Summary
The Ghost in the Shell continues to boast strong visuals and action, despite a slightly alienating pace and some cliche pandering.
Prime Video’s take on The Ghost in the Shell continues to work on fleshing out its world in Episode 2, which means a couple of things. One is a continuing deluge of proper nouns, oblique references, and underexplained concepts that remain pretty alienating for anyone not especially well-versed in the franchise lore. But “Super Spartan ii + Junk Jungle i” is a bit subtler than the breakneck premiere, allowing smaller character interactions to flesh out some of the details of the setting; one that is highly technologically advanced without having progressed a great deal beyond contemporary problems of class disparity, political corruption, and foreign interventionism.
I’d still argue the whole thing’s moving a bit too quickly for its own good. A slower episode that was less on-mission – this looks like the first of a multi-episode arc – and more focused on letting the audience settle would probably be a good idea, but it doesn’t look like we’re going to get it. In the meantime, though, an exciting pace, solid action, and stellar visuals continue to keep things engaging, even if you might be left scratching your head about one or two elements that are getting short shrift.
The climax of the premiere, which saw Kusanagi’s new team having apparently been shut down, counts for very little, since Aramaki just sets up a new version of the same team with the forward-thinking objective of stopping crime proactively. It’s a win-win for everyone, or so it seems, since the approach gives Kusanagi the latitude she has always wanted to tackle problems head-on, even if they interfere with her hard-partying downtime, which includes a heavy bar session in the first instance and a technologically embellished three-way in the second.
But duty calls. The episode’s plot revolves around the Gavel Republic, a small nation that recently overthrew its dictatorial military leadership to embrace democracy. A hacker is interfering with the cyberbrain of the Foreign Minister’s interpreter, supposedly at the behest of Col. Malles, the leader of the former junta, so Kusanagi and her team are enlisted to trace the hack. It’s a fairly standard mission on paper that predictably goes badly wrong by the end of the episode.
The devil is in the details. It’s really obvious that the whole thing’s a bit of a setup, since Kusanagi mentions out loud how lucky it is that the virus being used to hack the interpreter is an older, traceable kind, but it excuses a cool-looking chase at the end, so what can you do? I also enjoyed Kusanagi and Togusa’s conversation about their chosen weapons – sheer efficiency and modernity versus a kind of nostalgia and idealism born of inexperience; itself a distillation of the robot vs human debate at the show’s core – and the flippant back-and-forth of the garbage men who are being followed, since they provide the first perspectives we’ve yet seen of ordinary people too mired in poverty to have proper access to the technology that everyone else is so precious about.
Not everything works, obviously. Kusanagi’s downtime being depicted in the sauciest way possible is the typical type of lowest-common-denominator shonen pandering, and throwaway comedy beats like Batou putting fireworks in Aramaki’s tires only to realise he targeted the wrong vehicle aren’t great, even if they help to solidify the fractious dynamic between Aramaki and Kusanagi/Section 9.
But the main plot is very solid, and the visuals bringing the action to life are great. The camouflage utilised in the climactic set-piece looks excellent, and when the show kicks into gear, it becomes very obvious that it’s a high-quality production that is clearly having a ton of fun with the setting and characters. I’m hoping that subsequent episodes find the time and space to slow down just a touch, flesh out essential concepts, and spend more time building depth. But for now, it’s still working well enough to keep paying attention to.
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