English Dub Review: Ameku M.D.: Doctor Detective “Prescribed Poison”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Ameku gets sued for malpractice, but her intuition tells her there’s something more going on here.

OUR TAKE

After a week off, Ameku MD is back to take us over the halfway point with a self-contained plot that manages to fit inside a single episode! Strange how that’s such a rarity, but it’s definitely a nice change of pace. As said, this is the episode where Ameku gets sued by a patient’s mother for malpractice, which is already a big upset to just letting her do whatever the hell she likes in the hospital. Once more, I can’t help but notice some parallels to House MD, where the doctor version of a Sherlock analogue also just did whatever the hell HE liked with little to no push back, even though many viewers have pointed out he would be sued into oblivion if he tried any of these in the real world. Just like him, Ameku is the protagonist, so we shouldn’t want her to be fired or else the show couldn’t happen. In fact, having this episode smack dab in the middle of the season kind of gives away that nothing is going to come of it. But even putting that aside, this seems like the kind of premise that ideally could be used to give Ameku an opportunity to rethink how she handles certain methods. Instead, however, this turns out to just be a projection by the mother who is suing her, and it turns out said mom has Munchausen by Proxy and is poisoning her own son.

I very quickly become wary of plots where a character comes in to criticize a protagonist and the solution to the problem is “actually, the protagonist was right all along and the person who criticized them was completely evil and shouldn’t be trusted!” Not that I think that Ameku should have been fired or made to answer for the crime of being super duper smart, but if the end point of this was only to make her totally in the right, why even have this sort of plot at all? I can very much see a scenario where Ameku oversteps too far, even with the right information, and a patient could get hurt of killed, which could then hurt the hospital’s reputation and lead to her firing, which could lead to a much more interesting story. But instead, it’s basically tossed away on what is essentially a straw-man character made to preempt any criticism of her. Ah well, anyway, next time we start another multi-parter.