Reasons Leading to Flameout

Section 9 chases a hacker who weaponizes the internet, steering ordinary users into physical assaults, and the thread leads to a teenager. The episode opens with Tatsuya Hisata firing off a text and photo at an airport before a pair of eyeless strangers set upon him, swelling into a mob that hunts him down. Back at headquarters, Purin Ezaki briefs the team: the man's cyberbrain was fried at Fukuoka Airport by roughly three million simultaneous intruders. Kusanagi pins the likely cause on the post-human Suzuka Mizukane and splits the squad between hunting her and watching the airport's systems.

Left off the main assignment, Purin digs into matching killings and notices one man, Koji Kogure, recurring near the deaths. Under questioning he reveals an app called Peep Hole that lets users watch through a victim's eyes, run by a figure known as the Nameless King. Purin allows herself to be hacked in order to reach him and finds a crowned fish that explains Think Pol, a crowd-court where users vote a hated person guilty or innocent, which is how millions came to kill Tatsuya. Kusanagi cuts in and names the king as the boy Shinya Uotora.

Shinya admits he built only the peeping tool, not Think Pol itself, which he and his friends first tried on a teacher, Takeru Hamabe, before it spread; his aim was to open the platform to everyone. A fresh target then appears, Prime Minister Tate, and the eyeless crowd closes on him until Kusanagi, Batou, and Togusa shield him. The platform is shut for good, and Batou needles Purin for letting herself be hacked even as he praises her work.

Subtitled NET PEOPLE, the episode was directed by Masayuki Miyaji and written by Kurasumi Sunayama, airing in Japan on April 23, 2020, and in English on May 3, 2020. It falls between The Lonely Struggle and The Revolution of the 14-year-olds, and closes by steering the team toward another post-human, Takashi Shimamura.