Psycho-Pass 14: "Sweet Poison"
They’re finally figuring out what to do with the new intro theme; the graphic novel style works way better than the fragmented glass thing they were trying before.
It’s too bad they’re working these issues out in production, but I guess that’s still better than the alternative.
Near the end—it’s actually kind of a long sequence—we see the central conflict of the series: Tsunemori holding a Dominator and Kogami holding an old-fashioned pistol, on opposite sides of Makishima.
Whatever else, this intro cements Kogami’s position as Main Character.
Episode 14 opens with a pharmacy run by moogles.
It soon becomes a pharmacy run by murder, committed by this incredibly suspicious cosplayer.
And nobody does anything.
A few hours later, the place is cordoned off, in a deliberate callback all the way to Episode 1.
The police van shows up. The guns are unlocked. And…Tsunemori may have experience now, but somehow the Dominator doesn’t seem as trustworthy as it did before. What is she doing here?
Kogami comes up behind her, and understands. Someone else might have laid a comforting hand on her shoulder; instead he gives her a heavy slap on the back.
Whatever else they have going on, they’ve got something else to focus on right now. A normal crime.
Okay, maybe not quite a normal crime.
Kagari says what everyone’s thinking: this is just like Makishima, no? Ginoza points out that it’s probably the helmet. Kagari follows up by finally voicing one of my theories out loud.
Amusingly, in Japanese this was just「クラッキングかな」. Karanomori shuts down that idea in a way that makes me think us viewers aren’t supposed to spend much time on it, and another branch of possible Psycho-Pass universes fades out of existence. Probably. The team is stymied, for now.
Meanwhile, the helmeted figure goes out…and beats a woman to death. And nobody does anything.
And nobody does anything.
This was the most disturbing part of the episode for me. Not the murders in the beginning, and not even beating a woman to death and ripping off her clothes along the way. It was that the crowd just watched. It wasn’t even bystander effect—somehow people thought this was totally fine. They were confused at best. I don’t think they really knew what they were seeing; if anyone tried to think about it they probably decided it was some kind of publicity stunt, and no one was really getting hurt.
I’m not sure whether it scares me more that we could get to a society like that in 100 years, or that it’s possible people would write it off in the same way today.
(On a more practical note, the helpful drone probably should have tried to get the woman to a hospital even if it couldn’t tell why she was injured.)
Ginoza explains that in this society it never even occurs to people that someone might want to hurt them. (Makishima touches on this later as well.) That’s what Sibyl has done, and isn’t that a better way to live?
…as long as it’s true.
Of course Makishima’s the one behind all this. This time I have to look up the book he’s reading.
Iwakami is a modern-day (present-day) journalist, born in the 50s; the book is a prize-winning nonfiction piece about the fall of the Soviet Union. It sounds like it could be interesting but I can’t find very much about it in English.
Anyway, Makishima gets a phone call.
Makishima hints—no, Makishima says straight up that he has a lot more coming than just one-off murders. What’s more concerning is whoever he’s talking to; after the last episode’s twist ending there’s a good chance this is Chief M of the MDDOS. But we don’t know for sure.
Meanwhile, a street gang uses the helmets to pull off a carjacking, giving them access to cases and cases of wonderflonium. Ginoza is forced to split the party to go after the carjackers. Tsunemori watches them go.
This is the cue for Kogami to solve the whole case, with Karanomori’s “goddess of information analysis” help. Here’s our suspect:
I wouldn’t have bothered screencapping this except that it establishes that Psycho-Pass takes place exactly 100 years ahead of its original release in 2012.
As usual, Kogami’s hypothesis is completely correct. They find the culprit’s creepy hate-cave of an apartment, and the secret of the helmets is fully revealed by them working a little too well.
Well, he obviously isn’t Tsunemori, so the helmets must be mimicking the Psycho-Pass of someone nearby. This realization is undercut by the fact that Makishima already explained it earlier. *sigh*
Kogami and Masaoka chase the culprit into a deserted warehouse, with Karanomori setting up drones to cut off his escape routes. And this time
it picks Kogami. Who’s up at a whopping 282.6. Both Enforcers shoot and the culprit goes down. Masaoka:
Kogami: “I’m glad that this thing didn’t turn into an Eliminator.”
This is probably most interesting thing to happen this episode (besides the whole concept of the helmet). There’s a few different ways Kogami could mean this response. The first is a very literal reaction: this criminal might not deserve lethal enforcement, but Kogami’s Psycho-Pass could have spiked up to that level with his violent emotions running high.
But this guy killed someone; even Tsunemori might not mind too much if he ended up getting “eliminated”. (It’s supposedly painless, right?) So the second interpretation is a more practical version of the first: it’s possible that there’s more paperwork involved in a “lethal elimination”, particularly if it turns out that the guy’s Psycho-Pass was somewhere in the 100s. Again, seems unlikely given what he did, but still.
The last, more foreshadowy interpretation is that this was a dry run for what would happen if someone had to shoot Kogami himself. There’s no reason for Kogami to expect that to happen any time soon, but the more I think about it the more likely I think it’s going to come up. …Again.
That’s it for this episode, the “tick” in the tick/tock of plot vs. character episodes. (Or is it the tock? The two-parter finale of arc 1 and then Kunizuka’s special threw this off a bit.) Oh, Makishima does a bit more monologuing at “his” gang before he sweeps the leg on all of them and walks past a truckload of these Magneto-helmets. But surely that’s not too important.
The credits, not content with the opening sequence’s centering of Kogami, fire back by showing various shots of Tsunemori looking pensive. This is not a very strong contender; it feels like they’re focusing on the wrong thing. I miss the first arc credits.
Until next time.