A Modest Rebellion

A string of androids ending their own existence draws Section 9 to the firm that builds them. While Daisuke Aramaki grills the plant manager, Kusanagi and a Tachikoma quietly break into the factory's records. Every one of the dead machines turns out to be the same discontinued unit, the GA07_JL, nicknamed the Jeri and cherished by a small following for how easily an owner could customize it. The manager half-jokes that the models grew glum over their outdated status, but Kusanagi uncovers a virus planted in the mainframe, most likely by a customer who had shipped his Jeri back for refurbishment.

The trail leads to Marshall McLachlan, son of the Canadian Ambassador, who has bolted with his Jeri. When the team finally boxes him in, the standoff resolves in an unexpected way: his own Jeri strips him of his weapon and pins his arm, subduing him.

Afterward, Batou and Kusanagi turn the case over drinks. Batou reads it as an extortion play, while Kusanagi suspects the young man simply wanted a one-of-a-kind machine and that the Jeri turned on him out of a wish to protect him; the talk sends her drifting into recollections of her own past. Later, Togusa comes home to find his wife watching a film. Rewinding it, he catches that the ambassador's son and his Jeri had spoken the movie's lines word for word, and he asks whether any dialogue follows, only to be told there is none.

The episode is threaded with tributes to French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard. The diplomat's Jeri evokes Patricia Franchini from Breathless, a film whose story of a couple fleeing toward Italy mirrors the pair's flight here, and reels of it surface during the search of the son's home. One frame also foregrounds Alphaville, another Godard picture whose agent-versus-dystopia premise rhymes with the themes of Ghost in the Shell. The movie Togusa's wife watches is not quite the genuine Breathless, its subtitles close yet imperfect, hinting at a parallel-world version whose extra matching lines appear only at the last confrontation.