[loading data sector 01]
Playlist start: 'We're the Great'
Read here first
People who have not watched the show but want to be convinced to might be reading! For the purposes of discussion, this thread shall have mild spoilers as unmarked, and major spoilers protected by use of the
Playlist start: 'We're the Great'
Read here first
People who have not watched the show but want to be convinced to might be reading! For the purposes of discussion, this thread shall have mild spoilers as unmarked, and major spoilers protected by use of the
tag. I'll define mild spoilers as the conceptual ideas, character design and the plot premise/setup. I think the easiest way to segregate that is to say the first block of three Complex episodes are fair game, but after that plot points will be tagged.
Also, this post is about the first series only. I have not watched 2nd Gig. I intend to. Feel free to discuss it in this thread, but please please please use the goddamn spoiler tags.
Preface
I think like a lot of people my age, Ghost In The Shell was one of my very first exposures to 'grown-up' anime. Up until that point I'd been limited to Toonami, showing only Tenchi, Dragonball and Gundam Wing. Then I got my first job and used my first pay packet to pick up Ninja Scroll, Akira, and Ghost in the Shell. I don't think I could have asked for a better introduction into the world of adult-targeted animation.
Ghost In The Shell's amazing mix of action, corporate-political intrigue, philosophical consideration and, yes, sex appeal did a number on my young mind. I think of special note was that all the nature-of-life philosophy actually had depth to it, rather than just a veneer to add to the cyberpunk aesthetic. A few years later, when I was 18, I had the pleasure of attending a screening of the film's sequel, Ghost In The Shell: Innocence, a few months before its actual UK release, straight-to-DVD. It managed to be so different from the original, asking different philosophical questions and not simply re-treading the same ground plot-wise, yet still retain the same tone and high quality. I consider both as among the finest works in animated film history.
At University, I had the chance to read the original source manga for the first film. I was... disappointed. I think the film did the concept and characters much better. I didn't like the light-hearted tone. I thought the artist was poor at drawing action on static pages in a way that wasn't confusing. It wasn't a bad manga by any means, but I think it would have been historically irrelevant were it not for such a fantastic film to have been adapted.
I approached the series fully aware of it being set within its own continuity and of it re-inserting some of the humour of the original manga. It was with a mindset of zero expectations that I began watching Stand Alone Complex.
Track change: 'Inner Universe'
The Opening
The first thing you see when you start to watch the show and it certainly makes an impression. A gorgeously rendered nighttime cityscape pans down and cuts to fast-falling text creating larger text, in an effect reminiscent of The Matrix (which itself was reminiscent of the original Ghost In The Shell film's title sequence). Cut back to the city, this time at street level, and a thermo-optically camoflauged Major Kusanagi is running through the streets, intercut with footage of blue tanks and VTOL jets. All of this is set to a thumping, electronic song with a mixture of English, Latin and Russian lyrics. I think t.A.t.U were really popular at the time or something so it makes sense I guess.
There's actually a bit of storytelling going on in this opening. We are shown a short clip of the Major as a child gripping a toy doll so tightly it breaks. It then cuts to Kusanagi as an adult, living in a capsule room. Rather elegantly, we now know that the Major had cybernetic limbs from a very young age and that either she had difficulty controlling them or they made her so angry she broke her toys. You won't find out which is true, unfortunately, as it's never touched on in the series itself. Maybe it doesn't need to be? It adds character flavour without the exposition.
Fairly quickly it cuts back to a battle between the blue tanks and a larger tank, with Kusanagi getting involved at the end. It's exciting and frantic. Predictably for an anime opener, it's actually more exciting than anything in the show itself. Honestly I imagine most pre-production meetings in the anime industry go like this:
"Good news, people! We've been given a budget of $1 million to make our science fiction magnum opus! The team working on the opening, I want you to spend $750000 on the opening. Use state of the art animation techniques to create something that rivals Akira in quality. Everyone else? You'll have a tighter budget of $250000 and it needs to stretch over 26 episodes so let's be frugal. Everyone do your best!"
I understand the marketing perspective - catch someone's interest in the first thirty seconds and you'll have it for the remaining twenty five minutes, but still. It's not that the opening gives the expectation that the entire show would be rendered in gorgeous 3D, as that'd be silly, but it is so delicious-looking that when it cuts to cheaply animated digital cels pasted on top of even cheaper, boxy-looking 3D sets that the contrast is jarring.
Actually, on the subject of digital cels...
In the future the colours make me vomit
Digital anime animation was still relatively new at the time. A lot of the digitally produced anime back then had awful colouring. Really bright, super-saturated colours that don't work together especially well. The night scenes tend to fair okay, but it's the day scenes that look far too artificial and day-glo. It's not a massive problem, but it does expose SAC as a product of its time. More recently, most anime artists have learnt to balance their digital colouring well. Of course, some don't...
Track change: 'Home Stay'
Section 9
The new characters who were not present in the films are functional. They fit clear character roles and fit them well. The sniper. The heavy. The techie. There's not much to say and they're never really explored in too much depth either. They're all capable and sure of themselves.
'Returning' from the film are Major Motoko Kusanagi, Batou, Tosuga and Chief Aramaki. However, aside from Tosuga who seems almost identical to his previous portrayal (despite his mullet reaching even more ridiculous proportions), all the characters have received a bit of a softening up. Aramaki flits between stern leader and warm father figure. Batou is a happy-go-lucky bloke's bloke, a million miles away from how he appears in the second Ghost In The Shell film.
And the Major... well, gone is the navel-gazing and soul-searching of her film portrayal. She remains a very intelligent, highly-capable operative (one of my slight niggles with the series is that she seems more physically capable than Batou in combat) but a much more sarcastic, sassy side to her is shown. It's closer to the manga, just without the exagerated female oafishness. That includes the sex.
The Sex
This show is obsessed with sex. Don't get me wrong; the film very consciously used sex appeal in its aesthetic. However, this show takes that and runs with it. The Major's outfit is fucking ridiculous. A leotard and a leather jacket with thigh-high boots. It's the kind of getup that sees the "how to make an outfit sexy but still somewhat believable" and steps right over it, being sure as to take the hugest step possible so the line can get a decent up-skirt look-see.
The Major is constantly using her sex appeal to get out or into situations. She has no qualms with being used as a honeypot to ensnare male victims to complete her mission. It's schlocky female-sci-fi-character scenario planning at its worse, something goddamn Star Trek, the poster-child for science fiction female objectification, graduated out of in the 90s.
On the less insulting side, the Kusanagi's sexuality is also something touched upon. It is heavily implied that she is at least bi-sexual, possibly even lesbian. There's never any real moment of intimacy between her and a man, just her victory-by-seduction 'combat' approaches. However, her affections for women are clearly shown more than once. It's not a focus of any episode, but rather a background element that adds to the character. In a show that often isn't subtle, this aspect is.
The Memory
Aside from Tosuga, who is an ex-cop, all of the members of Section 9 are vets of a war that is often hinted at but never explained. We know the war had some kind of Asian focus due to the large amount of Chinese and Japanese refugees, we also know it happened about a decade ago, but beyond that it's left deliberately vague. What we are shown instead is how it affected modern life. Section 9, for example, was only able to be approved in the post-war panic. A high-tech police force was needed to do the dirty work and the end of the war provided a lot of exceptional out-of-work soldiers for hire.
These members of Section 9 are survivors, simultaneously carrying and forgetting their traumas. When watching the show you do well to remember that no-one in Section 9 is a particularly nice person. They're all bastards, in the end. Though they remain self-sacrificingly loyal to their comrades, willing to risk death to help each other, you get the distinct impression that who they regard as their comrades is a rather fluid concept.
The Tachikomas
Oh fuck this character design right in the ass. Right. In. The. Ass. With an augmented penis loaded with shotgun shells.
Ghost In The Shell's "think-tanks" - autonamous tanks with super-advanced AI. They can climb walls, shoot spiderman-like webs, are equipped with rocket launchers and miniguns, and have thermoptic camouflage. While entirely capable of acting independant, a single user may also inhabit the Tachikoma and pilot it.
Sounds baddass, right? They even look cool with their blue stylings and multiple 'eyes'. Unfortunately, the creators decided that the special ingredient needed to truly complete the design was that they needed the be as annoying as possible. They're meant to have child-like personalities, reflecting their curiosity as artificial intelligences designed to consume information and learn from data. In practice, this means they're given the most animu bullshit voices you ever heard. I'm talking the worst loli character from a nurse-themed hentai you ever heard and making it even more grating. Yeah. That bad.
Even worse is that the Tachikomas end up taking up at least half of the entire series' running time. They have entire episodes dedicated to themselves. But what makes them truly infuriating is that they're the shows single biggest missed opportunity. Had they been executed properly it might have elevated this series to one of the finest in anime history. Instead they drag the whole thing down like an unwanted child from a failed relationship when the mother has fucked off with a new man to the city and won't pay child support, which I guess is their characterisation anyway so go figure.
Track change: 'Run Rabbit Junk'
Stand Alone/Complex?
The show has a central meta-textual conceit in its episode naming format. It utilises the episodic-serial storytelling fusion popularised by the X-Files of having the a few, central "mythology" (dubbed 'Complex') episodes that deal with an over-arching plot peppered in-between the "monster of the week", isolated episodes ('Stand Alone'). The show gets through a batch of these stand-alone episodes before even hinting at the central, over-arching plot. As a narrative technique, this is fine and as old as storytelling itself - build up the world and characters before you build up the great problem they have to face.
As there are strengths to both the episodic and the serial storytelling format, having a mix of both isn't in concept a bad idea. Unfortunaely for SAC, there are two major faults that make the fusion approach seem unsatisfying. Firstly, the pacing is all out of whack. I'll explain what I mean by that later. More damning, most of the stand alone episodes simply aren't very good at all.
Stand Alone
The 'point' of these episodes is often to expand on both the characters and the world. The war that is constantly hinting at but never explained. The political reality of Section 9 existing. International relations. The implications of a cyberised society. Where the various members of Section 9 fit into this. Or, sometimes, just cool ideas and scenarios for combat/detective-work that wouldn't have fitted into the main plot. All good ideas, it's just the show's runners lack the skill to pull any of this off in a way that feels both satisfying in its own right whilst also not making the viewer go "GOD I just want to get back to the main plot already!"
There are two notable exceptions to this. Well, one and a half.
Episode 12, "Tachikoma Runs Away; The Movie Director's Dream", plays like two short episodes edited into one. In the first half, one of the woeful Tachikoma characters (specifically, Batou's personal think-tank) decides to just up and leave to go on a day adventure. It meets a girl and they go looking for the girl's lost dog. Yes. It's shit. However, while outside the annoying machine comes across a cyberbrain (literally a real person's brain in a box, which is what is installed inside cyborg bodies) which sets up the second half of the episode.
This second half is sublime. The cyberbrain is the central mystery; everyone in Section 9 who interfaces with it never comes out. Imagine Neo trapped in the Matrix at the beginning of the third film. For whatever reason, they don't 'disconnect'. Cue Kusanagi diving in herself to discover the cause. The exploration of what is inside the cyberbrain is so simple, yet so heartfelt, that I wondered sadly why the rest of the series couldn't have had more of this particular touch. It is exactly the concepts explored in this half-episode that are the most interesting to me about a futurised world with a blending between the virtual and the reality. This is 'hard' sci-fi, but with a soft touch.
The other episode I particularly enjoyed - episode 16, "Chinks in the Armor of the Heart – Ag2O"* - focusses on Batou. A paralympic boxing silver medalist is suspected of stealing information from a US Navy Base. Batou goes undercover and befriends the ex-boxer (who he's long admired) to ascertain the truth. This episode is successful because it weaves together many different conceptual threads into one package.
- The concept of 'paralympic' in a society with mechanical augmentation.
- Hero-worship and what happens when we suspect our heroes aren't really heroes at all.
- Comraderie and the respect men often find they gain of each other when in combat such as boxing.
- Just how important the notion of self-respect and belief is to every aspect of our lives.
- How suffering emotional trauma can eat away at who we are.
This last point is of special importance, because while the episode focusses on the emotional trauma of the boxer, the real framing comes from Batou's own pain. Deftly handled, it stands as one of the few moments of truly subtle character development in the entire series. All of the central characters of Section 9 are experts of putting their demons behind them and wiping their slates clean when their life demands it. This episode shows that the slate-wiping process isn't easy and some demons get so deep under the skin that they linger stubbornly. It's a concept that is visited only once more in the series' penultimate episode.
*Quiet, NBA-GAF!
Stand Alone: Complex
There is actually a second 'main' narrative thread running thoughout the series, confined to the Stand Alone episodes. The Tachikoma think-tanks, as I've already said, are absolutely terrible characters. However, these are also characters that dig at what the original Ghost In The Shell is all about - at what point does artificial intelligence become so complex that it can be classified as a life form? At what point does it develop a 'ghost'? The developing intelligence and (chiefly) personalities of the tachikomas are focussed on frequently within these Stand Alone episodes.
In a fairly interesting story mechanic, we have Kusanagi who is wary of and actively dislikes the tachikomas' curiosity and "chatter", and we have Batau who identifies with one of the tachikomas, considering it "his" and only ever using it, even giving it special organic oil. It's a nice contrast and sets the stage for the good philosophical consideration that Ghost In The Shell so successfully did.
Except it never does it. In fact, it wastes it. The child-like tachikomas are annoying and only get more annoying as time goes on. What could have been a brilliant side-story is ruined by awful character design and an idiot's approach to descartian philosophy. The real 'meat' of the problem is brought up and dismissed within the space of two minutes in the penultimate episode. It's a completely unsatisfying, grating plot thread that should have either been done properly or not at all.
[end of data sector 01]
Also, this post is about the first series only. I have not watched 2nd Gig. I intend to. Feel free to discuss it in this thread, but please please please use the goddamn spoiler tags.
Preface
I think like a lot of people my age, Ghost In The Shell was one of my very first exposures to 'grown-up' anime. Up until that point I'd been limited to Toonami, showing only Tenchi, Dragonball and Gundam Wing. Then I got my first job and used my first pay packet to pick up Ninja Scroll, Akira, and Ghost in the Shell. I don't think I could have asked for a better introduction into the world of adult-targeted animation.
Ghost In The Shell's amazing mix of action, corporate-political intrigue, philosophical consideration and, yes, sex appeal did a number on my young mind. I think of special note was that all the nature-of-life philosophy actually had depth to it, rather than just a veneer to add to the cyberpunk aesthetic. A few years later, when I was 18, I had the pleasure of attending a screening of the film's sequel, Ghost In The Shell: Innocence, a few months before its actual UK release, straight-to-DVD. It managed to be so different from the original, asking different philosophical questions and not simply re-treading the same ground plot-wise, yet still retain the same tone and high quality. I consider both as among the finest works in animated film history.
At University, I had the chance to read the original source manga for the first film. I was... disappointed. I think the film did the concept and characters much better. I didn't like the light-hearted tone. I thought the artist was poor at drawing action on static pages in a way that wasn't confusing. It wasn't a bad manga by any means, but I think it would have been historically irrelevant were it not for such a fantastic film to have been adapted.
I approached the series fully aware of it being set within its own continuity and of it re-inserting some of the humour of the original manga. It was with a mindset of zero expectations that I began watching Stand Alone Complex.
Track change: 'Inner Universe'
The Opening
The first thing you see when you start to watch the show and it certainly makes an impression. A gorgeously rendered nighttime cityscape pans down and cuts to fast-falling text creating larger text, in an effect reminiscent of The Matrix (which itself was reminiscent of the original Ghost In The Shell film's title sequence). Cut back to the city, this time at street level, and a thermo-optically camoflauged Major Kusanagi is running through the streets, intercut with footage of blue tanks and VTOL jets. All of this is set to a thumping, electronic song with a mixture of English, Latin and Russian lyrics. I think t.A.t.U were really popular at the time or something so it makes sense I guess.
There's actually a bit of storytelling going on in this opening. We are shown a short clip of the Major as a child gripping a toy doll so tightly it breaks. It then cuts to Kusanagi as an adult, living in a capsule room. Rather elegantly, we now know that the Major had cybernetic limbs from a very young age and that either she had difficulty controlling them or they made her so angry she broke her toys. You won't find out which is true, unfortunately, as it's never touched on in the series itself. Maybe it doesn't need to be? It adds character flavour without the exposition.
Fairly quickly it cuts back to a battle between the blue tanks and a larger tank, with Kusanagi getting involved at the end. It's exciting and frantic. Predictably for an anime opener, it's actually more exciting than anything in the show itself. Honestly I imagine most pre-production meetings in the anime industry go like this:
"Good news, people! We've been given a budget of $1 million to make our science fiction magnum opus! The team working on the opening, I want you to spend $750000 on the opening. Use state of the art animation techniques to create something that rivals Akira in quality. Everyone else? You'll have a tighter budget of $250000 and it needs to stretch over 26 episodes so let's be frugal. Everyone do your best!"
I understand the marketing perspective - catch someone's interest in the first thirty seconds and you'll have it for the remaining twenty five minutes, but still. It's not that the opening gives the expectation that the entire show would be rendered in gorgeous 3D, as that'd be silly, but it is so delicious-looking that when it cuts to cheaply animated digital cels pasted on top of even cheaper, boxy-looking 3D sets that the contrast is jarring.
Actually, on the subject of digital cels...
In the future the colours make me vomit
Digital anime animation was still relatively new at the time. A lot of the digitally produced anime back then had awful colouring. Really bright, super-saturated colours that don't work together especially well. The night scenes tend to fair okay, but it's the day scenes that look far too artificial and day-glo. It's not a massive problem, but it does expose SAC as a product of its time. More recently, most anime artists have learnt to balance their digital colouring well. Of course, some don't...
Track change: 'Home Stay'
Section 9
The new characters who were not present in the films are functional. They fit clear character roles and fit them well. The sniper. The heavy. The techie. There's not much to say and they're never really explored in too much depth either. They're all capable and sure of themselves.
'Returning' from the film are Major Motoko Kusanagi, Batou, Tosuga and Chief Aramaki. However, aside from Tosuga who seems almost identical to his previous portrayal (despite his mullet reaching even more ridiculous proportions), all the characters have received a bit of a softening up. Aramaki flits between stern leader and warm father figure. Batou is a happy-go-lucky bloke's bloke, a million miles away from how he appears in the second Ghost In The Shell film.
And the Major... well, gone is the navel-gazing and soul-searching of her film portrayal. She remains a very intelligent, highly-capable operative (one of my slight niggles with the series is that she seems more physically capable than Batou in combat) but a much more sarcastic, sassy side to her is shown. It's closer to the manga, just without the exagerated female oafishness. That includes the sex.
The Sex
This show is obsessed with sex. Don't get me wrong; the film very consciously used sex appeal in its aesthetic. However, this show takes that and runs with it. The Major's outfit is fucking ridiculous. A leotard and a leather jacket with thigh-high boots. It's the kind of getup that sees the "how to make an outfit sexy but still somewhat believable" and steps right over it, being sure as to take the hugest step possible so the line can get a decent up-skirt look-see.
The Major is constantly using her sex appeal to get out or into situations. She has no qualms with being used as a honeypot to ensnare male victims to complete her mission. It's schlocky female-sci-fi-character scenario planning at its worse, something goddamn Star Trek, the poster-child for science fiction female objectification, graduated out of in the 90s.
On the less insulting side, the Kusanagi's sexuality is also something touched upon. It is heavily implied that she is at least bi-sexual, possibly even lesbian. There's never any real moment of intimacy between her and a man, just her victory-by-seduction 'combat' approaches. However, her affections for women are clearly shown more than once. It's not a focus of any episode, but rather a background element that adds to the character. In a show that often isn't subtle, this aspect is.
There is a moment of possible intimacy/sexual tension with Batou in the penultimate episode. I liked this moment very much. It didn't go for the "the main characters of opposite-sex are together and in peril, they must make love" thing. Something lingered, but then it was gone. Or maybe it wasn't, and something happened off-screen, but it doesn't matter. It is left unspoken and all the better for it.
The Memory
Aside from Tosuga, who is an ex-cop, all of the members of Section 9 are vets of a war that is often hinted at but never explained. We know the war had some kind of Asian focus due to the large amount of Chinese and Japanese refugees, we also know it happened about a decade ago, but beyond that it's left deliberately vague. What we are shown instead is how it affected modern life. Section 9, for example, was only able to be approved in the post-war panic. A high-tech police force was needed to do the dirty work and the end of the war provided a lot of exceptional out-of-work soldiers for hire.
These members of Section 9 are survivors, simultaneously carrying and forgetting their traumas. When watching the show you do well to remember that no-one in Section 9 is a particularly nice person. They're all bastards, in the end. Though they remain self-sacrificingly loyal to their comrades, willing to risk death to help each other, you get the distinct impression that who they regard as their comrades is a rather fluid concept.
What really drove this home for me is the episode where the Major disbands Section 9. They all go their seperate ways without even so much as a curt nod or 'goodbye'. They'd been so loyal and friendly with each other because that's what people in the same squad do. The moment that squad ceased to exist that social contract was terminated. They weren't even sad about it. Slightly sentimental, but in a passing sense.
The Tachikomas
Oh fuck this character design right in the ass. Right. In. The. Ass. With an augmented penis loaded with shotgun shells.
Ghost In The Shell's "think-tanks" - autonamous tanks with super-advanced AI. They can climb walls, shoot spiderman-like webs, are equipped with rocket launchers and miniguns, and have thermoptic camouflage. While entirely capable of acting independant, a single user may also inhabit the Tachikoma and pilot it.
Sounds baddass, right? They even look cool with their blue stylings and multiple 'eyes'. Unfortunately, the creators decided that the special ingredient needed to truly complete the design was that they needed the be as annoying as possible. They're meant to have child-like personalities, reflecting their curiosity as artificial intelligences designed to consume information and learn from data. In practice, this means they're given the most animu bullshit voices you ever heard. I'm talking the worst loli character from a nurse-themed hentai you ever heard and making it even more grating. Yeah. That bad.
Even worse is that the Tachikomas end up taking up at least half of the entire series' running time. They have entire episodes dedicated to themselves. But what makes them truly infuriating is that they're the shows single biggest missed opportunity. Had they been executed properly it might have elevated this series to one of the finest in anime history. Instead they drag the whole thing down like an unwanted child from a failed relationship when the mother has fucked off with a new man to the city and won't pay child support, which I guess is their characterisation anyway so go figure.
Track change: 'Run Rabbit Junk'
Stand Alone/Complex?
The show has a central meta-textual conceit in its episode naming format. It utilises the episodic-serial storytelling fusion popularised by the X-Files of having the a few, central "mythology" (dubbed 'Complex') episodes that deal with an over-arching plot peppered in-between the "monster of the week", isolated episodes ('Stand Alone'). The show gets through a batch of these stand-alone episodes before even hinting at the central, over-arching plot. As a narrative technique, this is fine and as old as storytelling itself - build up the world and characters before you build up the great problem they have to face.
As there are strengths to both the episodic and the serial storytelling format, having a mix of both isn't in concept a bad idea. Unfortunaely for SAC, there are two major faults that make the fusion approach seem unsatisfying. Firstly, the pacing is all out of whack. I'll explain what I mean by that later. More damning, most of the stand alone episodes simply aren't very good at all.
Stand Alone
The 'point' of these episodes is often to expand on both the characters and the world. The war that is constantly hinting at but never explained. The political reality of Section 9 existing. International relations. The implications of a cyberised society. Where the various members of Section 9 fit into this. Or, sometimes, just cool ideas and scenarios for combat/detective-work that wouldn't have fitted into the main plot. All good ideas, it's just the show's runners lack the skill to pull any of this off in a way that feels both satisfying in its own right whilst also not making the viewer go "GOD I just want to get back to the main plot already!"
There are two notable exceptions to this. Well, one and a half.
Episode 12, "Tachikoma Runs Away; The Movie Director's Dream", plays like two short episodes edited into one. In the first half, one of the woeful Tachikoma characters (specifically, Batou's personal think-tank) decides to just up and leave to go on a day adventure. It meets a girl and they go looking for the girl's lost dog. Yes. It's shit. However, while outside the annoying machine comes across a cyberbrain (literally a real person's brain in a box, which is what is installed inside cyborg bodies) which sets up the second half of the episode.
This second half is sublime. The cyberbrain is the central mystery; everyone in Section 9 who interfaces with it never comes out. Imagine Neo trapped in the Matrix at the beginning of the third film. For whatever reason, they don't 'disconnect'. Cue Kusanagi diving in herself to discover the cause. The exploration of what is inside the cyberbrain is so simple, yet so heartfelt, that I wondered sadly why the rest of the series couldn't have had more of this particular touch. It is exactly the concepts explored in this half-episode that are the most interesting to me about a futurised world with a blending between the virtual and the reality. This is 'hard' sci-fi, but with a soft touch.
The other episode I particularly enjoyed - episode 16, "Chinks in the Armor of the Heart – Ag2O"* - focusses on Batou. A paralympic boxing silver medalist is suspected of stealing information from a US Navy Base. Batou goes undercover and befriends the ex-boxer (who he's long admired) to ascertain the truth. This episode is successful because it weaves together many different conceptual threads into one package.
- The concept of 'paralympic' in a society with mechanical augmentation.
- Hero-worship and what happens when we suspect our heroes aren't really heroes at all.
- Comraderie and the respect men often find they gain of each other when in combat such as boxing.
- Just how important the notion of self-respect and belief is to every aspect of our lives.
- How suffering emotional trauma can eat away at who we are.
This last point is of special importance, because while the episode focusses on the emotional trauma of the boxer, the real framing comes from Batou's own pain. Deftly handled, it stands as one of the few moments of truly subtle character development in the entire series. All of the central characters of Section 9 are experts of putting their demons behind them and wiping their slates clean when their life demands it. This episode shows that the slate-wiping process isn't easy and some demons get so deep under the skin that they linger stubbornly. It's a concept that is visited only once more in the series' penultimate episode.
As all of Section 9 have gone their separate ways and subsequently been arrested, only Batou and the Major are left. That quiet moment of unphysical intimacy, where Batou observes they both have sentimental hang-ons to remind them they were once human. Batou keeps a weight-lifting regimen, despite not needing to in the slightest. The Major keeps hold of the watch she used to 'celebrate' her final body change into an adult form, always making sure every body after fits the watch. It's such a powerful moment, one of the rare occassions where the series briefly reaches the same level as the film. I wanted more of this kind of thing, I really did.
*Quiet, NBA-GAF!
Stand Alone: Complex
There is actually a second 'main' narrative thread running thoughout the series, confined to the Stand Alone episodes. The Tachikoma think-tanks, as I've already said, are absolutely terrible characters. However, these are also characters that dig at what the original Ghost In The Shell is all about - at what point does artificial intelligence become so complex that it can be classified as a life form? At what point does it develop a 'ghost'? The developing intelligence and (chiefly) personalities of the tachikomas are focussed on frequently within these Stand Alone episodes.
In a fairly interesting story mechanic, we have Kusanagi who is wary of and actively dislikes the tachikomas' curiosity and "chatter", and we have Batau who identifies with one of the tachikomas, considering it "his" and only ever using it, even giving it special organic oil. It's a nice contrast and sets the stage for the good philosophical consideration that Ghost In The Shell so successfully did.
Except it never does it. In fact, it wastes it. The child-like tachikomas are annoying and only get more annoying as time goes on. What could have been a brilliant side-story is ruined by awful character design and an idiot's approach to descartian philosophy. The real 'meat' of the problem is brought up and dismissed within the space of two minutes in the penultimate episode. It's a completely unsatisfying, grating plot thread that should have either been done properly or not at all.
[end of data sector 01]
