English Dub Review: Cells at Work: Code Black “Stomach Ulcer, Friendship, and Loss”

Overview:

There’s an ulcer in the stomach and RBC and his friend go to help out. They might have bitten off more than they can chew with how much damage the stomach has sustained. RBC’s friend loses his life saving RBC, leading him to stop working.

Our Take:

This show has always been the darker cousin of Cells at Work, but boy did this one get dark. I had an idea of what was going to happen with the title of the episode so I won’t say I was shocked but it still sucked. Apparently, the only character to get development was to just supplement RBC’s development. Should I just give up on a WBC centric episode? I am thinking I probably should…

I really like what they are doing with RBC. They develop him really good and I am interested to see what happens to get him back on track. My guess is that WBC will be involved somehow. It seems like most characters are just there to support RBC which I guess makes sense but I haven’t seen a series this focused on its main character in a while. There a just a couple of characters that I was interested to learn more about and they just killed one so we will see how the rest is handled.

RBC is going to have to come back to work sometime, I mean from a thematic standpoint that’s really all that can happen. Though I can understand where he is coming from, he just saw his friend die, and to almost everyone else that was a totally normal occurrence. Who wants to work in that sort of environment? It’s impactful because of how optimistic and hardworking he has been that now he has just given up hope completely.

This was a decent but predictable episode, and as interesting as RBC is as a character I admit I am losing interest. When you only develop one character it’s hard to stay invested in something. I think the regular Cells at Work does that a lot better because there is someone from almost every cell group that is like a “named” character. The only memorable characters in this are RBC, and WBC now that his friend has died. I also am not really a fan of killing characters JUST to develop others but hopefully, the series can close out strongly.