English Dub Review: The Case Study of Vanitas “Scars”

Overview (Spoilers Below):

Domi relives flashes of her past, when her twin brother Louis was murdered for being a curse-bearer. His death affected everyone in different ways, but Noe might miss him most of all, and Domi is convinced the world would be better off if she had been killed instead of Louis. So when Vanitas’s little brother Mikhail arrives on the scene, she’s all too eager to play along and be used as a hostage while the creepy kid tries to get Noe to suck Vanitas’s blood.

Our Take:

Last week’s episode of The Case Study of Vanitas wasn’t my favorite. Between all the needlessly pointless romantic drama and the uninspired plotting and dialogue, there wasn’t much going for it. This week’s episode may be a lot different than last weeks in terms of structure and plot and characters and basically everything—but that doesn’t mean it’s any more enjoyable to watch.

To be honest, this might be one of the hardest episodes to watch in the show so far. Not necessarily because it’s boring, but because the subject matter is pretty much all dark and depressing stuff that doesn’t really have any light shining through. Darkness without a little light is just nothing, and Scars really lays it on thick here.

The inciting incident is that Dominique is missing. Her friends, including Jeanne, haven’t seen her in like three days, and she didn’t show up to work. But just because nobody knows where she is doesn’t mean she’s completely out of the picture. We get an extended series of flashbacks for the first half of the episode in which we are taken back to revisit that tragic time when Noe’s adopted family suffered a casualty. Louis, a young boy, was killed for being a curse-bearer. He was Noe’s best friend, and Domi’s twin brother, and the grief and guilt has haunted her ever since. Survivor’s guilt is a very real thing, and it’s nice to see the show tackle a subject that’s rooted in reality. The episode might have done well to let this subject play out, but instead it shifts focus to another dark tale—Vanitas’s little brother.

Mikhail is his name, and he was a fellow experiment courtesy of that weirdo doctor. He also has a book of Vanitas, but he isn’t quite as amiable as his elder brother. We see more flashbacks of Mikhail’s early life and find out that he was the son of a prostitute who was said to dress him up as a girl and offer him to her favorite clients. If that wasn’t dismal enough, she was also attacked by a vampire and Mikhail watched as his mother was murdered. He was then transferred to the church as an orphan, only to be funneled secretly to Doctor Moreau. It’s a sad state of affairs that has left the kid in a precarious state. Unfortunately, the show handles this with its usual grace and turns Mikhail into an off kilter killer who wound fit right in as a villain with the Joker, blushing and smiling as he monologues about how he’s going to wreak havoc on the world.

Scars starts out with a sour taste and it never goes away as the episode drags on. From Domi’s guilt-ridden conscience to Mikhail’s maniacal montages, it’s an episode that keeps piling on until it collapses under its own weight. In the end, it feels like one big mess of ickiness, and at this point, I feel like I would welcome a Jeanne/Vanitas episode instead, which is really saying something.