Okay, End Of Evangelion. I have no idea how much of this I'm going to get through in this sitting, even with the intent of only watching the first half this week. I suspect this may be the longest watch for me yet.
Episode 25': Air
My interpretation of the opening scene is that this takes place literally moments after the ending of episode 24, with Misato having just left Shinji standing by the lake. I guess you could read it as being an indeterminate amount of time later and that Shinji just goes back to that spot a lot.
Asuka's left wrist appears to be bandaged in the hospital, lending credence to the theory that she did attempt to kill herself in the previous episode. That may just be because that's where her IV is inserted, but the bandages seem excessive for that. I'm not a medical professional though, so maybe that is normal.
The scene with Shinji and Asuka in the hospital is rough. I found it hard to watch, even more so than on previous viewings. I can't back this up and the source is the same guy who's given me some dubious meta-information in the past, but I've been told that Anno has said in interviews that he wanted to have Shinji do the absolute worst thing he could possibly do that could still be forgivable for the audience. If true, I think that's pretty on-point. It's certainly one of the most memorable moments in the series to me, and it sort of sets the tone and themes of the movie.
On the most basic level, the plot of this "episode" is about what happens to NERV after they accomplish their goal and are no longer needed to keep the Angels at bay. It's obviously a lot more complicated than that, but the smokescreen that SEELE uses to invade their headquarters has to do with the UN's fears about a small group of people having alien super-weapons now that they don't have an outside enemy to use them on. I may have said this before, but that idea was always kind of in the back of my mind when I played X-Com. I made sure to liberally distribute alien tech to different countries throughout the game so that it wouldn't all be centralized in my base, hoping that my guys wouldn't get End Of Evangelioned after the game was over. :derp:
Misato, musing about the Instrumentality Project, says "So mankind, a race of flawed and incomplete separate entities, has reached the end of its evolutionary potential. The Instrumentality Project will manufacture the evolution of man's separate entities into a single consummate being". I wonder what makes her say that. I suppose that maybe the natural conclusion of the progression of the Angel might have to be that mankind has reached its destined final form. If Angels are supposed to be physically perfect beings via the Fruit Of Life, and Kaworu as an Angel has the appearance of a human, then humans could be extrapolated to be the endpoint of their evolutionary path. Seems like a bit of a leap of logic, and maybe that's not even what she's talking about.
We get a little more insight into what SEELE's plan has been the whole time. Keel says "Without the Lance Of Longinus we cannot use Lilith to complete the Project. Our only hope is to use Lilith's only true offspring, Eva Unit 01". This is telling of a couple of things, although they're things that we kind of already knew. First, SEELE's plan was to initiate Third Impact wholesale, eliminating all life except Unit 01. Second, for some reason Unit 01 is Lilith's "true offspring" and the other Evas are not. That can't be because they don't have S2 Engines, because the MP Evas do and apparently they don't qualify. So I'm not sure what it is about Unit 01 that's so special. Unit 00 seems like it's closer to being Lilith's offspring based on what we know because it houses at least part of Lilith's soul, if not the entire thing. So what's different about Unit 01?
We also learn about a major ideological difference between Gendo and SEELE's plans that fully casts SEELE as the villains at this late point in the series. Council member 09, whoever that is, says "We need not cast aside our human form to use Evangelion as our own private Ark". Maybe I'm jumping to conclusions because I don't know the full implications of what Third Impact would actually do if it went off as they intended, but it sounds like they plan on wiping everyone else out and surviving by shielding themselves inside of Unit 01, leaving themselves as the only living, or at least ego-intact, people on the planet after the event. By "human form" I assume they mean mentally human and not physically human and that they intend to store themselves inside of Unit 01 as data, but maybe they do actually intend to cram a bunch of old men into the entry plug, I don't know.
At any rate, this is one of my least favorite things about End Of Evangelion. Even though it's vague enough to be interpreted I think it pretty explicitly paints SEELE as selfish bad guys when I prefer they be ambiguously motivated, which puts them on similar ground with Gendo. This twist makes them the "bad side" and Gendo the "good side" because he at least seems to have all of humanity's interest at heart and they don't. I think that's a lot less interesting. They do go on to talk about all of humanity being reborn as one, but at this point given what they just said I don't think they plan to count themselves among "all of humanity".
Going back to the thing with Shinji's tape player tying in to the ending of the series, he's shown laying in bed with his headphones on and the tape player is low on batteries and set to track 0. I'm not sure what that means exactly, but it might be a sign that the TV ending and EoE are not, in fact, the same ending. That might be quite a stretch though.
I think this is the first reference we get to there being a number of Magi systems around the world. Interestingly this scene uses the corny dramatic music from much earlier in the series, which kind of seems out of place at this point. Despite the fact that this is a very different situation from last time the Magi were under attack, the score is the same.
There's an ironic exchange between Fuyutsuki and the bridge staff about how the final enemy is their fellow man after all. Of course later we'll find out that fellow man IS an Angel. I wonder who knows that at this point. Presumably Gendo, probably SEELE, maybe Futusuki, definitely Misato by way of Kaji, and probably not many others.
The shots of the invading forces massacring unarmed NERV staff are pretty rough. The soldiers have probably been fed a story about how NERV is plotting to destroy the world (and to be fair, that is totally true), but it wouldn't be easy to assume that all of their low-level staff is in on it too. I guess that's not how being a soldier works, but still, brutal.
While trying to get Shinji moving Misato says "15 years ago the Second Impact was intentionally engineered by mankind because it was the only way to minimize the potential damage. They had to reduce Adam to an embryonic state before the other Angels awoke". I wonder what that means. I never thought about it that way, that the Angels were inevitably going to surface in 2015 regardless of whether or not Second Impact had taken place, but I guess it's probably true. But what would have happened if Adam hadn't been turned into an embryo? Would he have awoken too and actively tried to rejoin the Angels or something?
She then says "You see Shinji, Mankind was spawned from a being called Lilith, just like Adam was. We are the 18th Angel". Wait, what? What does she mean "just like Adam was"? Does she think Lilith created Adam? By saying "the other Angels" in her last thought was she talking about Adam? That's not right, is it? Does this mean that Kaji was wrong about Adam the whole time? Is this just a mistranslation in my dub? I actually stopped and went to the wiki to look up Adam and Lilith to make sure I hadn't just been misunderstanding their relationship the whole time, and yeah, Misato is just wrong here.
We see the Prime Minister in Tokyo-2 (I don't think I knew Tokyo-2 was even still around, I assumed it was destroyed or abandoned like Old Tokyo), and he has indeed been fed a story by SEELE about NERV being evil. And again, none of the facts he was given were probably that wrong, except the omission that SEELE wants to do virtually the same thing. He even seems to be trying to contact NERV to settle things peacefully and only can't because SEELE cut the communication lines. He orders headquarters destroyed and says "Make sure no one can touch it for the next 20 years, like Old Tokyo". Does this indicate that maybe Old Tokyo was destroyed on purpose, or is that just sort of a figure of speech?
During the scene with Asuka in the cockpit under the lake with Kyoko reaching out to her there's a brief flash of something that I had to rewind and pause to see. It's Asuka's desiccated, maggot-ridden corpse. Lovely. Following that are a bunch of flashes of the scene with her as a little girl, but with a lot of extra added blood. When the imagery flashes back to her in the cockpit there are different things superimposed over her including some German text that I can't read but assume to be "I don't want to die" and that doll, which is layered over her head in such a way that, to me, it sort of looks like a brain.
This begins the fucking stupendous Mass Production Eva fight. I don't think I can even say that much about this sequence except that it's the best fight scene in animation. And Asuka kicks it off by undoubtedly killing a catastrophic number of people. I can't really blame her I guess, they are soldiers trying to kill her, but she throws a battleship into a battery of tanks, and I'm guessing all of those were manned.
It's pretty brave of all of those JSSDF hovercraft to keep coming after her after she annihilates the first few waves and they seemingly do nothing to her. I guess the pilots really believe this is a do-or-die situation anyway based on what they've been told about NERV. And that is the case, they're fucked regardless.
First appearance of the Mass Production Evas. I LOVE the designs on these guys. They're obviously from similar origins as the Evas, but they look different enough to be really scary and alien. Possibly notably the Revoltech Evangelion toys use the same basic body type for most of the Evas, but the MP Evas have a separate base body with completely different articulation. Then again Awoken Unit 01 from Rebuild 2.0 has a third completely different base body that only it uses and it looks exactly the same as Unit 01, so maybe that was more of an experiment than any kind of indication that their bodies are significantly structurally different.
We briefly see that the entry plugs for the MP Evas are marked with Kaworu's name, so they must be dummy plugs. I missed that the first time I saw this movie and assumed that there must have been a parallel cast of anime teens with mental problems piloting them that we just never see, which is kind of an interesting thought. But no, they use dummy plugs. And their behavior is consistent with Unit 01 when it was running off of Rei's dummy plug: They basically fight like wild animals.
Whenever I talk to someone about this movie one of the things I always say is that every time I watch it I take something different away from it, and during the scene right before Misato's death I realized what it is this time around: Shinji spends the first chunk of the movie trying not to pilot Unit 01 because when he's in an Eva "all he does is hurt and kill people". And I just realized that, at least at this point, he's sort of right. If he gets in Unit 01 all he'll do is hurt and kill people. The catch is that if he doesn't do it he and everyone else at NERV will die, and presumably Third Impact will still happen somehow because SEELE seems to have some kind of plan to activate Unit 01 without him, but he isn't wrong in resisting getting in. Misato basically bullies him into doing it, and in some ways she's the one in the wrong here. I wonder what would have happened if Shinji had just refused to get in the cockpit. Maybe nothing good, but then again maybe Third Impact could have been averted since it will end up being him that causes it.
I don't usually find myself relating that strongly with Misato, but she says something here that really resonates with me. "I've made tons of stupid mistakes and later I regretted them. And I've done it over and over again. A cycle of hollow joy and vicious self-hatred. But even so, every time I learned something about myself." I've always kind of considered Misato to be a rash, selfish person who's too focused on the present and who doesn't plan ahead. But this line makes me think maybe I've been misestimating her. Maybe she has been thinking carefully this whole time, and this is just how she does things. That's very similar to my personal ethos. I believe that it's okay to make any mistake as long as you learn something from it that can help prevent it from happening again. Misato's speech here is actually kind of uplifting given the circumstances. I'm not sure I agree with her that the right thing for Shinji to do is to get in Unit 01, but I can respect her decision making process.
Misato's last act is to kiss Shinji and proposition him. She probably knows that she's dying and that she'll never actually make good on her promise, but I do get the impression that she's been thinking about this before now.
We have the first of many, many deaths of main characters in this movie with Misato being killed by an explosion. She sees Rei right before she dies, which is in line with the rest of the movie. I paused the video to write this and realized that you can actually see her body being blown in half by the explosion. It's pretty graphic. I never noticed that before. Seems kind of unnecessary, but it wouldn't be the first time.
Ritsuko tries to kill Gendo, several times over. Does this mean that she's changed her mind on his plan, if she was ever on board with it, or just that she wants to hurt him personally? Gendo says something we can't hear before he kills her. I have to assume it was either "I love you" or "I didn't love you", and either way she calls him a liar. But which was it?
Unit 02 being impaled through the head by one of the replica Lances also seems to have taken out one of Asuka's eyes. We've seen the pilots feel what the Evas feel before, but we've never seen the physical injuries carry over. I assume that's either because the Lance is such a powerful weapon, or because Asuka's synchronization with Unit 02 is so complete.
The reactivation of the MP Evas is kind of an animation error, in the sense that after getting back up they don't still have all of the wounds she inflicted on them. Some of them are missing limbs, but the one she ripped in half still gets back up with the rest of them with no severe signs of damage. It's possible that their regeneration is that good, but then I figure they would have regrown their missing limbs too. Oh well, not a big problem.
As noted before, Asuka's death closely mirrors Rei II's death a few episodes ago. It has that same weird effect that Gendo's death will have later, where her body just kind of splits apart. Not sure what that means if anything, it might just be an interesting visual/symbolic effect.
Unit 01 reactivates itself and blasts free of the headquarters, complete with energy wings reminiscent of Adam's and resembling the ones seen in the TV opening. It looks ready to go, in contrast to Shinji who looks anything but. The part where the camera zooms through Unit 01's head with its crazy glowing eyes and into Shinji's tired face is a great juxtaposition. It occurs to me that the Awoken Unit 01 design from Rebuild 2.0 is probably heavily inspired by this scene. After all, why would Unit 01 only have these new powers now? It's not like anything particular has happened to it since it ate Zeruel, so it probably should have looked like this the whole time, at least while berserk.
To be continued... I'll finish this next week. As predicted that took a very long time. Not sure how long, since I went to go get dinner in the middle, but well over three hours.
