Psychedelic-Pass.

——

The boringness continues on from last week’s humdrum episode. Most of the time was pretty much spent at HQ with everyone analyzing the data while the computer did all the work. It was hardly engaging at all as not much investigating was going on; too perfect of an intuition going around. Kogami and Gino butt heads, as per usual, and take off on their own investigative routes.

Gino tracks Talisman’s whereabouts through his online access routes. Taking Kagari and Kunizuka along, he’s led to an apartment complex only to find that it’s booby trapped with explosives. Gino takes an injury to the hand while his enforcers make it out unscathed. Kogami, on the other hand, follows up on Akane’s latest meeting with Spooky Boogie through CommuField and notices varying speech patterns in the old and new recordings. He determines that Spooky Boogie has been taken over by the murderer and sets up specific parameters in the computer to find our culprit. Lo and behold, they find only one person who fits the criteria and his name is Mido Masatake.

Akane, Kogami, and Masaoka head out to Mido’s last access point at a hotel to apprehend him. At Mido’s room, the three are subjected to a hacked interior hologram and momentarily lose him behind the altering holograms. However, Masaoka is prepared with a little fire-breathing trick to set off the overhead sprinklers, short circuiting all holos. Kogami finds Mido and takes aim and the Dominator engages into Lethal Eliminator mode.

Mido is able to escape but with his left arm shot clean off. He makes it home where his stolen CommuField avatars greet him, but are soon taken over by someone known as Makishima, who drives Mido insane with his own avatars taunting him. Gino, Kagari, and Kunizuka arrive to take out Mido, resulting in a bloody explosion.

The latter half of the episode is what gains real interest. We’re briefly introduced to Makishima and Choe Gu-Sung, mystery characters who may have some sort of link to an onset of murders, or at the very least illegal activities. Most importantly, it’s revealed that Kogami was a former Inspector, as well as Gino’s partner, before he gained a rising Crime Coefficient, demoting him to Enforcer. It seems we might be finally getting somewhere after a very slow start. It’d be nice to know more on Masaoka and how he became an Enforcer seeing as he seems rather refined with knowledge of philosophy and love for the arts.

GO Rating: 3/5