Last Hope is a medical suspense drama centered on a team at a biomedical research and innovation institute that serves as the last hope for patients with life-threatening conditions. The members of the team all have their own particular issues, and we mainly find out about these issues through flashbacks. The flashbacks are so frequent that instead of writing “there was another flashback” or something similar every time, I’m just going to put “Flashback (Character, Year):” to keep things tighter.
For the first time in this episode, we actually start away from the hospital, with a character we don’t know (played by Ishida Hikari from Beginners!). She seems to be in charge off a design shop, and barely gets through telling her staff off . . .
. . . before she collapses.
I think starting the episode by giving us some sense of the patient as a human being is important. They haven’t done nearly enough to win the viewer’s sympathy for the patients in previous episodes because so much of the attention is on the doctors. The result is that we don’t end up caring whether the patient makes it through or not – only whether the doctors will be vindicated.
Actually, I can’t say the show really gets us to root for the doctors, either. After all, the first time we see one, it’s the completely distasteful Takagi (Tanabe Seiichi) trying to pick up another woman.