Psycho-Pass – 19

Getting back to basics, Kogami practices loading and unloading a revolver, reminding me a bit of Travis Bickle. But he still isn’t sure of Makishima’s next move, so he borrows Masaoka’s sportbike and tears off, Tetsuo-thru-Neo-Tokyo style, to the home of his mentor, Professor Saiga.

This is an exceedingly quiet episode of Psycho-Pass, even quieter than the last, which was dominated by Kogami’s goodbyes, but it’s also an episode in which the full extent of what Sybil has done to the country comes to light for us he audience. And even though nobody knows what Makishima knows about Sybil, it’s almost as if they sense it—in their guts and in their hearts.

It didn’t occur to me, for instance, that agriculture is completely automated, or that history is no longer studied, but that’s simply because the show hadn’t really turned its gaze on those aspects of its world until now. This is a truly FUBAR world, for all its aesthetic similarities to our own. Most of the population has accepted it, while intellectuals like Saiga retreat to the forest, unable to harm anyone with knowledge.

Of course, being intellectual means you can find ways around the system of control that essentially imprisons everyone else. Take the chat rooms Saiga participates in, hosted by offshore servers. Kogami’s visit proves more fruitful than picking the professor’s brain and saying another goodbye: when presented with the thread “How To Bring Down Sybil In Five Days”, the chat room participants have at it, providing a wealth of diverse ideas.

At first Kogami just sees them as a bunch of nerdy jokes, but as Ginoza says to his worried therapist about maintaining his hue, it’s about how you look at things. So Kogami picks the “joke” he thinks is “funniest” – meaning the plot most likely to fit Makishima’s cynical style.

That is to cause a food shortage that will force the government to interact with the outside world. Once the gates are cracked, people and knowledge will spread like antibodies, nullifying the entire crime coefficient system, and dealing a critical blow to the superiority the powers that be value so highly.

Meanwhile, Akane deals with the fact that Kogami is gone, and that if they ever meet again her orders are to kill him. She deals with it initially with a stiff upper lip, refusing to be depressed. When Shion gets her to open up, Akane voices her worry that because of her freakishly pure Hue means she’s cold and unfeeling.

For a moment there, I thought something was going to happen with those two, which would have been an interesting development considerin how relatively asexual Akane has been portrayed thus far. Her talk with Yayoi in the cafeteria is far less charged, but just as devastating in that they continue to detail everything wrong with the world they live in, that Akane is only just starting to realize.