Psycho-Pass - Episode 9

Rikako Oryo's killing spree might have come to a grisly end , but it's become very clear that there was a mastermind behind her "works of art" who is going to be an altogether trickier individual to track down given his abilities.

It's to this end that Kogami offers Akane some assistance, taking her to see a psychologist (not the best choice for a first date, Kogami) with a particular interest and expertise in criminal psychology, meaning that he's perfectly suited to give her a crash course in psychological profiling of suspects and the like.  Given the risks such knowledge could have for an individual's Psycho-Pass - the reason why such training is now barred from being offered to detectives - the decision to undertake this training is hardly a popular one in Ginoza's eyes, although Akane seems to have grown enough in stature to be able to bat his admonishment right back at him... a confrontation that also gives us a window into Ginoza's own back story.

Alongside all of this, we also get a glimpse into a world making strides in cyborg technology - strides demonstrated in an intelligent but also slightly creepy for by Toyohisa Senguji, a pioneer in this field whose entire body has been replaced with that of a cyborg aside from his brain.  But how does one try to keep one's brain young in an ageless body?  By turning young girls into smoking pipes and selecting people of interest to "hunt" and murder, it appears, as this very same Senguji is the man at the centre of many of the goings-on we've seen throughout the series thus far - goings-on instigated more directly by Makishima, the man currently the focus of the Pubic Safety Bureau's manhunt.

Now that it's more comfortable within its proverbial shoes, Psycho-Pass feels more and content with giving us some thought-provoking insights into its world - of course, its talk of cybernetic bodies and minds has more than a passing resemblance to Ghost in the Shell, but its ever-extending thoughts on the whole Sibyl system and mental health, be it the sitgma of mental illness or what even constitutes a "healthy" mental state is also fascinating in its own right, to the point where the detective drama angle of the series can quite easily take a back seat to such major concepts.  Thankfully, both the thought-provoking and dramatic elements of the series are working very well indeed up to this point, and Psycho-Pass remains one of the autumn season's best as a result.