Young Black Jack

Episode 11

The final episode of "The Gruesome Chronicle" has a strange place in Young Black Jack's chronology. It's an extremely satisfying conclusion to that arc—if an upsetting one for Hyakki. However, it comes a little too late in the overall anime sequence to have the impact it should have on Hazama as a character. I predicted last week that he didn't have the character buildup for this installment to have the impact it could have, and this week's episode largely confirmed my feelings.

However, "The Gruesome Chronicle, Part 3" starts with one hell of an emotional confrontation. Hazama corners Hyakki in his training fortress, where Hyakki lets loose the full story of what happened. He was never the real target of the operation, just collateral damage. Hyakki was working under another professor, who competed with a corrupt faction for control of the medical department at Teito University. Hyakki's colleagues were aligned with the guy currently in power, so they conspired to ruin Hyakki's mentor's reputation. He had an important surgery coming up on a finance minister, but they couldn't actually have him botch it and take the university's reputation with him too. So they just made sure it would be impossible for him to get there at all, hiring a mechanic to make his car unusable.

Several things went wrong, of course. The doctor was delayed by a health problem, so Hyakki was the one who got in the car to perform the surgery. The mechanic also misunderstood their instructions, messing with the brakes rather than the motor or something else that would prevent it from starting. So Hyakki gets sent tumbling over the cliffs and busts all his limbs. At least, that's everything he's learned about the plot that mutilated him.

The episode does a good job of spreading doubt over all the accounts of that fateful night, even Hyakki's. When Hazama goes to one of the survivors and gets his side of the story, he eventually admits that he lied to the police to send Hyakki to the gallows. However, he also disputes Hyakki's account that they were "the best of friends" in medical school. He always resented Hyakki for being both more talented and more personable than him, never needing "factions" in order to get ahead in the medical world. For all we know, he did something to get Hyakki in that car or purposefully told the mechanic to cause an accident instead. Either way, he seems extremely satisfied with the way that things turned out, with Hyakki in jail awaiting execution.

The whole episode causes a crisis of conscience for Hazama. The victim tells him that he's as arrogant as Hyakki, encouraging him to consider if helping Hyakki actually did anything but set him on the path he follows now. Hazama takes this to heart, but I don't think the conundrum makes a lot of sense. Hyakki would have likely found out the truth about how he lost his position anyway, and he's not the kind of person to let his disability stop him from pursuing his goals. He could have found an accomplice for the attacks, or he could have found someone else to operate on him if Hazama had not. This was a respected doctor who was suddenly dropped from the profession, after all—he still got lecturer positions at other universities. I have trouble believing that his fate was up to Hazama or nothing.

Hazama flashes back to his past surgeries during this sequence too, but the connection between Hazama's surgeries and their later unfortunate consequences are even more tenuous. In Vietnam, the option was to let the American soldier die slowly or save him. Hazama couldn't have anticipated him running into a land mine later. Is that end really worse than if he'd succumbed to his injuries earlier? In the case of Johnny, Hazama did him a favor by getting rid of the ability that the CIA secretly gave him, taking him out of the public eye where he'd made himself into a target. Young Black Jack can only do so much to hide that they haven't really built to this conclusion from previous arcs.

Even Hyakki notes that Hazama has "changed" from this experience. He's seen the medical establishment's corruption firsthand—whereas in previous cases, like Vietnam, doctors were often the only completely blameless people in a complicated situation. It makes sense that this would have a bigger impact on his choice of profession, but is he only shocked enough to change when the suffering hits close to home? This makes Hazama look unempathetic, which isn't reflective of the character he later becomes in Black Jack, where he's more deeply affected by suffering and unfairness wherever he sees it.

As a self-contained story arc, "The Gruesome Chronicle" largely works. Most of the internal character growth that didn't quite work is resolved through future revelations, and Hazama reacts believably to what happens. However, all it does is highlight how much he hasn't reacted to very much before this point. He suffered through Vietnam, learned about horrific CIA experiences, dealt with unscrupulous protesters, but remained a bystander in history through all of it. Now he's suddenly emotionally involved, enough to actively defy the law for Hyakki's sake. His character didn't have the build-up for this sudden shift to feel believable. I can believe he might do what he did to save Hyakki's life—giving him a way out of jail by turning his eye into a Swiss army knife. I don't believe Hazama would now be reconsidering his position and his whole outlook on the world.

As an origin story for Black Jack, Young Black Jack has largely failed. While this one incident does explain his "switch," the poor character development before this makes it feel like too little too late. The series mostly feels like an excuse to drop Black Jack into different historical events and integrate characters from other Osamu Tezuka works into his story. On that level, it's been an entertaining ride. It's just hard to shake the feeling that the story could have been so much more. Just one more episode to go! We'll see how this all wraps up.

Rating: B+

Young Black Jack is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Rose is a music Ph.D. student who loves overanalyzing anime soundtracks. Follow her on her media blog Rose's Turn, and on Twitter.