Drama: Bull Doctor ep05-11 Final

Official Site: NTV - Bull Doctor

I have decided to discuss all the episodes together instead of doing individual posts.  At least now I can discuss the drama as a whole, especially since there are a couple different plots.

Story:
(in no particular order)
*Plot A - Tamami and her family:
Tamami is trying to juggle her family and work at the same time, but usually its her family that gets the backseat.  It's not that she doesn't care about her family, she worries about them as well, but with her passion for forensic pathology, she wants to know the truth.  In ep06 her son was kidnapped, and here she shows another side of herself to her colleagues.  Ep07 and onwards, you see the marital problems she endures with her husband and how she overcomes them.  Tamami needed to understand where her husband was coming from and not just rely on him for everything.

*Plot B - Chika and Nakura-sensei:
From ep05 and onwards, Chika has to choose whether or not her and Nakura-sensei are meant to be together or not.  She finally tells him she loves him and he does so as well, but as the series progressed, he never showed his affection or even acknowledges their relationship.  Ultimately they break up along the way, but in the end, they realize the love that they have for each other and end up together.

*Plot C - Takeda Family problems:
While the drama is about following Tamami and her, I guess shenanigans, the whole backbone of Bull Doctor is about the Takeda family and their past.  The story about Nobuo's drinking problem unfolds as we learn who's been sending him the texts messages.  Yashiro-sensei was paid to antagonize Takeda-sensei about his criminal past.  Takeda-sensei had for years, forged death certificates under the advisory of the head of the hospital.  It all started with the transplant surgery from his wife to Mia.  A medical error had occurred and his wife had lost her life while on the operating table.  If they were to investigate, Mia wouldn't have had her transplant and would have passed away as well.  The doctors in the room had all agreed to cover it up and claim she had passed away after the surgery in order for Mia to get her kidney.  The cover was blown and Takeda-sensei was being blackmailed in order to forge death certificates since then. 

He was pushed down the stairs and endured severe head trauma.  During recovery, he felt it was finally time to tell the public truth, with Mia's permission.  When preparations were ready, the head of the hospital beat him to it and announced Takeda-sensei's leave from the hospital and that an investigation will have to go on at the hospital.  Because of his leave, Nakura-sensei was now the head professor of the forensic department.

Chika and Tamami commit a crime by stealing the body of the assistant in the hospital department, and examining it, when a forged certificate was written for his death without a primary examination.  In a confrontation, it turned out Nakura-sensei was actually helping the department by recording the conversations he had with the Head.  Before something serious had happened, the Head was arrested.  Takeda-sensei was also arrested for his part in this investigation, but Chika and Tamami were on probation for about a year before coming back to work.

Comments:
While the ratings fluctuated for the rest of the series, the finale gained more than 3% above it's first episode gaining the highest rating of the series ending with 16.4%.

I anticipated each week for episodes to get released and I really liked how the series turned out.  While I don't think the drama name matches the series in its entirety, I think it done a great job following Tamami's life and the work that revolved around her.  Adding in the sub plot with her family was kind of boring, but while I didn't care for it, it was necessary in order to give Tamami more than one-dimension. 

I didn't like that not all the other forensic doctors got a chance to have a storyline.  In fact, none of them had any relevance to the story but just to be fillers and make it more realistic in the department.  The only other person that had a story that involved the main cast was Yashiro-sensei.

I do like how Mia had her relevance in the story, finally, as it revolved around her transplant surgery as a child.  At the cliff hanger, we knew that Takeda-sensei had committed a crime, but I didn't think it would have evolved his family.  It wasn't like it was a twist ending, but it was a shocker at how it started.

I think overall I can give this drama a 7, maybe a 7.5 out of 10. It was a great series to go through, but it's not one where I'm compelled to rewatch it over and over again.

Drama: Bull Doctor ep04

Official Site: NTV - Bull Doctor

Short version of my story/review (because I'm getting tired of this haha):

Kousuke arrives back at home after playing in the park with a surprise in store for Tamami.  Chika escorted Kousuke back because of an injury he had endured and wanted to explain thoroughly what had happened.  It appears to be a few scratches to the knee, which Tamami dismisses, but Kousuke wanted Chika to stay for a bit.  Chika witnesses the closeness of Tamami and her family and feels a bit envious.

 The next day, she heads to the shrine for prayer and leaves an ema (prayer/wish plaque) asking for a family.  As she leaves, she notices the woman, that had handed her the pen to write on the plaque, lying on the floor.  Chika comes along with her as they are rushed to the hospital.  The woman had suffered brain damage and her life is quickly deteriorating.  The patient's mother is also a patient at the hospital, awaiting a heart transplant.  It had appeared that the girl is an organ donor, in which they are entrusting her heart to her mother.  Before they could perform a transplant, if there were to be one, they must investigate this matter.  If it called a crime case, an autopsy must be performed which will lead her organs to be unusable, however, if this were not a criminal case, it will be possible for a transplant.

 Another crime had occured with a woman getting a lariat clothesline from a guy riding a scooter/motorbike.  She was concious and able to answer questions.  Her belongings were not taken except for her lipstick.  Chika understood that this situation was a criminal one, but she knew that if she said something, the organ donation would not be done.  She asked Tamami for advise, in return, Tamami had a plan that would stop Chika from calling in an autopsy immediately.  After the transplant, that's when the autopsy was done, and even caught the criminal.

Comments:
It was obvious that this was going to be a win-win situation.  I actually shouldnt be calling a it win-win since someone had to die for this.  The mother was able to have her transplant, keeping her daughter close to heart, literally, and the police being able to to catch the culprit after the autopsy report.

I also liked the little monologue that Mia gave in the patient's room.  While she hasn't been a necessary character, as of yet, this is the start of what will arise from the Takeda family.  This is the first we hear about her mother and more about her liver transplant, so it's really building a secondary story within Bull Doctor.

Drama: Bull Doctor ep03

Official Site: NTV - Bull Doctor

The ratings for this episode jumped significantly high.  I'm not sure if there was something that week like a baseball game or what, but the viewership went back up to around 13%

The story starts with Tamami teaching her class about how people can die from unbelievable reasons.  Tamami asks Mia to laugh as hard as she can, which resulted in the first case she showed.  Someone had choked on their false teeth.

 The scene cuts to Chika trying to reach the branches of a tree by jumping.  Tamami sees her and wonders what she's doing, so Tamami jumps and smacks the tree branch letting all the rain droplets fall all over Chika.  Chika gets angry because she's wet and she's off to go to a middle school reunion (they really have those?).  As Chika explains why she wanted to go to her reunion, Tamami runs off in a hurry to get to a parent-teacher meeting.

 At the parents meeting, the mothers around the room smell something strange, Tamami takes a quick sniff at herself and realizes its her.  She gets up and tells all the mothers its her and she's sorry because it's because of the job she does.  At the reunion, Chika and her friends are gathered at some lounge/restaurant.  She asks them where her best friend, Chiaki, from middle school is, but she hadn't shown up.  She takes a drink with an old friend who appears to be getting married sometime.

 The scene changes to a crime scene in the park with Chika investigating.  A women is seen lying face down near a tree.  It appears that she may have been robbed as her belongings are missing, although there aren't any externals wounds apparent, so an autopsy is to be reported.  Once cut open, it appears the woman had undergone cosmetic surgery (plastic surgery).  In order for identification, a tooth examination will be order.  The cause of death was ruled as drowning, but Chika can't believe it because it was in the public park.

 (Left: After, Right: Before)

 Matsuoka-sensei notices that the nails from the body are from a magazine and shows it to Chika.  Chika heads over to the nail salon that was advertised with Tamami tagging along.  At the nail salon, the lady recognizes the nails and shows them the reservation booklet of who had it last.  The woman's name was Satonaka Chika, spelling her first name exactly the way Chika spells her name.  The next day, they head over to the plastic surgeons office to get information about the woman.  The doctor shows them a before and after picture of Satonaka.  Chika looks stunned when she saw the before picture.  After talking to the doctor, it appears the woman had no confidence in her looks.  She wanted the change because of various reasons, one being her middle school reunion was coming up and she wanted to be just like her best friend.  It also turned out that Satonaka Chika was an alias of hers and her real name was Mizushima Chiaki.

 Chika heads to Okayama to talk to Chiaki's father about the death of his daughter.  When they bring him back to the medical center, he sees the face of a different girl and doesn't believe his daughter is dead.  Mizushima-san leaves the hospital distraught and frustrated.  That night, Chika set off to Chiaki's apartment to look for clues as to what might have happened.  They get a chance to talk to her neighbor but get no helpful information.  Inside a drawer, Chika finds a stack of coasters from the same cafe and opt to go there the next morning.  At the cafe, it appears she had been seen there multiple times meeting the same guy for lunch, who happens to be the same classmate Chika was speaking to at the reunion.

Chika goes and speaks to the guy (THIS guy man, I swear.... ) and talks to him about how he met Chiaki/Chika and what they talked about.  He mentions that Chiaki had told him that she felt like her neighbor is stalking her.  Chika brings the neighbor for questioning at the station.  It appears he had been taking her things without permission, even taking her bag at the park the day of her death.  At the University, Narumi-sensei had finished his analysis on the liquid in the lungs of Chiaki. it turns out to be fresh water.  Tamami realizes that the rain from before had been the reason for Chiaki's death.

At the crime scene, Mia watered the trees in the area with a hose, reenacting what had happened the day of the incident.  Tamami tells Chika that Chiaki had hit her head, causing a paralysis.  Not being able to move, Chiaki had drowned in a small puddle on the ground.  They explain once again to Mizushima-san about his daughter and show him messages she had written on her twitter before she passed away.  He finally realizes the emotions that Chiaki had been feeling and accepts the fact his daughter had passed away.  The end of the story, Chika and Tamami have a heartfelt conversation, ending with Tamami laughing away at a serious point.

Comments:
This story was so much better than the last episode, while the surgery transformation isnt possibly realistic, you can feel the emotion that Chika had felt about her friend.  Ishihara Satomi really did a great job at conveying her anger in the interrogation room and her depression when talking to Tamami and Nakura-sensei.  The only problem I have with her character is the way she talks to Tamami when she's trying to rub something in her face.  It's really irritating.  One problem I had with this episode is how they incorporated the suspects.  They were only questioned for maybe a minute or 2, which seemed unnecessary.  Might as well not even have included it in the story.  They could have easily made the story just about the stalker neighbor or just the old classmate, instead of using both of them.

Drama: Bull Doctor ep01

* The links to enlarging pictures got messed up for some of them and I won't be able to fix them unfortunately.

Plot:
Esumi’s character Tamami is the “bull doctor” of the show’s title, which comes from the word “bulldozer.” Ignoring any opposition from the people around her, she uses any means necessary to determine the truth behind the deaths of the bodies she examines. Because of her personality, she is constantly at odds with both Ishihara and Inagaki’s characters.
Credit: DramaWiki

Cast:
Esumi Makiko, Ishihara Satomi, Inagaki Goro, Shida Mirai, TOM, Ohno Takuro, Sakura, Ikeda Narushi, Anan Kenji, Ichikawa Kamejiro, Ichige Yoshie, Kohinata Fumiyo

Official Site: NTV - Bull Doctor

Comments:
The drama starts off in a lecture hall of Jyoto University for students of Forensic Medicine.  This is when we first see Takeda Mia (Shida Mirai) and Takeda Nobuo (Kohinata Fumiyo).  Nobuo is a professor at the school teaching about Forensic Medicine while his daughter, Mia, is a first year student.  When I read character descriptions, I didn't put 2-and-2 together that Shida was going to play a college student.  I think she comes off fairly young still, until I realized she IS 18 in real life.  Moving on, Nobuo introduces the character Odate Tamami (Esumi Makiko) as a new professor who is coming from the US.

We see her riding her bike to the University when a man jogging nearly collides with her.  He falls to the floor grabbing his chest and is taken to the hospital via ambulance.

Getting to the hospital, we see Kamatsuda Chika (Ishihara Satomi), an investigator for the police, get out of her squad car and into the hospital where she meets Tamami.  They exchange a few friendly words and head off into the hospitals mortuary.  Their first meeting was kind of awkward because it looked like Chika was trying hard to just get through her job.  It didn't really seem like she had any intentions to get along with Tamami in the first place.

Already we're getting that stubbornness that Tamami exhibits when she doesn't believe that Akai-san's death was just a heart attack.  While there aren't any bruises, cuts, wounds or anything that would indicate physical damage, she just doesn't believe that it was a heart attack that killed him.  When a thorough examination isnt permitted for her and refuses to just let it go, Chika heads into the faculty room calling for Nakura Junnosuke (Inagaki Goro) who is an assistant to the head of the department, i believe.  Nakura is quick to call the death a heart attack and puts an end to the matter.

 

(First meeting with Tamami, she still hadn't shown up to meet her colleagues yet either)

 While in the mortuary, Chika gets called to a different scene to investigate.  This scene looks like a murder.  There was head trauma to the male and they found sleeping pills in the bedroom.  This body versus Akai-san's body was sent to the examiners.  Tamami was the lead Forsensic pathologist and everyone in the room was shocked at the way she does her examinations (she didn't bow her head before starting procedure).  It already seemed like it'd be a homicide case, but of course, Tamami wasn't having it and did not declare it was homicide while Chika did.

*From here I'm going to bullet some points to shorten this post, and also because I dont have screencaps for them everything.  Caps will be placed where needed.*
- Chika vents her frustrations and concerns to her boyfriend who turns out to be Nakura.  Really.
- Chika interrogates Taguchi Yoshimo over the murder of her husband.  She thinks she has the murder weapon.
- Tamami tries to see if the murder weapon fits the wound, but doesn't. Chika tries to make it fit.
- Frusted Chika goes to calligraphy class and meets Odate Kousuke, who right now, doesn't know that's Tamami's son.  This scene was really cute though.  They showed off their inky hands and at first it seemed like Chika was just showing off her inky hands as like "im an idiot" kind of way, but when I rewatched that scene, it seemed she genuinely showed them off to say that her and Kousuke are alike

- One last look at the Taguchi household trying to find any chance of a murder weapon, Tamami, Chika and Mia (who happened to tag along) meet the Taguchi families daughter who's trying to clear her mother's name.  From what I've seen so far, Mia is very ambitious to become a great forensics doctor, like her father, so ends up tagging a long to the scene of the crimes or during examinations with Tamami.  I see this as a trend for the series.
- They find out that the father and mother, even though tended to fight, were actually trying to find a way to reconcile.  Because their anniversary was coming up, they wanted to do something special for each other in secret.  The father actually passed away because he slipped and hit his head on a cinder block and lost a lot of blood pressure to the brain when he fell asleep.  This was a really touching scene and I did get teary eyed.  I was just lucky to be home alone at this time haha.

(The scrapbook the father was making)

So in the end, still not convinced that the Akai-san had died from a heart attack, Chika went on a stake out and ended up overhearing some stuff between Akai-san's wife and a friend of hers.  Tamami also had found something out doing her own investigation and in the end, it turns out Akai-san was poisoned by his wife after taking a "vitamin capsule".

Before we find out that they ruled Akai-san's death as a homicide, we get Tamami's monologue about why she became a forensics doctor.  It's really inspiring, at least to me, on why she changed from the emergency to forensics which is that life just doesnt end at death. She wants to know why it happened.  As she says, she can't pray for the dead until she finds out why.  It's really touching... it reminds me the other drama that Ishihara Satomi was in about forensics which was "Voice."  Forensic doctors are the voice for the dead, they want to know why it happened and let them rest in peace.

Ok so,
Strange, I'm not much of a fan of doctor dramas, shows, movies, etc, but I tend to like Forensic and Forensic Pathology ones. It's most likely because I major in microbio, so a lot of things that have to do with microcultures and discovering reasons why certain things happen appeal to me.

The story so far is keeping me interested.  I thought Bull Doctor would be a drama I'd drop after the first episode, but it seems interesting enough to keep going, even without a cliffhanger from the first episode. I don't see much character chemistry yet, but it is only the first episode and we havent gotten a chance to see character development yet. This is the first time I'm seeing Esumi Makiko in anything so I wasn't sure what kind of acting style she has. To be honest, I'm not really impressed yet. Her stubborness comes across poorly in acting like you know she's acting stubborn, but she really shines when she smiles. I really liked the way she was with her son at the end of the episode, it's really precious.

I've seen plenty of dramas with Ishihara Satomi (which is one reason why I picked up this drama).  I have a love/hate relationship to this girl, I really do.  Some roles where she has to play a serious character are usually the ones I tend to hate because her acting gets a bit overdramatic and fake. Going through the first episode, I thought it was gonna start going that route, but she didn't overact this time around and delivered well.

I'm ready to watch the next episode just to see where things go after this episode. There's more to this drama than having the two leads butting heads, but the other characters need to unfold their backstories as well.