Prime Video’s take on The Ghost in the Shell has gotten off to a solid start, with energetic pacing, great retro-futurist visuals, and solid action. But a common complaint is that the show drops viewers into the world with little explanation about some pretty essential concepts of the fiction, leading to a bit of alienation, especially for newcomers who aren’t familiar with previous adaptations of Masamune Shirow’s original 1989 manga.
This isn’t just a lore thing. This is one of the most influential cyberpunk universes ever created, and more to the point, the technological details are stand-ins for the setting’s core underpinning philosophy. Getting the basics allows you to get everything else, since the conflicts and plot points are invariably outgrowths of the metaphysical concerns. Physical bodies versus consciousness, organic versus synthetic, free will versus programming, human imagination versus autonomous AI. It’s all here. And luckily, so are we to explain it all.
The Ghost and the Shell
As is pretty obvious from the title, the core concept of this franchise is the relationship between the physical body and the “self” – the peskily ambiguous idea of consciousness and innate humanity. These distinct identities are represented by the ghost and the shell.
- The Shell is the physical body, or essentially the container for the ghost. It doesn’t have to be an organic body, either, and often isn’t, since in this setting entirely prosthetic cybernetic bodies are commonplace.
- The Ghost is the consciousness, the soul, the “you” part of an individual. In this setting, identity can be transplanted into any physical form, even a completely inorganic one.
The Ghost in the Shell often refers to these two distinct elements as distinct elements. There are multiple mentions of “The Ghost” in the premiere, for example. But it’s best to think about these ideas not as individualised instances but as running threads throughout the fabric of the setting itself.
Stolen Memory
Since the mind itself can be entirely digitized and transferred between vessels, all kinds of existential questions crop up as a result. If the breadth of an individual’s experience can become a product, to what extent are they still human? If someone’s very identity is susceptible to intrusion and corruption, what might that mean?
This idea is played with in The Ghost in the Shell in myriad ways. The Big Bad is The Puppet Master, a notorious faceless hacker who can tunnel into people’s brains, mess with their memories, and turn them into tools of international espionage. Personhood is what’s vulnerable, even while technological advances create the impression that personhood is what’s being preserved.
The most significant of these technological leaps, but also the one that makes a mind most susceptible to this kind of control, is a cyberbrain. This is essentially a biological brain that has been technologically enhanced to allow the user to interface directly with the global grid. Naturally, this advantage comes with a pretty significant cost, which is that it makes the brain susceptible to being hacked, as seen in Episode 2.
Public Security Section 9
The idea of Public Security Section 9, or “Shell Squad”, is mostly a useful way to tie the above technological and philosophical ideas together. Section 9 is a covert outfit operating under the Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs, designed to pre-emptively counter crime and terrorism using advanced technology and elite expertise. Because of the nature of the setting, most of the crimes they tackle involve cybercrime, political corruption, and corporate espionage.
The team is also pretty cosmopolitan to reflect these ideas. The commander of Section 9 and protagonist of the franchise is Major Motoko Kusanagi, a complete cyborg with a top-tier combat chassis. Conversely, Togusa, another member of the squad, has basically zero cybernetic implants and represents the “human” perspective. Batou, a third member, is somewhere in the middle, not as fully optimised as Kusanagi but possessed of useful tactical additions where suitable (namely cybernetic eyes).
All of these things taken together give The Ghost in the Shell its essential texture, and they all interweave and play off one another in fascinating ways. Most of these ideas, though, have sadly been inadequately explained in the Prime Video show, or in some cases not explained at all, so hopefully this little primer has been a useful way to get a sense of the core concepts underpinning the cool-looking action.
