Healer Girl Episode 10 Discussion

BlichoBoy said:
Im too lazy to remember but, is this the first episode that we see Ria full face on her blonde phase?

Urban_Druid said:
I always liked that this show took such a silly premise of "vocal medicine" and tried to ground it and even pair it with traditional means of treating patients, even though the whole process and concepts like “image” remain of fairly magical’ish nature. But throughout this course i was anticipating for creators to delve a bit deeper, for example - the misuse of the healing techniques, which could end up in hurting the patient instead of treating him. When it came to "vocal medicine", the show was always very vague about that. There were multiple mentions of rules and Kana got lightly scolded in the first episode for treating the wound, but I don’t remember that it was truly elaborated on why is it important to abide by those rules, what dangers are there. Of course i wasn't sure that this show would even dare to go to that territory, but in this episode they at least tried to do something regarding that.

Up until the party at the clinic i wasn't impressed with this Hibiki centric episode. For me she was the weakest and least interesting of the trio and this episode didn't really do much to correct that, though the message of the episode is simple and nice. I am also not the fan of how her vocals sounded in this episode either, especially during the shopping sequence, her voice in her part felt pretty over-exaggerated.

Also a minor thing, but i don't like how they sometimes reuse the same music for musical inserts even with different lyrics like they did again in the shopping sequence, but since it is a very catchy melody, i don't mind that much.

The main performance of the episode during the party was great as always with great animation and a majestic song. Unfortunately in the beginning of the song, music is a tad too loud and overwhelms the singing.
The moment I enjoyed the most was when the purple smoke/energy/whatever began to form around the girls in their “image” while they were gleefully singing in front of everyone which seemingly came as a surprise to other healers and Ria had to step in in order to cleanse this negative(?) energy.

It's not the first time, that Ria obviously recognizes an immense potential that the girls are able to manifest and i suppose the party could've ended on a not so happy note if not for her, but she doesn't try to scold them and instead offers them an opportunity to move on to another stage of their healer careers. Next episode seems to be a training episode, so i hope that girls will naturally grasp the responsibility of a healer.
I understand why they didn’t go for a darker ending, like for example someone could’ve gotten actually sick during the party (because of that purple energy thing), but that might have been too traumatizing and shocking knowing the overall tone of this show. Even if I am not a fan of the idea that everything in this show needs to be kept lighthearted, I can appreciate that they a least showed something regarding the possible negative consequences of careless healer actions. Though that in itself remained depicted in a fairly vague way, since the girls were not doing anything bad on surface, but dialogue after the party and after-credits scene alluded to a bit more serious tone.

P.S. Halloween "costumes" were disappointing for the main trio. They really could have used something different than their usual clinic clothes + some props.