Yesterday, the 5th episode of the new animated Ghost in the Shell series released on Prime Video. The new animated series is produced by Science SARU, based on Masamune Shirow’s 1989 manga series. The series began airing on 7th July on a simultaneous global release schedule, with weekly episode drops, giving the worldwide community the chance to discuss the series episode by episode.

So far, we’ve had the inception of Section 9, after a bit of a false start, then a couple of cases of mistaken identity with regards to The Puppet Master. The animation has been great, with some good action scenes, and a bit of philosophising over the line between human and non-human, and the nature of the ‘ghosts’ of the title. Recent episodes have drifted away from The Puppet Master arc to be more stand-alone, with last week’s episode 4 possibly the best and most ‘complete’ episode so far.

Episode 5 again focuses on one plot. Section 9 has been monitoring a combat cyborg named Koil, who was travelling on a train. The rookie assigned to watch him, trained by Batou, is slaughtered by Koil. As you might imagine, Batou does not take this well. Kusanagi, who labels herself The Major for the first time in the series, visits an old military contact, a hacker, and the team are pointed in the direction of a company named Sagawa Electronics, who seem to have expanded into an old army base.

Batou, who has been busy training recruits, and testing firearms extensively, visits the morgue with Ishikawa to see the body of the slaughtered recruit, Yano, reaffirming the personal nature of this mission for Batou. They investigate a Sagawa location, and ultimately get into a violent confrontation with Koil, and Batou takes him down. Whilst there, they discover a stockpile of gold. The Major arrives at Sagawa Electronics posing as a photographer, and also gets into a skirmish, before hacking a disc, gaining intel on the company’s illegal activities – it turns out they have been misappropriating public money by moving finance between entities. She then, after a brief struggle, apprehends the former Chief of Far North Special Operations, Colonel Sohei Kagasaki.

If that character’s title is a bit wordy, it’s symbolic of the episode in general. The episodes are short, and have a lot of backstory and exposition to put across with regards to the geopolitical climate, the various government agencies and criminal groups involved, and how they all intersect with each other. There’s enough here for a 45 minute episode of TV, and it all needs to be condensed so much that it is very difficult to fully follow. If you’re a fan of the manga and the IP in general, you probably know enough to not need spoon-feeding, but for the many that are being exposed to these stories for the first time, it’s a lot to take in.

The character development, though, is good, particularly for Batou. We’ve not seen that much of him in the series so far, but he’s all over this. As the training officer, he feels a great sense of responsibility for his recruits, and when Yano is killed, it affects him. He gets vengeance on Koil, but as shown in the final scenes of the episode, that doesn’t make it easier to face the disappointment and anger from the families of the dead. Whether this ends up affecting how he approaches the job is yet to be seen, but it does show the series has stakes rather than just being a fun action romp.

What did you think of episode five? Are you able to follow all the plots, backstory, and exposition, or would you rather they split storylines between a couple of episodes so there’s more time to explain the politics and the nature of the various organisations? Let us know in the comments.

You can watch the new Ghost in the Shell series on Prime Video with a valid subscription, and episodes will be released every Tuesday. You can enjoy the show’s opening sequence below –