Section 9 acts as if they never encountered post-humans. Major Kusanagi feels askew and discovers the nature of N. Season Finale.
Episode 24 – “DOUBLETHINK / Event Boundary”
Heh.
Everyone died at the end of the last episode, so what are we looking at here? Will this be the SAC_2045 version of Groundhog Day? Motoko’s team is back at Section 9 headquarters. They’re working on “typical” cases. They solved Huge’s death as a suicide! It’s as if they never discovered post-humans, and the last 23 episodes never happened. Borma is in a wheelchair! Geez. I can stop complaining about never getting bright lighting on Motoko’s backside. Batou complains about peace not suiting them. Aramaki walks in with a medal from the prime minister. It’s an award for preventing global nuclear war! We’re watching an idealized fantasy. But whose? Motoko can’t reconcile the change in detail. Togusa can see his kids again!
Let’s see if the Tachikomas have their dreamland in SAC_2045. The Tachikomas claim each one’s judgments were tested in the last case, but they still don’t have a hierarchy. Puzzling. Their love for Batou still hasn’t changed. Motoko’s facial expression looks like nostalgia. Togusa claims Takashi returned home to his parents. It’s the ideal ending. That’s too much for Motoko to believe! And it’s Groundhog Day: SAC_2045! When will Motoko break out of this time loop? She calls it a “brain maze.” Nice. Motoko went to the paper records to check her version of events. Purin is still dead, and Agent Smith is still on ice. Motoko doesn’t remember either of them.
She’ll talk to the NSA Spy-cicle. Ding! Like he popped out of a microwave! Gross. Spy puke. Fun. The first question from John Smith is, “what year is it?” Har. Smith confessed to everything the Americans did about Code 1A84. He knew everything about N and post-humans. Whoa! Smith’s restraining bolt blocked Motoko’s presence. That’s like how post-humans walk around. Strange. Smith quickly reconciled Motoko’s presence as non-threatening. I thought he would puke again, but it was a visceral reaction to his memories being overwritten. Motoko realized her consciousness was traveling without her body.
And now it’s The Matrix: SAC_2045. Look at all those empty stasis pods! Is this where the three million people of Geo City were before they joined N? Was Motoko the last one in Room 101? It’s Purin! Her cosplay suit isn’t ripped up, either. Was the last time we saw objective reality in SAC_2045 when Purin had agreed to help Takashi? Purin must have hacked the B-2 bombers carrying Smart Gas after Takashi left her. Everyone else evacuated, but the one most resistant to a frictionless society was Motoko. She was stuck in a pod until she hacked her way out.
Imagine walking around in a delusion that nuclear missiles struck other nations, and your fellow pedestrian believes the opposite. That resembles the state of social media. The N-filter in SAC_2045 is individualized doublethink! According to Purin, members of N are “people who live in reality, but at the same time, they can live in another reality, with no friction between the two.” Purin’s analogy is that everyone is enjoying their own private video game. Aha! “N” could stand for “nostalgia” in the “nostalgia virus” from the first season. Motoko has that virus too, but she used it to figure out something was wrong. The Major will never be a member of N. Aw. Purin is still the same funny kid. Purin doesn’t want to get in trouble or disappoint Motoko.
Woof. Takashi turned Suzuka’s chair into a skyscraper of cables. He’s making sure his doublethink N-filter spreads everywhere. He can write memes that can infect minds that aren’t connected to the Net. Wow! Takashi can talk. With his mouth! Agent Smith hid America’s N problems from Japan since the start of SAC_2045. That’s why he knew about N when he popped out of the deep freeze. Takashi gives Motoko a choice to undo the N-filter’s effects.
Ah. Motoko asks why she has not developed doublethink. Takashi explains that Motoko is a romantic! Her dreams and reality are consistent. Purin didn’t succumb to doublethink because she had no ghost. The poor girl hasn’t yet reconciled that fact. A person can’t separate memories from the self, but Purin’s A.I. can. Takashi’s N-filter is a form of ghost-hacking. Purin couldn’t live a lie after betraying Batou, so she protected Takashi until he finished assembling the global N-filter. It hurt her feelings, though.
Did Motoko pull Takashi’s cords? Or did we reset to when Purin joined Section 9? Standard also joining the crew gives us a hint. This is Purin’s do-over. She’s so happy! The nostalgia virus hits Motoko hard, so it’s time to check out. She’s said goodbye to Batou and Togusa many times before.
Batou knew what time it was in SAC_2045. The N-filter created billions of new cyber worlds to explore, so Major Motoko Kusanagi needs to know their boundaries. Remember Code 1A84 for the next time Motoko reappears. The N-filter effectively prevents a stand-alone complex. What will the next chapter of Ghost in the Shell have for us?
Final Thoughts.
SAC_2045 requires the audience to be a fan of Western sci-fi and literature. You had to do homework before watching the entire series. References to George Orwell’s 1984 and Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near armed you in advance. Kurzweil predicted the Singularity to occur in 2045, which explains the title of this Stand Alone Complex series. Also, the story begins in Hollywood, California, and relies on comfort with the concept of a sustainable economy. These are all current Western societal concepts and aspects of culture. These items make SAC_2045 a strange anime to originate in Japan. The past Stand Alone Complex anime seasons wrote storylines based on Southeast Asian experiences with refugees and failed nation-states. The world of Ghost in the Shell of the 90s movies felt inspired by Blade Runner, which then inspired The Matrix. SAC_2045 feels like an Americanized version of Ghost in the Shell based on American media.
SAC_2045 seemed like a small story because of 3D CGI animation choices. There were few settings and hardly any people. The past seasons made the audience feel the crush of people in megalopolises. Here, we only saw the mob when the post-humans caused people to attack victims in schools, airports, or hotel lobbies. The lack of a lived-in society adds to the sense that SAC_2045 was an anthology of sci-fi short stories that Production I.G. adapted into serial episodes. Look at the disconnected narrative between Suzuka trying to steal 1A84 and joining Takashi in Geo City. How about Togusa waking up to reality after two months? We never saw an explanation of why Takashi’s childhood friend led him away from the Thought Police.
SAC_2045’s opening credits sequence was a spoiler for the season finale. The visual of millions of bubble worlds occupying a vast landscape is the concept of Takashi’s N-filter. Instead of the mechanism from 1984, where the government supplies a singular narrative causing doublethink, we have Takashi’s 1A84 filter. Doublethink in 1984 caused an irrational rage that needed to be directed at a target in the two-minute-hate. The 1A84 version of doublethink uses individual narratives to overwrite cognitive dissonance to make irrational peace. This is Takashi’s frictionless society. Our objective reality was already filtered through personal subjective filters. But Takashi’s N-filter adds a layer of solipsism to reduce disagreement. Modern western science fiction loved exploring philosophy, so SAC_2045 again shows its inspired roots.
Motoko Kusanagi rejects participating in the N-filter and seeks to explore the boundary between subjective and objective perspectives in cyberspace. Motoko’s spirit is consistent here from the movies in the 1990s and the animated series. Motoko often disappears between Ghost in the Shell titles to find adventure between the worlds of cyberspace and reality. Unfortunately, I see her vanishing act as the punctuation point on the production committee’s cowardice. SAC_2045 was never Motoko Kusanagi’s story. The world of the 2045 Singularity belonged to the perspectives of Togusa and Purin. Togusa, the natural-born, met the post-human Purin halfway in embracing the N-filter. SAC_2045 spent time building their character development to the final episode. We saw no character development in the nominal focal character of Ghost in the Shell. I saw that the writing committee was afraid to touch Motoko’s personality. SAC_2045 gave us another layer of reality and the first human without a ghost. But Motoko was a side character in her anime.
Sola Digital Arts beautifully brought Ilya Kuvshinov’s character designs to a 3D CGI world in SAC_2045. They even upgraded the quality of the hair in the two years between seasons. But Production I.G.’s choice to use full 3D CGI animation instead of 2D cell animation alienated many Ghost in the Shell fans. CGI models in 2022 are still not ready for anime fans, and the Netflix model of dumping twelve episodes at once didn’t help either. I hope the A.I. animation in 2045 is incredible because if it’s not, the fans of Ghost in the Shell still will not accept the aesthetic. That would be a terrible irony for the Singularity not to happen in 2045 because Ghost in the Shell looked so bad in 2022.
How did you feel about SAC_2045’s heavy reliance on Western sci-fi and futurism? Did the 3D CGI help or hurt your experience? I liked how Motoko, Purin, and Suzuka became much prettier in the second half. Let us know what you think in the comments or on social media.
Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045 streams on Netflix in multiple languages and subtitles.
