Ghost in the Shell: Philosophical Nonsense or Intelligent Genius?
Wed, June 1, 2011 at 4:42 PM The date flashed menacingly on my screen. The deadline loomed. The time had finally come.
Yes, Netflix was informing me that Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex Season 2 was about to disappear from its instant streaming service, so if I wanted to watch it, I’d have to act fast.
Perhaps not the most important of deadlines I’d ever faced, but I often find it so difficult to focus my attention on the sprawling expanses of a full TV series unless there’s something like its imminent disappearance to motivate me.
I recall enjoying the first season of the show, but only in that foggy way that defines the brain’s attempt to make sense of a memory that it labels as distant and no longer important. Such things as specific plot details have escaped me. It hasn’t actually been that long since I finished it, but the very nature of the show insured I was bound to remember little of it. Simple plots can stick with you for a while. The complicated meanderings of Ghost in the Shell, where the tiniest detail is vital to making sense of anything, are doomed to disappear from my consciousness long before they reach that walled-off section of my brain labeled “long-term memory”.
As such, one might say my time with the second season was defined primarily by repeated attempts to try and figure out what was actually going on and my subsequent inevitable failure to do so. This is a show designed either for those with freakishly detail-oriented minds or those not afraid to keep a wiki open on their laptop whilst pausing the action every couple of seconds to pull up another obscure reference.
Or perhaps the third option is actually most relevant. Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex is an anime, like so many others, that requires you to view it at least twice to know what’s actually going on.