Recap

Everyone quivers in terror for an entire episode. Except for Kamui, who is too busy trying to drown people in shit. Literally.

I was all excited to further watch this show tear itself apart in the most hilarious way, but sadly, it won’t even grant me that. With the idea that Sibyl, as a collective of many individuals needs to judge itself as an individual if it wants to judge a similar opponent as an individual, Psycho-Pass 2 even has a relatively interesting idea going for it — or at least it would have if the opponent in question actually was a dissociative identity disorder patient or something, and not a poor man’s Makishima Frankenstein named Kirito Kamui. This entire logic the show tries to force down your throat with its incessant pontificating is really only rendered null and void because of one thing: Kirito is, by all means, one man. He has never displayed any signs of being anyone other than the same Kirito Kamui that survived the plane crash — obviously, because brains don’t work the way this season of Psycho-Pass thinks they do.

The fact that Akane thinks Kamui actually has a point only makes the whole thing even more preposterous. Makishima hated the Sibyl System as well, but that never made her forget about the fact that he was a mass-murdering lunatic. In fact, it was Akane herself who argued way back in season 1, that, if Makishima could not be judged and executed by Dominators, he should be captured alive and put on trial, but that idea now seems to have vanished into thin air. In fact, she even starts to consider killing Kamui herself, naturally based on the advice of the imaginary Kogami she now so idolizes. Wasn’t Akane the one who vehemently opposed Kogami going rogue and becoming a killer? Akane respected Kogami until the very end, but she never agreed with his actions. That’s what their entire relationship was about! Yet now she’s blindly following in his footsteps because she’s too weak and too female to have values of her own? Akane never once wavered from her ideals, not even when she saw her best friend executed before her very eyes. Now, however, one of the most endearing female characters in recent anime history is unceremoniously forced out of character simply to show just how eeeeeevil Tow Ubakuta’s new boring, smirking, puppy-killing Villain Sue really is.

I mean, it’s not as if Akane’s Crime Coefficient went up after seeing her grandmother dead. She hasn’t been demoted to Enforcer, so why is Sibyl still taking her off the case when Akane’s Psycho-Pass says she’s still fit for the job? I understand that the whole thing with Sibyl is that it doesn’t play by its own rules, but if that were the case, they should’ve revoked Shisui’s Dominator access ages ago. Sibyl is apparently so dedicated to its own order that it won’t even defy said order when it is abused to its disadvantage, but it will cheat if that means screwing over Akane? Really, if they want to get rid of her so badly, why don’t they just execute her? It’s been shown in season one that Kasei can force a Dominator into its lethal mode even on people whose Psycho-Pass is too low, so what are they waiting for? What is even the point of this entire hare-brained ‘paint her black’ scheme in the first place? This is the Kinoko Nasu school of writing: establishing fixed rules for your universe and then systematically breaking every single one of them.

I must hand it to Ubakuta, though: At the very least, Urobuchi did the very same thing with the whole ‘criminally asymptomatic’ thing. Psycho-Pass 2 seems to take this notion and runs with it, fabricating one poorly thought out situation after another to poke holes into and experiment with the franchise’s formula, but fails to do anything meaningful with it. The only think Psycho-Pass 2 is seemingly trying to achieve is not to expand and improve on its predecessor, but to stretch it, cut it up and toy with it, to poke holes in its fundamentals and to see just how far you can take it and still call it Psycho-Pass. It’s not Psycho-Pass. It’s a sick joke dressed in a mask cut from the face of Psycho-Pass‘s corpse. It’s a patchwork, pseudo-intellectual ghost with an enormous ego and no idea what it’s talking about. Truly, it’s its own enemy, and you may take that very, very literally.

Random Observations

• Why does Kamui despise Togane so much, when his motives up until no have consisted of helping people with high Psycho-Passes? Kamui doesn’t know that Togane is the son of the doctor who screwed him up, let alone that she’s part of the Sibyl System. What kind of beef could they possibly have?

• I didn’t even get to mention the very dumbest thing in this episode: The Crime Coefficients of all the passengers on the train skyrocketing merely because they are stuck on a train. Remember when the show made a really big deal out of people being so used to everything being okay that they didn’t even bat an eye at someone being murdered in public? Tow Ubakuta sure doesn’t.