[Categories: Anime Reviews]
GitS SAC: 2nd Gig episodes 13-16
After the third instalment that provided some much-needed attention on the characters, disc 4 seems to continue the trend with two more of the supporting cast members, Paz and Saito, getting their own episodes dedicated to them. Then there’s the token Tachikoma episode followed by some more details concerning the Individual Eleven: overall it’s a fairly well-balanced, if not flawless, set of episodes that carry the series through the notoriously tricky midpoint of the episode run.
Paz and Saito are much like Boma and, to a lesser degree, Togusa in that we have learned little about them to date. Paz winds up being apparently framed for a murder connected with the Individual Eleven terrorist Kuze, while Saito recounts the time immediately prior to his days with Section Nine during a poker game. I really enjoyed the Saito-orientated episode: it explains how he came to have a bionic eye, and the background artists are able to show off their ability to draw landscapes that differ from the high-rise urban environments that we’ve come to expect from the series.
The episode featuring Paz is nearly, but not quite, as enjoyable. In a similar way to Togusa in the previous volume, he has to clear his name thanks to the ‘bad guys’ who can probably by now be identified as Gohda and/or Kuze (not that there’s any way of knowing if the two of them are connected). Unfortunately Gohda only rears his ugly head once or twice in this volume, which is a bit of a shame.
The Tachikomas on the other hand have an entire episode devoted to them, which isn’t really as good as it sounds. Sure, they are some of the most endearing and entertaining supporting characters in the entire show but their lengthy discussions had me tuning out a bit at times. It is as close to filler as the series has got so far and quite honestly at this stage in the game trivial details such as who engineered them and their thoughts on mortality are a bit of a hinderance to the flow of the story.
The volume finishes on a high though, with Ishikawa unearthing the backstory to Kuze; it involves some typically lengthy GitS: SAC exposition segments but the effort on the part of the viewer pays off in the end. His tale is quite a sad one considering the hardships he experienced, and adds more to the history and political climate of the series’ worldview. I’m hoping for some more of the same in the next volume, hopefully with the Tachikomas entertaining us in the supporting roles where they belong.
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