Corporate Graft

The DEA's chief lands in custody on a murder charge tied to the assault on the Sunflower Society building. Aramaki directs Section 9 to comb through every record on file, hunting for whoever has been orchestrating the strikes against the unit and testing whether the same party engineered the Laughing Man affair. As he leaves the building, he shares an elevator with former prime minister Kanzaki, who quietly warns that the leading suspect enjoys powerful allies and deep ties to the navy.

The surviving members of the Narcotic Suppression Squad try to pin drug trafficking on Aramaki, baiting him into a refugee district, but the plot unravels when Batou pulls the chief clear before the police can close in. At the same time, Kusanagi arranges to mend her prosthetic body, badly wrecked in a clash with the government's newest prototype weapon, expecting nothing more than a straightforward transfer into a fresh shell.

That routine procedure turns deadly, since the physician overseeing it is secretly an NSS agent sent to kill her. With her death seemingly assured, the Laughing Man intervenes, and in return for her cooperation he completes the swap and saves her. The Major muses that immature people yearn to perish grandly for a cause, whereas the mature settle for living humbly toward one. The episode carries the subtitle SCANDAL and first aired in Japan on February 25, 2003, with the English broadcast on April 10, 2005.