Psycho-Pass - 22 [End]

"Perfect World"

Social commentary, right down to the very end.

I'm sure there's a lot of people who are going to be unsatisfied with this ending, and I can understand why. After all, almost nothing got resolved the way we expected it to, and in the end, everything that Akane and the others experienced ultimately came to nothing, didn't it? Sybil is still around, Akane took Ginoza's place, we never find out what happened to Kougami; it's a very open ended finale.

But somehow, it all fit for me. The thing is, this series, like all Urobuchi Gen works, are really mouthpieces to his ideals and philosophy, and, that being the case, there was no way Psycho-Pass was going to escape that in its final episode. In a sense, this isn't a story about characters. It isn't really about Akane or Kougami or even Makishima. It's a story about society, and what parallels the viewer can draw to his or her own world. In particular, Urobuchi is interested in driving a point home to his Japanese audience, whose society is ominously alluded to here.

I think to some extent it's safe to say that Urobuchi is lampooning Japanese society and politics with this series, and because it's a critique, giving its characters a fulfilling end may have seemed to him like it would cheapen his message. If this is an ongoing problem in society, something that he sees as still well-established, then it would make more sense to end on a note of indignation, of cyclical conflict. The fight isn't over, for Akane or for society, and until humans reach that point where they can face the Sybils of the real world, where they can overcome these unjust systems and find a better solution, all they can do is to do what they can while within the system, and apply the law where they can. As Akane herself says, "The law doesn't protect people, people protect the law", which means that it's up to humans to decide when those laws are no longer worth protecting. In the case of Psycho-Pass, the time was not yet ripe for humans to overthrow their laws, and so the cycle begins again, and Sybil awaits the next great threat to its authority.

In terms of the actual events, I suppose I'm pretty satisfied with the way things went. Urobuchi managed to get his bit of Christ imagery into Makishima's death, and Kougami followed through in destroying his rival the way he was always meant to. Akane had to mature into a true Inspector, and in the end, Ginoza followed the footsteps of his father. There wasn't much closure between the Kougami-Akane relationship on any level, and it's unclear if Kougami becomes what Makishima was, but the ambiguity in this case allows the viewer to make his or her own connections on the matter. I suppose in the end the narrative point is that the Sybil System is a necessary evil, and that it's going to take more turns of the wheel to get it to end. It feels pretty characteristic of Urobuchi to me; he's the master of asking questions, of stimulating discussion, but like most philosophers, he doesn't really have an answer, just an ideal that may someday be attainable.