12.19
So Psycho-Pass 2 has recently ended. And after my commending impression of the first episode, this show went off the rails more than any other show this season could do. Yes, you can say that Grisaia or Sword Art Online were worse, but they didn’t have that extra sting of being promised a sequel to a wonderful show. Maybe it was blind idealism getting in the way of seeing what was going on before the beginning. One could hope that Urobuchi being succeeded by Ubukata wouldn’t have been as much of a whiplash as the product turned out to be. One could delude themselves into thinking that it would provide a broader perspective than the first season. But no, we had people in their underwear exploding thanks to stupid cops. We had those same stupid cops murdered over an Angry Birds ersatz. We had the idea of a personified legion taken literally through exposition that only served to make things more nonsensical than they already were. And most of all, we had illegal immigrants dressed up as zebras being burnt alive to the tune of opera music.
The wish of many a Psycho-Pass fan was to have a sequel that would resolve the loose ends like how Akane could fulfill her campaign against the Sibyl System. The first season’s ending was one that promised a better, but still grim future. That there is a light at the end of the tunnel, but you have to step over broken glass to reach that potential. This is usually how Gen Urobuchi works in his shows, rather than the “being everyone is suffering” stereotype that detractors have tacked on to him. While he’s not known for being very subtle in his messages, he makes them clear. That the path to righteousness is an arduous journey, but realizing what is noble and what isn’t is the hardest step on that road. For the same guy who wrote Fate/Zero, he crafted a hopeful message in light of dystopia. Even if the system is oppressing its people, they can’t just fight back through brute force like savages. Being able to attain a better world means not abandoning those ideals and not succumbing to utilitarianism, which while repeated in other Urobuchi works felt the most genuine here.
But this sequel ignores that in favor of reinforcing the grim messages the antagonists like Makishima gave but watered down and with less clarity behind those motives. Instead of one morally gray side fighting a darker gray, it was just assholes beating up other assholes while the main characters could do nothing but watch. This missed the point of the Sibyl System. Despite being an analogue to Big Brother, the first season made efforts to show that it worked as a legitimate governor. The Sibyl System created happy civilians and diminished crime, at the cost of free expression and the right to control one’s own future. It was a dystopia that you could see in real life, and even worse, one that you could see people happily accepting.
Of course, that all gets thrown down the toilet and replaced with a regime that performs bizarre science experiments for no concrete reason and can be brought to hysteria through an old man who refuses to take his medication. The cold logic of the first season’s hierarchy was replaced with backstabbing for backstabbing’s sake. Instead of the officers acting like real people governed by a mechanized authority, the tables were turned. Enforcers were now shooting at civilians without a second’s thought while their superior didn’t know which button to turn it all off. The acts of police brutality committed in the name of Sibyl could make even a Ferguson cop scratch their heads. It made any unsubtle point that Urobuchi had made in the previous season and inflated it into sheer idiocy.
The realization that characters become little more than mindless cogs for Sibyl’s imagination can be seen clearly in Inspector Mika Shimotsuki. Even before the backlash against the season had become widespread, she was always the point of derision among fans for serving little more than a contrarian to Akane’s mission. But instead of acting like a real person who had reason to suspect Akane’s ideals, she became a mad puppet who had complete faith in what the Sibyl System did despite any contrary evidence. To her, the Sibyl System was right because it said so. They could give a single word on her behalf, and she would applaud like Charles Foster Kane. Despite being a minor flaw in comparison to the rest, she still served as the most irritating for her inability to be anything except a strawman.
What Ubukata thinks people are like.
Then there’s Togane, and his derailment into a psychopath after being a seemingly decent replacement for Kougami. The show offers no middle point between those two. One episode, he acts like a regular person. Next, he’s mutilating old ladies inside his trunk. He doesn’t even get a reason to be crazy. He’s just a test tube baby that the Sibyl System made for the sake of having a psychopath on their force, which makes no sense when looking at the Sibyl System’s previous view on deranged individuals and contradicts the original message. And it’s all because it would look cool if they had a Black Butler clone as a villain. Why even have assassins in the midst when you’re an all-seeing eye that can coerce everyone into doing what you want? Did Ubukata even watch the first season? Because it seems from his writing that he wanted to make his own cyberpunk cop show, but had to make do with this instead. His ideas contradict the format and do nothing that hasn’t been previously done.
And in the rare moment when he does something original, we get a man made out of 184 dead kids trying to get some vaguely-described revenge against the Sibyl System. This is supposed to create a dynamic of legion versus legion, and how a law can judge a group of people for what one person does. That would be an interesting concept that could have challenged the show’s themes, but this was all tarnished by execution not seen since that one episode of Umineko. Ubukata’s idea of social satire is having the rich literally eat the lower class. He illustrates how the average human is trapped in their own waste by having Kirito literally trapping a group of people with human waste. I guess when he was writing this, turning these metaphors inside out was supposed to be smart. Admittedly, this is from the same series that gave us Spooky Boogie, so I should allow the show to do some stupid things once in a while. But when they’re churned out episode by episode without any real thought to them besides shock value, it stops becoming a message on society’s woes and is just a guy trying too hard.
I’m not well versed on Ubukata’s previous works, with only a passing knowledge on Mardock Scramble and the like. But through her thumbprint in this season, he changed what was supposed to be call to not lose hope into borderline nihilism. Sure, less named characters died this season, but the existing characters had nothing to do this season. People complained that Yayoi needed more to do last season, and she gets even less here. I’ve heard the rumors that the film will ignore this season, and while it’s believable, I don’t see the point in ignoring this season if none of the characters developed throughout this season to really impact the film’s characterization. Sure, Akane’s now a bit hardened thanks to some betrayals, but I already assumed she would go down that path. Knowing that, the show becomes less of a narrative and more of a halfhearted advertisement. I wanted to like Psycho-Pass 2, and spent every episode wondering when the show would go back to form and be good again. Alas, I have to wait for the movie to wash away the mental scars.