Monster -- Naoki Urasawa

Monster is a dark psychological thought experiment set in post Cold-war Germany. The show follows a brilliant neurosurgeon, Dr. Tenma and his journey across parts of Germany and Czechia. He is on the quest of finding answers and supposedly “correcting” his mistake of saving the life of a young boy, Johan Liebert.

The show begins showing how skilled Dr. Tenma is and the corrupt hospital leadership. Dr. Tenma saves the life of a young boy instead of the governor. This young boy later turns into a serial killer, psychopath and “supposedly” a pure incarnate of evil. Over the course of the rest of the episodes, Dr. Tenma meets various people in his journey to kill Johan. The people include Johan’s twin sister, Nina, Dr. Tenma’s old friend, Dr. Gillan, Dr. Tenma’s ex-fiancee, Eva, a detective investigating the case, Inspector Lunge and various other people from Johan’s past, like Wolfgang Grimmer.

The initial part of the journey is beautifully scripted. Each episode seems makes you ponder over your value systems. Additionally, the author is a genius when it comes to withholding information. He intentionally leaves parts of the story upto the watchers’ interpretation. This is by far the most beautiful part of Monster for me. We are introduced to 511 Kinderheim, a child orphanage which was used to perform experiments on children.

Subsequently, we start focusing on certain characters more. The story starts picking up pace. Albeit, I loved the Munich Arc as well, but the show starts to lose just some of it’s magic for me. However, the story developing is very intriguing and is surrounded with a lair of mystery hence I still had a blast. Next, the story starts to focus on the pasts of the twins and we learn about their family origins in the former Czech Republic. We explore a new character, Grimmer, one of the kids from the orphanage. This character solely carried the story for me in this arc. To a certain degree I seem to relate with him when he occasionally mentions how he doesn’t know what the right feelings to feel are. Overall, the series is solid till here.

So post this, is where the series loses some of it’s charm and wasn’t able to suspend my disbelief. Plot convenience starts to creep in and the philosophical elements are toned down in the favor of progressing the story forward. Few characters like Lunge seem to act out of character at times. Here’s where the show loses half a point for me. The Red rose mansion, despite being an extremely beautiful setting, feels slightly forced and unbelievable. Klaus Poppe/Franc Bonaparte, as a character is an interesting one but comes off shallow towards the end. His motivations (and the subsequent lack of thereof) isn’t given proper justification.

The ending of the show felt slightly underwhelming for me. Not that shows like these need superb ending but it felt too random. Looking at the potential, it really could have explored a deep human psyche but the author chose to close the story instead. It is an artistic direction which I respect but a part of me would have wanted to see something more.

The theme it revolves around

Monster deals with a lot of complex emotions and moral dilemma. The first half of the series is filled with these to the brim. The latter half chooses to give character conclusions over exploring the topics in a greater detail. I try to list them below however I know I will keep visiting and re-visiting other people’s opinions on the themes of Monster.

The most prominent theme of Monster is that of conducting experiments on children to produce the “perfect” leaders. This as a proof of concept is an interesting idea. Children in 511 Kinderheim are subjected to extreme conditions, Grimmer being one of the best examples. He ends up adopting the split personality of the “Magnificent Steiner” after being forced to watch the show day-in day-out. It’s hard for me to believe that this hasn’t been tried before in real life. Surely much of these evidences would be destroyed by now, however still for some reason, some part of it keeps nagging me because in theory this is “purely scientific”. Can 511 Kinderheim ever be justified if we start introducing many guardrails around it? What if the people running it are actually “good” people who want to benefit not just themselves but the world in general?

The next prominent theme is that of a “Nameless” Monster. Johan intentionally was never given a name. “Johan” was just a pseudonym the person went with. The show really puts forward the theme extremely subtly but it seems to allude that a name of a person gives the person a value system, makes them have beliefs and gives them a fallback to their identity. Without a name, a person cannot suffer through emotions the same way, i.e. during an extreme emotion like a break-up, a person occasionally falls back to their core belief systems. In absense of one, the person turns into a Psychopath. Grimmer is a beautiful contradiction to this however. I wish the author chose to dwell most into Grimmer’s life after his stay in 511 Kinderheim.

Further, the story tries to convince you that this person who sometimes goes by the name of Johan, is pure evil incarnate. This starts making us think about whether such a being can exist. Does the devil exist? Phrased more philosophically, can the devil exist? (subtle difference). If the answer is yes, how would that entity look like? How would it behave? Would it have any self-interests? If it would, would it even be devil? These are the sort of questions which the story induces. Supposedly the inspiration for this is the story of Faust, a German Folklore which is considered as a legend by many.

Finally, there are few more interesting character tropes that deserve a mention. Dr. Tenma is a doctor who considers all lives to be equal, whereas Johan, his arch-nemesis, considers that the only equality that lies is in the death. There is a brief mention about perfect suicide where a person, instead of taking their own life, is able to eliminate all the people in the world who know them, this in fact would be a suicide (or would it?). The show also talks about the concept of every individual showing evil tendencies, i.e. every person has an inner monster. Finally, Inspector Lunge is an interesting character, whose admiration for his work takes him to the lengths which breaks his character and makes him realise something greater (which is unfortunately not touched a lot)

The show’s last episode is titled “The Real Monster” in which we learn that the twins’ mother was given a choice between sending one of her children to suffer through horrific experiments and that she ends up choosing the twin sister, Nina instead of Johan. The show forces us to try to find out who the real monster is in the entire story. Is it Johan? His mother? Klaus Poppe? The show never truly answers this and it never intended too. It is a beautiful ending in it’s own and one which is going to stay with me a while longer

Ratings: 9.5/10

“People can become…whatever they want to be.” - Franc Bonaparte/Klaus Poppe.