice through it all with a cleanly explained knife when she makes her appearance. It drags and means the show is only starting to get into its first proper mystery when the credits roll, but bundling in the second half straight away helps to foster goodwill in the viewer.
Once it actually gets going, the crime procedural elements of Dr. Ameku snap along. It’s walking comfortably in the well-trodden footprints of Detective Conan: opening wackiness that’s tied to the ultimate climax; long static shots of key items sans context, on the off chance you might be able to get to the answer first (and also a convenient cost-saving measure); investigation scenes where various players underestimate our detective; and the traditional parlor room explanation at the end. It’s all familiar, but this is a genre that exists primarily as comfort food, so I can’t call this a knock against it when it keeps falling together at a pleasant pace.
The real unexpected charm ended up being the show’s giddy little nods to other detective shows. Obviously this is an unashamed Sherlock Holmes story, but that overlong opening does include what I simply must assume is a nod to Hate Crimes M.D House, and there’s a blatant Columbo for Takao to spar with on the police force. There’s a Sherlock-esque “mind palace” moment too, but I won’t hold that against it. They’re all done without drawing too much attention to themselves, which makes them feel like cute easter eggs rather than self-satisfied display of bona fides. Not-Columbo might be the show’s biggest boon, honestly, as it gives Takao an ostensible ally of comparable intelligence who’s still sort of inherently untrustworthy.
Heaven knows it’s not her Watson, because Takanashi Yu (or Kotori, as she calls him thanks to a very lengthy kanji-related pun) is wet noodle enough to make you miss Nigel Bruce. We start with his and Takao’s rapport already established: he’s diligent and serious, she’s eccentric and impulsive. He’s also her medical protégé, which is potentially interesting but doesn’t amount to anything here. In practice, he mainly frowns at Takao disapprovingly or picks her up by the scruff to remove her from a situation until the very last scene, when he’s called upon to use karate to defend her from the culprit.
All of which is part and parcel of my greater frustration with this premiere: the continued background infantilization of Takao. The fact that she’s supposedly a grown woman who “looks like she’s in high school” seems like a move done for marketing—she’s not a child prodigy (though she might have been that as well), but she’s still got that cute round face that can be made into a Nendoroid. While I’d ask why a competent grown woman can’t just look like an adult, I can see how we got here. Likewise, it’s a very common writing decision to make an extremely intellectual character emotionally immature, so they’ll have a flaw that balances them out, while they have an emotionally mature sidekick to keep them in line.
But sometimes things just…well, fall together. So the result is that we have a genius woman at the top of her field who’s half the size of everyone around her, emotionally acts like a teenager in a way that conforms to her physical appearance rather than contrasting with it, who regularly gets manhandled like a misbehaving dog by her younger male student (another bit of physical comedy that, again, mainly works when there’s a level of contrast between appearance and behavior) while also needing to be protected by him—and the non-zero likelihood we’re meant to ship them in future. None of these are bad tropes on their own and they don’t feel malicious here. What they feel is thoughtless and annoying, more concerned with making a Quirky Heroine for the algorithm than anything else. Oh, and there’s her feet. There’s no fan service, but boy do the animators love her feet.
There is also, for the record, the usual low-grade discomfort of watching any police procedural. In this case the case ends with the police triumphantly pinning the culprit for breaking-and-entering, which will give them an excuse to search for the evidence of the crime they actually want to pin on him. Obviously in this universe we all know the perpetrator is guilty, 100 percent, making for some neat moral absolution. But boy does it leave a bad taste when you think about these tactics in the real world even a little bit. I’d guess this is a familiar bit of background discomfort for readers with a fondness for detective shows.
As downsides go, these are extremely vibes-based ones that probably won’t ping for everyone. They’re also the kind of thing that can even out once the show shakes off its character-introduction blues, so I’m hesitant to shoo people away from this one. If you like the genre, definitely give it a look; if the character elements are your highest priority in a mystery show, maybe see how the second case pans out before fully committing yourself.
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