The episode begins with a scene of a crowd of people angrily shouting, though that does cut away to a woman who appeared to have been sleeping. While awake, she notices a child run by and drop his handkerchief, where she decides to have her hand act as a fox to deliver the item back to its proper owner. The child thanks her and goes back to heading to where he was going. We then see the lady looking over a menu, wanting to order something. She calls out to try to get someone to take her order, but before anyone can, the plane begins malfunctioning and falling towards the ground.
We then backtrack to a surgery where the main character — Aoi Takamoto as her name is in this life — walks in while the other surgeons are panicking. She asks what they are supposed to be doing, and after getting the response, she helps to make sure that the surgery is a success. After the surgery, one of Aoi’s co-workers comes up to her and compliments her using a nickname she came up with for her, and even notices Aoi’s messy handwriting, promising to decipher and rewrite what Aoi wrote in the log.
After they’re done with work, the two decide to head out, with one of the younger doctors tagging along as well. This younger doctor takes pictures of Aoi’s hands to set them as her phone wallpaper. During this outing, they’re able to get dessert, and Aoi chooses to order a strawberry cake. After making a comment that seems odd to her co-workers, Aoi chooses to head to the bathroom. While leaving, Aoi runs into the daughter of one of her patients and that girl tells Aoi about how her actions had saved her mom’s life. The girl begins to tear up in her eyes, and Aoi grabs her handkerchief to wipe a tear from her eyes. As the girl heads off, Aoi reflects on her past life as Elise deClorence, but during these reflections, her cake arrives.
As the three head out, we find out that Aoi has an early morning because she’s going to be heading to Germany to help with a surgery there. When she gets home, she’s packing and finds a book for medical terminology. She then reflects as to how she was an orphan during this life, and that she became a doctor to atone for the sins that she did in her previous life. The next morning, we see her in a car where she’s talking to someone from Germany, and see her go through the standard process of boarding the plane.
We then revisit what happened when the plane began to crash, and see it crash. Once she realizes that she’s alive, Aoi notices the kid again, and the kid takes her to his mother, where Aoi works to patch her up. She goes to save the rest of the passengers who are still alive, even using glass from the plane, water, and a stapler as makeshift surgery tools. Unfortunately, while she was able to save everyone else that was still alive in the plane, she was unable to save herself, and ends up dying, falling out of the wreckage of the plane in the process, with the wish to see her family from her previous life again.
We then see a bed with an owl perched in it, and the main character makes a comment that seemed to suggest that she’s still somewhat sleepy. But when she’s more awake and notices the owl, she then also looks in the mirror, with a maid from the castle coming in to check in on the main character, and calling her by Elise…confirming that Elise is back in her first life. She’s no longer confined to her room, and goes to a banquet…where she sees her parents and siblings again.
I found this anime by scrolling through Crunchyroll’s Seasonal Lineup for the Winter 2024 anime season and seeing this title. While at the time that I initially saw the listing the trailer wasn’t available yet, I watched the trailer as soon as I noticed one was available, and that solidified my decision to watch this series. While a good majority of the episode is spent during the main character’s life as Aoi, I don’t see this as a bad thing: in all honesty, it made the impact of her death much heavier for me. While I already knew that she was going to die to proceed the story, fleshing her out as a character made her more than just a sacrificial lamb to be able to have the isekai element of the story to me. It’ll be interesting to see which direction the story goes in starting next week.
Additional posts about Doctor Elise: The Royal Lady with the Lamp:
Sara Talks Anime 
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