The Ghost in the Shell #04 — Aborted Zombie Robot Apocalypse
July 28th, 2026
That sure is social discourse for you.
I dreaded watching that magical girl soldier show, and the entire episode was just restating that Mimi is a zombie. She was revived by her mom with forbidden magic and… that's it really. Now she's an immortal zombie that's been around for like a hundred years, yet nobody met her before. Let's all have lots of feelings and wonder if we're having the right feelings. I got a third of the way through sorting caps and I just… didn't want to finish, there was so little in the episode. So I guess I'm done with it.
Impressions:
Better than last week's episode, though it swung a bit far in the opposite direction. Preferable, certainly, but still undoubtedly a mess. Especially when it starts with an apparent outbreak of robot-zombies going completely feral. So you'd think the episode would be about that, or the giant mountain of them the cops keep in the basement. But then it's just like "Oh, yeah, androids snap like that sometimes and turn into ravenous monsters. Society. What can ya do?" But actually, the mystery is that a handful of them had SOS written in blood in their heads, and were going crazy for a completely different reason altogether which just so happens to look the same.
This continued through the second half, where they fought literaly Some Random Dude. Some Yakuza there for revenge. The actual antagonists? A pair of comic relief idiots who were trafficking and murdering children. Ah, yes. My favorite characters for dumb slapstick. Certainly can't say it isn't living up to the completely bonkers 80s nonsense script in any case.
Next Episode:
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The first episode without filler. This Charles Bronson nihilist version of Batou, who is as deranged as any criminal and barely drawn on model (when is he ever?), only exists in this story despite being in all full-length chapters of Vol 1 and 1.5. He gets one final semi-serious treatment next week and never again. Not that positive main characters exist in this specific work. These cops are as inept and fascist as the real deal. Very 80s and clearly unintentional commentary but it could have worked.
The adaptation didn´t give the child sex slaves heavy close-ups of their chests and half-exposed asses, so that’s something but the show´s removal of the gore took away the horror atmosphere. Not that it mattered, given the endless sexism, a Looney Tunes 3rd act and the sexual slavers being gag characters. Another positive, Batou doesn´t show open contempt for the children, unlike in the manga, despite near identical dialogue. There is a reason Innocence heavily rewrote this case. It even integrates the Yakuza detour naturally.
Next up. The source material for the 3rd film Mamoru Oshii failed to greenlight?