Plot: Jonouchi visits his little sister, Shizuka, in the hospital on her birthday. He soon develops a crush on a nurse at the hospital, Miyuki. A slimy and extremely negligent doctor, Gouyuu, harasses Miyuki to try to get her to date him, much to her clear annoyance. When it gets so bad that Gouyuu gets her fired as a punishment for refusing to date him, Jonouchi takes matters into his own hands to protect the newfound target of his affections.
Breakdown: Something we never get in the manga, at least during the original run, is Jonouchi’s sister, Shizuka. Meaning this is technically where Shizuka originated and technically one of few things that originated exclusively from Season Zero and carried over into the 2000 series/Duelist manga. Their backstories are still roughly the same except in Season Zero she had typical girl-in-an-anime syndrome of having some vague weakness/sickness that keeps her in and out of hospitals for most of her life instead of her future ailment of having her vision slowly fail since childhood and requires surgery to fix it.
Jonouchi goes to buy a big pink stuffed bear for Shizuka’s birthday and bumps into Yugi, who had no idea Jonouchi had a sister until now. Yugi accidentally gets some ice cream on an evil thug because this is Yu-Gi-Oh Season Zero where everyone’s an evil thug. Jonouchi beats up the thug and his friends to protect Yugi, but the bear gets ruined as a result. He has no more money for a new gift, so he asks Yugi to come with him as he visits Shizuka.
They do a cute little comedy routine when they enter Shizuka’s hospital room as a means of a makeshift gift, which Shizuka enjoys. Soon enough, Jonouchi finds himself quickly infatuated with a kind nurse named Miyuki, who tends to his wounds from the fight.
A doctor at the hospital, Dr. Gouyuu, is an evil asshole because Season Zero. He has an inordinate amount of patients die in his care because he just doesn’t….well….care. He acts like he does and then later shows that he cares more about his golf game than anything. He can easily walk away from another lost patient and gleefully go on about his golf game, even swinging a golf club around the halls of the hospital almost every time he’s on screen.
If that’s not enough, he also sexually harasses Miyuki and low-key threatens to fire her if she doesn’t quit rejecting him. Lovely.
The next day, Jonouchi arrives at the hospital again to surprise Shizuka, this time with Yugi, Anzu, Miho and Honda in tow as well because Yugi couldn’t help but spill the beans about Shizuka to the others and they wanted to meet her. Soon enough, the others catch onto Jonouchi’s crush on Miyuki and encourage him to go after her.
Honda then does the worst thing I’ve ever seen him do. He offers Jonouchi a bag containing a gift he can give to Miyuki to ‘help her on the night shift.’ I was immediately suspicious, but I had no idea he would do what he was about to do.
Jonouchi gives her the gift, mentioning the part about how it will help her on the night shift, and it turns out to be a frickin’ bra. Miyuki is pissed off, Jonouchi is appalled and all Honda has to say is “Give it up. There’s no chance.”
Honda, what the actual fuck? Jonouchi is visiting his sick sister and has an innocent crush on a nurse and you make him look like a harassing perv to her? Jonouchi did nothing to you. Why are you such an asshole right now?
The pervy doctor skeevs on Miyuki again, though this time Jonouchi confronts him. As he and Gouyuu argue, Miyuki slaps Gouyuu and chews him out for being so disrespectful and uncaring about his patients. She demands he never speak to her ever again and walks away while Jonouchi chases after her.
A woman standing up for herself to an evil incel with power? I only expect positive outcomes from this.
The next day at school, Jonouchi is extremely depressed over Miyuki. His friends are observing him from afar, but for some reason aren’t chastising Honda for clearly being responsible for this mess. Do I believe a nurse probably in her mid twenties at the very least would be interested in a 16-17 year old ex-bully? No. I love ya bunches, Jonouchi, but not only is that unlikely, it’s also pretty inappropriate. But that doesn’t mean he can’t still enjoy her company and have a simple crush – both of which Honda completely destroyed with his moronic prank. She liked Jonouchi just fine before this, and now she thinks he’s a juvenile pervert.
Yugi, being the superior Jonouchi best friend, confronts him and tells him something Jonouchi used to tell him all the time, “You’re not being manly!” Jonouchi laughs and agrees, stating he has a newfound resolve to do his best with Miyuki.
He buys some flowers for her, but when he gets to the hospital Shizuka tells him that Miyuki was fired. From what Gouyuu said, she put a patient in danger by ignoring or forgetting orders that he gave her, but Miyuki doesn’t remember getting the orders, and Shizuka doesn’t believe Miyuki would get such important orders and not fulfill them.
As Jonouchi explores the halls of the hospital, he remembers what happened right after they walked away from Gouyuu. Jonouchi apologized to Miyuki, and she decided to forgive him and change his bandages. As we see Miyuki caring for Jonouchi, we also see Gouyuu outside the door with a smirk.
In present time, Jonouchi confronts Gouyuu, proclaiming that he was with Miyuki when he supposedly gave this order and didn’t hear a thing. He threatens to rat him out, but Gouyuu, being an evil slimeball, counters by saying, if Jonouchi rats him out, he’ll have Shizuka removed from the hospital’s care. The hospital has some of the best treatment in the area and it might be a huge problem if she’s sent away.
Jonouchi begrudgingly agrees to keep his mouth shut, but I don’t quite get why. Sure the hospital may be good, but if he has the power to kick her out, surely he’s her actual doctor, right? Why would Jonouchi want this disgusting negligent homiciding sack of lawsuits caring for his sister at all?
Outside with Yugi, Jonouchi is clearly hurting a lot by this. He has no choice but to protect Shizuka, but it means having to sacrifice saving Miyuki’s job. Seeing Jonouchi’s tears, Yugi immediately summons Yami complete with a foreboding massive shadow on the ground that has the Millennium symbol shining at the top and glowing eyes, which is just the sweetest thing. I know this is a serious and pretty badass moment too, but really the instant he sees Jonouchi crying, Yugi calls Yami out to kick ass in his name. I love these two (or three?) so much.
…..Screw you, Honda.
Yami (and Yugi) are so colossally pissed that we don’t follow Yami through the hospital as he looks for Gouyuu – we follow his pissed off looking glowing eyed and Millennium symbol’d shadow as it rushes around the halls. The effects are, admittedly, kinda janky. They’re pulling some really low-budget old CGI work here or something, but who cares? Yami Yugi is out for blood to protect his baby boy—I mean Jonouchi, and I am HERE for that.
Gouyuu is talking on the phone with someone about putting off another surgery to go golfing (I get the stereotype, but what exactly is Gouyuu’s deal with golf? It’s all he thinks about besides perving on nurses.) and brags to this person about how they had Miyuki fired for turning him down and that’s a ‘natural penalty’ for that. Dude….tone it down. If Captain Planet had villains centered on sexual harassment and malpractice, you’d easily be one.
I really can’t understand how he’s in the position he is, let alone that he might get promoted to head of the hospital. Everyone comments about how he loses a lot of patients, notably way more than other doctors, he’s constantly pushing surgeries back, not caring for patients properly, ignoring them most of the time, harassing the nurses, and he doesn’t seem to be good at keeping his mouth shut about this shit – how is he even employed?
Yami records him saying those things on a tape recorder and plays it back for him in the doorway before challenging him to a game.
Meanwhile, Shizuka tells Jonouchi that Miyuki is leaving the city, presumably to never return, so Shizuka tells him to go to the train station and talk to her. She doesn’t want Jonouchi to have any regrets about her.
Shadow Game
Yami sets up today’s Shadow Game to be Gouyuu’s beloved golf. The twist is that they’re playing in the empty halls of the hospital. The stakes are, if Yami loses, Gouyuu gets the incriminating tape. If Gouyuu loses, Yami keeps the tape and Gouyuu gets a punishment game.
Gouyuu chooses his club and asks what Yami will be using for a club. He grabs Gouyuu’s stethoscope and says he’ll use that. Gouyuu laughs at his choice of a ‘club’ and claims he’s won before the match even starts.
…..Is there no one in this hospital? Why are the halls all empty?
The goal is the Nurse’s Center on the floor directly below them. Gouyuu goes first and manages to cleanly hit the ball down the hall. Yami, using the stethoscope as a slingshot, whacks the ball, causing it to bounce around the walls of the hall before ending up in some room.
With a laugh, Gouyuu goes on ahead while Yami is supposedly left to figure out how to get his ball out of the room and down to the Nurse’s Center.
With a few more strokes, Gouyuu is able to get down to the Nurse’s Center quite easily. As he’s about to hit his ball into the room, Yami’s ball suddenly emerges. He explains that the room he hit his ball into has a neat system – a mail drop. He hit his ball into the chute, and it fell directly into the Nurse’s Center. Hole-in-one.
Uhh…..Is it just me….or does this make no sense? I can understand having a chute system for mail, but why does the mail chute wind up in the Nurse’s Center? Wouldn’t it make more sense for the mail to go to an administration office or, I dunno, a mail room?
Yami smirks and mocks Gouyuu because he knows golf courses very well, but he obviously doesn’t know his own hospital.
Gouyuu tries to attack Yami, causing him to break his precious club and fall over. Yami opens the door to darkness, and Gouyuu is suddenly haunted by the frightening spirits of all the patients that he let die in his care. Yami walks away, leaving a screaming Gouyuu behind.
Meanwhile, Jonouchi finally reaches the train station with the flowers. He gives them to Miyuki only to find that all of the petals fell off as he was running. She smiles and thanks him for them anyway. Jonouchi begs her to come back to the hospital, but Miyuki reveals that she had been planning on leaving for a while. A man approaches, and Miyuki explains that she decided to go to work at a clinic on a small remote island with this man, the doctor who runs the place. It’s implied that they’re interested in each other romantically. She bids Jonouchi farewell, telling him to bring Shizuka by for a visit sometime.
Jonouchi is rightfully shocked and devastated.
The next day, we see Gouyuu on the floor of the hospital surrounded by patients and doctors. He prattles on in a crazy state about how he cares more about golf than his patients while a boom box plays the tape of him confessing to his unethical behavior behind him.
At the hospital, Jonouchi is greeted by his friends who shoot confetti at him and try to make him feel better by openly sharing his pain with them. Honda approaches him and says he understands how he feels, which I thought might lead to a legitimately nice moment and redeem the shit he did earlier a little, because Honda does know how it feels to pine after someone he’ll never have. But no. He goes on telling Jonouchi that he can cry into his chest if he wants, and Jonouchi points out that Honda has a huge grin on his face, seemingly happy that Jonouchi got rejected and is taking delight in his pain.
Again, screw Honda. Please just write him out of this show and take Miho with him.
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This episode was pretty good. It was adorable seeing Jonouchi have a crush, even if I knew it was going to end in heartbreak. At least Miyuki was fairly nice about it instead of making her the villain or just a jerk or something. I wish we got more focus on Shizuka because, at the end of the day, we learned nothing about her besides she’s nice, loves her brother and is sick. Unlike in the 2000 anime, where we learn she’s……nice…..loves her brother….and is sick….
The Yugi and Jonouchi moments in this episode were sweet as pie, and that scene where Yami charges off in a shadow form to hunt down Gouyuu in vengeance because he saw Jonouchi crying is mwah perfect.
Gouyuu was as over-the-top as any Yu-Gi-Oh! villain, but he was built on a very real type of person. There are more sick misogynist guys in power who are more than willing to fire women for the horrific crime of turning them down for a date than I care to think about.
The one truly bad spot in this episode was Honda. What the heck was up with Honda today? Why was he so cruel to poor Jonouchi all because he had a crush on a nurse? The only good thing he did in this episode was loan Jonouchi the money to get Shizuka a teddy bear, which he didn’t even know was the intention of the money, but screw him entirely otherwise in this episode.
Next time, Kaiba’s third Shitennou shows up – a supermodel who can seemingly predict all of Yami’s moves.
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The Anime Madhouse 