Psycho-Pass - 17

"Iron Heart"

Well some of that was unexpected.

I should probably stop making assumptions about where this series is going because clearly the deductive thinking that got me great results for E7:AO is terrible at theorizing when it comes to anything else. Obviously this isn't the series' problem either, because probably every other blogger and viewer saw a good deal of this coming, word for word. Especially the brains part. I guessed it would be something alive, but not to that extent, and I read at least three other reviews that actually used the terms "brains connected to a system". I've never particularly considered this a very original premise, but it's pretty obvious that originality probably isn't what Gen had in mind when he wrote the series. My lack of familiarity with works like The Minority Report and dystopian literature (the only ones I can think of are Brave New World and 1984 off the top of my head) might have something to do with my difficulty in grasping the direction of the series, but I guess that's fine; at least I get an actual surprise when stuff like this happens.

I'm guessing (or maybe hoping) that most people probably didn't see Toma Kouzaburou coming back the way he did, however; I thought that the Chief would have a connection to Makishima, but I was expecting her to be his mother or something. It's kind of horrible to realize that Sibyl is made up of human brains, but I think it's even more horrible that those brains belong to the self-aware criminals that Sibyl hunts down in the first place. It's corruption on a visceral level and I can't imagine too many of those criminally asymptotic people were all too happy to find themselves part of the machine; literally. Though, if Kouzaburou is anyone to judge by, they probably have all developed a god complex while working as Sibyl, and now they get a sick pleasure off controlling the country. Makishima is right, as we've all realized by now; Sibyl's got to go.

As such, it was sickeningly awesome watching him get away without breaking a sweat (even if she's a cyborg, that was a horrible scene to watch) and rise back as the real antagonist once again. His analogy to Gulliver's Travels (which I've actually read several times; it was a childhood favorite and very interesting to look over again as an adult) and Balnibarbi was quite apt, though I profess that I can't quite recall the actual surgery he refers to. Most of what I remember of Balnibarbi has to do with the one official who is intelligent enough to realize that everyone else is wasting science and uses it to become prosperous among the fools who attempt to use it for ridiculous purposes like making cucumbers regurgitate the sunlight they took in while growing (and I only remember that after the mouth-bladders of Laputa). Of course, that's more or less irrelevant here, but the idea is that in the scene Makishima mentions, opposing officials in that country have their brains cut in half and switched so as to mix their opinions and thus create a more prosperous society in the process... (I did say the series wasn't very original). In a sense, the whole series is framed in a mishmash of literary and dystopian-culture references on purpose, and Gen Urobuchi isn't particularly concerned with keeping that low-profile.

I never doubted for a moment that there was any chance in hell that Makishima would accept Kouzaburou's offer, and really, Sibyl was a bit stupid for even considering that Makishima might do it. He hates Sibyl too much to even think about it and he doesn't care in the least to want to be a part of it, regardless of how thrilling it might be to be god. "I love life too much" is what he tells the Chief, and I really think he does; he firmly believes in the idea that human beings deserve to be more than just sheep, and no cyborg is going to get in the way of that. After all, what good is a system that proclaims to be impartial when in reality it is made up of over two hundred human criminal consciousnesses?

As has been the case from the very beginning, Makishima's real opponent has always been Kougami, who despite the flaws of society is willing to fight to protect it. It's a little scary just how friendly their minute-long conversation was (or rather, how friendly Makishima sounded), almost like it was a call about something small and irrelevant rather than Sibyl itself. I also jumped when Kougami imagined Makishima sitting next to him, and for a second I actually thought he was there. What role Akane will ultimately end up playing in the showdown between these two, you're best off not asking me, but I suspect that her possible status as a criminally asymptotic individual may place her in danger as a target for Sibyl. Whether or not that will be of any importance will just have to wait.