The Ghost in the Shell #02 — Garbage Collection
July 14th, 2026
Sure we don't have enough babble?
Impressions:
This was a much duller episode, especially the middle. A veritable wall of technobabble going nowhere and saying nothing. The classification of the virus. Firearm specifications and usage. Interdepartment politics. When it finally, finally ends, it's time for… three minutes of… filler with the garbage men. Oh, so they must be relevant and the culprits, right? No, not really. And even then, it takes until the last 90 seconds of the episode to get there, whereupon the chase finally begins, with a completely different guy, and the episode ends, chase only actually just begun.
And it's not like the start was important either. Anything that does a bit of setup and then goes "Anyway, three months later" rarely is. Mostly fanservice and gags. And even the fanservice was people reciting technobabble about nerve clusters or the like. The episode could've started five minutes from the end and I'm pretty sure nothing would've been lost. About 20 minutes of setup for a little light Spidermanning around.
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“Comedy”, technobabble, softcore porn + technobabble, random politicians that add nothing due to the setting never being particularly clear, some mention of a superhacker (only chap 9 and 11 of 11 focus on the puppeteer), a random crime that barely gets resolved and then ending on a joke to fully muddle the point. That´s how the IP´s life began. Shirow Masamune was the Michael Bay of his generation. One of the most famous scenes of 90s sci-fi in the movie version, the revelation of the implanted memories into the garbage collector, will culminate in an alimony joke next week.
This adaptation deciding to stop within chapters to resolve them as Act 1 in the next ep only ads to the confusion. I might have to take back that the anime is better than the manga, just because it´s easier to look at.