“Safe stress care. Taking you to a world without suffering.”
Summary
After confirming the use of plastination in the human specimen under the fountain, Gino bans Shinya from continuing with the case, prompting Akane to ask Shinya directly about the death of Sasayama and his eventual demotion to an Enforcer. Elsewhere, Makishima converses with a man over the subject of Rikako’s father, Oryo Rouichi while unknowingly, Rikako herself has captured both Yoshika and her friend and are readying them for the plastination process.
Impression
I feel pretty sorry for Shinya after learning his back-story directly from him – there’s certainly more to it than what the CID officially have as a record. Even more so when we’re freshly reminded about the process of plastination, where first the body is dismembered and cut open, with chemicals then used to turn them into preserved human specimens. The protein within the body is converted into plastic, and so the final product is this grotesquely warped creature that used to be a human being. Knowing that Shinya’s subordinate Sasayama had to go through all of that, and had to experience the dismembering alive was really painful to me, and despite all of his faults no-one deserves that kind of death, especially when Shinya thought that he was actually a decent guy deep down. What was most ironic was the bullcrap that was placed on the hologram that hid his body, apparently taking him to a “world without suffering”. Man, the justifications used by some of these people are hilariously crude. It does explain why Shinya ended up raising his Crime Coefficient though – as he wanted the same misfortune to befall the guy who did that to Sasayama, he ended up with latent criminal thoughts, ending his Inspector career. His CC may return to normal if his revenge is carried out, but at the end of the day, the Sibyl System was his downfall; the system designed to NOT make people’s lives full of suffering deemed him dangerous – no matter how much evidence and research Shinya does on the Specimen Case, who would ever credit the “delusions” of a latent criminal?
It’s as clear as day that the mastermind pulling all the strings in both cases is Makishima, who decided to sponsor various people to stir up mischief in society. His conversation was slightly hard for me to follow the whole way through, but I did get the concept of Eustress Deficiency being the side effect of excessive stress care, which seems to be a mechanism designed to control stress levels and prevent clouding up of Psycho-Passes. Stress ended up being a hindrance with constant check-ups, and Makishima basically highlighted more issues with the society they live in – e.g. life span is actually decreasing despite tech advancing. The idea of an abuse of the stress care system (leading to addiction) was seen in Rikako’s father too, who had a fucked up ideology of improving humanity that died out when Psycho-Pass measurement became standardised.
Compared to last week, the shock value over the whole theme of plastination in this arc has died down a bit, but it’s still a gruesome thing to learn more about as well as actually glimpse a bit of the process it involves. Like father, like daughter seems to be the best way to put Rikako’s situation now – it seems that her inspiration was her father, who is described as having the talent for drawing vivid nightmares out of girls’ bodies. How charming. I actually find the daughter much more psycho though – the father only ever drew them on a canvas, while here there was even a scene of Rikako talking to the dead corpse of Yoshika, who was strangely in the same bed as her. To complete her father’s unfinished works may be one objective, but while setting up Yoshika’s plastination I couldn’t help but get the cold feeling that she was doing it purely for fun – because she gets a kick out of cutting apart then wrongly putting back together dead preserved corpses. I have no idea how she’s even passing her Psycho-Pass evaluations right now, but it’s very possible in a school where she seems to have a lot of power – and the students themselves don’t suspect her and can’t be bothered to investigate, as they don’t want to involve themselves in anything shady.
All the time, I’ve had the suspicion that Yoshika would be plastinated, but her friend (whose name doesn’t really matter, does it) brings a whole host of possibilities that I’d really rather not explore – but I have this sinking feeling that Rikako’s mention of a schoolgirl friendship motif means that she’s going to plastinate them both together into one being…
