Ghost in the Shell: Stand-Alone Complex (S1E4-6) (continued)

Section 9 does its own investigation into Nanao, just in case there's something that the police missed (or failed to record due to conspiracy shenanigans). A series of interviews of former schoolmates, activist buddies, coworkers, and criminal contacts paint a picture of a highly intelligent, highly motivated individual who never quits pursuing a goal once he's got his mind set on it. Most of them also seem to have liked him at least decently well on a personal level, with his ex-coworkers at Serano all resenting their employer on his behalf (on top of all the usual reasons for cyberpunk workers to hate their megacorp employer).

Meanwhile, they have their team bruiser, Batou, posted on a rooftop across from Nanao's apartment, where he keeps an eye both on Nanao and on the police officers tapping his comms from next door.

Section 9 is keeping their bases covered. It seems that in recent times, Nanao has resorted to running a spam botnet to keep a roof over his head (or at least, that's what he pretends). He's spent most of his time since Batou started watching him sitting at his desktop and sending spam; no viruses or other malware other than the spambots themselves as far as S9's eggheads can tell, strictly aboveboard annoying crap.

Meanwhile, Kusanagi goes to access her "external memory device." Which she apparently left with some hot lesbians who she spends the night banging in between data-scraping sessions.

I kinda have mixed feelings about this. And, I'm starting to understand The Discourse about this show's sexualization of Kusanagi a little better.

...

When it comes to cheesecake in media, and deciding whether it's the good kind that every rightthinking sex-positive intersectional feminist is ethically required to love or the badwrong fanservice kind that only knuckle-dragging neckbeards can stand, there are two questions to ask.

First: does the sexiness actually make sense for that female character in these circumstances, or is it being imposed on her by factors external to the story?

Second: is sexiness an entry requirement for female characters to exist in the work, in a way that it isn't for male characters?

To the first, I'd say that what I've seen of GitS:SAC passes with flying colors. Kusanagi is a brazen, unfiltered transhuman-ubermensch archetype, and the hypersexuality is part of who she is. Yes, she would dress like that on the job, and her cyborg body is armored and insulated enough that there are only social downsides to doing so. Yes, she would leave a pile of hotties for herself to cannonball-jump into at every location she's likely to spend free time in.

To the second, unfortunately, I'm starting to agree with the critics. It's not just that Kusanagi is the only woman on the Section 9 roster; it's that Kusanagi's voluptuous blonde background decorations are the only other women in this entire investigation. The witnesses being interviewed are all men. The cops from the rival agency are all men. The suspect is a man. The potential victims in the corporate and police leadership positions we've seen are all men. This is a world where women *have* to fill titillating roles and do not exist outside of them, with men as the default in those roles' absence.

In short, the problem with GitS:SAC's treatment of women isn't Major Kusanagi. It's everything besides Major Kusanagi. Which is preferable to the opposite, to be sure, but it's still pretty annoying.

The data girls do live in a pretty cool building though.

So that's nice, at least.

...

Anyway, Kusanagi's archive binge threesome includes a review of camera footage from the first-ever appearance of the Laughing Man. And also, seemingly, his only meatspace appearance to date. His initial cyberattack against Serano Genomics was accompanied with a physical, in-person attack on the company's top executive. As in, the Laughing Man actually grabbed the dude and put a gun to his head before fleeing the scene, relying on his cyberwarfare tricks to throw off the pursuing police.

There were a couple of older poor people without ocular implants or AR brain chips who saw behind the logo. But only in brief glimpses, so a simple mask and hood were sufficient to stop them from seeing anything that could be used to identify him.

The ransomware/devaluation attacks started right after the failure of this attempt at a forced confession. The Laughing Man moved on to the other companies after he'd done all the damage he could to Serano without having to change tactics again.

Of course, the masked gunman might not have been the tech-genius behind the Laughing Man. In fact, it seems most likely that he wasn't, since the superhacker would have probably wanted to stay at their computer to actively manage the AR tricks during the operation. But he's still their best lead besides the circumstantial evidence implicating Nanao.

And of course, just like in this most recent incident, that original grass-touching terrorist venture involved trying to force someone important to confess an unknown crime to the public. Although, once again, if the Laughing Man's techniques have been proliferated then it's entirely possible that someone else is just copying his MO and logo along with his software.

On a hunch, Kusanagi gets Aramaki's permission to be at the event that the police commissioner is supposed to be at when the time runs out. I would have thought Aramaki would want his top field agent to be there at that time anyway, but apparently she needs to convince him for some reason. Meanwhile, Section 9's interviews of Nanao's acquaintances yield surprising fruit when they find subtle differences between the new answers and the old ones on record, with the old ones subtly altered to be more positive and more generic than the new without it being too obvious. Closer inspection reveals this to be down to very delicate hacking work, with the old files having been doctored after the fact.

Well, this revelation comes just a couple hours before the event. And it means that either Nanao is definitely guilty, or that someone - either the police themselves, or the real Laughing Man doing some 4D chess play - put a lot of effort into making him appear so. In either case, Aramaki figures this is grounds to arrest Nanao and hold him for at least a few hours, thus protecting the commissioner from him or him from a potential framejob.

And, well, it looks like Nanao was guilty. Sort of.

Nanao was not the Laughing Man who just pulled that stunt three days ago. However, he was the Laughing Man (or at least, one of several Laughing Men) who terrorized the company that screwed him over a couple of years ago. And, since someone else had the Laughing Man issue a threat, Nanao figures that he might as well play his part to help ensure it gets carried out.

And then it all gets fucking stupid when Batou and his backup storm into Nanao's apartment to arrest him, and we learn that they've been using web-connected cameras to keep tabs on the guy who is notorious for hacking into surveillance technology.

Nanao hasn't been in this apartment in days. He left a spambot running on his computer, and a blow-up doll on his chair just to mock them when this inevitably happened.

Really, Section 9?

No basic video-cameras even as a backup? All your surveillance was done via Internet Of Things at all times? When dealing with a fucking Laughing Man suspect?

This show came out in the early 2000's, but this feels like 1990's hacker-hysteria era magical thinking. Maybe it's drawing heavily from a scene in the manga for this part.

Anyway, the episode ends with Nanao crowing about how now history will remember him as the true Laughing Man (oh wait, maybe he wasn't involved until now then? Maybe he's just been incriminating himself in all these subtle ways just to get famous and take credit for crimes he didn't really commit), and also activates the modular virus he's been sending out in stages to all the cops at the event Kusanagi is observing. Apparently they haven't been checked for those backdoor-ridden eye implants yet, despite the everything. Kusanagi somehow can tell that he's doing this, and warns her colleagues. I'm very confused about how any of this works now.

Like I said, this storyline starts showing its warts after the midpoint of S1E5.

Episode 6, "Meme," starts with another twist. Namely, that while Namao was being used as a patsy, it wasn't by the police.

The true Laughing Man - or at least, the one responsible for the current incident - hired him to do this. And now he shows up at Namao's true location and kills him, so that the fact he wasn't the true mastermind will not be extracted from him. When Batou and Togusa eventually kick in the door to Namao's real lair, they find his corpse sprawled out on the floor with a smile on its face. Apparently, all Namao ever really wanted - as an activist, an inventor, or a criminal - was to be famous, and he died thinking he'll be remembered as the true Laughing Man.

That's nothing compared to the shit tornado that starts blowing at the event Kusanagi is shadowing the commissioner at, though.

At first, the attack takes a frightening but somewhat underwhelming form. Most of the cyborg cops at the event actually *do* have enough compartmentalization in their cyberbrains to protect themselves from viruses and the like (though I'm still very, very sceptical about how much they're over-relying on networked devices when they know they're up against the Laughing Man, but still, better than I thought). The lone exception is an officer who happened to have a compromised dummy hard drive connection, and is promptly taken over by the virus and prompted to kill everything around him while screaming "let the purge begin!" That's got to be a reference lol. Anyway, since only one guy failed his saving throw, Kusanagi easily subdues him with the help of his fellows, and she takes a copy of the virus for the Section 9 eggheads to take a look at and try to devise a vaccine.

And then, while everyone is breathing a sigh of relief and Section 9's antivirus people are busy with the first brain-hack, a crowd of random people from outside push passed the distracted guards and storm into the building. Most of them are armed. Half of them are claiming to be the Laughing Man. All of them are trying to kill the Commissioner. Someone drives a car through the wall and tries to plow into him. Several others fire guns, one of them hitting. Kusanagi plays through a stressful FPS escort mission trying to get the wounded commissioner to an ambulance while more infected(?) civilians pour in through every door and window and pop around every corner with weapons at the ready.

When people with high-powered body augs like the brute in the screenshot above start appearing among the assassins, Section 9 is forced to send tachikomas (the big, heavily-armed spider robots) to reinforce her. It's an urban combat situation.

To Kusanagi's credit, she manages to get the Comissioner to the ambulance (though not before he takes a second bullet from a well-placed sniper. The dude is incredibly lucky that neither shot hit anything vital).

The worst part is still to come, though.

Thirty-some people are arrested, either for actively trying to kill the Commissioner or doing very suspicious shit around the periphery. They're tested for viruses, hacking, nanites, every mind control vector there is. They appear to be clean.

When interrogated, each suspect tells a unique, verifiable story about how they came to decide to assassinate the Commissioner. Most of them thought they were working alone, or in small groups. Some of them decided to take on the alias "Laughing Man" for themselves, while others just saw the Laughing Man's ultimatum on TV and thought they should lend him a hand for their various reasons. Either there's some incredibly subtle next-gen meme virus taking people over, or the Laughing Man is just an unbelievably effective stochastic terrorism apparatus
(or a "stand alone complex" as they call it in-universe, for dat phat title drop).

That said, Kusanagi had to fight to get a copy of that initial rage virus saved before someone else could hack into the victim's cyberbrain and wipe it. Meaning that there is still at least one mastermind hacker (possibly the same one who gave the ultimatum and used the AR logo two episodes ago, possibly not. Possibly the original Laughing Man from years ago, possibly not. Possibly the same man who murdered Nanao, possibly not) alive and active. Even if the rioters and assassins really were acting of their free will (which I doubt, but even if they were), there's still a very dangerous superhacker to deal with.

The final sequence has Kusanagi and Aramaki visiting the Commissioner in the hospital, and also informing him that in the wake of his medically-neccessitated retirement Section 9 will be taking over this entire Laughing Man case. They also ask him if he's suuuuuuuure there isn't some information he'd like to share with them. He says there isn't, but his face says otherwise.

Whatever it is the Laughing Man who acted in episode 4 wanted him to confess to, he still ain't doing it. Even when they threaten to look into his financial relationship with Serano.

Aramaki still thinks that the police were plotting some sort of charade or black flag yesterday. Just, it got buried under the intervention of someone else. Possibly multiple someone elses. For now, the official story will be that the people they arrested were all brainhacked by mad scientist Nanao before the latter was murdered by a treacherous accomplice. Hopefully, that'll lure the enemy into a false sense of security. Kusanagi thinks that's wishful thinking; no way in hell was this just stochastic. There's something much weirder and more sinister going on behind that bizarro-awesomeface and its Catcher In the Rye quote.

Also, when Kusanagi does deign to wear a proper uniform she fucking *rocks* it holy shit.

As they leave the building, Kusanagi spies people wearing Laughing Man paraphernalia everywhere. Children. Adults. Hospital visitors. Passerby. She doesn't act like this is an imminent attack, though, or even like this is a message, which is weird. I guess maybe the Laughing Man has gotten a big cultural following since the initial incident? Or...maybe that logo was a preexisting meme that the original Laughing Man appropriated? I don't know. In either case, I think the show should have established this before now, because without additional context I feel like these people are just asking for trouble wearing that stuff in public the day after the attack.

Even with that unexplained weirdness, it's a pretty effective stinger. The symbol is everywhere, and anyone could be behind it, at any time.

If it really is a sentient memetic life form or an incredibly subtle cyberbrain virus, then that just turns this from tense to outright horrific.

Quite the mystery being set up in this three-parter, and one with potentially very, very high stakes.


The Laughing Man thing is starting to seem a little less prescient and a little more nineties-zeerust at this point (is it really that hard for them to use normal, non-internet cameras?), but it still has a lot going for it. As far as the characters' situation goes, it seems like the solution to this puzzle might be to just ignore the Laughing Man connection entirely, and assume that every media-savvy criminal in Japan is using the name and logo for their own purposes; the symbol serves only to confuse and obfuscate at this point, so don't pay attention to it, just the crimes. This remains the case even if there really is an evil AI or something using that persona in addition to the untold number of randos doing so unrelatedly.

Beyond that...for the most part, these three episodes are more of the same as far as my thoughts on the show go. It's fun, it's got enjoyable characters and concepts, and excellent quirky scifi scenery.

I still am ambivalent about this gritty world full of corruption and corporate overreach containing a team of inexplicably squeaky-clean and uncorruptible supercops who are allowed free reign to get in all the assholes' way. I'm not sure if "copaganda" is the right description here, because all the cops *besides* Section 9 are portrayed as some combination of incompetent and corrupt. So far, it hasn't seemed to glorify Hard Decisions and shit-talk civil liberties the way this type of story often does (though I think there were a few moments of that in the standalone episodes I saw before? It's been a while), so that's also a help. It's like...on one hand, it's sort of an aspirational ideal for how law enforcement is supposed to look, and I think that's a good thing to have. On the other, the belief that this bunch could exist for any length of time in this society without getting shuttered, sidelined, or assassinated is more outdated than any amount of cyberspace kung fu and laughing skull viruses.

It's a fun show, and one that occasionally makes you think. But in so many ways, looking at its predictions for the information age's problems and solutions, it's just...quaint.