Comedy
Dead Boy Detectives
Dead Boy Detectives targets teens in style and story. But it comes with very adult, problematic content.
Now, open your mouth and say, “Ahhhh.” No, your other mouth. No, the other-other mouth, the one on your shoulder. Great. Now let me test your tentacle reflexes with this massive hamm—oh, sorry. That’s your spleen. My mistake.
But listen, it’s not easy to treat patients from across the galaxy, y’know. All those wildly differing limbs and gills and sentient gaseous orifices. It’s a challenge. And just between us, you’re receiving better care than you would in some other medical establishments.
Just take a look at The Second Best Hospital in the Galaxy.
Meet Dr. Sleech and Dr. Klak, two semi-well-meaning physicians who work to cure the galaxy’s sick, injured and momentarily dead. Sure, both are a little sick themselves: Dr. Klak deals with near-crippling anxiety, thanks to her mother writing a book about … well, her daughter’s crippling anxiety. And Dr. Sleech is at least as interested in having sex with the local vending-machine restocker as she is in her patients. Still, both of them work to save their patients. That’s more than can be said for some.
They’re joined by a cohort of other reasonably engaged doctors. Dr. Powlp is an impressive emotional empath who looks a bit like a giant chicken. Dr. Vlam, a medical intern, is actually on her several-hundredth career, being an immortal robot and all. She means well, though—and she’s determined to help her patients reach the end of their pitifully short lifespans.
And then there’s Nurse Tup, who’s seen just about everything and has patience for nothing—especially not these pesky doctors who’re always upsetting her schedule.
But hey, it’s a living.
The care one might receive at the Second Best Hospital in the Galaxy, the actual hospital, might be a bit … dubious. The doctors take unwarranted chances and perhaps inflict unnecessary pain—but it could be worse.
The same could be said for The Second Best Hospital in the Galaxy, the show.
For an adult-targeted animated comedy, Second Best Hospital is … not horrible. Profanity, at least at the show’s early stage, seems rare. Sexual encounters—while more frequent than we’d like, certainly—rarely involve recognizable human body parts, so that’s something. And the gore is—
Well, let’s face it, the gore is where the show begins to go well off the rails.
Yes, the blood is animated, played for laughs and colored every color you might find in an expensive box of crayons. Still, it gets everywhere. Organs, too. And the show seems to revel in making its main characters eat other, smaller-but-seemingly-sentient organisms. (We see the critters pulled apart; and we hear their tiny, anguished screams.)
And certainly, this galaxy is filled with plenty of sexually active characters and quite LGBT welcoming: Dr. Klak seems to have a crush on Dr. Azel, a seemingly fellow female doctor who works at a rival hospital. (That said, Dr. Azel is voiced by male singer Sam Smith, so perhaps in some meta-reality scenario, this could be positioned as a heterosexual crush? Except that Sam Smith is gay, so maybe not? These issues are confusing.)
Yes, if animated shows were held to some sort of traditional Judeo-Christian moral Hippocratic Oath, The Second Best Hospital in the Galaxy would definitely have its license revoked. Its animated rooms are far from sanitized. Sure, you’ll find more objectionable content out there, no question. But if you want to guarantee a healthy entertainment regimen, this is one hospital you won’t want to visit.
Nurse Tup announces to Dr. Klak and Dr. Sleech that a case has come in that “only two delusional narcissists would attempt. And they asked for you.” The case: a nasty, multi-eyed worm that feeds on anxiety has lodged itself in a patient’s head. And if it’s not removed, the said head will (in the words of Dr. Sleech) “violently explode into a geyser of wet skull chunks.”
The happy upshot, if there is one, is that because the worm feeds on anxious thoughts, the worm’s victim is quite mellow about her impending death. A bump on the patient’s head (obviously where the worm’s living) grows throughout the episode, with Nurse Tup drawing a smiley face on it to make it “less terminal looking.”
The two doctors hover around an apparently human woman suffering from a parasite inside. Turns out, they were trying to save the parasite—which bursts out of the woman’s stomach in a shower of blood. Another operating-room scene features a doctor doing her best to seal several spouts of different colors of blood.
An insect-like patient must be tickled in order to receive an injection underneath his exoskeleton. In appreciation, he offers the blessing, “May wet meat rain on you all.” Dr. Vlam, a robot that’s millennia old, recalls a time when she was married to a Rat King, calling him a “great lover, great cook” and endowed with a “really flexible tail.” She adds that she later “slit his throat in the middle of the night and overthrew his regime.”
Dr. Vlam also mentions to a patient that over her long existence, she’s had “so many wives, so many husbands, so many poly-compounds.” Dr. Klak fawns over another female doctor at a rival hospital. Dr. Sleech shoots her frog-like tongue to catch a workman in a kiss. The two slink off to a storage room, where we see various inhuman parts (think gills, pores, excreting gasses) in action as sensual music plays, reinforcing the sexual nature of the encounter. We see a clip of a long-running TV melodrama titled “My Lover, My Clone.” (A clip shows the two identical characters facing each other, with one saying, “Shut up and kiss me, me.”)
Klak and Sleech repeatedly snack on sentient creatures, which scream in horror as they’re dismembered. (Some are engaged in a game of charades when their doom descends.) Klak feeds adorable live mice to a carnivorous plant. Creatures apparently made out of cinnamon are eaten while still alive—and one such creature takes a bite out of another one’s tail.
Surgeries at a rival hospital are interrupted by commercial breaks. There’s some discussion about a troubling gill rash. Klak takes a great deal of medication for her anxiety.
We hear God’s name misused twice.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
Dead Boy Detectives targets teens in style and story. But it comes with very adult, problematic content.
An elf mage contemplates on connection and regret as she watches her human friends grow old and pass away.
