Man's Search for Meaning

Watching from outside himself, Togusa observes a younger version bound to a chair and questioned by a woman, and he reflects on how reckless and green he once was. The recollection returns to a case he had been chasing on Takashi Shimamura alongside Batou, until a Public Security officer named Noda is thrown into the same cell. After more interrogation, the woman decides Togusa is not the informant her people fear, so his bonds come off, but he is handed an impossible choice: kill Noda or be killed. He flees with Noda into a blizzard, admitting he is a fellow cop who could not pull the trigger, and the two improvise shelter by roofing a trench with scavenged planks.

Once the weather clears, the men split up to improve their odds, Noda into the forest and Togusa the other way. Togusa recalls surviving somehow and eventually joining Section 9, though the connecting details escape him. He runs blind for three days, is overtaken on the fourth, and, discovering only one round remains in the chamber, gives himself up. Kneeling with his hands behind his head, unsure whether any of it is a dream, he sees the Major arrive holding his weapon and telling him to choose life over a pointless heroic end.

Togusa wakes aboard a moving subway train and spots Noda nearby, who no longer recognizes him yet calls himself a "Clear Person" bound for a destination named N. Outside the windows lies a barren waste dotted with wrecked buildings. The train empties at its final stop, Hakaze "592 Shin-Tokyo," where Noda offers Togusa a weapon, describing how something called Miniluv scrubbed away the guilt of an old betrayal. As the sunset transfixes the passengers, they gather on a lower level, and Togusa glimpses Takashi in the throng but cannot reach him. Cut off by a signal jammer, he finds a payphone at a tobacco shop, calls Batou, and, gazing at the light on the horizon, asks how beautiful being alive can truly be as he starts to weep.

This seventeenth episode of Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045 premiered on May 23, 2022, in both Japanese and English. Soichi Masui directed, with the script credited to Daisuke Daito and Kenji Kamiyama. Set between Born in Heaven and How to Build an Independent Nation, it turns almost entirely inward on Togusa, weaving his half-recovered past into the eerie society of N. Its title echoes the Viktor Frankl memoir, and elements like "Miniluv" and "double-think" nod openly toward dystopian fiction.