Anime Pilgrimage RTT

Monster – episode 63

October 12, 2005 on 11:12 am | In Monster | Comments Off on Monster – episode 63

“An Irrelevant Homicide”

You may have noticed that this is my first entry for the Monster series. This is going to make the work much harder for me. While I work something out, I recommend visiting Memento for backstory detail.

Another “new” character is added to the Monster cast, and he seems close to being an initiate of Team Reichwein. Inspector Weissbach is a German detective, one day away from retirement. On his last job, he has to transport a killer of “human scum” to a new prison.
Each time the man killed, he killed for moral reasons. Unique among his cases is one that he says “I didn’t feel so good after that one”. The man relates how he got his inspiration from a blonde boy in pyjamas eleven years ago …

It turns out that Inspector Weissbach is the insensitive detective from episode three, who attempted to interrogate a semi-catatonic Anna. The disappearance of the twins is a case that he never solved so, in the final days of his career, it is natural that he would reflect on it and become instantly reminded.

Where this comes into the main plot is that Gillen is investigating serial killers who have an “irrelevant homicide” on their CVs, rather like he investigated that man back in the twenties. These criminals are surprisingly more forthcoming than that last one who, rather than giving too much about Johan away, committed suicide with a ballpoint pen … onscreen.

This episode does not do anything particularly interesting story wise, short of the addition of Inspector Weissbach, but it is a good examination of Johan’s own mentality and his affinity for psychopaths. The thing is that each of these killers had their own justifications for their actions. The killings that they have performed on behalf of someone other than themselves don’t gel, and they actually feel remorse for them.
This feeling of remorse is cancelled by the charisma of Johan; each of the three cases saw Johan as “the truth” – a real vampire, a real alien – and this appeal to their cores made them capable of doing him this favour, no matter how morally repugnant they found them.

Of course, there is an issue of this technique that Johan has used: if you make enough serial killers have “irrelevant homicides”, then someone like Gillen will piece them all together as part of another serial killer’s grand master plan. This might actually be Johan’s intention; he may want to be found out. 63 episodes in, I still find him hard to read. All I know is that the authorities are truly terrified of him when they understand his existence.

Speaking of that, the idea that he can’t control the monster within has really fallen to the wayside. Is he playing with Tenma? Who knows; Johan’s treatment in this show ranges widely. At the moment we’ve got “reflections of a monster”.
Hopefully we’ll get back to the main story and see more of either Tenma or Eva next time.