There are times when Blackjacks over the top nature can be entertaining presentation wise and others when it can remove any sense of surprise. While I do like the things Blackjack explores, it is very clear cut on how it shows it. In this episode the man that Blackjack and the army Medic have been spending two episodes trying to save, dies when he wanders out of his room and trips a landmine. This scene was exhibited in such a way that I knew exactly what was going to happen before it did. The minute I saw Steve in that field, I knew he was going to die and he made that all the more certain as he started walking back with tears in his eyes, triggering so many death flags that the reaper himself couldn’t stand it any longer. Bob was quick to blame the Vietcong but I point my finger at the others. In particular I find it funny that Blackjack never thought of the state his patient would wake up in and worse still had no one watching over him. To be fair however, it’s not as if anyone would expect the guy to walk into a single landmine placed in a wide open field. Really, how is it that that single lone landmine managed to remain undetonated right up till this moment or who was the lazy soldier who figured a single solitary landmine in the middle of an open field near a Vietnam village was a perfect place to kill some Americans?
As I said, I don’t think the characters handled this very well, especially when it came to Bob. It doesn’t take a psychiatrist to figure out that Bob was in a very dangerous emotional state and yet the characters only seem to make it worse by antagonizing him. Blackjack and the Medic in particular really should have handled the situation better as it was clear to anyone with eyes that Bob was about to do something drastic. Which makes me even more surprised that he was left to his own devices. In all honestly, you guys have no one to blame but yourselves for the guy calling in an air strike. The episode finale is something I raise an eyebrow at, as Black and the others finish surgery on a Vietnam soldier, survive an air strike and carry the guy through a literal sea of fire in what looks to be very flammable material. This show can be silly and over dramatic but that was really pushing it.
The episode’s final reveal was unfortunately lost on me due to my ignorance of the source material. Upon the reveal of the army doctor’s name I was feeling left out as the way the reveal was staged made this seem like a very big deal, yet when I heard his name I had no idea to its significance. So one google search later, I got exactly who he is and it puts these past few episodes in new context. Put simply, this mystery Medic is Doctor Kiriko, Blackjacks future Arch-nemesis. Eventually this war twists his personality causing him to essentially become Blackjack’s evil counterpart so it is rather interesting that these two worked together once to save a life without even realizing it.
