Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045: Season Two (2022)

GitS: SAC_2045: Season Two (2022)

Dirs: Shinji Aramaki + Kenji Kamiyama | Eps: 12, approx 25 mins each

The good news is it's better than Season One. But that doesn't mean it's good. It's like the difference between shitting yourself while wearing shorts versus shitting yourself while wearing trousers with bicycle clips. Both stink and are best avoided.

The first episode is numbered 13, which makes sense because — even though Netflix pretend otherwise — it's clearly the second half of Season One, which they didn't bother to finish properly.

It has a new opening and new theme song that despite not being at all memorable is definitely an improvement over the last effort. (It's called Secret Ceremony, by millennium parade.) It's the kind of thing you might get if you asked a manufactured J-pop band to make a more edgy song for one of the superfluous Kingdom Hearts handheld games.

The story explains the posthumans and delves further into what caused the Sustainable War. As before, there's no 'stand alone' episodes, it's all 'complex' ones, with many cliff-hangers, but there's an admirable attempt to deepen the narrative beyond the dumbed-down 'passive audience' crap in S01. Sometimes the new approach works and sometimes it's simply confused storytelling, but they get points for trying.

There's a few new characters, with varying degrees of usefulness. The first of them is named Esaki Purin (pictured top right). Her excessively shiny pink hair often looks more like a helmet and initially she's little more than a mixed bag of various anime clichés, including occasional fan service, but she develops over time and by the end I found her to be even somewhat likable.

If memory serves, the primary antagonists feature in only about half of the 12 episodes, collectively. One is a standard SAC-esque villain with obsessive fixations, while the other (Bayonetta cosplay, bottom left) is present more but has woefully underdeveloped motivations.

On a more general note, the team appear to be Public Security Section 9 again — although I don't know when that actually happened, it was either not made clear in the story or I simply zoned-out in boredom — and there's more Tachikoma involvement than there was previously. Oh, and there's some annoying virtual lens flare because it adds a sense of realism... allegedly. *sigh

One of the most perplexing aspects of episodes 01-12 (S01) is also present in episodes 13-24 (S02), namely the dialogue in the dub sometimes being different as that given in the subs. And as before the two things can even convey a polar opposite viewpoint from each other. I've no idea about which of the two should be considered the correct one. I've no plans to ever re-watch the SAC_2045 series, so it really doesn't matter to me now one way or the other, but it's worth noting for anyone that thought the series wasn't a complete insult to long-time GitS fans.

"The longer I look at it... Is this arm even mine?!"