Cells at Work!! Season 2

Episode 4

Disclaimer: The views and opinions in these reviews are observations made by the reviewer(s) and should in no way be construed as medical advice! If you have a question, please contact your general practitioner for information!

We finally have an answer about those Weeble Wobbles in the opening credit sequence. A completely average cell with dreams of rising above his station finds four adorable germs and decides to help them. He knows that taking them in will mean trouble for him and possibly death for the germs but have you heard the way they helplessly "nyuuu"? Who could overlook their plight?

The cell takes them home but the germs are quickly sniffed out by White Blood Cell. He takes custody of the offending germ babies and is about to dispose of them outside when he's called in to take care of an attack by H. Pylori in the stomach. The ordinary cell gives chase to retrieve his adorable basket of germs when he's struck by a sense of responsibility to protect them. They survive, more by luck than anything else, and that's when the pill-shaped bacteria decide to reveal their true identities: lactic acid bacteria. This episode could easily be interpreted as a 20-minute ad for Activia yogurt as Ordinary Cell and White Blood Cell travel to other areas of the body and drop off the remaining bacteria.

I won't waste too many words complaining about the overly shiny animation, but it remains distracting at times. However, I'd say this episode looks better than episode two and three for the most part. Ordinary Cell provides a multitude of meme-able faces whenever he's hit by a particularly strong emotion, which is pretty much every other minute in this episode; he bounces between fear, frustration, elation, and depression incredibly quickly. The plot isn't trying to get the audience invested emotionally (at least I don't think so), and the extremes are played for absurdity more than anything else.

We also get to see new areas of the body whereas previous episodes have mostly stuck around generic blood pathways. I'll admit though, when WBC and Ordinary Cell checked out the small intestine it didn't motivate me to eat better. Uric acid crystals (the kind that lead to kidney stones, see this week's Cells at Work! Code Black) look like konpeito and purines are rendered as pudding of the same sort as Sanrio's Purin mascot. Apparently this is something else that lactic acid bacteria enjoy gobbling up.

The first half of what I assume is a two-part arc ends with Ordinary Cell essentially slipping on a banana peel and dropping one of the bacteria into a waterway. Just as he's lamenting how cruel it is that the Neurophils can't communicate with one another to identify the bacteria as good, superhot NK Cell descends from the ceiling. We haven't seen Natural Killer cell since the first season when she helped defeat a cancerous growth in the body. The anime's opening sequence hints that we might see cancer return with lactic acid bacteria and Ordinary Cell getting involved. That arc, while medically accurate, was contentious due to how cancer was shown in a pitiable light. It'll be interesting to see how season one's arc could influence the disease's depiction this time around.

Observations from Matt (RN): Ok, so honestly I thought the probiotic episode was kind of whack. I'm not saying the information they presented is wrong (i.e. lactic acid bacteria can reduce purines or inhibit H. Pylori), but I feel the episode made them out to be a treatment for these, which they are not. At best they may reduce purine levels or h pylori presence, but are not a substitute for currently accepted treatments.

As for purines, those are chemical compounds that help aid the body in production of DNA and RNA, as well as cell energy. They break down into uric acid which we pee out. In some people this uric acid crystallizes and can get into joints, leading to gout. An interesting note about H. Pylori, it's a bacteria capable of surviving in stomach acid and it's overgrowth leads to stomach ulcers. It was once believed that stress caused stomach ulcers, until Dr. Barry Marshall intentionally ingested H. Pylori culture to prove it as the true cause. He and his partner were awarded a Nobel prize in 2005 for their research.

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Cells at Work! is currently streaming on Funimation.