Authoritarian control through the digital landscape, exploitation of mass surveillance, and loss of autonomy are recurrent themes in cyberpunk narratives, and in that sense, exploring these ideas in a futuristic post-privacy Tokyo, as seen in Netflix’s latest anime, Tokyo Override, created by Yusuke Fukada and Veerapatra Jinanavin, initially seems like a pretty conventional affair. That is until the series counters the established order by presenting motorcycle riding as a symbol of freedom, rebellion against the system, and brotherhood, which makes the narrative an adrenaline-fueled exhilarating ride that ends in a flash with six short episodes in the first season, leaving you craving for more. You don’t need to be a motorhead to enjoy the thrill of revved-up motorcylces zooming across neon-lit freeways, but if you are one, the mean beasts designed by Yamaha and Honda Motocorp are surely going to make you excited. The homage to Japan’s Bosozuku bike tradition shown in the series counters the nation’s preoccupation with replacing human resources with technology to create a faultless, ideal society. The series also deals with immigration issues, critiques Japan’s perspective towards foreign residents of the country.Â
Spoilers Ahead
Post Privacy Japan
The series is set a century ahead of the present day in Tokyo, which has been divided into three major provinces following a terrible earthquake. The West section is where wealthier, original native residents live and enjoy the best amenities, while the East section comprises mostly the rootless, the outsiders and refugees—where the situation isn’t as amicable—and in the midsection a confluence of both sectors is noticeable. Technology has advanced to such an extent that a digital wall has been created to keep the three sections separated. Mass surveillance has introduced a revolutionary arrangement known as Insight, which allows the governance to digitally tag every single citizen to control mobility, resulting in a so-called safe, clean society that is punctual, orderly, and controllable. The transportation service, which now only comprises electric vehicles, is completely controlled through Insight as well, leading to hassle-free, prompt service all around. Think of the big data surveillance system of China, except cranked up to 11 in this traceability system. With the basic income system, the necessities of every citizen are taken care of as well, which ensures no chance of public outcry. But even in the midst of this seemingly perfect society, there are people—mostly outsiders—who remain tagless (a method invented by the current government to track the citizens) and are desperate to find recognition to ensure the security of their livelihood. The guise of freedom and privacy is a myth when everyone can be tracked at a moment’s notice and social and economic disparity still exists.
How Did Kai Meet Sumo Garage Crew?
Kai, a talented teenage hacker, has made her way into the posh west section of Tokyo by using her skills to remain undetected by the authorities. Not much about Kai’s past is revealed, but what we do learn is that she is a rootless orphan who used to live in the East section of the city, used to be tagless, and her desire to have a better chance at life led her to forge her identity, having a digital tag of her own, and living a life of comfort—all by her own. Perhaps it’s a feeling of guilt of being able to move ahead in her life, leaving her peers behind, which made Kai a shut-off loner, and at the stage of life where we meet her, she seems lacking in direction or purpose in her life. Kai’s only friend is Ayumi, whose rich, overbearing parents have contributed to her carefree mindset. Even though Kai trusts her wholeheartedly, Ayumi is mostly interested in using Kai’s talents for her personal gains. On one occasion, Ayumi requests Kai to arrange for her a stash of Highway, a popular drug, by going to the midsection. Initially hesitant, Kai eventually agrees to her request, but while meeting with the drug dealer, she gets caught by the chief of the health ministry’s narcotics investigation department, Lizard.
However, Kai manages to evade capture by hacking their handheld tag devices, and while on the run, manages to hack the digital profile of a random woman to access transportation. However, Watari, whose identity she stole temporarily, wasn’t a mere random bystander, and is a hacker herself, and her comrades, Hugo and Spoke, along with their mentor, Yukio, run an underground delivery service operating from a certain Sumo Garage, which acts as a front for their seemingly illegal business. Kai gets abducted by the group, and Hugo, the jubilant, happy-go-lucky leader, appears quite friendly with her. The group plans to hand Kai over to the authorities, but a sharp-witted Kai has already realized that the crew operated hidden from the prying eyes of the authorities and manages to strike a bargain with them. She will not expose them if they don’t get her captured, a deal which the team disgruntledly agrees to.
What Kind of Service did Sumo Garage Offer?
Kai learns that the Sumo Garage crew bypass surveillance, the digital wall, and other means of cyber control to deliver stuff that generally doesn’t get prioritized by the system. Even though the nature of their work is illegal, the assignments taken by the crew are genuinely noble. As they were already on a mission, Hugo decided to let Kai stick along, and the crew met with Ieuji, a humanitarian and high-ranking official in the digital ministry who is a close ally of the group. Ieuji introduces them to a group of tagless kids who were brought in by the human rights relief program and promised a chance at a better life, but after the cancellation of the program, these kids were left abandoned, tagless. Ieuji wants the crew to secretly deliver the kids to a shelter where they can stay until an arrangement can be made to provide them with tags; otherwise, they will be deported by the authorities. Kai, who herself used to be a tagless kid, sympathizes with their plight and feels a sense of respect towards Ieuji and the garage crew.
While transporting the kids, the crew get detected by the authorities and a bunch of sentry droids are launched to apprehend them – and this is when things get really exciting for Kai and the viewers, as Hugo, Spoke and Watari decide to bring out their old school, combustion engine motorcycles – which can not be traced or controlled by the authorities. As the trio decides to complete their assignment by taking the kids on their bikes, Kai, riding pillion on Hugo’s bike, feels the thrill and a sense of liberation for the first time. Swerving, revving, and cutting through the freeway, the daredevils manage to evade capture and deliver the kids to the shelter in time.
Why Did Lizard Suspect The Crew?
Unbeknownst to Kai or the garage crew, one of the kids, whom Kai had shown kindness by offering him one of Hugo’s lucky candies, is found dead the next day, and Lizard’s drug deal investigation leads him to this case as well. Lizard has a hunch that the death of the kid might be related to the digital profile duplication attempt incident (Kai’s attempt), but gets surprised to find access to the data being denied. To protect the crew, Ieuji had denied access, and assuming the Digital Ministry might be involved in this, Lizard goes to request access to the digital wall data. It should be mentioned that as part of the digital ministry’s surveillance sector, Ieuji she had complete control over monitoring and moderating Tokyo’s transportation system via data point servers scattered across the city and her access to Insight. Lizard fails in his attempt to gain intel as Mikuriya, chief of the Justice Bureau, shuts him out. It is revealed that the narcotics investigation department is on the verge of being shut down due to the recent trend of high-techhigh tech dependency, which means the need for old-school manhunters like Lizard has nearly come to an end. Lizard decides to follow his hunch and considers Kai as his first lead—given her hacking talents and profile duplication incident feelsfeel connected to the investigator.
On the other hand, after returning back to the west, Kai has a heated exchange with Ayumi, her purported best and only friend on the west side, who blames her for wasting her money and returning empty-handed without Highway and calls Kai out for faking her identity to stay in the west. Later on, Kai finds herself tracked down by Lizard and his colleagues and is horrified to learn about the death of the kid. Kai somehow manages to escape the narcs and reach Sumo Garage, which is at the moment her only refuge; she informs the crew about the harrowing incident. Much later, Lizard learns about the activities of the crew by following Kai’s trail.
How Did Kai Become a Member of the Sumo Garage Crew?
The crew calls Ieuji, who promises to look into the matter while warning them about Lizard. Hugo is moved by Kai’s empathy for the rootless, and recognizing her talents as a hacker, he offers for her to become a part of the crew. Kai, who had already taken a fascination with the rider’srider life, agrees to do so, as otherwise she will get captured by the narcs anyway. During her time spent with Hugo and co., Kai takes part in crucial missions—on one occasion, the crew was in a race against time while delivering a heart for transplant, and Kai finds a sense of fulfillment. She meets a professional bike racer, Amarin, who seeks assistance from Sumo Garage to best the superior AI-controlled bikes during the Tokyo warp race, and Kai feels herself slowly getting more and more hooked into the thrill-seeking life of a rider. Her skills prove to be an asset for the team as well, and Kai fits right in among the crew. In the meantime, Hugo begins investigating the tagless kid on his own and stumbles across a former drug dealer, who provides him with a ledger where thorough details of Tokyo’s transportation records are registered.
Who Was Responsible For The Death of the Tagless Kid?
After learning that the narcs led by Lizard are targeting people with connections to Highway, Kai grows concerned for Ayumi and decides to accept her invitation to visit during a concert. However, if Kai gets caught, the crew will suffer as well, and Watari and Hugo warn her not to maketake any rash decisions. However, a rebellious Kai decides to steal a bike from the garage and goes to the concert, and after having a chat with Ayumi, she realizes that Ayumi wanted the drugs to get close to her favorite idols. Witnessing Ayumi getting abducted by a bunch of drug dealers, Kai springs into action and reaches their hideout, where she finds all the dealers to have been brutally shot to death. Kai is relieved to find Ayumi alive but gets the shock of a lifetime after realizing Ayumi had set her up but didn’t anticipate carnage of this proportion. At the same time, the Sumo Garage crew arrive at the spot, and they come across Lizard and his narc team, which leads Kai to assume that Lizard has killed all these dealers to close the investigation and keep his department afloat, while Lizard considers the crew to be the murderers and considers them as suspects. Lizard injures the crew with nonlethal tracker rounds, especially Hugo, who suffers the worst, but Kai manages to disarm the narcs by hacking their weapons through a direct channel link device given by Yukio and manages to buy a chance toof escape.
However, the next day Lizard arrives at the garage, and as it turns out, it was a huge misunderstanding on both their parts, as the assailants were third parties who left the drug dealer hideout in time and deliberately arranged a way for both the narcs and Sumo Garage crew to arrive at the spot at the same time, to pit them against each other. In fact, the crew was being presented as targets by this third party for quite a while, and Kai remembers that even before she hacked Watari’s profile, it was already hacked by someone else. The only person with such a level of access and information is none other than Ieuji, who is revealed to have used the crew as her pawns all the while. In fact, it was her superior Mikuriya who had planned to use the tagless kids as exploitable resources, like as labor in drug deals, and on the off chance a situation went south, the kids were eliminated, and thanks to their tagless status, in general no investigations were made, until Lizard decided to pry closer in this situation. Lizard had arrived at the crew’s hideout to ask for their help because any intelligence shared with his department could have been monitored by Ieuji.
Were Sumo Garage Crew Able To Expose Ieuji?
Lizard and crew decide to hide from Ieuji’s gaze by going to the abandoned suburbs of the east section, where administrative neglect has resulted in practically no surveillance. This is a homecoming moment for Kai, as she grew up on the Eastside. Determined to bring Ieuji to justice, the crew plans to upload the data discrepancy by comparing Ieuji’s concocted record with the original record of Hugo’s ledger, directly to the digital ministry’s server, which will expose Ieuji for tagless child trafficking.
However, the job is easier said than done, as the moment they get out of their eastside hideout, Ieuji begins tracking them, and she has been given free reign by Mikuriya to stop the crew by any means necessary. Watari and Spoke manage to get the necessary data by accessing data points across the city, and the duty to upload it falls on the shoulders of Kai and Hugo. A desperate Ieuji begins blocking their path by interfering with the data points and eventually demolishes the streets using a digital interface connection, and Hugo is unable to ride after taking a nasty fall, so Amarin makes a surprise return to save him from sentry droids. The responsibility to upload the data now rests on Kai, who is revealed to have found her long-needed purpose in being a part of the Sumo Garage crew and choosing the rider life. Kai hacks the Insight and makes way for herself completely on her own, symbolic of her taking control of her own life, and finally manages to overcome all the hurdles posed by Ieuji to upload the data to the digital ministry server.
As the first season comes to a close, Ieuji is revealed to have been fired by her department; Kai has received her own bike as an active member of the crew and found a sense of direction after all. Lizard and his department are still needed to bring perps like Ieuji to justice, who use loopholes in the system for their personal gain. However, with Mikuriya still holding his position, the threat of surveillance exploitation is never truly gone, and hopefully, the second season will focus on that aspect. And talking about Ayumi and the regular West siders, they look up to Kai as unlike them she has her life figured out and completely under control. Despite being wealthy, the West Siders are extremely dependent on modern technology whereas Kai and her newly found fraternity are free to ride and find ways on their own.
