So who's watching this? (Warning: Probable spoilers for the first series.)
The ending of the first Psycho Pass was weird in that it was completely open-ended, but it didn't really seem to be asking for a sequel. A lot of stuff was left undone and unsaid, but that was okay because the show didn't need them. At least, I didn't feel like I really needed to see Akane try to change society from the inside, and I still don't really. The first episode of the second season didn't do a great job of convincing me that I want to see more of this story. It's kind of awkward, we've basically seen it before, and I really don't know what the point is.
It's way too early to declare that this season has lost track of the meticulous balance of complicated ideas that the original series was built on, but it doesn't do a great job of showing us otherwise. For now there are clearly-delineated camps of Right People (Akane and Ginoza) who are doing the Right Things, and Wrong People (well, pretty much just Mika) who need to be shown just how Wrong they are and they'll see the light. On paper it's not really that much different than the relationship between Akane and Ginoza in the first series, and it's clearly set up to mirror that, it just feels more clunky and one-sided now. And the new villain, from all we've seen on him so far, doesn't seem terribly interesting yet either. "Anarchist who thinks society is broken so he wants to shake up society" doesn't seem like much to work with. That's unfair though, we haven't had nearly enough time yet to see how everything is going to develop, I just wasn't super amazed by our first glimpse of the new show. It deserves time to set up interesting scenarios that will do justice to the complex, ambiguous world I expect from this series, although I would've hoped that having a foot in the door already by virtue of having an entire season to build on already would have sped that process along a little more.
