Kogami’s a little upset that Tsunemori’s getting all the attention when he’s supposed to be the main character. He had his mysterious backstory shown in lieu of the usual title sequence in the first episode, and he’s in the regular title sequence, and yet I haven’t been paying him enough attention. He takes out his frustration by practicing martial arts on a punching bag, then strikes a sexy pose.

Still, this is just small potatoes compared to his Unfinished Business. He goes over to his Conspiracy Board and stares at one of the photographs there, making him so mad that he crushes a lit cigarette in his hand, just because he can.

Someday, someday he’ll kill Sasuke’s Brother.

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Here we are with Psycho-Pass episode 3. A reminder that these will no longer appear on the home page of my blog; you can find them under the “Psycho-Pass watchthrough” tag.

The opening titles reveal…

Hey, Tsunemori and Ginoza are actually working as partners! Driving to go investigate a crime scene. The music is fairly light as they drive up to the factory, and I think my NCIS comparison is sticking. Tsunemori mentions eagerly that she’s getting along better with the Enforcers. Ginoza’s less than impressed.

Pause for analysis! Ginoza specifically tells Tsunemori she has the choice to learn from her own experience or from history, and I’m immediately wondering what “history” this is. Have Enforcers gone rogue in the past? (Almost certainly.) Is there something specific Tsunemori should have looked up beforehand, or should look up when she gets back? (Maybe.)

Did something happen to Ginoza specifically? Perhaps, perhaps not. (But as we see later in the episode: yes, absolutely.)

The six of them go in and meet the smiling bureaucrat who runs the place, who gives them the basic facts and establishes that they’re going to be filming a horror movie here later.

I’m docking a few points for this being incredibly unsubtle, but it ends up serving multiple purposes: it establishes that the poor live-in (?) workers really don’t have any source of entertainment, and it means the MNMNM crew can’t use their fancy guns with Psycho-Pass-based safeties. It’s not just that they can’t call for help.

Smiley McManager is perfectly polite, but not particularly helpful—he’s not going to just shut down his plant so the Inspectors can scan everyone properly. The show makes sure to color him unfavorably, though, by having him deliberately overlook the bullying going on in the company cafeteria. He explains to Tsunemori and co that it’s better for morale when there’s someone around to take the beatings. Maybe it’s even Sibyl’s doing!

Given that he’s just trying to get Tsunemori off his case, I don’t actually buy his reasoning here, but it’s still a valid idea. After all, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, right?

(See also Asimov’s “The Evitable Conflict”, part of the I, Robot collection.)

Tsunemori’s not convinced, but more importantly neither is Main Character Kogami. He throws some serious shade and goes to help the victim up.

Tsunemori’s very pleased by this.

The team finds a surprisingly nice conference room to strategize in. Since the only character that’s been named so far is the bullying victim, he’s the one who has suspicious Psycho-Pass scores on his record. (Which is also what they were bullying him for!) It’s pretty clearly him, says Masaoka.

Ginoza rubs his forehead once more and then loses his cool

dropping a small bit of information for us along the way: they are not exactly crime investigators, as such. They are Psycho-Pass enforcement. If someone commits a crime but does not disturb order and does not ruin their own mental health, that’s technically not part of their job.

(I’m extrapolating and exaggerating but again I’ve seen these themes before.)

Tsunemori tries to save the situation by asking for a private word in the hallway, but then she blows up at him in return, finally asking if he has something against Masaoka.

Yes. Yes, he does.

Tsunemori is taken aback, but stands her ground, firing a second salvo by saying that after a week on the job she’s better at working with the Enforcers than he is. Ginoza throws some shade of his own before leaving her to it.

Kagari finds it hilarious that Tsunemori just asked Ginoza about Masaoka straight-up.

The Enforcers put Kogami’s plan into motion. Tsunemori doesn’t actually know what the plan is, other than to get the suspect out into range of their wifi repeaters so they can scan him with their guns. She checks to make sure Kogami is just going to talk to the guy.

“Yeah.”

Kogami finds our suspect in the bathroom, eating alone to avoid further bullying (*sad*), and…well, “talk” isn’t the word I’d use.

It turns out Kogami’s plan is to threaten the suspect’s very livelihood by saying he’s going to post on Twitter that the guy is “a killer”, and worse, “whose Psycho-Pass is clouded”. Given Twitter dogpiles these days, that would probably work. His reasoning is that if the guy’s guilty, he has to try to kill them!

It’s Tsunemori’s turn to be Not Happy. “WTF kind of plan is that?” she shouts as they run down the stairs away from the Repurposed Death Robots. But Kogami is smiling.

The important point here is not that crime is a life-or-death activity that requires a life-or-death response, but that Kogami is enjoying it. In a “regular” cop show this would just be hubris, but here it’s a reminder that he’s still a “latent criminal”. Getting your highs from life-or-death situations certainly isn’t conducive to a good Psycho-Pass score.

(In order to make sure we don’t miss this crucial point, Tsunemori says it explicitly just before the closing credits.)

This plan, of course, suffers from the same problem as the first episode: putting someone in more and more stressful situations can make them snap, even when they would have been fine otherwise.

It’s people who think like Kogami who try to use torture as a means to extract information or confessions, even though studies have shown (citation needed) that torturing someone who’s innocent will just result in a false confession to get the torture to stop. This isn’t exactly the same situation, and he appears to have been right this time, but I’m still not sure it’s a fair test.

But he is right this time, and Kagari and Kunizuka ride in on their motorcycle with a gun and a router, and Kogami shoots the killer—

—in stun gun mode.

Even as he’s trying to kill them with Repurposed Death Robots.

I’m not sure Sibyl’s done a good job of evaluating human threat levels. (Take that, machine-learning enthusiasts.)

Just for kicks the robots keep going, and so the gun levels up a few more times and Kogami shoots them both. Kagari gleefully cheers the explosions, Tsunemori’s a little disturbed that they’re all so into this, and Kunizuka—

Hm. We need a Kunizuka episode at some point. Just being the taciturn one isn’t giving me enough to make fun of.

One thing’s for sure, though…

Tsunemori and Ginoza are going to have some awkward conversation from here on out.

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Compared to the previous two, this wasn’t a very compelling episode. I think my main takeaway was that a Psycho-Pass reading is not a complete indicator of crime, since Kanehara (okay, I’ll finally name the victim/killer) never dipped below a yellowy green. It’s possible the more advanced Sibyl-over-LTE system they have out in the open would have been able to detect something, but still. The other point on this was what I mentioned before: their job is to preserve order according to the Crime Coefficient scores.

A minor side point is that this is hardly a perfect society: these workers are still working long hours with who-knows-what kind of vacation or sick days, and that’s probably all they can do because the system controls everyone’s choices. Tsunemori and her friends—even her “blue-collar” friend—can go have lunch on a balcony cafe in the city, but somehow I don’t see these folks doing that.

Finally, why didn’t Kagari just shoot the guy himself? We know the Dominators work from a distance, and don’t tell me he’s not good enough to aim from a motorcycle.

Oh well, whatever.

Psycho-Pass is available on Hulu. (It’s probably available elsewhere too, but Hulu is where I’m watching it.)

This entry was posted on April 13, 2017. Tags: Psycho-Pass, Psycho-Pass watchthrough