Anime Pilgrimage RTT

Monster – episode 71

February 1, 2006 on 2:40 pm | In Monster | 3 Comments

“The Magnificent Steiner’s Rage”

Tears were brought forth. This was a combination of many moments of exhiliration and many, many more of astonishment.

Spoilers to the max; don’t even think about it if you don’t want to be spoiled.

Tenma ushers people out of Ruhenheim. Lunge meets him and passes on the sausage girl, who has become horrified at the true nature of Roberto. Grimmer stays behind at Hotel Versteck to make sure that the old people don’t get away, and to ensure the survival of the Hennichs (the lottery winners), Poppe and Wim.
Then Grimmer’s final assault begins.

Some anime have excellent final arcs where you love every second, where you can’t believe any second of it was so good, and your heart is by turns thrilled and broken. Monster is of course that program. I can’t remember when last I was this thrilled or excited or torn up over anime.
“The Magnificent Steiner’s Rage” contained excellent music, direction and animation. There was not one moment out of step with the ultimate glory of the Monster story.

As the title indicates, this story is about Grimmer; his scenes are amongst the most powerful in all of Monster. When Mr. Hennich talks to Grimmer about living a “normal life”, you can see Grimmer’s benign smile but there is his definite unacknowledged sadness behind it. The derailment of his plan is quite shocking (these last few episodes a thought prevalent in my mind as been “poor sausage girl”), and it’s just too much. Grimmer surprisingly wanted the Magnificent Steiner to come out. No man shuld want that.
Lunge had not considered what Grimmer’s outcome might have been; the rage took hold. On reflection, Grimmer says that it was all him. Whether he was retroactively saying this for all of the instances he accredited to the Magnificent Steiner or whether he was simply saying there was no last hurrah for the character, I can’t say. However, his final words really got to me: “in the last episode, he returned to being human”.
Beautiful stuff.

Onto the Lunge aspect: Lunge is really good at his job. I would suggest perhaps too good, with his pointing guns at the elderly and sticking them in the faces of the defenceless. At one point he even seemed to be enjoying himself. It’s because he’s considered all of the Johan investigation to be a sort of extended dream, and now he’s snapped into reality and can sort everything out. Perhaps the most surprising part is that he actually apologised to Tenma. Tenma’s life would have been hellish anyway, but Lunge has done very little to help that until recently. Lunge is still controlled by hubris that might be his downfall.

On a final note, discounting the Nina scenes because they just hint at more horrible things yet to come, it was interesting to note that all of the civilians in Ruhenheim were attributing blame. The Hennichs thought they were responsible for Ruhenheim madness; Wim blamed his father. Releasing that “burden of guilt” is very important to all of them to continue living. Sadly, Poppe will never be free of his own.

I’m deliberately stretching these Monster episodes for extra tension; I think I’m fit to burst.