Psycho-Pass 11: "Saint's Supper"
We return, in medias res, to the scene of the hunt, where Kogami is rescued by figurative deus ex literal machina. His newly-retrieved gun has some helpful advice for him.
Makishima tells the Tunnelminator that his time is up—the MWD40 team has knocked over their single jamming box and will be here soon. The other rhapsodizes about his experiences in war.
*snrk* Pretty sure you need a rose crest for that.
Tunnelminator and Kogami have both shot each other by this point. The latter walks into Kogami’s final trap to a glorious choral rendition of “Ode to Joy”.
I’m not quite sure why, but it does lend the scene some grandeur. I guess it’s just the connection back up to the elegant mansion.
Kogami, mindful of his job as medical personnel, advises Stripy Leggings to get therapy immediately once they get out—his version of the “keep your Psycho-Pass clear” line. Stripes, relieved beyond words, isn’t worried about that right now.
There’s something interesting here but I can’t quite put my finger on it. Although…when did he tell her he was a latent criminal? But maybe it’s on his badge, and she just didn’t have any better choices than to follow him.
Their moment of celebration is short-lived, as Makishima—who hasn’t just fled the premises as I expected—appears out of nowhere to snap handcuffs on Stripes before Kogami passes out.
Meanwhile, Tsunemori and Masaoka have almost found them. They are also incredibly exposed.
If Makishima wanted them dead, he could have shot them both before they even reached Kogami. They’re just not prepared for a hunt where the criminal can shoot back.
But they find Kogami, who’s unfortunately still lucid enough to tell them that someone has taken Stripy Leggings. Tsunemori goes tearing after them.
I don’t exactly blame her for this, but this has basically 0 chance of succeeding. Admittedly, she hasn’t listened to the grim musings of Kagari and Kunizuka about the hunting grounds (because they haven’t had them yet), but this is still someone who took out Kogami. Charging in without backup when you’re the novice on the team is going to get someone killed.
(…oh jeez.)
Elsewhere, it is gamer boy Kagari putting the pieces together as he thinks out loud.
Ginoza is initially shocked by the idea. At first I thought this made him dangerously naïve, but now I’ve pulled back from that a bit: with Sibyl around, this kind of twisted criminal mastermind should be rare. What I want to know is how they can tell that “dozens, no, hundreds” of people have been killed here. Are they using the robot scanner, or is it just a sixth sense?
Masaoka calls for reinforcements, then prepares to go after Tsunemori, having finished Kogami’s first aid. Kogami tries to go with him, and…
…Masaoka gives him a firm headbutt to underscore how bad a condition he’s in. Fortunately, the rest of the crew shows up then…leaving Masaoka free to run off after Tsunemori. “Hold him down!” he shouts as he leaves.
Man, nobody’s staying put today.
Kunizuka scans the area and discovers Tunnelminator’s real CEO name, which I had already forgotten. Her surprise is the most emotion I remember seeing from her, ever.
Kagari doesn’t know what’s got them all worked up. It turns out he doesn’t watch Big Brother TV.
And…here we go.
Wait, what?
I’ve actually been waiting for this, although I wasn’t sure it was going to be Makishima himself. It’s been foreshadowed in some sense the entire show, but particularly every time Ginoza says it’s a done deal whenever someone’s Psycho-Pass is over the limit. It was only a matter of (meta‑)time before they’d confront someone whose Psycho-Pass wasn’t over the limit.
(My other theory for how this would come up was using normal people, unaware of the larger plot, as pawns. Someone told to deliver a specific bag to a specific person as a favor wouldn’t necessarily know there was a bomb in the bag. Buuuut no.)
Tsunemori’s at a loss, but tries to keep the play going anyway. “Police! You’re under arrest!” Makishima already knows this isn’t a real threat, so he introduces himself and explains a bit of his personality.
Though Makishima says quite a bit in this extended confrontation, we actually get very little of what drives him. I think this is the strongest part, that he’s genuinely interested in what people do when given the means and opportunity—potentially not even just in terms of crimes. But it’s still not very specific, and we don’t know how he got this way. He’s not old enough to be pre-Sibyl, but he still has a strong feeling that choices—not just criminality—have been over-circumscribed by this system. And he’s not necessarily wrong about that part.
I actually watched this episode with LEX, the friend who originally recommended Psycho-Pass to me. We talked about how Makishima didn’t seem satisfied with Rikako’s explanation for her “art”; this scene doesn’t explain that dissatisfaction yet. I’m sure Makishima has plenty more time to villain-monologue at us later, though.
Hang on. The number’s going down.
Makishima offers an explanation of what might be going on. He posits that the scan measures some kind of mental health, which is how it can catch latent criminals at 5 years old and also can observe changes in day-to-day mental state. But what that doesn’t cover is a person’s will—if they’re in “perfect mental health” and decide to commit a crime anyway, that won’t show up on the scan.
He also confirms implicitly that this isn’t him hacking the system.
Oh hey, I got the color order right. Also, oh hey, that’s why he has white hair.
I speculated around this point that it was a bluff, that Makishima’s Psycho-Pass was clear because he himself had never committed a crime, and that he managed to believe, really, truly, that that made him innocent, and that that’s what the system was looking for. That would mean he couldn’t actually kill Yuki, because that would be irrevocable in some way—he couldn’t pretend anymore. There was a bit of evidence for that from him mentioning that he couldn’t stand the sight of blood. (Whoops, this was Choe.)
I was clearly wrong about this.
The Big Bad should not be this kawaii.
(He’s not talking about himself, by the way, but the hypothetical person qualified to “judge” him. Since Sibyl can’t.)
Okay, no. Surprisingly low? All right. Falling during a conversation? Suspicious, but sure. But zero? No one is a zero. In practice, no one should even be close enough to zero to round down to zero. This really makes me think something else is going on here.
The most obvious next step goes to what I hinted at way back in Episode 2.
Both of Tsunemori’s friends are half-complimenting, half-teasing Tsunemori about her ability to have such a good score despite supposedly being upset about having screwed up at work. This could just be idle chitchat (and again, worldbuilding), but given where I expect the show to go, it’s probably a hint that the Psycho-Pass doesn’t really measure mental state, or at least not in all cases. The system currently needs Tsunemori, and therefore she’s going to stay light blue even after a night like last night.
The conclusion, in this line of thought, is that the system needs Makishima, or thinks it does, and therefore he’s going to stay “pure white” no matter what he does. That goes against Makishima’s own theory, which is also something I had considered, but I still can’t get past the zero. Zero just shouldn’t happen.
Despite me even choosing to call it out in the previous episode, it took a reminder from Lex to get the other half of this:
“I wonder if those people with the clearest Psycho-Pass Hues are always people like her [Tsunemori].”
No. No, they are not.
I didn’t talk about Tsunemori struggling with the shotgun. This was foreshadowed in Episode 7 with Kogami’s sparring, where he says that he’d hope Tsunemori never ends up in a situation where she has to kill someone. I can’t really fault her actions here—this is her first time in a real situation like this. I can’t honestly say for sure I’d do any better, even knowing that my friend’s life was on the line. I hope I would, but I don’t know.
What else is there to say? How do you comfort someone who just saw their best friend killed in front of them, and they had a non-hypothetical chance to stop it?
(This is the death that hit me hardest in the show so far, because Yuki—feels like a bit much to call her “Stripes” now—was both just a bystander and also a character we got to see acting normally, not to mention one of Tsunemori’s few everyday connections outside her work.)
(Gosh, what’s she going to say to their other friend?)
And on top of this, as if this wasn’t enough, Tsunemori grew up in the age of Sibyl, the age where criminals can be identified, analyzed, and contained, and where aptitudes are tested and future opportunities are decided from an early age. But…
If criminality isn’t what Sibyl is measuring, what is it? What else could it be wrong about?
Fairy tale wa
saki shinda mitai…
Thus ends the first season of Psycho-Pass.