Well-Fed Me

In the wake of a nuclear third world war and a non-nuclear fourth conflict remembered as a second Vietnam War, Japan enacts a Refugee Special Action Policy that opens its borders to displaced people from across Asia. Many accept and settle into the low-wage work that companies dangle at them as cheap labor. Gino, a former combat pilot who fought in that fourth war, is one of these refugees, now steering a helicopter for a corporate chairman.

The episode inhabits his point of view as he moves through an ordinary working life soured by resentment and despair. Angry at the country that used him and depressed by his diminished place in it, he begins to nurse a plan for revenge, convinced that a reckoning is his to deliver.

When Section 9 is finally set on his trail to gauge the threat, the danger deflates. Kusanagi remarks to Batou that Gino is merely one more entry in a long procession of pitiable people who dream of achieving what will forever stay beyond their reach.

The backstory sketches how the twin wars and the refugee policy created a permanent underclass of veterans like Gino, treated as disposable both in battle and in peace. His mounting rage and fantasies of violence drive the episode's tension, but Section 9's investigation reframes him not as a coming terrorist but as a broken idealist. Kusanagi's closing judgment defines him as harmless in the end, a man whose revenge lives only in his head.

The story openly evokes the film Taxi Driver, sharing its portrait of a returning soldier scarred by a war the public would rather forget and turning that hurt outward into visions of bloodshed. A remembered passage of dialogue has Gino rapturously describing the Major in a prosthetic body, praising her as the one person he can be certain is truly human. The subtitle reads NIGHT CRUISE, and the episode aired in Japan on January 1, 2004, and in English on November 26, 2005.