Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!

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Today on Healer Girl: someone almost dies on an operating table!

Yes, really!

I can’t pretend this is an entirely unexpected turn for the show. It’s been fairly clear from the jump that the practices of “vocal medicine” and, you know, normal medicine are well entwined. On its own, then, it’s not strange that Healer Girl would eventually involve someone doing Actual Serious Surgery in an Actual Hospital Setting. But I am surprised that the show went there this early. The girls have just acquired their assistant’s licenses, as they remind us at the top of this episode with Kana’s amusing bragging.

Putting them in a medical setting this dire seems like skipping a step. Especially, since, as the first part of the episode hilariously demonstrates, none of them are even really used to seeing blood. (They end up “training” by watching a bunch of splatter horror flicks, an idea that strains credulity. It’s very funny to watch them freak out, though, so I’ll let the show have this one.)

Plus, on the other hand, the girls are not doing the surgery. (Thankfully.) Instead, our heroes’ assignment here is to provide live music during a surgery, with the idea being that it calms down the surgeon and assistants and helps them focus. Healer Girl has mostly been pretty good about not pitting its own fantastical branch of medicine against the mundane thing so far, so this arrangement is smart on that front, as well.

Not that everyone feels that way. Ria is fine with it. Shouko, her assistant, is fine with it. And of course, our protagonists Kana, Reimi, and Hibiki are all (eventually) fine with it. But one person who isn’t is the actual operating surgeon. Not because of any “this isn’t real medicine” ideological conflict—something I have to admit I became worried about when the character was introduced—but simply because this is his first surgery, too, and he thinks his skills are being belittled.

Despite his distaste, he goes along with it. (The person in charge of his department favors experimenting with live music in a surgical setting and is an old college classmate of Ria and Shouko’s, so really, he’s outnumbered and outranked.) And for a while, it seems like everything is basically fine. The girls sing in shifts, with each of them ducking out and letting the other carry the tune for a while to rest their voices and get some water at set intervals.

Then, just as he’s about to finish up, the surgeon notices that the issue with the patient is far more widespread than initially realized, and they need to do more than they initially planned. This goes badly. As in, “shots of the heart rate monitor going down and one of the nurses yelling ‘he’s critical!'” badly. In keeping with how we’ve seen this work before, the girls’ song-environment promptly falls to pieces under the stress, all three of them are shaken. But crucially they don’t actually panic. Instead, Reimi pulls Kana back in to the song with what might be my favorite two-line exchange of the whole season so far.

Healer Girl really loves imagery of ground and earth being knit back together after a cataclysm, this is the second of these “song spaces” to invoke that particular visual trope, and it looks even better here than it did two episodes ago when Ria comforted a pregnant woman. Angels fly from the skies and return everything to a serene—and slightly surreal—calm.

In terms of the actual surgery, a more experienced doctor intervenes and fixes the patient up. Crisis averted; everything is fine.

The girls take the well-earned time to bask in a job well done, and Ria is relieved that she didn’t actually have to intervene, praising the girls for their good judgment and level heads. The grumpy doctor, if you were wondering, does eventually thank the girls for their services, though only in a rather brusque and abrupt way. (You ever stepped in front of someone’s car while they’re pulling out of a parking lot? Not the best idea, usually.)

More importantly, back home, the girls text each other in the episode’s epilogue. Kana thanks Reimi for encouraging her. It’s a cute, warm end to another casually dazzling episode. How does Healer Girl make it look so easy?

Song Count: Just one, technically, this time around, but what a song it is.

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