Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex #3 Bandai 100 minutes English/Japanese English Subtitles Released: 11/12/2004 Reviewed: 03/07/2006

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Ghost in the Shell is a weird little guy. Its original iteration, the manga, is full of funny noses and weird plastic chicks like anything else Masamune Shirow has ever drawn. Now the man has moved onto greater things... like making pornographic pictures of females with overtly phallic cigars in their mouths being 'milked' by anthropomorphic horses who do it like they have a purpose. This is fortunate for everyone involved, as the source material is much greater than that crazy fella could ever get a handle on. I can't say that the creation of such great franchises as Ghost in the Shell and Appleseed balances out the man's need to doodle Aztecan tentacle rape, but it sure does help. Blah blah blah. Like the other show we've talked about this week, this is the third disc in a series I quite enjoy. What is there to say about it? There's robots, sorta, or cyborgs at least. There's touching moments while cyborg cops hunt down cyborg serial killers in sort of a Bladerunner meets First Blood situation that tantalizes the mind as much as it does the senses. Will we let ourselves be confused as the mostly-human detective Togusa goes undercover in an trade school for mentally damaged children? What exactly is happening in that online chatroom? All these and more will be answered by the end of 100 cartoon minutes.

In this disc we're treated to a wonderful, super, spectacular episode. It's great! Batou, our blonde buddy who normally plays the second fiddle, is allowed to assume center stage while he tries to hunt down an ex-comrade who's decided that skinning young girls alive is the order of the day. Have you seen the Ralph Fiennes sci-fi "classic" Strange Days? I think our good buddy Marco has! The episode borrows clearly more than a bit from the movie, but with enough material to keep it fresh it combines a few things that I find quite tantalizing: sarcastic robot men and detective drama. It was a good concept to begin with! The next episode is notably more sedate, featuring our other kickass buddy Togusa tramping around in a mental hospital for reasons unknown. Perhaps to uncover a conspiracy? I really could not tell you! But the result is a giant cyborg, a lot of bullets, and we all learn a valuable lesson about the fact that people are people too... through violence. It's a bit on the slow side, sure, but do you hear me complaining? This is the kind of classic TV that doesn't happen every day!

It makes up for the fact that the rest of the episodes are a little lackluster. Sandwiched around our Batou-centric mystery fest and Togusa's creepy sanitarium crawl are episodes that are slightly more boring and 100% more expository in nature (which is quite a feat, considering the show's exceedingly verbose nature). The Major sits down and indulges herself in a 20 minute chatroom session about the notorious cybercriminal "The Laughing Man". This basically comprises a "clip show" in that not a whole lot happens. You will be bored, dear reader, and you won't feel like you've learned a whole lot that you didn't already know... but these things just need to be mucked through to get to the episodes where they're in the flashbacking to the South American jungle and people are dying. So too with "little robot's big day in the city!" where the tiny tank pairs up with the lonely little girl in the quest to dig up her dead dog, or something along those lines. Of course we don't actually know the dog is dead, that's all part of the experience! At the end of the day we all learn a another valuable lesson about being honest to your kids... and then there's a whole bunch of stuff about a movie creator who locked his brain in a box or something. It's not really the show's finest hour, but damn if it doesn't try.

Truth be told this is sort of a weak-sauce disc of Stand Alone Complex, but consider the material. In our most recent podcast I bring up the idea of quality points. Fist of the North Star is worth something like 150 quality points andLove Hina is a junk-tacular 4/3 quality points (for the one chick with a choker, which is sorta hot). Stand Alone Complex on its average day would score 150, possibly upwards of 200 quality points. The actual value of said points is up in the air... but I think you can understand what I'm getting at. Say this disc, with its goofy-cutesy "little robot's big day in the city!" episode, is only worth something like 125 quality points over all. That's still a respectable number! There's no shame watching Stand Alone Complex, even in its low points. And if you're not embarrassed that the idea for the show came from a guy who gets his jollies off drawing pirate girls getting raped by magical spells... well... that's okay too, but I think you should learn how to concentrate. He's still a sicko, but he's our sicko and what he's inspired is just plain beautiful.