Psycho-Pass 2 – 08

God this episode……urgh.  While I am glad to see some attempt is being made to pull all the plot threads together into one story, the way this episode played out, and some of the revelations in it, were just cringe-worthy.  Piling multiple exposition heavy conversations on top of each other isn’t exactly compelling story-telling, and I’m not all that hyped for the explanations behind Kamui & Togane.

First off then – Kamui is a Frankenstein’s Monster made from the corpses of the 185 children who died in that plane crash he miraculously survived.  This is the reason given for his status as a ghost to the Sybil System – so little of his original self remains that he just appears as a pile of corpses to the system & they end up ignoring him completely.  What I found strange was that the doctor made a point to say that Kamui did still register with Sybil immediately after his surgery, but as the transplanted tissue became more stabilised he started to become invisible to Sybil.  I would have thought it would be the other way round – as the transplanted tissue became more ingrained into his body it would be treated more as a whole, rather than a mass of unrelated chunks of meat.  But hey, what do I know?

So Kamui ended up getting more and more isolated as time went on because no one wanted to associate with an existence Sybil did not acknowledge.  To agree that Kamui existed was tantamount to doubting the infallibility of Sybil – something which will inevitably cloud a person’s hue, so Kamui ended up with no one willing to help him, not even those responsible for creating him in the first place.

Which takes us neatly on to Togane’s background.  Togane’s mother is the person responsible for developing the techniques employed during Kamui’s surgery.  She is also the one behind the technology which created Sybil’s brain collective core – the technique to remove a brain completely intact.  I am completely okay with the revelation that Togane’s mother is one of the ringleaders in Sybil’s brain hive mind, but I find Togane’s actions a bit harder to reconcile.  I can get behind the fact he was created because his mother was experimenting with artificially creating criminally asymptomatic individuals – that makes complete sense since Sybil is entirely made up of such individuals, but I don’t really get Togane’s motivation for working for Sybil – I don’t buy that it is just because his mother has joined their ranks.

Togane isn’t criminally asymptomatic – rather he has a monstrous crime co-efficient and has had his freedom restricted as a result.  Mika theorises that Togane takes pleasure from corrupting those with clear Psycho-Passes, but it seems more likely that he is being used by Sybil to find more highly intelligent, criminally asymptomatic people.  After all Inspectors are among the most intelligent members of this society, in addition to having remarkably clear psycho-passes despite being exposed to a lot of stress – they are prime candidates for Sybil.  I’m not sure what Togane is doing to push Inspectors over the edge, but it doesn’t really bode well for Akane since she is quite clearly his current target.

But it is Mika who is in the most trouble right now.  While I am somewhat impressed Mika managed to uncover the link between Kamui & the Togane Foundation on her own (even if that just involved looking up information that seemed to be publicly available), I am somewhat mystified about her continued vendetta against Akane.  In her report she basically says Akane has been making awful decisions that have led to many Inspector’s deaths – which is complete rubbish.  Nothing Akane has done has been unprofessional, the carnage that has unfolded is in no way her fault – Mika has more responsibility for the bloodbath in episode 4 since her inaction allowed the situation to escalate.  Mika is just being blindly malicious as this stage, which means I kind of cheered when it became apparent she was in deep shit with Sybil.

Sybil just coming right out and telling Mika its biggest secret came a bit out of nowhere.  But I think Sybil is trying to use Mika as a test case for public reaction to their true nature.  Mika is after all basically the poster-child for the ideal citizen under Sybil – unquestioning faith in the system has always been Mika’s default status regardless of what situation she was in.  But even if this is the case it doesn’t really make much sense – secrecy has worked for Sybil so far, so why on earth would they try to go public now?

Other stuff:

• Apparently Kamui claims to have retained the personalities of all the 185 children used to create his composite body – so I was mistaken last week in thinking Kamui had assembled a loyal team of followers to wear his special holo avatars.  Instead all the holo’s are Kamui himself, which just seems fecking ridiculous to me since it makes Kamui so unbelievably overpowered.
• Kamui’s surgeon claims that Kamui has developed drugs and meditation techniques that can clear people’s hues – which is a pretty good reason for him gaining so many very loyal followers from those who have fallen out of Sybil’s good graces.  However what the hell happened with Shisui then?  As an inspector she had a pretty stable psycho-pass until Kamui kidnapped her.  Did she just fall for Kamui’s good looks or something!?
• Illegal aliens are being used as replacements for those people in key positions in order to prevent a suspicious amount of missing persons cases popping up.
• “The Season of Hell” – incident when an alternative to Sybil was trialled but ultimately failed when it ended up causing a record number of accidents – including the plane crash that Kamui was in.

So a bit of a strange episode.  While I do like that the plot is going somewhere, I can’t really profess to liking the utterly ridiculous turn the sci-fi has taken, or the choice to basically info-dump via long conversations.  This second season hasn’t really lived up to the standard set by the first season.