Psycho-Pass - "Crime Coefficient" (TV Episode Review #33)

 

It’s Akane Tsunemori’s first day at her new job.  As an inspector for the CID, she is assigned to work with a team of Enforcers in hunting down a latent criminal on the loose.  Seems like this will be business as usual.  She’s been trained to handle cases like this one—surely, it can’t be too hard for a new inspector.

 

The first episode does an excellent job at transporting the audience into Psycho-Pass’s dystopian cyberpunk future immediately.  The main points of the setting and premise—the Sybil System, which is the backbone of law enforcement in this world, as well as a psycho-pass, a Crime Coefficient, and the Dominator—are all introduced right away with such ease.  It also helps that the animation in Psycho-Pass is beautiful—just beautiful—and the art direction helps set the tone and mood for the audience’s first impression of the series.  Since most of “Crime Coefficient” takes place at night, there is a high contrast between the lighting and the shadows that makes the colors stand out.  For example, there are some shots where the neon lights shine so bright they silhouette the characters in the foreground.  The subtle rainfall blends so well with the nighttime background it is almost unnoticeable on first watch.  The visuals alone line out the dark and bleak world that Akane lives in as though it were a real place.

As the protagonist, Akane Tsunemori makes a perfect audience surrogate into this dystopian world.  She is new to her job as a police officer and is an honorable cop willing to uphold the law while playing by the book.  Her ability to express empathy and compassion for innocent human beings, common emotions almost all good people must have, is a quality that is key to making her a relatable protagonist.  I know some people didn’t like this as a starting point for her character arc, but personally I love characters who are empathetic and compassionate, especially when put in a grimdark world like this one.  In a world so dark and gritty, we always need at least one morally good character who the audience can easily connect to.

Such a morally good character is especially vital when the subject matter takes a left-hand turn and goes tonally south very fast.  Akane’s first case is the old-fashioned scenario of chasing down a crazed man with a high Crime Coefficient attempting to rape and murder a woman in a dark alley.  These scenes, thankfully, are neither too long nor too explicit—not to the point of exploitation.  I am grateful that the episode puts greater emphasis on Akane’s willingness to save the female victim, as it allows her to breathe a lot more as a character in her first 20 minutes onscreen.

The contrast between Akane’s moral code and the coldness of the world she live in is personified by her coworkers in the field, a team of Enforcers.  They are agents working for law enforcement who have high Crime Coefficients, meaning they have the guts to do what most sane people wouldn’t dare to do.  The Enforcers here live up to their name—they set out to accomplish their mission, without question, and do whatever it takes to complete their objectives regardless of the moral ambiguity of their actions.  None of these guys better exemplifies this than Shinya Kogami.  The living embodiment of an Enforcer, this guy shoots first and asks questions later, and does the very difficult job an Enforcer is expected to do.  That is not to say that all of the Enforcers are cold and calculating, however; Tomomi Masaoka, for example, doesn’t seem like a person with a high Crime Coefficient on the surface, since he comes off as very laidback and in self-control.  By allowing the Enforcers to have a diversity of personalities, the story succeeds at humanizing latent criminals.

The humanization of latent criminals is important to mention because right off the bat, Psycho-Pass sets out to put its own status quo into question.  The Enforcers aren’t the only latent criminals to be humanized—strangely enough, so is the villain of the week.  For his self-exemplifying motives, he was a guy who lived a normal life until one day he got red flagged with a high Crime Coefficient on his psycho-pass.  With the one monologue he delivers to his victim, we get some insight on a man who used to fit in with society until he was ostracized by the law without any prior recorded criminal history.  With this context, Akane and the Enforcers are placed at odds against each other in the climax, in which they have to make a moral choice that would have to contradict the other’s moral codes.  It is an intense and quite terrifying sequence that plays out in a way that is completely unpredictable, and a bold way to end the first episode.

Psycho-Pass could not have asked for a more fantastic opener than “Crime Coefficient”.  Right from the get-go, it nails all the main points on the concept, setting, and characters while also setting the tone for the rest of the TV series.  All of this is accomplished in what is basically a standalone story—but of course, not without leaving enough room for a wider world to explore, going forward.