Dun dun dun!
— People are still playing that game, apparently. Of course, there are sick individuals in the world who just want to hurt others, but these perpetrators are newly-minted, if you will. They are the results of the recent rise in elevated stress level. I just don’t see the causal connection between elevated stress levels and directly harming people. Plus, why would you be this stupid? Even if you wanted to hurt people, why would you openly play a game that can be easily tracked?
— Saiga: “Transplanting a lot of one’s organs is like transplanting one’s Psycho-Pass.” That’s an odd thing to say. I kind of wanted Saiga to explain his logic, but I guess the anime felt like it has spelled everything else out enough. On a related note, he’s not really trying to interrogate or pump the representative for information whatsoever. He’s just talking to the audience. I don’t really like scenes like this one because they’re disingenuous.
— It is now nighttime, but Akane is still standing on that ledge. Unless she came back for some odd reason, she literally just stood there for hours. She then complains that she couldn’t shoot. Then why didn’t she let Sakuya shoot the gun? Is it because she cares about him the same way she cares about Shinya? I hope not. Sakuya hasn’t really done a goddamn thing to justify that sort of treatment. But if it’s not that, then why? This is especially bizarre because it sounds like she wanted to take the shot herself.
— By the way, Sakuya is right. They did come face-to-face with their ghost, a.k.a. Kamui. What say you now, Mika? Ginoza? Every goddamn person who has doubted Akane even though it was fairly obvious that technology wasn’t infallible?
— Akane: “Who on earth are you trying to point those Dominators at?” Is that really the pertinent question? How about… “Why are these Dominators still operational?” Or how about “Even if the members of the MWPSB have high readings, why are you allowing the Dominators to fire?” More importantly, why is nobody asking those questions? Why is nobody questioning the fact that the Sibyl System isn’t playing a large enough of a role in stopping this madman? The Sibyl System is doing nothing but sitting back and throwing its hands up in defeat. All I can do is scan for people’s Psycho-Pass! A bloo bloo bloo… all I can do…. is scan! ;;
— Shinya pops out of Akane’s imagination to help her through these tough times. She then snaps back to reality, and realizes that Shinya’s words were actually Sakuya’s. I wanted Shinya to be involved in this story somehow, but not like this, man… not like this. It’s fairly obvious that Sakuya is supposed to be this twisted subversion of the former Enforcer, but it doesn’t work. We hardly know anything about the guy other than that he’s a creep, and he’s aping Shinya’s actions. We spent two-cours with Shinya. We’ve only spent six episodes with Sakuya. Not only that, it was revealed rather early on that he’s up to no good. So not only does the audience not find him credible, the audience doesn’t find Akane’s reliance on him credible either.
— Maybe the answer is just that literal. Maybe Kamui’s color is clear because he’s hiding behind other people’s organs as Saiga had suggested. In other words, he’s this dystopian world’s version of a zombie. He’s dead to scanners for all intents and purposes. That would explain why these same scanners can’t recognize or detect him. But why can’t the Dominator scan his brain, which, presumably, he can’t replace with a transplant? I doubt having a new face would somehow help him avoid this problem.
— Saiga: “As long as Sibyl continues to recognize [Shisui’s] actions as valid, those Dominators will continue to be used.” Oh, so we do acknowledge this… so is anyone going to bring this fact up with Kasei?
— But just look at this:
Shion: “Hey, is that sarcasm towards Sibyl?”
Saiga: “No, it’s suspicion.”
Shion: “That’s even worse.”
God is unquestionable. You can’t even joke about God.
— Oh look, Ginoza’s onscreen. Let’s see what he has to contribu–…
Ginoza: “Tsunemori, you should rest a bit.”
Oh, right. He’s a robot these days. He can’t say anything but a handful of lines over and over.
— Ginoza is exasperated at the fact that Akane hasn’t moved from her apartment yet. I’m sure Sakuya is delighted about this, because he thinks this will make it easier to corrupt her. Do you get the feeling Shinya will just show up at the last minute and save Akane?
— The very brief conversation between Akane and her grandmother feels stilted. It doesn’t feel like two loved ones catching up. Instead, her grandmother is basically telling her what to do next in the story. Epiphanies every time I talk to my grandma! Ahhhhhhh, this writing, man.
— Finally, we ask Kasei some very important questions. And of course, her answer is completely stupid! Shisui’s Psycho-Pass is still clear so there’s no reason to disable her access to the Dominators! Genius! Air-tight logic! We can’t make exceptions! Akane deduces that the Sibyl System just doesn’t want to appear flawed, i.e. it is incapable of handling the current situation. So let me get this straight. A group of super-intelligent brains would rather preserve its reputation in the short-term over stopping a madman who is very carefully and very deliberately causing people’s faith in the Sibyl System to erode? Does that make sense to any of you? It doesn’t make sense to me. I’d rather swallow a bitter pill and stop Kamui dead in his tracks instead of letting him run around and cause mayhem. But hey, that’s just me! I’m certainly not a writer who’s attempting to put himself in the shoes of a group of super-intelligent brains.
— But everyone’s stupid! It’s not just the Sibyl System! Akane wants to know how they can stop Kamui if the scanners won’t even recognize him?
Kasei: “It’s simple. In fact, you tried to do it, right?”
Akane: “Are you saying that killing him is appropriate?”
Of course it is! Look how many people he has killed! His aim isn’t just to commit crime. He’s not just your bread-and-butter serial killer. His aim is to bring down society altogether.
— Like Makishima, this guy is a terrorist. Does he deserve a fair trial? No! But there’s no such thing as a fair trial in this world anyway. Who lives and who dies are completely dependent on the Sibyl System’s judgement. But that’s the problem, isn’t it? These characters are so used to having the Sibyl System judge everyone that they can’t even entertain the idea of passing those same judgement themselves. That’s why Shinya was a hero. He had the guts to judge Makishima, especially since the Sibyl System wasn’t going to do so. No, you shouldn’t go on a rampage and judge every single person out there, deciding whether or not they get to live. But when there are clear-cut cases like Makishima or Kamui, you shouldn’t hesitate and let these assholes kill more people. What is wrong with you!
— Akane: “…we’ll arrest him and bring him to rightful justice.” Sigh. What is justice? The longer Kamui is on the loose, the more people he will hurt. No amount of “rightful” justice will undo the pain and suffering that he has caused or will cause because Akane allowed him to get away in last week’s episode. I know her grandma said that people’s lives are valuable, but I don’t think someone like Kamui is what the old lady had in mind.
— Mika learns that everyone who has worked with Sakuya ends up becoming a latent criminal. Why is he allowed to work for the MWPSB again? I guess we won’t find out until much later. I laughed at Mika being so spooked that she would toss her drink away over a phone ring.
— According to our crack team, Kamui “has an extraordinary knowledge of drugs.” So not only is he a master of psychiatry, he’s a proper surgeon because he can remove your organs without damaging them, he’s a master at holograms, he can hack into incredibly secure networks, he can program a game that somehow translates action in the real world to gameplay that you see on screen, and… oh, of course, he “has extraordinary knowledge of drugs.” Welp. At this point, what can’t he do?
— Can he salvage this sequel?
— Aaaaand in the middle of an investigation, Mika throws a tantrum.
— All of Kamui’s holograms appear to be aged versions of kids who had died on some plane crash. But then the one survivor is… dun dun dun! Kirito Kamui! But if he’s this smart, he would never leave such an obvious clue behind. Obviously, he wanted our investigators to figure this out. The only question, then, is to what end?
— Magically, however, our investigators can’t even access Kamui’s records. They can talk to his surgeon, but not surprisingly, this guy is also a devoted follower of Kamui.
— I don’t think I’m a big fan of Sho’s characterization, especially the whole “big sis” thing. It’s just cringeworthy. Because this season is too short to really develop any of these characters, all the writer can do is distinguish them by giving them very obvious traits. Mika’s a giant baby, Sho stutters a lot, Ginoza just doubts Akane, so on and so forth. It makes for a cast of characters that are difficult to relate to.
— Then we get a reminder that Shion and Yayoi are still a thing. Okay. Yayoi is barely in this sequel, but at least we know these two lesbians are getting it on! There’s no other way to show that they’re lesbians either.
— The Togane Foundation is then linked to the doctor that Akane has just taken in. Man, I think the new writer is too concerned with spinning a web of conspiracy instead of just writing a proper story.
— After Sho finishes aging up all the holograms, our heroes realize that they’ve been interacting with Kamui this entire time! But the audience already knew this from the get-go. Hell, I said this back in week two:
According to Kitazawa, his accomplice had come to see him and made his color clear. Risa instantly believes that this is a lie, because the only person to visit Kitazawa recently was a therapist. Considering what we had just learned about holograms, however, I can’t help but think our villain had disguised himself as a therapist, then made his way to Kitazawa to clear the guy’s color. The problem, however, is that the therapist himself claims that he had talked to Kitazawa. But how do we know that the therapist in front of Akane is actually the real therapist? What if the real therapist had been killed a long time ago, and they’re actually talking to the bad guy?
So the big reveal is a giant letdown. The sequel isn’t as clever as it wants to be.
Moe Sucks 
“According to our crack team, Kamui “has an extraordinary knowledge of drugs.” So not only is he a master of psychiatry, he’s a proper surgeon because he can remove your organs without damaging them, he’s a master at holograms, he can hack into incredibly secure networks, he can program a game that somehow translates action in the real world to gameplay that you see on screen, and… oh, of course, he “has extraordinary knowledge of drugs.” Welp. At this point, what can’t he do?”
Nothing, I say. Didn’t you paid attention to his other name? Kirito. Actually he is our Gary Stu from SAO, so that’s why there’s nothing he can’t do. #conspiracy
Agreed with “Kirito” thing. Anyone with that name must be a perfect gary stu.
Called it
Welp. We should call him Kirito-kun from now on, instead of Kamui.
Welp, doesn’t sound good… Oh well, I’m off to watch some GitS to get my cyberpunk fix
Speaking of Gits, the Arise one was written by Tow Ubukata too and it has none of the problem plaguing this season of Psycho pass. So what the fuck happened to Tow Ubukata? Did he Urobutcher or something?
*hate Urobutcher
Actually this is the first episode that has made sense in a while. The sybil system is pretty much god. Last season just showed god was corrupt it knew everything that was going on how ever maki was a creation of god thus god simply want it to join forces. This season sybil is a egotistic god still only this time the guy causing trouble is well someone god does not acknowledge such a person can not exist so god wants them to be cleansed from existence. Not only that this person is outsmarting god which is again doing the impossible. If god takes action it admits defeat. Btw kamui did not to everything alone he had help he was not the only one useing holos. Pretty sure the genuis surgeon who worked with him did all the surgeon shit. All and all this was a decent episode that asked questions that should have been asked soon.
Only outsmarting God because God is incredibly stupid.
Case in point, only an idiot would believe this. The Sibyl System is risking everything for the short-term.
He removed Shisui’s eye by himself, so he knows enough. He’s still too unrealistic. And the story hints heavily that all those people our heroes have met are just him wearing different disguises. The surgeon is the only unique person that we know about.
Disagree. It was a terrible episode that repeated all the horrible mistakes the sequel has been and apparently will continue to commit.
Now they need to make Kamui goals clear becuase they are saying he is just some murderer then what is his goal. Why are we just now seeing 1 meaningful member of his. When are we going to see the other people who are going to use those dominators he took. Because as of now everyone who worked with him aside from the doctor and public speaker sound and act like mass murdering terrorist. Speaking of lack of characters to relate with thats another thing the villians all sound like pallet swaps of each other. Where as on season one each villian had a motive and different goals.
Yeah, the characters of this season suck. Even the interesting one from PP1 like Ginoza act like an idiot. The Sybil system has no problem overriding dominator in season 1, and now it do nothing!
Glad to see that this train wreck has yet to redeem itself and is, in fact, only making things worse for itself with the now-grating “Man, I shoulda coulda killed them, but we gotta have to do this the right way!” nonsense.
Nothing about the society is just to begin with. When in a world where “proper justice” is a demented perversion of a totalitarian god-brain-computer, the only real justice you can cling to is the prevention of more slaughter, i.e. SHOOT THE TERRORIST
Anyway, I give you props for figuring out the killer early on but yeah, it really was an anticlimactic reveal. I notice that in a lot of serial killer dramas, especially in anime/VNs and television, the killer is very often a brilliant psychoanalyst AND master surgeon AND master technician AND had layers upon layers of diabolical planning. It’s just silly since most of these aspects are never properly explained. Yeah, dude just mastered all of these incredibly intricate crafts. No, we won’t tell/show you how or why to make it believable.
_It’s also ridiculous considering serial killers are more likely to masturbate to a corpse than enact complex schemes, but whatever. If done right it’s fine, and considering this guy’s got grander goals I can believe he wouldn’t instead be stalking some hapless victim for selfish means. However when you tack on ALL of these skills and amp it up to 11 for each? You haven’t made a believable nemesis anymore.
You’ve made a super villain.
“Do you get the feeling Shinya will just show up at the last minute and save Akane?”
Oh, mate, totally. The only question is how, as in: Considering how this series is going, how cliche will it be?
This isn’t a serial killer drama he is more of a terrorist. Serial killers are portrayed as geniuses simply to make cops not look dumb .Ted Bundy for instance was not a genius he went around with his rape kit in his car for one and for 2 a big part of cops not catching him was nope he didn’t do it he looks like a decent guy. Finally it is not common for serial killers to rape a corpse contrary to popular belief, their is a real famous serial killer who has done so but it is not the norm. As for terrorist they simply learn by doing if they get away with it the first time.
I think it can work even if you don’t properly explain how he comes by these skills. The Joker in The Dark Knight was also a mastermind. But the thing is, he was portrayed more as a force of nature — something to counteract Batman’s unerring justice — rather than a real person. This is evident by the way his origin story constantly changes. Anyway, my point is that Kamui hasn’t been portrayed in this fashion. The closest we’ve come to is that he’s some sort of ghost to the scanners, but he’s certainly not a ghost to Akane. It remains to be seen what his origin story will be like, but the fact that he has an origin story also necessitates that his existence is realistic to some extent.
Perhaps I am letting my imagination fly, but after I watched the episode, I kinda had a slightly different conclusion about Kamui. When I heard the surgeon talk about him never being alone, I got the impression, that all these “disguises” are not disguises in the normal sense, but physically distinct beings – or to say it simpler – Kamui is a pharmacist, holo cracker and so on, so on, because the MSWP are in reality facing an army of Kamuis. And the fact that there can be so many Kamuis is tied to his physical condition of not being traceable through the scanners.
Skimming through your post made me realize that what I thought was pretty much the point of the episode is perhaps nothing more but my personal hypothesis. Your thoughts about sloppy characterization and writing (especially the grandma scene) are as always spot on and a delight to read. Please keep it up.
I dunno, maybe there’s more than one Kamui walking around. I hadn’t considered it. But the logistics of this has to be pretty wild.
I would actually argue the other way around. Having an army of Kamuis make the logistics at least possible in my eyes. As you very nicely said in your title, sometimes he seems to be everywhere and I simply cannot wrap my head around the fact that this is done by one single physical body (though I do not discount the possibility that we are still dealing with one individual here… for a certain definition of individual).
His super-human skillset is of course another very glaring problem, that could be salvaged by the concrete nature of my little Kirito-army-theory, but who knows? Perhaps the show just shoots itself in the foot next week with some bullshit explaination. Considering its track record this season I am certainly not getting my hopes up.
I think the logistics are insane because we have a hard enough problem believing why Shisui would follow him. Naturally, it’s even more insane that he could attract an entire army of weirdo Kamui devotees. And he’s attracted experts to his cause too. He’s not just attracting idiots. He’s attracting people who are arguably at the top of their respective fields. I don’t know what’s harder to believe, to be honest. Kamui being an expert at everything like most stereotypical masterminds, or that these experts are just ready and willing to die for him because he’s said a few soothing things in their ears.
The only reason that would make some sense in the whole “can’t be scanned by an unhackable system” is if he end up being a machine either himself or because he use a remote controlled body.
I got this theory since about episode three that Kamui’s brain is cyberized. Remember how Senguji in season 1 talked about how he waited for this particular technology to happen, so that he can become truly immortal.
Perhaps Cyberbrains already exists in secret. Chief Kasei is actually a primary suspect for already reaping the benefits of this technological breakthrough, I mean she/he/it even talked with Makishima in season 1 about how her cyborg body was made with technology not open to the public. Perhaps she was not only talking about the elaborate outer design of her body.
I actually wondered before season 2, why the technology of Cyberbrains (from Ghost in the Shell) was only periphically hinted at in the Psycho-Pass universe, until I realized how much of a gamebreaker they could be in this kind of society.
After this episode, my suspicions about Kamui having a Cyberbrain are getting more concrete. The information lockdown on his medical treatment is one thing, but his plane-crash background is a straight rip-off from Motoko Kusanagis background in GiTS-stand-alone-complex. Hopefully next episode will prove me right… or wrong.
This would just raise more questions for a burgeoning sequel. Who created him? And why? How? And how would a machine avoid something as simple as cameras?
GROAN!!…breathe… ok Lets say Kasei is right and Sybil System is not allowed to deactivate Shisui’s dominator just because she’s clear, then why on the earth she won’t at least deactivate dominators of the deceased Inspectors and Enforcers that Kamui stole? I mean they’re dead and she knows Kamui is a thing, and most likely he’s going to use them for no good.
The writing is so damn atrocious, I can’t even say is lazy, is just horrendous, feeling like psycho-pass just don’t cut it when your story lacks of any common sense.
That would be too pragmatic. A bunch of super-intelligent brains can only worry about the abstract.
I really doubt Kamui is a single individual. It’s far more likely that there are 180 people taking the role of Kamui, with 180 different skill sets and positions (which explains how Kamui could simultaneously be at the Factory, within the MPHSB, and Hacking from the Defense Ministry, all at once), then Kamui being an individual with 180 abilities. The alternative is: , this isn’t Kamui the Gary Stu or Kamui the god, it’s Kamui the character written by a writer that clearly has lost his marbles and any sense of sanity or sense for plausibility.
True, the logistics and co-ordination problems would be tricky, but not impossible…. I won’t be surprised if “Kamui” has some kind of serious Backing behind him. Either foreign, or from within… It might explain why a year passed between Makashima and Kamui. Setting up these… experiments probably required significant amount of preparation and planning.
Secondly, I get the niggling feeling that Sibyl is testing whether Akane is criminally asymptomatic. If anything, the take away from the Grandmother scene (besides speculations she’s an impostor, or some kind of Chekov gun for a future plot twist) is that Akane was raised with a very strong moral compass – strong enough, that pulling off a Makashima is unthinkable to her own internal morality. And I’m not sure whether Sibyl has a way of determining whether an individual is Criminally asymptomatic, unless a candidate has committed a crime. It’s almost as if Sibyl is trying to get Akane to snap, and test whether her Psycho Pass breaks or remains clear. At this rate, Akane might well end up as a brain in a vat. It might also explain why Sibyl chooses to do nothing – to it, Kamui could be crushed at any time, it can pull the plug on Shisui’s eight dominators at will – but the opportunity to test whether Akane can be included in their ranks by trying to break her is too good to pass up.
All I have to mention is that at the end of the episode there’s a bike ^^ I wonder who’s (I’m trying to avoid speculations but I fail visibly)