[Traece]

Originally Posted by Roger Rambo

That's also missing the fact that as a supervisor (which is what Inspectors ARE basically) Akane is better at this job than Gino. She's extremely prosocial, so even though she zapped Kougami her first day on the job, she came to recognize how valuable the Enforcers were, and trusted them enough to give them the freedom they needed to carry out a number of different investigations. What Gino derided as naivety turned into mutual trust. I certainly think Akane gained allot of their trust when she stood up for Kougami when there was a possibility he might have been making an escape attempt, then subsequently risking damaging her hue to help identify Makishima.

I honestly think the enforcers value a superior like Akane who trusts them over some hypothetical meat head commando.
But should this really be surprising?

Which is more or less what she should NOT be doing. Gino is only inferior to Akane in the realm of being really nice to her enforcers. The only reason she can even afford to do that without becoming one herself is her MC mental armor. She is an exception to a rule, and she is constantly regarded as such by people within the show.

Originally Posted by Vicious108

The implication that the main antagonist is basically no better than one of his pawns? Why yes, yes it is. For starters, it makes the conflict a lot less layered and a lot less interesting, which isn't usually the case with Urobuchi.

And Kougami's intent alone is not a good enough reason (be it on an in-universe or meta level) for their confrontation to amount to nothing more than a short brawl. In episode 11 Makishima had a showdown with Akane (which was a lot more interesting than this one in spite of the supposed main rivalry being between Kougami and Makishima) and the only reason Akane was there was also just to capture Makishima, but he still had something of substance to say and still managed to put her to the test in more interesting ways than just physically.

Now I'm not saying the exact same thing should have happened in his confrontation with Kougami, but would something more akin to his encounter with Akane have been preferable to a brief and brainless fistfight with a really anti-climatic ending? Yes, it would.

And don't tell me he couldn't afford to wax philosophy with a hunting dog like Kougami around. He kicked his ass (didn't get hit once, in fact) and immobilized him with ease, so there was nothing stopping him, really. If anything I would have expected that, as soon as he got done with Kougami, Makishima would look around and see if Kougami had any teammates with him that Makishima could use to further test and plunge him into a deeper abyss, etc.

But alas, as you said, the prospect of carving Kougami up like a turkey was stimulating enough for him. Which yes, I found surprising, as well as disappointing.

I feel like a lot of people are disappointed in what happened with Makishima because they wanted something cool to happen. What we got was realism. Makishima doesn't have some kind of fancy clairvoyance or a-human fighting abilities. He's a really smart guy who can kick some ass and whose brain happens to beat the Sybil System. Getting hit in the back of the head with a blunt object is still very detrimental to his health.

We have the beautiful power of being the audience. We know everything, and they know what they know. Since Akane generally follows Ko wherever he goes whenever she can, it's rather strange that he would appear at the top of the tower without her beside him. As far as I know he had no way of knowing that she had accompanied him beyond predicting a likely outcome. As far as hearing her coming, by the time "we" hear her coming she's a good three or four steps out from her epic helmet swing. Makishima is a human being. He just finished a huge fight, he got overconfident, and he wasn't expecting Akane. It makes sense no matter what stick you shake at it.