Sara Talks Anime

Wow. If I had a nickel for each time I chose to write episode by episode about an anime that focuses on the medical industry and aired during the Winter season of its respective year, I’d have two nickels, which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice. So, why’d I choose to watch Ameku M.D.: Doctor Detective? The premise intrigued me, and I figured it was worth taking the plunge and seeing what this series was about. And hoo boy, did it not disappoint, in my opinion. I better get into the actual review before I get too rambly.

Also, for simplicity’s sake, I’m referring to everyone at the hospital who works with patients as doctors. I’m sorry, but I don’t have the brain capacity to memorize if they’re in any specific roles at this time.

The episode begins with a shot of the interior of a room where someone is working. However, this isn’t a focus for too long as we see the cases of two patients unfold: a young boy and an older man. Both are experiencing symptoms of sickness, yet for the two doctors taking care of them, the test results don’t seem to suggest that anything was wrong. They consider some next steps but don’t move forward with anything yet.

When the female doctor recalls that the male doctor (Takahashi) is hired in another department, however, we begin the introduction of the protagonist of this story: Takao Ameku, the head of the Supervisory Department of Diagnostic Pathology. This specific department specializes in helping where conventional methods fail. Takao is extremely good at her job, seeing the symptoms and making observations of what she can see in both the patient and the belongings of the patient or someone close to the patient to come up with a diagnosis. Although her talking for this does use a lot of medical terms, so while I’m watching, I’m just sitting here like, “…can you please explain this in layman’s terms?”, but you can get the basic gist of what’s happening with them by paying close attention, and even instructs the two other doctors to the correct next steps.

After this, Takao reveals why she’s here…to convince Takahashi to take off from work early to watch Jurassic Park! Okay, that isn’t so bad…but then a call comes in about another person being brought into the emergency room. Takao tries to fight against it (probably because she wants to watch Jurassic Park), but the patient is still brought in. It is here that Takao notices two things: the blood of the patient is blue, and the injury looks like it was caused by an animal biting it and ripping it off. Oh, yeah, the patient is also in rigor mortis, meaning he’s dead.

To figure out what’s happening, Takao heads to her office (a house on the roof, which is also HER HOUSE) and begins researching if any creatures on the loose could’ve caused this. Of course, her timing isn’t the best, as she gets a call from the director, who tells her not to bother playing detective as the police are already on the case. Takao proceeds forward anyway because she’s stubborn like that.

We also meet a character attached to this mystery, and I don’t like him. Maybe I’ll warm up to him throughout the series, but I don’t like him right now. We also get introduced to another character on the case. I like him a lot better, as he was willing to listen to Takao, even if it only resulted in them going to a park, which is where Takao provides what she believes caused the death…and it’s not an answer that one would expect.

But to that, I say: trust the process. I would say another three word phrase, but since the internet decided to leave the creator who truly popularized that phrase in 2024, I’m forcefully removing the phrase from my lexicon. Takao probably has a good reason to say what she believed caused it.

Crunchyroll dropped the first two episodes of Ameku M.D.: Doctor Detective on January 1^st,  2025, as that was likely the same schedule that streaming in Japan is using. I wrote this after only watching the first episode, and will do the second episode as its own writeup. We’ll see if it’s right for us to trust the process or not next week. Mainly saying that because, since I’m scheduling these in advanced, I can post these whenever I freaking want!

Additional posts about Ameku M.D.: Doctor Detective:

• Ameku M.D.: Doctor Detective Episode 2 – “Blue Blood Cells and Dragon Fangs”