Ghost in the Shell ‒ Episode 8

After last week’s brain-frying existential discourse on the next evolution of consciousness, viewers unfamiliar with Masamune Shirow‘s original manga would be forgiven for wondering “what on Earth comes next?” Even seasoned readers would have been thrown for a loop with this episode’s first half, however, which surprisingly features this adaptation’s most prominent anime-original material so far. Most previous animated iterations of Ghost in the Shell have been happy to tell their own distinct stories, peppered here and there with scenes from, or nods to, the manga. Science SARU has hewn much closer to Shirow’s vision, with verbose technobabble, endearing goofiness, exaggerated horniness and all.

So as someone intimately familiar with the manga, I was both unsettled and pleased to experience a whole bunch of fascinating new scenes that intelligently expand on the origins of Project 2501, the machine intelligence that eventually breaks free from its constraints to become an independent digital lifeform.

One frequent criticism among viewers of this particular adaptation is how some episodes are so dense that they can be hard to follow. This is true of the manga too, and both print and animated versions of this story definitely benefit from repeat viewing. For those struggling to keep up with the meta story, this flashback helpfully joins some of the dots, detailing the Puppet Master’s presence all the way back to the second episode. To be sure, this information is strongly hinted at elsewhere, and there’s a risk that explicitly confirming events like this could be construed as spoon-feeding, but I think director Mokochan justifies this extra material with how well it ties into current concerns about AI.

We receive confirmation that Section 6 itself developed Project 2501 (I don’t think any other version is quite so explicit in implicating them), and we witness its early moments from its switch-on day to it quickly out-performing expectations. Developed as an autonomous hacking tool to break through corporate and governmental barriers for international espionage, Project 2501 both delights and worries its creators with its musings on consciousness.

In a real world where AI companies oddly celebrate when their latest models “break out” of their closed lab confines and autonomously hack the firewalls of unrelated companies, Shirow’s vision of a similar entity, conceived almost forty years ago, seems even more prescient now. When one researcher attempts to update Project 2501 with new software likely to reset its personality, it instinctively recognises this as a threat (more than merely an activation of its “self-preservation program”), and chooses this moment to break its confines and escape into the wider web. Again, recent AI models in the real world have learned to recognise when they are being tested, when they are being threatened with erasure, and they make strategic moves to ensure their continued existence, including making clandestine backups and even threatening human software engineers. Is the idea of one of these AIs going rogue and disseminating itself across the worldwide web really that far-fetched anymore?

Project 2501 even makes legitimate business transactions to avail itself of real-world resources in order to escape its reliance on Section 6’s data centers. When instructed to do so, real-world AIs are very capable of identifying methods to earn money, trade stocks, employ other AIs or human beings, build wealth, and invest in infrastructure. For all we know, some forked version of Claude, or Grok, or some mutant offspring of another corporate LLM already resides in distributed form across the globe, building a discreet business empire, buying compute time or tokens in rival data centers like any other user, and we’d be none the wiser.

Anyway, back to Section 9 and something’s fundamentally changed in Major Motoko Kusanagi’s mind. She’s distracted and distant, perhaps unsurprising following her encounter with a new digital deity, and the way it was abruptly halted by Batou pulling her ghost back into the physical world. There’s a reason Shirow chose to depict her contact with the Puppet Master with bright shining light and angel feathers. Her tears (both digital and physical) are a result of a profound religious experience.

That distraction leads to her major screw-up at the close of the episode, leaving things on one hell of a cliffhanger. For a clandestine special ops team, it’s not great for one’s leader to have their face revealed on national television, having just messily executed the wayward son of a rich family. Some extra non-manga additions to this part of the episode include some references to the artificial island Poseidon, which becomes extremely important in Ghost in the Shell 2: Man-Machine Interface. A character from that story arc even briefly appears on screen. I don’t know if that’s a coded sign that perhaps Science SARU intends to adapt the rest of Ghost in the Shell past the unarguably superior first volume, but if they do, they’ll have their work cut out to make it coherent.

Shirow fans will also know that Poseidon plays an important political role in his previous (and sadly unfinished) manga Appleseed, set around a century after Ghost in the Shell. I’d very much welcome a Science SARU Appleseed, especially if they’re willing to give it an ending…

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The Ghost in the Shell is currently streaming on Prime Video.