I’m not sure astroturfing is the answer.
Impressions:
This episode definitely lost the thread. Also, I feel like things definitely would’ve worked out better had they structured stuff so that the whole Puppet Master thing was warpped up at the end of an episode, not like eight minutes in, giving way to what appears to be a whole bunch of filler. Add another chase scene or shootout to pad it out to two episodes, or cut out all that pointless babble and garbage man comic relief to make it a single episode. Having all the excitement be in the first two minutes leaves the rest of the episode feeling boring. It wasn’t even really wrapped up, as everybody was hacked.
The start wasn’t bad at least, and is the only thing I think really worth talking about, as on the nose as the Fuchikoma robot revolution discussion was. For it being the exciting part of the episode, I still think they could be doing a better job with the animation and especially the direction. I’m not sure why certain things happened, like the abrupt tech overlay filter. It looked like they just didn’t finish the animation on time. Simultaneously, other things really needed some kind of extra effect rather than technobabble, such as when he apparently mass hacked the crowd to jump Kusanagi. At least, I assume that’s what was intended since she yelled something on those lines… but all they showed was him panic yelling. Did he just hack a bunch of people, or are they just a bunch of idiots? You’ve not made much of a case for the former.
