You watch this thinking you're getting a police procedural about cybercrime, then somewhere between a laughing man's conspiracy and a tank driving through a city, you realize the show has been asking what you actually are the whole time. Each stand-alone episode feels disposable until you rewatch and see how they're all building the same question from different angles. The dialogue is dense enough to require subtitles even in Japanese, but that's the point, this show doesn't simplify consciousness down to soundbites, it lets you drown in the real weight of it. By the final arc, you're not solving a mystery; you're watching Section 9 confront the possibility that the person they're hunting might not exist at all, and that might be the most honest ending cyberpunk has ever given you.

In the near future, people can replace their flesh bodies entirely with machine ones, which greatly boosts their physical and cybernetic abilities and blurs the boundary between the two. Criminals exploit the same technology to commit new and dangerous offenses. To handle these sensitive cases, the Japanese government forms Section 9, an independent police unit led by Daisuke Aramaki and Motoko Kusanagi, which usually gets results. That changes when a highly skilled hacker called the Laughing Man appears, drawing the team into a risky game of cat and mouse as they follow the trail he leaves across Japan. Expect a sci-fi action mystery with a psychological edge.