[PREV - DRAGON_TATT] [TOP]
DOCTOR_X
June 10-12, 2015
August 14, 2015
"Doctor X"...
Will build a creature, splicing it together out of leg arteries
and colon material with a borrowed kidney and half-a-liver.
"Doctor X" is a Japanese television show about a hot-shot
female surgeon with zero people skills who survives in the
world of Japanese research hospitals as a ronin, a "freelance
surgeon" working for a small referral agency.
The dramatic action in this show is remarkably formulaic,
repeating week-after-week in the cyclic fashion of the
older-style of television-- there's very little of an arc of
development throughout the series. Michiko Daimon (who's
detractors regularly call her "Demon"), dives in to pull off a
daring surgery in spite of practical difficulties and hospital
politics-- she announces flatly "I never fail", and we never do
see her fail, in spite of the fact that she's working on things
that we don't really have the technology to do-- like cleaning
every trace of a Stage III or IV abdominable cancer from
someone's body.
One thing that's notable is the rather
obvious feminist issues in-play: Daimon
typically works under "no bullshit"
contracts, refusing to do anything that
doesn't require a medical degree. She does
not do clerical work, she does not make
coffee, she does not go drinking with the
staff, and so on. Even more frequently than
"I never fail" she repeats the slogan "I will Her individualistic
not do that." That might not seem very edgy, character seems very
but we are talking about a Japanese unjapanese... She refuses
television show, and a reasonably popular one to be polite, never goes
at that (they made three seasons of it, along with the team... this
albeit short ones of ~9 episodes). may be one of the more
revolutionary things about
the show, and it's a
popular show. Perhaps
there's a widespread fantasy
about busting-out and
telling people what you
really think about them?
The choices made in her appearence and personal style are
also somewhat interesting: she's tall and slim, and favors
short skirts and shorts showing off her long legs, but she
does look a little older than typical for this kind of
television show, old enough to have acquired the skill she
displays, but young enough for her extreme energy and
determination to be believable. We see very little in the
way of love affairs in her life, and her behavior has nothing
of the Kawaii Kitten about it. The revival of puritanical
feminism that seems to be sweeping the United States would no
doubt find problems with some of this, but there's something
to be said for female characters where intelligence and
competence are not in conflict with being sexually
attractive.
There are some remarks about how she's not really a woman,
(she's a "demon"), but then, these are usually made by the
dubious secondary characters, and can be taken as more as
reflections on them than on her.
(My partner comments that I seem to be DANGERBABY
very interested in studying images of
female power in different guises, BLAZING
whether it's "Doctor X", "Modesty
Blaise", or for that matter "AKB48", who AKB48
arguably have a power of their own.)
There's something else that strikes me as more interesting,
built into the background premises of the show: there's a deep
conviction that the Japanese establishment is thoroughly
corrupt, a mess of carreerism and cronyism, to the point where
the old guys in the charge of the hospitals regularly assign very
low priority to concerns like "saving someone's life".
The psychology of these low-grade "villians" is interesting
in itself-- they have an odd mixture of self-consciousness
and delusion. They kind-of know they're scum-- they think
it's the only smart way to be, but they also seize on any
convenient rationalization to tell themselves they're not
really scum.
Very little of the usual romantic features occur throughout
this story-- "Androcles and the Lion", this ain't:
Someone is hostile to our heroine, they fall ill, and our heroine
steps up and saves their life through daring, skillful surgery,
and then... they're not won over to her side. They're
likely to stab her in the back at first opportunity.
There's one very disturbing feature, however: there's an
anti-intellectual bias that real Doctors are out there
curing the sick, and only the phonies engage in bullshit
like medical research.
Our heroine evidently never publishes about her surgical
techniques, and the only figures we see who do aren't real
doctors, they're just playing careerist games.
(Where do they think the fancy techniques that
our heroine displays come from in the first place?)
--------
[NEXT - WINTER_SONATA]