Face

Following a live broadcast in which Individual Eleven members carry out a ritual mass suicide, Section 9 examines the one survivor, Hideo Kuze, whose full-prosthetic body wears a lifelike sculpted face. Matsui points out that the face has too little neural structure to move expressively, which means a rare artist made it. Batou and Togusa track the handiwork to one of the country's only two such sculptors, but arrive to find the man killed and footage showing a murderer who wears Pazu's face.

Because the prints on the scene are Pazu's, Kusanagi orders him to stand down until things clear up. The case darkens when a detective last seen with Pazu turns up shot by a round tied to the Seburo M-5 that Section 9 issues. Combing the sculptor's clients, Pazu finds a name he knew five years back, Kaori Kawashima. He does not realize that Kaori had, months earlier, taken over a bar manager's prosthetic body and used it to collect prints and DNA. Pazu had even talked with her at the bar, ribbing the manager about a fresh interest in death masks, never guessing whose braincase would later be tossed out with the garbage.

Pazu chases Kaori to a rundown building. This time she meets him wearing not the bar manager's body but a brand-new prosthetic, an exact copy of Pazu's own frame dressed in identical clothing. Veering between warmth, spite, and delusion, she says she never understood why he left and remade herself as him to make sense of the rejection, claiming she now carries his ghost and no longer needs the living man. She cuts him; he pulls his own knife, and they fight fiercely. Batou and a Tachikoma finally break in, finding a lone Pazu over a mirror-image corpse, a deeper gash across its chest and a blade in its eye. Batou notes afterward that Pazu was slow to piece it together, Kusanagi remarks that many women might want him dead since he never bedded the same one twice, and asked if the survivor is truly Pazu, Batou will only say, probably.

Section 9 links Kuze's crafted prosthetic face to a rare specialist, then discovers that specialist dead and a killer caught on tape wearing Pazu's likeness.

Prints that match Pazu and a Seburo-linked shooting push Kusanagi to sideline him as suspicion builds.

The real perpetrator turns out to be Kaori Kawashima, who commandeered bodies and rebuilt herself as a flawless duplicate of Pazu.

Pazu comes through the showdown alive and kills the impostor, though Batou can only guess he is the genuine article.

This 2nd GIG installment carries the subtitle MAKE UP and turns the Individual Eleven arc toward Pazu. Direction came from Itsuro Kawasaki, working off a script by Yutaka Omatsu and Kenji Kamiyama.

Japan saw it air on June 3, 2004, with the English broadcast following on February 25, 2006. In running order it arrives just before Beware the Left Eye, partway through the 2nd GIG season.