'Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045' Season 1 Ending Explained: Takashi's past is revealed but what happened to Togusa?
Contains spoilers for 'Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045' Season 1.
The first twelve episodes of 'Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045' are out and they present a truly gripping plotline. The show's first season ends with a major cliffhanger that's got us feeling desperate for more, which is the way it should be with such a high-concept sci-fi thriller.
Picking up fifteen years after the beginning of 'Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex', the new series looks at a world where a race of "post-humans" is beginning to threaten humanity's continuation as a species. Episode 12 'NOSTALGIA - All Will Become N' takes a deep-dive into the past of one of these post-humans and in the process, it brings about a change in one of our protagonists at Section 9.
When Togusa (Koichi Yamadera) analyzes the data taken from the home of the young post-human Takashi Shimamura (Megumi Hayashibara), he begins to seize up and passes out. As it turns out, there was some sort of a code embedded in the data that triggered old memories and a sense of nostalgia in the Section 9 officer.
With Batou (Akio Otsuka) by his side, Togusa sets off to Kyoto where Takashi spent some time living with his uncle when he was 9. While there, Togusa begins experiencing strange visions of Takashi's past. Through these visions, we find out that Yuzu, the little girl whom Takashi has been hallucinating, was actually his younger cousin who developed an attachment for Takashi while he was staying with her family.
We also see how Takashi met an "airborne trooper", inspiring his lifelong fascination with the military outfit, and how that trooper gave Takashi his copy of '1984' by George Orwell. The book clearly had a huge impact on Takashi and the episode's ending explains exactly why.
Takashi and Yuzu accidentally stumble onto some corrupt cops killing one of their own and are saved from them by the trooper but during the firefight, Yuzu is hit and she dies. This moment is where Takashi's journey began and in many ways, it illustrates just how similar this world is to '1984'.
Those who do not conform to the will of the masses are beaten down and as Takashi would find out later in life, people are ultimately afraid to stand up against those in power even when those people abuse that power. Realizing Takashi's perspective, Togusa is invited to join the young post-human in his new "sustainable war" and from Batou's perspective, we see that Togusa has disappeared from sight the way the other post-humans do.
The ending implies that Togusa may have become a post-human himself or at least that he's on the way to becoming one. Perhaps the next season might reveal the true agenda of the post-humans and Togusa could end up being the one who either wins this war for humanity or dooms them all.
Either way, the ending creates a lot of mystery and we can't wait to see how this story is resolved in the second half of the show.
'Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045' Season 1 is currently available for streaming exclusively on Netflix.
