English Dub Review: Ameku M.D.: Doctor Detective “Drowning in a Dry Room [Part 1]”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Yu is told to return to his old hospital at the end of the month to replace a doctor who can’t work, making Ameku furious. However, the doctor who can’t work because he is a murder suspect, so Ameku takes the case against him to find out if she can keep him Yu from leaving.

OUR TAKE

We’re down to our final story arc of the season, which will take up the remaining three episodes. Fittingly, it’s a story arc that focuses at least partially on the friendship between Yu and Ameku. As this is still a Sherlock Holmes adaptation, their dynamic is that of Holmes and Watson, with Ameku being the driven eccentric intellectual who is normally hard to deal with, while Yu is the more even tempered assistant of more average intelligence always dragged haplessly into the former’s escapades. And also somewhat fittingly, the mystery for this arc involves a classic Locked Room Mystery, a staple of the Sherlock series. As the name implies, it’s a mystery where someone mysteriously dies alone while inside a locked room, so solving it comes out figuring out whether they were alone, or maybe something happened to them that had a delayed reaction, or something along those lines. In this case, it turns out the suspect doctor is in fact the love child of an affair, which caused his father’s first wife to eventually kill herself, and his first son has been rightfully pissed at his father ever since. He came to crash a party the day he died, and even hit the suspect so hard he bled, but then was found dead in the house with his lungs filled with water somehow. The suspect was away for a few hours and his father had the body cremated to avoid suspicion…which it did not.

So, already this is an incredibly personal and sticky situation, even without the murder, as well as one that directly impacts Yu and whether or not he’ll keep working with Ameku. Looking at it from a genre savvy perspective, the bastard brother being the suspect seems a bit too obvious with how it’s the only option suggested, so obviously something more is going on here that will be uncovered within the next few episodes, which will then allow Yu to continue working with Ameku and the status quo will be restored. That’s all fine on its own, it’s just the execution of this story and mystery that are really going to be up in the air here. But so far, they’ve introduced us to a pretty interesting premise and made it feel like the characters’ relationships throughout the season actually matter and are at stake here (even if they probably aren’t), so I guess we’ll see in the last two episodes of the season where the heck all of this is going. And personally, I’m actually looking forward to figuring out how this specific mystery plays out, since they’re usually pretty interesting in terms of outcomes.