Stop me if you’ve heard this one before – in the not-to-distant future, the government has implemented some new system that has largely eliminated crime, but –
I’m just going to assume most readers would have stopped me by then. As near-future science fiction stories go, the “safe” dystopia is about as classical as they come. Usually, there’s some horrible dark underbelly that’s actually the focus of the story and is the reason for the veneer of peace that people in the setting usually accept. It can be just starting or it can be moderately established, but the general tenor is the same: humanity (at least the portion of it the story is concerned with) traded liberty for security. Generally, we’re supposed to believe that it’s somewhere between a bad deal and an overwhelmingly horrific one.
Psycho-Pass does clearly come from that lineage. Specifically, it’s got a feel to it that’s not dissimilar to the Phillip K. Dick short story turned blockbuster movie, The Minority Report. In both that work and Psycho-Pass, society uses an element of prediction to neutralize most potential criminals before crime can be committed. In The Minority Report, the prediction is done via future-seeing mutants called Precogs, wired into a machine that interprets their visions and produces forecasts of events. In Psycho-Pass, Japan is instead largely governed by the Sybil System, a supercomputer that uses omnipresent surveillance and vast processing to judge the thoughts and emotions of citizens, flagging those who deviate in a direction that would lead to them being capable of committing crimes. However, while there is some tonal recognition between the two works, the similarities largely stop there.
This assessment by Sybil is the titular Psycho-Pass, a detailed psychographic analysis we see has both a “hue” and a numeric Crime Coefficient. If a person’s hue becomes cloudy, that’s bad. If their Crime Coefficient is higher, naturally, it means they’re closer to being a criminal. Over one hundred, the subject is a target for enforcement action, and confinement until or unless their number goes down. Over three hundred and the person is subject to summary execution at the discretion of the police. In addition to managing society to catch and theoretically rehabilitate criminals before they actually do anything criminal (the term “latent criminal” is used a lot for those with Crime Coefficients stuck in the high numbers), the Sybil System also handles a lot of ordinary life, like job placement, meaning that most people rely on it all the time.
The story opens properly, however, without telling us any of that. It’s the first day on the job for Akane Tsunemori. She’s starting her life as an Inspector, one of the few remaining police elements, who handle bringing in those flagged by Sybil for enforcement action, as well as any cases that still occur in Sybil’s peaceful world. Her senior, Nobuchika Ginoza (usually called Gin) introduces her to the tools of the trade. On one side, special guns called Dominators that act as Sybil’s eyes, rendering judgment on whatever they’re pointed at and setting themselves to Safe, Stun, or Kill as befits the situation. On the other side, the Enforcers – a group of law enforcement agents who are themselves latent criminals, and who do most of the dirty work, rather than forcing the Inspectors to do things that would cloud their hue more than is necessary. Gin seems to regard the Enforcers as subhuman, like they’re the attack dogs of the police, and says that Akane’s job is basically to watch them and make sure (by stunning them with the Dominator if necessary) they don’t go too far with anything. After all, they’re latent criminals – basically insane, with no place in polite society. Of course they can’t be trusted.
Akane doesn’t seem even a fraction as judgmental as her senpai, but the opening is neither the time nor the place to argue with it, as the force is facing a case that, by normal standards, is quite bad before Akane is even introduced to everyone, pursuing a man who is fleeing after a failed wellness check, growing steadily darker as he tries to duck Sybil’s watchful eyes.
The man takes a hostage, a young woman he terrorizes in his flight, but Akane arrives on scene with one of the Enforcers, Shinya Kogami. Kogami reduces the criminal to chunky salsa (his coefficient well over the threshold) and then faces down the hostage. Due to extreme stress, her Crime Coefficient has also spiked, even creeping up to levels that allow the Dominator to enter its wonderfully gory lethal mode. Akane, reasoning that the woman can be talked down and saved rather than discarded on a moment’s judgment from Sybil, has to stun Kogami so she can do some actual work. In the aftermath, the woman is recovering well in police custody and we start to see a bond between Akane and Kogami, the latter having explicitly trusted the former to keep him on the straight and narrow, and the former seemingly fascinated by the latter’s strange way of living.
Over the next few episodes, we’re introduced to the rest of the team in more detail (who I will go into if and when I have to) as they face up to some pretty shocking crimes. They investigate a series of murders, or perhaps a series of series of murders – culprits are apprehended, but many of the crimes point to a shared mastermind, someone who commits few if any crimes of his own but inspires others to do so. Many of the details of these cases also seem to tie back to one Kogami was involved with years ago – back when he was an Inspector himself, and his partner was killed looking into the mystery. Kogami’s own Psycho-Pass permanently clouded, leaving him a latent criminal, due to his obsession over that unsolved case, and it’s clear both that his mania hasn’t died off and that the current events are, in fact, related.
These cases are well-executed in their own rights, featuring disturbed criminals with different ways of slipping Sybil’s notice for a time (mostly involving the fact that Sybil’s scanners are only in public locations, and are known and can be avoided with some significant effort) so that you almost feel like the show is going down an episodic route. During this stretch, we get to know Akane, Kogami, and their co-workers a good deal better, as well as getting steadily more hints of the greater evil lurking out of sight.
I think most important to bring up is the dynamic between Akane and Kogami, and how it highlights who they are. Akane is usually pretty soft spoken, and is very much ‘a good person’. Even Sybil agrees, and it’s noted that her hue doesn’t cloud easily and both her hue and Crime Coefficient bounce back better than most after traumatic or stressful incidents that would leave most people reeling or trapped in dark thoughts. Because of this, I feel like it would be easy for some viewers to mistakenly write her off as the naive good girl archetype… which she very much is not. She shows off a little more in the end game of the season, but even at the start she is a person of strong convictions and certain action. Akane doesn’t hesitate to do what has to be done, and holds her beliefs in very high value.
I wanted to bring this up in part because I feel one common failure of commentary is to mis-define what makes a character strong, accepting only boorish loners as “strong” and deriding characters who know how to pick their battles as “weak” despite their success. Akane is polite, and knows when to bow her head to a superior. She doesn’t fight many battles (in a social sense) that she knows she has no chance of winning, but when there’s something on the line she stays true to her convictions, and she’s in a position where non-hostile interaction, especially with her seniors and superiors, is the better answer if she wants to get things done.
Akane isn’t just a strong character, she’s an amazingly strong one, and well-rounded at that, since we’re also allowed to see her flaws, foibles, and how she acts when she doesn’t have a good and clean option presented to her. I’ll highlight a couple of her best moments when we come to them, but she’s got a way of making a splash without raising her voice.
In some ways, I feel this can be contrasted to Kogami. Unlike Akane, Kogami is exactly the archetype you’ll think of him as after, if not the first episode where he plays “attack dog” well, at least when his background comes out. He’s the obsessed cop character, and he lives and breathes the archetype. He has That One Case that got him out of sorts, he’s quick to pin everything on the evil mastermind he’s certain exists but that orthodox policing doesn’t have the evidence to follow up on. He’s intelligent and analytical, with good instincts (natural or trained) but he’s also easily blinded to how he’s to follow up on something. Unlike Akane, Kogami is outwardly bull-headed, and we see how this gets him in no end of trouble, and how he keeps getting himself in trouble even when he clearly knows what’s going to happen.
The difference between Kogami and the normal obsessed cop in crime dramas is Kogami’s position as an Enforcer. Usually, the obsessed cop remains in some degree of good standing, but Kogami has been demoted to the point of being dehumanized. In a sense, he’s the obsessed cop stripped down to the core; denied a normal life by Sybil thanks to his status as a Latent Criminal, everything about Kogami that’s not to do with his investigative obsession has withered and atrophied. Akane, who actually treats him like a human being and tries to form a bond with him, as partners in the crime-solving business if not as friends or more, attempts to nurture Kogami’s human side and breathe life back into it, and much of their interplay hinges on the fact that it remains questionable whether he can be ‘saved’ or even if there’s anything left there to save.
Thus, despite the fact that Kogami does have his own drive, and is the more traditional ass-kicker (he’s got great gunplay and hand-to-hand fights), he is by far the weaker character, since his arc depends on the fact that his ego and humanity are in reduced states, and the question of how much of that is natural and how much has been forced on him by his environment. And it’s fine to have characters that are weak, but I think it’s interesting to really dig in to what makes a character a weak or strong character in an emotional sense, rather than just in being powerful or not powerful.
Digression aside, it’s time to talk about the main antagonist of Psycho-Pass, the target of Kogami’s search and the mastermind behind a string of shocking crimes, a character who seemed set up to specifically and emphatically tick me off as a writer/reviewer and yet didn’t.
His name, not that it’s free to learn, is Shogo Makishima. His business is, to begin with, supplying potential criminals with the means to do the deed, seemingly just to see what will happen. He comes into focus in the case of a high school girl and deranged artist who performs copycat crimes, plastinating bodies and displaying them in public to disturb the masses with extremely gruesome art. He fills in as her teacher, an assumed role, and helps and guides her… but when her slip-ups mean she’s sure to be caught, burns her without a second thought (allowing one of his other friends, a wealthy cyborg, to treat her as prey in the infamous most dangerous game).
I say Makishima seems like the kind of character who should by rights annoy me because he fits into the “haughty philosophizing pretty boy schemer” villain archetype, broadly speaking. He looks the part, and he does deliver quite a few attempted breaking speeches about whatever seems relevant at the moment, all while retaining the unflappable confidence that poorly-written schemers often display. The thing is, he’s not actually a poorly written schemer there to prove that the author has taken Philosophy 101. Some of this comes in how the story plays out; Makishima doesn’t effortlessly stay five steps ahead like the all-too-common bad version of his archetype, he plays a very legitimate game of cat and mouse and you feel like, during the struggle, the cops are closing in behind him. When his philosophy comes off as empty (which is not always – he has some interesting things to say about his setting), you get the feeling that it’s supposed to come off as empty, because when you cut down to it he’s not a sane or reasonable individual, and the veneer of urbane refinement he puts over himself is really just a facade.
Makishima also has one huge advantage, one trick that helps sell everything he achieves in this show: Sybil can’t judge him. After the arc with the art student, Kogami ends up getting redirected into the hunting grounds of Makishima’s cyborg ally in an effort to rescue one of Akane’s close friends from outside work. It takes everything he has, but Kogami manages to defeat the cyborg. However, as Kogami is passing out from his injuries, Makishima appears and (continues to) abduct the young woman. Akane, on scene, gives chase and becomes the first police member to properly confront the mastermind. She raises her Dominator… and it reads a Crime Coefficient of 0 and locks the trigger. It continues to show a 0, registering Makishima as entirely innocent, as he tosses Akane a real gun to test her resolve and then, as she watches and tries desperately to get her Dominator to work, murders her friend with a razor.
We later hear that Makishima appears to be “criminally asymptomatic”. That is, because Sybil relies on biometric data to make its judgments and not actual magical/supernatural foresight or telepathy, some extremely rare individuals with abnormal psychology can commit criminal acts without giving any tell at all to Sybil, even the tiny and unconscious biological fluctuations that would normally make the world’s best poker face plain as day to the Sybil System’s eyes. This is a known factor, but is incredibly rare (something like one in a million is quoted). Combined with actually having the will to commit crimes, the intellect to do so carefully, and until this point in the show (when, recall, he’s been operating on and off for years beforehand) Makishima’s Moriarty-like penchant for not getting his own hands dirty, this means he’s devilishly hard to catch, especially for a society that has largely given up on traditional investigative policing to rely on Sybil to identify and track baddies.
The pursuit of Makishima, officially a thing after the incident with Akane’s friend provides irrefutable hard evidence of his existence, leads into discovering Makishima’s ultimate plan. He and his allies have developed a special helmet that spoofs the Psycho-Pass of the wearer, fooling Sybil as effectively as Makishima’s nature. Makishima arms criminal elements with these helmets, but his goal is more what follows when they start acting out without Sybil’s immediate judgment being rendered: normal people, long unfamiliar with violence or threats in their society (which, despite the police leads dealing with horrific crimes every episode, is usually extremely safe and peaceful by modern standards. Recall, Tokyo is a city of millions.) act on their animal impulses and turn into a panicked, violent mob. Sybil and all the atrophied policing elements left in the city are overwhelmed both by the nature of the helmet-wearers attacks and the vast sum of hazards created by the mob.
Some villains might have stopped there in their goal to bring down Sybil, reckoning that the riots and aftermath would do the job, but our leads realize that Makishima is thinking bigger, and guess correctly that he’s infiltrating the building that houses Sybil’s mainframe (a closely-guarded secret that they also have to derive from evidence, as he did, seeing as Sybil is publicly considered to be a distributed computing setup). In the building, Akane and Kogami head to the upper levels to face down Makishima while one of the other enforcers pursues his right-hand man down into the sub-basement.
Makishima and Kogami meet properly face to face for the first time (a moment that was, in a flash forward, the very first scene of the show) and have it out with melee weapons and fists. Kogami is flagging and injured and Makishima slowly gets the upper hand until Akane catches up and bludgeons him with one of the helmets, a fitting takedown given the degree to which Makishima disregarded her.
Down below, the enforcer catches up to his quarry, but not before the man has managed to hack the locks and open up Sybil’s core, allowing both of them to see the truth.
Sybil, it turns out, is not a distributed computing system. Nor is it a massive data center mainframe. No, Sybil is revealed to be a collection of human brains. As the two of them stare aghast at this, the chief of police (previously believed killed) appears, revealed as a mechanoid of some description. She shoots the terrorist dead, and then forces her Dominator into disintegrate mode to make sure the enforcer who has seen the truth disappears as well.
The riots are quelled, Makishima is in custody (since Sybil can’t judge him and Akane didn’t let Kogami just murder him, it’s suspected he’ll need the first real trial in a long time), and despite the “mysterious disappearance” of one Enforcer, it seems like the story Psycho-Pass was telling is largely at an end… but the reveal about the true nature of Sybil leads us into one arc more.
While he’s being transported, the Police Chief talks to Makishima. Said chief reveals that (s)he is an ally of Makishima from long ago, who was arrested and, because he was Criminally Asymptomatic, made into one of the brains of the Sybil System. Indeed, it seems that Sybil learns and grows by incorporating Criminally Asymptomatic brains, in order to acquire what it does not otherwise understand, and the Police Chief is an alias used by Sybil brains taking an opportunity to have a turn at incarnated life and direct society more openly.
Makishima’s old friend, who seems to be enamored with existence as part of Sybil, extends Makishima an invitation to join them – not that he’s to have a choice in the matter. Makishima respectfully declines, by which I mean he breaches containment, eliminates (that incarnation of) the Police Chief, hijacks the transport helicopter, and crashes it into the city in a way that lets him walk away from the harsh landing.
Kogami, who was already deeply dissatisfied with not finishing things with Makishima in their previous encounter, is sent even farther off the deep end by the man’s escape, especially as government forces do their best to stonewall him out of the manhunt. Akane tries her best to keep Kogami, and indeed everyone around her, on the straight and narrow. In one really great scene, she even manages to effectively save both Kogami and Gin – Gin is given a test of loyalty by the police chief (who was not reported dead in the crash, and thus continues on with other Sybil brains), being asked to shoot Kogami with a Dominator in order to stop him. The Chief forces the Dominator into lethal mode, which nearly makes Gin break down, until Akane appears and stuns Kogami with her Dominator, deftly defusing the situation by insisting that Gin’s must have been malfunctioning and in need of service, since Kogami’s Crime Coefficient wasn’t high enough to warrant an execution.
Kogami does end up going AWOL, however (with help from a cool older Enforcer, who we also learn is Gin’s father, and tacit help from others), and Sybil decides that the situation is pear-shaped enough that extreme measures need to be taken.
The main measure is that Sybil decides to talk to Akane in person. The brains show her the truth of what they, the system she has lived her whole life under and has defended thus far, really is, and explain why Makishima is important to them and why he needs to be recovered alive. Akane, who had already been getting more than a little fed up with obstruction from upstairs, doesn’t take it very well. Even though she’ll continue to obey Sybil, she’s come to hate it.
To Sybil, that’s just fine. In fact, it’s ideal, as we learn that Sybil’s big evil plan is to… fairly and legitimately win her trust and respect, reasoning that if a normal person with every reason to hate them can come to accept them, that will teach them how to navigate the labyrinth of social interactions and… come out to the public and be accepted for what they are and all the good they do for ordinary society rather than ruling from the shadows.
Yeah… Sybil may be corrupt in a lot of conventional senses, and the world of Psycho-Pass may resemble a lot of other dystopias, but Sybil is actually interestingly non-malicious. It’s not the sort of entity you can write off as just evil or despotic. Since it’s made of Criminally Asymptomatic brains, Sybil doesn’t exactly have what we would consider a normal conscience or moral compass, but it does seem to be trying to do its best for the people of Japan. A lot of what it is is viscerally creepy and a lot of what it does hurts or screws over characters we care about, but at the same time its rationalizations don’t entirely fail to hold water.
This is the mark of a dystopia that’s well written in a way different than we normally see. We tend to think of dystopic futures as ones that are abjectly awful, that no one in their right mind would want to live in. But even knowing Sybil’s deep dark secrets, it’s actually fairly understandable how such a thing would come to be and why people would accept it… not that Akane does just now.
In the more immediate, Akane actually manages to talk back to Sybil enough to negotiate rather than take orders, and cuts a deal: if she brings back Makishima alive, Sybil will pardon Kogami and allow him to live. She even manages to more or less blackmail Sybil into unlocking her Dominator, in theory so that she can stun Makishima in order to arrest him.
Makishima doesn’t take his situation lying down. He starts to really crack here, in terms of his motive, and rather than just fleeing with his life begins a spur of the moment terrorist plot. Kogami, with his understanding of Makishima and the help of an older criminologist, manages to successfully figure out where he’s going and what he’s up to, following evidence of a murdered biologist (where he leaves a clue for Akane and the rest) to where Makishima is indeed going.
Makishima’s goal is a facility that manages the farming of a genetically engineered grain called Hyper-Oats, which is the basis of future Japan’s entire food infrastructure. He hopes to modify the virus used to control the Hyper-Oats in order to blight the crops and cause a catastrophic famine. While the facility is almost entirely automated, allowing him to break in, Kogami is not far behind Makishima, and Akane and her team aren’t far behind Kogami.
The confrontation at the facility shows that Makishima is still more than formidable enough to hold his own. He wounds Gin and Akane alike in a long and involved struggle and only fails to kill Gin because Gin’s father takes the blow instead, sacrificing himself for his son despite their estrangement. Akane manages the pursuit longest, even briefly seeming to work alongside Kogami to stop Makishima, but in the end she’s left behind as Kogami chases Makishima away from the facility to their respective dooms.
Kogami eventually catches up to a wounded Makishima out in the hills. Makishima accepts dying at his rival’s hand, and Kogami becomes a murderer with no way back in order to fulfill his own vision of justice.
Kogami escapes to parts unknown, Sybil forgives Akane for being merely extremely competent and not a miracle-worker and reaffirms their plot to sway her, Gin’s traumas leave him unable to recover his Psycho-Pass and he becomes an Enforcer like his father and Kogami before him, and we end the series with something of a bookend: it’s once again a rainy night as a new girl on the force has a harsh introduction to policing under the Sybil system, standing where Akane stood at the start of the show. Akane, however, introduces the Enforcers differently, as partners, friends, and fellow humans rather than as tools or bloodhounds.
Thus ends Psycho-Pass… or at least the first season, as there are both sequels and movies for another time.
It’s hard to overstate the skill shown in this one. The atmosphere is excellent and pervasive, the world is fleshed-out, the characters are lively, the pacing is strong. It’s got a good mix of action, mystery, and drama to create a memorable near-future thriller that can actually stand up to its formidable antecedents in the genre, not just in terms of anime but in terms of film and literature.
Psycho-Pass is not a perfect show. In a sense nothing can be, and there are ways in which the show can stumble. Rare, minor ways but one or two of the episodes feel more or less wasted, and it’s somewhat telling that I got through the whole summary without having to mention most of the Enforcers and support staff that have a lot of time dedicated to their personas and arcs. We enjoy any of the wasted time, though, so there’s a question as to how much it can really be considered “wasted”.
It’s also not a show for anyone, any time. This is a dark, heavy crime drama in a dystopian future, even if one of the more livable dystopian futures you’re likely to see. There is precious little light to be had in Psycho-Pass; it’s a story where people are miserable and die a great deal. The show navigates the challenges of being dark and comparatively miserable fairly well, but it’s still one to be warned before jumping into.
All the same, I can’t deny it an A+ rating. Shows like this don’t come around very often, often leaving us with pale imitators and failed pretenders that lack humanity, botch their plot, can’t sustain their tone, present laughable futures, or any combination of the above. Psycho-Pass more or less has it all, and does it while also going the extra mile with its ideas and characterization. I’m immensely glad that more has been made in the franchise, because if any follow-ups are half as good as the original, it will be a joy. A dark, miserable joy but a joy nonetheless.