“They say that fools learn from experience, while the wise learn from history. I hope you’re not a fool.”
Summary
Akane, Gino and their regular team of Enforcers are sent to a factory which mass-produces drones, investigating an “accident” in which a worker was mutilated by a rouge drone. While the boss wants to dismiss the case and get back to production, further probing has the team find out that one worker who is subject to bullying as a method of maintaining the Psycho-Passes of others has a cloudy Hue himself, with his victimising matching up with both the murder dates and his Hue fluctuations.
Impression
“He said he wants to be a detective rather than a hunting dog. But the look in his eyes…was that of a carnivore who had cornered his prey.”
I found that there was much for me to muse on this episode, and despite it being pretty late already over here I’ll do my best to keep sentences coherent. The times when I wake up the next morning and realize that a draft paragraph was just a messed up drabble xD So first off, today’s premise took place at a factory – where a random guy died after being attacked and dissected alive by a drone he was working on. That is…somewhat disturbing, though reasonable in line with the kind of society the show takes place in. Or more specifically, Episode 1. It must be a really harsh life in a factory like that – you can’t de-stress very often because there’s no internet and it’s in an offline location to stop hacking of the drones, meaning that apart from breaks and sleep, its all constant working on the production line. I know that as a trade-off, there’s already a lower quality of life in some working class cases that should really be expected of a society that runs on high technology, but division of labour in our world today isn’t terribly exciting already, and with no recreation you can expect Psycho-Passes to get heavily clouded. Clearly, the boss Goda is only worried about the economic disruptions, and I saw that his priority was to dismiss it as an incident because it’d disrupt the production line and in the long run, his paycheck.
It’s a cruel, cruel world to be in, especially if you’re the sole victim of workplace bullying. Surely…there are other ways to de-stress other than taking everything out on a random fat guy for a year, which seems completely unfair in the first place as well as morally, really cruel. Even Haruyuki didn’t get that much trouble. In effect that’s just sacrificing one person’s life for the sake of the majority…and I find myself really mixed as to whether that’s supposed to be a good thing or not. Dammit, that sounds like something Akane would say. In this case utilatarianism (greatest happiness for the greatest number) is good from an economic viewpoint, but I can’t see how you can justify throwing away one person’s life to save the rest. If you can’t maintain all the Psycho-Passes to a point, then there’s something wrong with the system.
The guy whose Psycho-Pass is yellow-green (his name is Kanehara apparently) turned out to be the perpetrator, and it clicked as soon as Masaoka mentioned that he had been the victim for around the same time as when the killing started. What probably happened was that one by one, he went around killing the people that bullied him the most, taking advantage of the fact that it was a dangerous workplace and that the boss was just after production levels. You really get an idea of how twisted it is when the guy’s Psycho-Pass actually gets BETTER after he kills someone – maybe feeling that he’s gotten rid of one more tormentor. He probably won’t be killed, and instead put into therapy, but this shows the effects of how someone’s whole life can be ruled by a single colour. You can’t justify a response to bullying through murder, but when the bullying risks your own life by clouding your Psycho-Pass…you’ll be targeted and locked up. What a fucked up place this is.
Anyway, I haven’t talked about Akane much yet, so let’s look at her decision on how to do her job. Evidently, Gino has labelled her a fool that only learns through experience, hinting that there’s something about the Enforcers that we’re slowly starting to get. While she’s decided to side with the Enforcers, she’s clearly noticed the reckless methods used by Shinya – his kind disposition towards the murderer changed instantly when he realized who he was. It might just be me, but I’m starting to see a really predatory nature deep down in Shinya – and Akane said so herself, that he seemed more like a hunting dog right before he shot both Kanehara and the drones. Gino obviously knows this, and he’s had a bad past with Masaoka himself, resulting in him seeing the Enforcers as tools instead. So it’s a split between the two methods: the way Inspectors go about their legal, slow procedures, and the Enforcers who act impulsively and instinctively, getting the job done. It might be really rash now, but later when shit goes down maybe that’s the kind of attitude needed to survive.
Akane just… She was said to be a top student yet she hadn’t shown any skill that convinces me of that title. She’s so clueless about the system and all she do is keeps asking a question every time. She’s pratically useless in this ep. She’s just there so Masaoka can explain Sibyl System to us, the audience. Please prove me wrong ep 4.
Give me more Yayoi and Shion, please! Those lesbian more interesting than her.
Perhaps Sibyl’s analysis of Akane didn’t factor in her record as a top student but maybe instead as the bridge between Inspectors and Enforcers, helping the latter act like proper detectives and establishing trust. But I agree, for now she serves as the question bank for the viewers, but hopefully she’ll start to get more involved soon.
As for Ep 4…I want something much like what Ep 1 was. I was really impressed by the opening episode, and it’s actually slightly disappointing that we haven’t revisited the wild, dark excitement that was Ep 1.