The Ghost in the Shell #09 — The Future is Meetings
September 1st, 2026
This season is killing me.
Impressions:
I'm still baffled that this is a three episode arc, apparently going to the end, which is next week at an abbreviated 10 episodes. After all the casual street murders, chases in broad daylight, blowing random ax terrorists heads off in the street, and running tanks through downtown, assassinating some criminal rando on a yacht is the huge crisis that forces Kusanagi onto the lam… but not even that. First we must have meetings, and briefings, and court arguments… where she rants like a lunatic about being a garbage collector purging the unclean. Yeah, that's reassuring.
Even the bombing in the episode started and ended with a long explanation of who they were going to meet and why, and then recapped that. Along the way, plenty of super silly faces were made, and the explosion itself was highlighted with a bird having all its feathers comically blown off. What tone are we going for here exactly? Anyway, time for more meetings. We haven't run out of fat old men to dryly discuss the situation yet.
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This is what actually happens: Israel is the one who set up S9, and they put the blame on Syria, whose men were killed on the boat. The whole thing is a false-flag operation designed to create conflict and secure a better position in future trade deals. The final info frop on that would be revealed in the opening of next week’s finale, but it won’t, as the censorship already started last week. Aramaki doesn’t make the shh hand motion as he leaves Motoko unattended and gives her an out to flee. Motoko’s whole plan to save her bacon comes off as an improvisation in the manga because it is, not some grand plot S9 is running.
Israel here and in Appleseed aren’t even particularly evil, as America, Russia, and Japan, the major Earth nations of his canon, all commit false flags and murder regularly, and are all corrupt. And Mossad gets away scot free, more accidental realism. Just look at all the crimes seen on this show so far, and at my post last week! The anime is the only adaptation, outside of the 2017 US film, to have nothing to say politically. And with that, I officially prefer the manga and view the adaptation as a lesser product. It even became more confusing in its own ways because of all the filler inserted. The only positive over the manga is the more unified art.
Again, the manga is just 340 pages. Pushing for more than 8 episodes on the dot is criminal. There are exactly 8 main cases, with a short prologue for the first, an equally short one for this final case, and 4 × 2 pages of gag material/technical info that the back half of EP 3 stretched into 10 minutes.
27 pages were adapted this time, with some empty air created to prolong scenes, but the anime couldn’t even get to the big-ticket cliffhanger 3 pages later to end on a bang. The one famously in the 95 film and the finale of SAC1 and so I can’t even make the post I wanted to make this week. Yes, the messy fake assassination of S9 at the end of SAC S1 is inspired by this case. The worst aspect of that season calling back to the manga. I am shocked, I tell you.
Next week: Will Batou get to make a rape joke, as that was pushed into next week, and will anybody be able to follow the climactic Shintoism segment? Spoilers: No one will, as GitS 2.0 (its conclusion features the cyber-literal Tree of Life, explain only 2 decades later in Pandora in the Crimson Shell) and Shirow’s hentai both state that the Shinto-adjacent religion of the GitS/Shirowverse isn’t Shinto. So you can’t even research WTF anything is supposed to mean! And no, his Shinto battle manga Orion, which he started after GitS 1 Vol. 1 and, of course, left abandoned, doesn’t explain anything either, despite being canon. It almost got a movie by 4°C, but no one wanted to fund it, so even its teaser is now lost media. You know how Disney has exploited the concept of canon so that ultra-nerds have to buy a mountain of Star Wars EU material to keep up with the background plot? Shirow perfected that sunk-cost fallacy first.