Maidens of the Kaleidoscope
~Beyond the Border~ => Sara's Audio-Visual Import-Overflow Retail => Topic started by: commandercool on September 16, 2015, 01:38:01 AM
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As anyone who knows me probably knows, I l-o-v-e the classic 1995 Gainax anime Neon Genesis Evangelion. It is my favorite anime, and pretty much my favorite thing. I've seen it a dozen times or so, mostly recently about a year ago with my roommate, who is also a huge Eva fan but who I had never watched it with, and one of my neighbors, who had seen it years ago but didn't really remember it.
Well, about a year ago since my last viewing is too long, and I'm ready to watch it again. I figured I'd try something different this time, and I've already forced it on everyone I know who has the tiniest chance of actually liking it. So this time I figured I'd try poking around on the internet and see if I can find someone to watch it with me. What do you guys think, is anyone out there interested in watching Evangelion and talking about it? I'm thinking it would be fun to get a handful of people to watch it together, maybe an episode or two a week. I'm interested in hearing people's thoughts, be they new to the series or longtime fans or anything else. I get something new out of Evangelion every time I watch it, but bringing in some fresh blood seems like it would be a great opportunity for some new ideas and interpretations.
So does this sound interesting to anyone? If I was planning this out right I would wait for the Blu-Ray release, but I want to watch it now and frankly after how long it's taken Rebuild 3.0 to not come out I'm not confident we'll be seeing it any time soon.
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Sounds fun. I might hitch a ride if more people show interest.
My roommate just finished watching the tv series with another ffriend and has a couple figures. Guess I can watch it again since it's been awhile since I've seen the original. I could make some time for best girl Ramiel.
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SUP LET'S DO THIS
IT MAY BE MY 17TH TIME REWATCHING BUT SURE
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What's a group watch?
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It's a thing I assume is real where a bunch of people watch something and then talk about it. Either that, or it's a thing I just made up.
In this case I'm thinking something along the lines of people watch two episodes during the week, and on a particular day (Sunday?) we compare notes for those episodes.
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Yeah more or less. I'm not big on analyzing Eva but I might join in anyway.
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I'm not necessarily interested in analyzing Eva as a whole (although I'm sure there will be plenty of that) in this case. The reason this format occurred to me is that I've never really evaluated it on an episode-by-episode basis.
It's my intent this time to focus more on each episode on its own merits. The first chunk of the series in particular is pretty episodic, so there should be plenty to look at. I suppose that counts as analysis, but hopefully not in the most traditional sense.
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Alright, well, looks like we got a few people. Sounds good to me. I'm going to watch the first two episodes over the course of next week and be back here to talk about them next Sunday I guess.
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Oh god I forgot all about this! I had a crazy week leading up to last Sunday and then I just forgot. I, uh, haven't watched anything. Please wait warmly, I'll get around to this at some point soon. It will probably just be me talking to myself mostly, but that happens a lot anyway. Sorry.
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Was wondering what happened to this. I have a little list of notes from the week of last on my laptop I can post once I get back.
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Alright, alright, I'm finally kicking this off. Sorry I suck so bad, I'll try to keep on track now that I've gotten rolling here. Fuck me for being a week late of the 20-year anniversary. I don't know how the format for this should work at all, so I'm just going to try dividing my notes up into episodes and running with them. I watched the first two episodes, from the Platinum DVD box set, subbed.
Episode one-Angel Attack:
Right out of the gate, first thing, is of course the opening credits. A lot has been written about this opening given the anniversary, but... Yeah... I think it's safe to say that this remains the best title sequence of all time. Was the anime tradition of changing up the opening every few episodes established at this point? Because if it was, major credit to Gainax for resisting the urge (and forgoing the expense) to ever change it.
Eva was the show that turned me on to anime after many failed attempts by different people to try to hook me on different shows throughout my childhood and teens. I credit a lot of that to how fast it jumps into the action, and not in a superficial way either. It's easy to slap a flashy-but-pointless (or if not pointless, contextless) action sequence in the first two minutes of a show and call that a fast start, but Eva does the first few minutes right. Eva was the first anime I ever watched that completely hooked me from the first few minutes, and that may be the only reason I love the medium so much today. I don't know that that necessarily makes it the best choice to introduce just anyone to anime though. I've seen a handful of people get engaged by the first episode but get turned off by the downshift in momentum in some of the following episodes, but it worked for me and it remains one of my picks for babby's first anime for people with a taste that accommodates how slow and weird it gets sometimes.
I'm sure this is something that I'm going to the say a lot to the point of obnoxiousness, but I do think it applies here: the opening scene is iconic. When I think of Evangelion, the imagery in this scene is one of the first things that comes to mind. Short of seeing the robots it lays out most of the major imagery that we'll be seeing a lot of for the rest of the series, too. The desolate empty cities with the washed-out blue color palette, rolling green hills, the NERV bridge and associated technobabble, Shinji being mildly aghast at things, the nice baseline that Sachiel sets for what the Angels might be and do. Most of the major motifs of the series are here.
Sachiel itself is bizarre. I don't think it's one of the stronger monster designs in the series, which is too bad for being among the very first things we see the second the series starts, but again, it kind of sets a trend that gets improved upon as the monsters get weirder. Gotta love its face though, I've said before that if I ever get a tattoo it will probably be of Sachiel's weird beak mask.
I have a decent-sized collection of Eva toys, mostly Revoltechs, and it's been a consistent source of frustration to me that nobody has ever done a toy of Sachiel (or if anyone has it's not readily available). It's the right size and shape to make a traditional action figure unlike most of the Angels and Eva has merchandise of absolutely everything, so why no Angel Revoltechs? Get on it, Japan.
I think it's a little weird how casually Shinji and Misato shrug off being so close to what we as the audience have no reason to assume at this point isn't a nuclear weapon. It makes a lot of sense to show how badass the monster is by showing it surviving a huge bomb blast, but the decision to have it be so close as to flip Misato's car seems like a weird choice. That never really pays off in any particular way, and although that scene is where Shinji and Misato introduce themselves to each-other and the audience there's no reason it particularly had to work like that. And if one N2 bomb hurt Sachiel that badly would a second one finish it off? Did they just have the one? Maybe Gendo has inside knowledge that pelting it with more bombs would just cause it to repeatedly regenerate stronger than before, but it seems like it would have been worth trying.
I'm not generally one of those people who hates Shinji (he's obviously kind of unlikable a lot of the time, but I also find him to be pretty relatable and I don't begrudge him most of his bullshit), but he is kind of an ass to Misato in this episode given that they've just met. Maybe that's just his shock at almost being stepped on by an alien and almost being blown up, but he is pretty rude to her when they're in the car. I might even go as far as to say that how much he talks back to her is a little out of character for how passive he is a lot of the time. Obviously he gets pretty casual with her specifically pretty quickly, but given that she's an authority figure that he just met I'm surprised he was so outspoken. I guess a lot of that is also probably due to how intensely uninterested he is in being bossed around by Gendo.
I don't think I ever noticed before that Shinji calls the Tokyo-3 Geo-Front "a real Geo-Front", implying that there are more than one, and that this one might not be public knowledge (although maybe he's just ignorant). I wonder who has the other ones and what they look like. Given all of the plot relevance that the exact location of this one has it seems weird to me that there might be a bunch of them.
I don't have a ton to say about the introduction of Unit 01 or its activation. Aside from how bizarre Shinji and Gendo act there isn't much here that isn't standard giant robot fare, which I'm sure it by design. I guess the most notable thing is that we miss the usual tedious training montages because everything happens so fast. I'm not incredibly well-versed in the mecha genre though, especially not accounting for trends that Eva created itself, so maybe there's something else going on here that unique to this show at this point, but if there is it went over my head.
A lot of people have said before that the Eva launch sequence doesn't really seem to make sense with the geography of Tokyo-3 and the Geo-Front, and that's true, but it looks so cool...
The end credits sequence is just one of many pieces of sound design that I will never not associate with Evangelion. It's a weird choice, but I love it.
Episode two-Unfamiliar Ceiling
Unit 01 being skewered through the head by Sachiel's laser is the first appearance of the classic Eva "super high-pressure blood geyser". It's weird that it's so brief in this instance. Did the wound heal that fast, or was that all of the blood in Unit 01's head?
One of the conversations that I have periodically with different people about Eva concerns the point at which it must have started to become clear for people watching this show as it was airing that it wasn't "just another robot show". People often point to scenes in this episode, and I think the cut away from the Sachiel fight to Shinji in the hospital might be a decent answer. It's quite a power play on the show's part, to just skip the fight scene and cut to the aftermath, although of course they do go back and show everything that happened pretty quickly. Obviously it doesn't give much of a hint as to the scope or content of the show, but it's the first obvious case of something out of the ordinary for a run-of-the-mill mecha show happening even if it is pretty minor.
The Seele glasses guy mentions something about "now that the Angels are public knowledge", and it occurs to me that I've never been that clear on how that works. Obviously everyone on Earth knows about Second Impact, but do ordinary people know about Angels from that time? I suppose they probably don't, which means there must be some crazy shit going on offscreen with people learning that there are goddamn aliens walking around now. Or maybe living through Second Impact makes you jaded and nobody's that surprised. But if this is in fact the first time anything this crazy has become public knowledge it's pretty remarkable that every line of passing dialogue from randos that we overhear for the rest of the series isn't about how aliens are a thing now. And then again there's a line later on from Misato about "hushing up the truth", although it isn't clear exactly what she's talking about. I'm assuming that refers more to Unit 01 than to the Angel, but I'm not sure if we ever find out for sure at what point the public learns what.
I forgot that Gendo and Shinji living together was ever even on the table. I want to see the show that would have been... Actually, I just want to see where Gendo lives at all. We see his office, but I don't think we ever see where he sleeps, do we?
This episode is the first appearance of Pen Pen, which brings me to one of the biggest things that still confounds me about this series. What is the point of Pen Pen? Why is he in the show? Did all anime absolutely have to have a mascot at this point and he was the most fitting one they could think of? It he supposed to be a hint that humans are dabbling in genetic experimentation? There aren't that many instances of Pen Pen contributing anything to the series that I can think of, he just seems out of place mostly. There is one point later on where I feel like he almost justifies his existence and I'll point it out when we get there if I remember, but mostly I think he's one of the most inexplicable things in Eva.
This is also the first appearance of Shinji's tape deck. I wonder if the meta-significance* that it gains in Rebuild 2.0 with the 27th track was just a lucky coincidence, or if it was somehow meant to mean something when the original series was being written. Without that extra bit in a movie that surely hadn't been conceived yet when this episode was written I can't imagine what the significance of the specific tracks he keeps looping was. *(If you don't remember, Shinji constantly loops tracks 25 and 26 on his tape deck. This parallels, whether intentionally or not, the 25th and 26th episodes of the series, which are the last two and which we see multiple times from different perspectives. In Rebuild 2.0 he skips to the 27th track shortly before the plot starts to change significantly from the original series, indicating that we're not looping the same events any more.)
Another of the scenes that people like to point to as being a potential early cue to audiences that this show isn't a standard mech show is the fight scene at the end of the episode. You could argue that it's basically superficial at this point, we learn that Unit 01 is self-aware and that it's organic under its armor, but there's no reason any old mech show couldn't just throw in that twist and still be basically the same. If there's anything truly out of the ordinary here it's that sound that Unit 01 makes. Coming to life and freaking out like a weird animal is one thing, but that sound means business.
This was the first time that I ever figured out how the perspective on the scene where Shinji sees Unit 01 with its helmet off works. I never noticed before that he was seeing it reflected in the side of a building. I always just thought the camera made no sense. Don't know how I missed that. Also, Unit 01 has a vagina for an eye, to be mirrored later in Cosmic Rei's various vagina-based body parts. Sort of makes sense, given the particulars of what all went into making it.
Well, that's what I got for the first two episodes. That took a lot longer than I expected, and that's more notes than I would have guessed. What do you guys think, if anyone's still out there after I fucked up the timing as bad as I did?
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The Seele glasses guy mentions something about "now that the Angels are public knowledge", and it occurs to me that I've never been that clear on how that works. Obviously everyone on Earth knows about Second Impact, but do ordinary people know about Angels from that time?
Seeing as the Second Impact was initiated by a failed contact experiment conducted by Seele-funded secret(?) expeditions in Antarctica, it makes sense that no one knows about Angels until they actually appear in Tokyo-3 in broad daylight in the first episode. The name itself, "Second Impact" refers to the cover-up they used to explain away the huge disaster. They call it the second impact because they explain that it was actually the result of an impact from a very small meteor moving at significant fractions of the speed of light. The 'very small' bit is important, since they can now claim that it was too small and too fast to have been able to be detected. The 'Second' bit refers to the meteor that killed all the dinosaurs and blotted out the sun for a couple millennia, which the coverup calls the First Impact. Since the governments who know this is a coverup but are demanding an actual explanation from whoever was responsible need something to chew on, Seele/Nerv introduces the term Third Impact, which I think they just explain that another big catastrophe will happen if they allow an Angel to contact the white Giant below Geofront. As for why the people don't seem so panicked from finding out about titanic genocidal aliens, it may have had to do in part with what you said about people being jaded since the Second Impact, but I think if the government just said that they had been expecting them for years and have a way to deal with them (Tokyo-3), people would blindly rejoice at having something to hope on and cling to. And carry on like usual. Since nothing's scarier than change.
Anyway, since someone finally started, and I didn't want to be the first, now I'll go ahead and post my notes now.
Ep1
My thoughts start off with the first words someone would have heard when this show first aired, which would be the opening line of the intro:
- 残酷な天使の様に、少年よ、神話になれ
Like a cruel angel, young boy, become a legend
Now what the heck does this even mean? The stories of something resembling a cruel angel that I can think of would be either the angel of death that killed the firstborne sons of the Egyptians during the 10th plague (a la Moses), or the other story of the angel of God killing the Israelites when David took a census of Israel. I guess one could argue that both instances of angels doing cruel things both ended becoming legends of sorts. Then again, I can't imagine the Bible mentioning something casually and not managing to spawn a legend from it. Talking donkeys, anyone? If I had to extrapolate on similar circumstances, we could say that both angels were following orders from God, but were themselves just tools of destruction against something that God decided needed destruction-ing. If we can suppose that Gendo would represent God, with the song clearly referring to Shinji as the angel, then what could the target of destruction be? Alternatively, who would be the ones to see him as cruel? Maybe I'm trying to wade too deeply in shallow waters.
- Angel -> Misato -> Shinji -> Gendo/Fuyutsuki
For whatever reason, I decided to notate in what order people appeared:
- Sees ghost of Rei
I don't get this part (I expect to be saying this a lot). Why was he seeing an apparition of Rei? And what was with the cut to flying doves immediately after?
- random Misato monologue about ruining best dress, putting in her 'all'
I didn't notice before, but Misato kinda comes off as strangely pedophile-ic. What with kissing Shinji in EoE, and trying to sleep with him in one of the later episodes, I don't get her deal.
- 単独兵器 about the angels self-regenerating
Gendo refers to the angels as autonomous/independent weapons. The 'weapons' bit strikes me as a bit of an odd choice for describing the angels. As the spawn of Adam, they're no less 'human' than we Lilin are, so it feels odd to call them weapons. A bit of early installment weirdness? The independent bit already makes it clear that we won't be expecting two Angels to attack at once.
- もう一人の予備が届く about a pilot for Unit-01 arriving
"The other replacement/spare will be arriving". Gendo knows how Evas work, he and Fuyutsuki are both experts of Metaphysical Biology, and he knows that only Shinji can (reliably) pilot Unit-01, so why would he call him a spare? It feels like more of early installment weirdness, like the show didn't actually set down the mechanics of how the Evangelions worked, with the convoluted souls business and what not, and so they instead focused on Gendo's chessmaster, magnificent bastard, negligent father side. Then again, he says the "other spare", which probably also refers to him calling Rei disposable as well. Which, well, wouldn't strictly be wrong, but it still feels a bit odd. Unless they were talking about the Second Child, and then Shinji entered the conversation at some point, in which case Asuka would be the 'first replacement' and Shinji would be 'the other replacement'. Asuka being disposable is unfortunately rather true, but again Shinji isn't, so what the heck.
- O9 system, 0.0000000001 percent activiation success rate
This made me laugh
- 予備が使えなくなった
"The spare is unusable." Gendo says this to Fuyutsuki before telling him to go call Rei in reference to Shinji when he says he can't pilot the Eva. It makes a little bit more sense here, in that Gendo seems to trust Rei more than Shinji in doing her job and following his orders. But Gendo also knows that Unit-01 is very important, hell, one of the key components, of Third Impact/Intrumentality. The only who can get Unit-01 to that phase in the plan is Shinji, so again I find it odd for Gendo to call him a spare. Unless this is just him being tsundere for Shinji off-screen.
- Ritsuko: Someone with even a slight bit of success chance
- Gendo: No other person can pilot it
And yet here, Gendo mentions that no one else can pilot it, so the show knows. What's going on?
- Eva01 protects Shinji, Ritsuko is in shock because there's no entry plug
Ritsuko doesn't know how the Eva works? Or perhaps in theory the soul is only supposed to reside dormant in the Eva? Specifically, she's in shock that the Eva moved when there wasn't an entry plug inserted. She knows that the Eva is actually bio-organic, ie: that it's alive, so perhaps the Eva was designed to not function at all without an entry plug? I suppose they were somewhat surprised in ep. 24 as well when they found out that Unit-02 didn't have an entry plug inserted as well (or was that only unmanned?).
Ep2
My thoughts on the intro. The words in [brackets] are the flashes of text
Intro: (Middle main theme section)
Shows Eva01
[Eva 01]
Shows Eva01 then shows quick shot of Angel mask, then back to Eva01
Shows Red glowy sphere
[ATField]
Shows Kaworu dyed in red, then Rei with a full moon backshot
[Angels]
Shows Tokyo3
[Tokyo-3]
Shows Geofront
(Nerv Logo)
Shows nerv staff
This is that middle section right when the chorus kicks in with all that flashy jazz cutting here and there. This is a reduction, but I didn't cut out anything in between, the newlines just make it a bit easier to see the groupings. The section I want to emphasize is that middle section at [Angels]. Unlike the rest of the flashes of text, there isn't any shots of any angels before or after the text of [Angels] flashes in front of the screen. The only unassociated shots around that are those of Kawori and Rei. Kaworu's red-ness can tie back to the red sphere right before the word [AT Field] flashes, potentially indicating that the red-ness of his picture is actually him deploying his AT Field, but then what of Rei? This could perhaps be a very early foreshadowing of Rei's and later Kaworu's true identities. The full moon behind Rei is also obviously foreshadowing.
- AT Field doesn't activate
I found this odd. Why doesn't his AT Field activate? It only activates after it goes into berserk mode, after which the AT Field functions like normal in the next episodes.
- Eye pierce
- Cut to Shinji in a white hospital bed
It's been so long since I've seen Evangelion that I don't remember this part. Heck there's a lot that feels entirely new to me because there's so much I don't remember, the car scenes from episode 1 being one of them. I'm realizing that so much of my expectations of how I expect the show to present itself come from me watching Rebuild more times, more recently. This part in particular, like CC mentions, is really the point where I would expect viewers to catch on that this isn't your typical super robot show. Even if this tips off that this is more of a real robot show, it still doesn't relay just how out there Evangelion really becomes, but it's a nice and unexpected twist of expectations to suddenly cut to Shinji in a hospital bed (did he have an eyepatch?). It's so sudden that I was actually stunned, rather disoriented, which retrospectively was a rather nice touch, since Shinji was also very disoriented after not knowing what had happened after the battle. I noticed that this ward of the hospital said something about brain nerve damage center, which was rather interesting. It lets the viewer know that yeah, piloting the Eva really sucks.
- Title card eye catch
- Eva01's disembodied head is being carried by a crane
I thought this was the decapitated head, but later I realized it was only the helmet.
- Maya in background talks about a possibility of contamination at the site of the Angel's explosion
- 精神汚染 Mental contamination, Misato's worry about Shinji's memory jog
Either the show hadn't decided yet whether Angels were some hostile alien monster species whose very biology was harmful to human beings, or this is what the people in the show believed, which Maya had to dispel. It's funny that mental contamination appears so early in the show, considering what happens later on.
- That disembodied head was just the front portion of the helmet
Like I said.
- He looks at reflection of Eva on the right side, eye regenerates
Like CC said, it took me a while of staring at the screen and rotating my head like an owl to finally get that he was looking at a reflection of Unit-01 from the side of a wall or building or something. They should really emphasize those panel lines on that reflective surface more, I thought I was looking at the actual Unit-01.
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...explanation of the second impact thing...
Makes sense to me.
- 残酷な天使の様に、少年よ、神話になれ
Like a cruel angel, young boy, become a legend
Now what the heck does this even mean? The stories of something resembling a cruel angel that I can think of would be either the angel of death that killed the firstborne sons of the Egyptians during the 10th plague (a la Moses), or the other story of the angel of God killing the Israelites when David took a census of Israel. I guess one could argue that both instances of angels doing cruel things both ended becoming legends of sorts. Then again, I can't imagine the Bible mentioning something casually and not managing to spawn a legend from it. Talking donkeys, anyone? If I had to extrapolate on similar circumstances, we could say that both angels were following orders from God, but were themselves just tools of destruction against something that God decided needed destruction-ing. If we can suppose that Gendo would represent God, with the song clearly referring to Shinji as the angel, then what could the target of destruction be? Alternatively, who would be the ones to see him as cruel? Maybe I'm trying to wade too deeply in shallow waters.
The composer famously never had and still has not seen the show, so I think it's safe to assume they gave her the roughest possible outline and she composed a song that has few if any ties to the source material.
- Sees ghost of Rei
I don't get this part (I expect to be saying this a lot). Why was he seeing an apparition of Rei? And what was with the cut to flying doves immediately after?
The most common-sense explanation of that is that this is Quantum Rei from End Of Evangelion when she gains the ability to be in all places at once to begin harvesting human souls. Presumably she also gains the ability to be in all times at once as well, and this is the earliest and most innocent instance of Shinji she knows about. EoE Rei came back in time to see him for a moment, for whatever reason.
- random Misato monologue about ruining best dress, putting in her 'all'
I didn't notice before, but Misato kinda comes off as strangely pedophile-ic. What with kissing Shinji in EoE, and trying to sleep with him in one of the later episodes, I don't get her deal.
Canon spends a lot of time establishing that Misato (and just about everyone else) is a sad, broken person. This is probably part of that. She had too weird of a childhood to have well-established boundaries.
- 単独兵器 about the angels self-regenerating
Gendo refers to the angels as autonomous/independent weapons. The 'weapons' bit strikes me as a bit of an odd choice for describing the angels. As the spawn of Adam, they're no less 'human' than we Lilin are, so it feels odd to call them weapons. A bit of early installment weirdness? The independent bit already makes it clear that we won't be expecting two Angels to attack at once.
I'd chalk that up as a creative description of the whole "fruit of life" thing. Because they're more physically perfect than humans they're natural weapons? The obvious answer I suppose is that the show is still trying to trick the audience into thinking that Angels are just normal aliens so it's using misleading language, but maybe Gendo is also trying to deliberately mislead someone with his choice of words. I don't know who that might be, but maybe someone.
- もう一人の予備が届く about a pilot for Unit-01 arriving
"The other replacement/spare will be arriving". Gendo knows how Evas work, he and Fuyutsuki are both experts of Metaphysical Biology, and he knows that only Shinji can (reliably) pilot Unit-01, so why would he call him a spare? It feels like more of early installment weirdness, like the show didn't actually set down the mechanics of how the Evangelions worked, with the convoluted souls business and what not, and so they instead focused on Gendo's chessmaster, magnificent bastard, negligent father side. Then again, he says the "other spare", which probably also refers to him calling Rei disposable as well. Which, well, wouldn't strictly be wrong, but it still feels a bit odd. Unless they were talking about the Second Child, and then Shinji entered the conversation at some point, in which case Asuka would be the 'first replacement' and Shinji would be 'the other replacement'. Asuka being disposable is unfortunately rather true, but again Shinji isn't, so what the heck.
- 予備が使えなくなった
"The spare is unusable." Gendo says this to Fuyutsuki before telling him to go call Rei in reference to Shinji when he says he can't pilot the Eva. It makes a little bit more sense here, in that Gendo seems to trust Rei more than Shinji in doing her job and following his orders. But Gendo also knows that Unit-01 is very important, hell, one of the key components, of Third Impact/Intrumentality. The only who can get Unit-01 to that phase in the plan is Shinji, so again I find it odd for Gendo to call him a spare. Unless this is just him being tsundere for Shinji off-screen.
My best guess is that this is just him being a dick. Although isn't it also theoretically possible for any of his renewable stock of Reis to activate Unit 01 since she has as much claim to that throne as Shinji, if not more? It was always my assumption that he was planning on using her to activate Third Impact from the beginning and was forced to use Shinji... for some reason? It makes sense that Unit 01 wouldn't be happy with that because Rei is an abomination, but I assumed Gendo thought he had some kind of way to force compatibility. Now I can't remember if there was a reason I thought that or if it's just extrapolation on my part.
- Eva01 protects Shinji, Ritsuko is in shock because there's no entry plug
Ritsuko doesn't know how the Eva works? Or perhaps in theory the soul is only supposed to reside dormant in the Eva? Specifically, she's in shock that the Eva moved when there wasn't an entry plug inserted. She knows that the Eva is actually bio-organic, ie: that it's alive, so perhaps the Eva was designed to not function at all without an entry plug? I suppose they were somewhat surprised in ep. 24 as well when they found out that Unit-02 didn't have an entry plug inserted as well (or was that only unmanned?).
They may be bio-organic, but they literally have to be plugged in to function, so I think there are a lot of restrictions on how they should be able to move in theory. I think it makes sense that she's surprised. Granted, Unit 01 is probably plugged in and charged up right now because they plan on sending it into battle shortly, but if something like being out of batteries can theoretically shut one down then I think it makes sense that there are all sorts of conditions, whether deliberately installed as failsafes or due to an imperfect bonding of flesh to mechanical parts, that need to be met before they should be able to move. And presumably she doesn't know that Unit 01 has a soul. Does she? She probably just think it's a lifeless pile of flesh, but I can't remember if she knows the truth about its identity or not.
My thoughts on the intro. The words in [brackets] are the flashes of text
Intro: (Middle main theme section)
Shows Eva01
[Eva 01]
Shows Eva01 then shows quick shot of Angel mask, then back to Eva01
Shows Red glowy sphere
[ATField]
Shows Kaworu dyed in red, then Rei with a full moon backshot
[Angels]
Shows Tokyo3
[Tokyo-3]
Shows Geofront
(Nerv Logo)
Shows nerv staff
This is that middle section right when the chorus kicks in with all that flashy jazz cutting here and there. This is a reduction, but I didn't cut out anything in between, the newlines just make it a bit easier to see the groupings. The section I want to emphasize is that middle section at [Angels]. Unlike the rest of the flashes of text, there isn't any shots of any angels before or after the text of [Angels] flashes in front of the screen. The only unassociated shots around that are those of Kawori and Rei. Kaworu's red-ness can tie back to the red sphere right before the word [AT Field] flashes, potentially indicating that the red-ness of his picture is actually him deploying his AT Field, but then what of Rei? This could perhaps be a very early foreshadowing of Rei's and later Kaworu's true identities. The full moon behind Rei is also obviously foreshadowing.
Rei and the moon is one of the most persistent visual motifs in the show (along with, in a much more subtle way, Asuka and the sun), so I think it's safe to assume that's foreshadowing. The composer may not have known anything about the show when she wrote the song, but whoever put together the visuals of the opening seemed to.
- AT Field doesn't activate
I found this odd. Why doesn't his AT Field activate? It only activates after it goes into berserk mode, after which the AT Field functions like normal in the next episodes.
Something to do with Shinji's low initial sync rate? As soon as he's out of the way Unit 01 can activate its AT Field, but he's probably doing more harm than good until then because he's untrained, not wearing a plugsuit, and his heart isn't in it.
- Maya in background talks about a possibility of contamination at the site of the Angel's explosion
- 精神汚染 Mental contamination, Misato's worry about Shinji's memory jog
Either the show hadn't decided yet whether Angels were some hostile alien monster species whose very biology was harmful to human beings, or this is what the people in the show believed, which Maya had to dispel. It's funny that mental contamination appears so early in the show, considering what happens later on.
I don't know how much of this the NERV staff was prepared to deal with, so it's completely likely that Maya isn't fully informed on what Angels are and aren't. I wouldn't expect Gendo to reveal more to his underlings than he thinks he has to to get by. And besides that, even fully knowing what Angels are I wouldn't put it past at least some of them to have harmful biology. They seem to have a huge range of traits, so poison blood doesn't seem out of the question. That really crappy Angel with the acid tears from later on probably had harmful biology.
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The composer famously never had and still has not seen the show, so I think it's safe to assume they gave her the roughest possible outline and she composed a song that has few if any ties to the source material.
lolwut
My best guess is that this is just him being a dick. Although isn't it also theoretically possible for any of his renewable stock of Reis to activate Unit 01 since she has as much claim to that throne as Shinji, if not more? It was always my assumption that he was planning on using her to activate Third Impact from the beginning and was forced to use Shinji... for some reason? It makes sense that Unit 01 wouldn't be happy with that because Rei is an abomination, but I assumed Gendo thought he had some kind of way to force compatibility. Now I can't remember if there was a reason I thought that or if it's just extrapolation on my part.
I would go to the wiki, but I feel like that would be cheating since we're watching through all this anyway. Since not knowing is probably going to be more fun, drawing my own conclusions based on shreds of information I glean from the anime, I'll just go with that. Let's see, from what I remember and assume, the most basic requirements of a controlled Instrumentality should be:
1) Acquiring both fruit of life and fruit of knowledge
2) Fusing together both Adam and Lilith
Pragmatically speaking, (1) involves taking an S2 Engine from an angel in one of the battles, specifically having Unit-01 be the one to 'acquire' it. It has to be Unit-01 since that's the only one that's based off of Lilith instead of Adam. That is, Unit-01 has the fruit of knowledge. If it devours an S2 Engine, then it has both fruits, which I believe allow it to become the Tree of Sephirot at Third Impact (I forget why or how), which is the thing that sends out the anti-AT Fields.
So basically, he needs someone to pilot Unit-01 to get it to eat a fruit at some point. Did he think he could get Rei to do it, with Shinji to pilot it in the meantime until he got the dummy-plug system all sorted out? I think that's possible, now that you mention it. He was confounded later when Yui rejected the Dummy Plug system, though that may have been because he was being a dick to Shinji. Simply put, someone needs some level of synchronization with Unit-01 to get it to work. Though now that I'm thinking, what is synchronization anyway? The Rebuild series does away with it entirely, replacing it with plug-depth. But let's stick to anime-verse since we can treat the other like an alternate universe. I'm realizing in general that I will get way more out of the show when asking questions about it and analyzing things if I stop questioning whether something was an 'early installment weirdness' or what not and assume that everything mentioned and shown in the show is relevant. So synchronization. Is it with the soul within the Eva? Or with the Eva itself? Let's see, Kaworu in ep. 24 was able to adjust his sync levels at will, and he mentions that Unit-02 had closed off its soul and that he wouldn't have been able to pilot it if it hadn't closed itself off. Which means that he, as an incarnation of Adam, was probably adjusting his synchronization levels with the Eva itself, not the soul. Which makes sense, again, the soul had closed itself off. Which we could extrapolate that sync levels refer to the degree of synchronization with the Eva itself, with the dormant soul being the catalyst or medium which greatly boosts those amplitudes. Or not. Not amplitudes, now that I think about it. The graphics for synchronization always had two wave graphs overlapping each other, with the two waves becoming largely offset when sync levels were really low. So not amplitude, so really 'sync' levels oh I feel so stupid. Yeah, the two graphs sync with each other, hence sync levels. So the soul then mediates the two waves to more easily become one. Then again, with that it doesn't really make sense to have a sync level of any greater than 100%, which may precisely have been the reason why Rebuild decided to use plug depth instead. Well anyway I got way off track. Can Rei sync with Unit-01? It makes sense that shes wouldn't be able to adjust sync rates with Unit-00 since it's Adam-based, but she also wouldn't be able to with 01 since it has a non-closed off soul. Which means if the dormant soul, Yui, doesn't cooperate, then it's probably next to impossible. That guy Hyuga called it the O9 system, 0.0000000001% chance of success. I can't imagine that he would think Rei to be a reliable option. With Shinji, all he really needs to do is have him activate the Eva and then put him out there in danger and watch the Eva go berserk and win.
As for (2), this is where he really needs Rei. He was expecting her to side with him and fuse with him/Adam at Third Impact. Would it also make sense for her to be the primary pilot of Unit-01? Maybe, maybe not. I'm sure he thought of a couple of ways for her to both be piloting shortly before Tree of Sephirot-ifying and also being in a position to fuse herself with Gendo. If he intended the Dummy Plug system to be piloting, then yeah it'll be a lot easier.
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As with most of Eva's mysteries, this question basically boils down to two other questions: "How well-informed is Gendo's plan?" and "Which parts of his plan, if any, is he bullshitting or wrong about when we learn about them?". I've never known the answers to either of those, and I don't know that they're actually answerable, but I'll be extra careful to watch out for them this time.
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I've done a group watch of Eva before with my friends. It was a two day event (I could only make the first one though because it was during my most terrible point in life) where we went through the entire series - anime, End, Rebuilds, and all the extras. I'd watched it all before but it's still fun to do with a bunch of friends making riffs at the thing while you watch the horror unfold.
A couple of my friends have an unhealthy obsession with Eva, like you, I assume, but when they aren't trying to debate the fine details (none of this happened at the party), we mostly make fun of it, because despite the legacy of Eva there's a lot to pick at and joke about.
I don't think I'd do it again for a long time, most of my friends agree with me on it as well, but some apparently do yearly watches because they're obsessed with it.
I remember the first time I watched The End. I brought it with me to my best friend's house, we decided when we started the movie to try and keep a running count of how many times the movie 'mind-screwed' us.
We lost count before the end of the movie.
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Okay, week two and I haven't gotten lazy or forgotten to watch yet (except for a the beginning when I totally did)! Over the last week I showed that scene with Unit 01's reflection to three different people and all of them were amazed by it. Apparently I'm not the only one who was never able to figure out what was happening there before.
Episode 3-The Phone That Never Rings
Why does NERV even give the Evas guns? Isn't that just a waste of giant bullets? I can think of one time ever where it's actually useful, mostly it's just a waste of everyone's time and money. I suppose the first few times it's fair to try it and hope for the best, but it seems like there should be a cutoff point where they just scrap the guns, or at least stop using them as a first resort.
I love how fast Sachiel dies in the training simulation. If Unit 01 neutralized its AT field while Shinji was still cognizant enough to make it use a gun would it die that easily? And would it still explode? I assume this is just an ego booster for Shinji's fragile morale, but it's pretty funny. At this point in the episode we have no reason to assume that there are a bunch of different Angels or that there's only one of each Angel, so most people were probably expecting to just see a bunch more of that specific creature. Usually when that happens the monster suffers from Aliens Syndrome, so I guess Shinji effortlessly gunning down hordes of Sachiels was probably to be expected.
In the newscast in the background of the second scene we learn that there are no more seasons, just endless summer. I couldn't remember if this was ever explicitly stated or if it was just clear from context, but apparently we are directly told about it early on. I wonder what the point of that decision was? It colors the overall mood of the series, but it's never really plot-important. Was it just a mechanism to hide how much time is passing, or is there some kind of thematic or plot reason that I'm not recognizing?
Lol@phone technology. "I gave Shinji a cellular phone" indeed in 2015. The technology in Eva is weird. Some of it is surprisingly spot-on for a 1995 prediction of what technology would be like in 2015, much of it is quaintly retro in a way that works pretty well with the aesthetic. It sort of makes sense to me that a recovering post-apocalyptic world would have kind of austere appliances. Maybe that's just because the animation style is so of its era that the technology level just naturally fits it, but I don't think it mostly stands out too much.
The two manga that that two kids are reading in 5:07 is open to a page with what looks a lot like Pikachu. I assume this is just because all animal mascots look the same, but Pokemon technically existed in some form in 1995. Was it in the public eye to even a tiny degree when Eva was being animated? Maybe this is an incredibly prescient prediction that Pokemon would still be popular 20 years later (I'm sure it isn't).
I like that seemingly all of the public education that kids receive in Eva revolves around second impact in some way. It's pretty important to everyone's day to day life, obviously, but it seems pretty weird that the first random lesson we drop in one is just a basic summary of the public version of it. These kids probably already know this a hundred times over. This is obviously more for the audience's benefit, but I like the idea that the old teacher guy relates everything back to second impact in some way and it's all he can talk about, even when he teaches math and language and stuff.
Shamshel, like Sachiel, is pretty silly looking,. Are those eyes on its head supposed to be real, or are they just markings like on a buttefly's wings? If anything they make it look a lot less menacing, it goes from "inhumanly weird" to "kind of dopey". I guess it's good Shinji wins, because it would be pretty sad for humanity to be beaten by such a ridiculous monster.
I don't think it's entirely fair of Misato to be mad at Shinji for going nuts shooting at the first thing he sees after she's been teaching him that Angels vaporize the second bullets touch them.
I like the cartoon sound effect when Shinji grabs Shamshel by the tentacles and throws it.
Episode 4: Rain, Escape, And Afterwards
The way Toji keeps talking over Kensuke when they introduce themselves to Misato made me laugh out loud.
Going back to the theme of "in a post-second impact world all people can talk about is second impact, even 15 years later", the movie in the theater Shinji hides in is a cheesy disaster movie about second impact. Only this time it isn't just exposition to the audience. I mean, it still is exposition, but it's about the fact that that's what the movie is about, rather than being about the content of the movie.
Shinji wanders into an idyllic Japanese countryside, then a sunflower field. Misato and Gendo have forgotten about him already and he has crossed into Gensokyo. Surely he will be eaten by youkai within the hour.
I'm told that the mountain Shinji visits on his walk is most like a real place, a mountain called Owakudani that's famous for suicides.
"We have to use fourteen year olds to pilot the Evas" is one of the more mysterious lines in the series. There could be any number of explanations to that. Ritsuko could just be wrong of course, or it could have something to do with the mental state of people at that precise age, or there could be something different about people born after Second Impact that means only they can do it and fourteen year olds are just the most developed candidates available. The actual reason the pilots have to be who they are seems to just be related to the souls housed within the individual Evas, so my inclination is to assume that this line doesn't actually mean much, but I wonder if this means that all of the pilots will lose their ability to interface with the Evas as they grow older. Will their minds become closed off as their personas become more developed or something?
One of the theories that I hear thrown around a lot for this line is that after Second Impact all new humans are born without souls (often citing the "the Chamber of Guf was empty" stuff) and that somehow makes them able to interface with the Evas as well as explaining why Shinji, Rei, and Asuka are so fucked up, but I don't think that makes sense given the events of End Of Evangelion. And it raises weird implications that I don't think the show would just let go without directly addressing.
This episode is kind of interesting in how it fits into the show. Compared to previous episodes there's not actually a ton of new exposition, it seems to exist more to break what seems to be a developing "monster of the week" format than anything (and that format is ultimately, more or less, what defines the first big chunk of the show anyway). Nothing much has changed from the beginning of the episode to the end. Arguably Shinji resolves his hesitation about wanting to be a pilot, but that doesn't totally pan out in practice, or if it does it's not because of anything that happens in this episode. It basically reinforces things we already know about Shinji, which is important, but I'm not sure if they're necessary for the show to still be what it is. Could you cut this episode from the series entirely? I don't know. This is certainly one of the less necessary episodes, but the "hedgehog's dilemma" stuff needs to be fit in somewhere, and the character building may or may not be very important.
So this episode is slow, most of it probably doesn't actually need to be here, and there's nothing resembling action, but I do like it a lot. A lot of that has to do with Kensuke and how much I like him. In light of stuff we learn later and his potential candidacy as a pilot this could have been a much more important episode than it is, retroactively. But he never does get to be a pilot and just kind of gets swept under the rug, at least in this canon. I hear there are some spinoffs (video games or visual novels or something?) where he does become a pilot, I think of Unit 04? I haven't actually seen any of that stuff, but can anyone confirm or deny that? And if true, is it interesting? Seems like there could be a lot of material to work with regarding Kensuke, but Rebuild didn't really manage to fit him in.
A couple of my friends have an unhealthy obsession with Eva, like you, I assume...
Lol. :D
I don't think of myself as having an unhealthy obsession. I think it's pretty reasonable, tons of people have things they're really really into.
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Nothing really plot significant in episodes 3 and 4 that I noticed.
Episode 03: The Phone That Doesn't Ring
The first instance of the Hedgehog's Dilemma being mentioned in the show. Misato says that becoming an adult is a repeating of meetings and partings until you learn to find the best distance between people that minimizes hurt in relations. The whole series seems to be one about people and distances.
I'm actually enjoying a rewatch since I don't remember any of these scenes.
Kensuke mentions the 'Robot Incident'. It seems the common people don't know much of what happened, because he says 'incident'. Or perhaps that the convenient label the media attached to it, because his classmates in general (particularly Toji's sister) seem to know that Shinji is piloting a robot to fight against some enemy. Toji calls the pilot of Unit-01 an idiot for being the one to cause a mess. Which seems to me to imply that this battle was reported on the media as some testing of the Evangelions by NERV, and it happened to go bad, causing a mess of things. Hence, an incident.
Toji's dad and grandfather both work in a lab of some sort. Probably significant, considering what happens later. And seeing as how that's the only close family he mentions when saying why he's had to stay by his sister for a whole 2 weeks in the hospital, it seems he doesn't have a mother either. Kensuke also mentions that he doesn't have a mother in the next episode.
Rei and Shinji's first conversation. Of sorts. Rei tells Shinji she'll be going to the front ahead.
Shamshel is a really lame angel to choose to sneak a peek at. I mean, it's one of the lamest angels there are. This and that spider one (Matariel?) are probably the lowest in my ranking, I don't even remember what its name was. Followed closely by Sandolphon, that lava one, and maaaybe the twin one.
Shinji monologues, why am I piloting if father isn't here? In the next episode, he tells Kensuke that he shouldn't want to pilot an Eva because it would worry his mother. Also in the next episode, Shinji's eyes are dead but come to life when he observes a couple making out. It seems he just wants to be loved, have some kind of mother and father figure in his life, and also friends or a special someone to simply accept and love him.
You can suspend an Eva's active state by having it continually, autonomously execute the last command it was given.
Mustn't run away mantra.
Toji gets Shinji's number and dials. End of Episode.
Episode 04: Rain, After Running Away
Ritsuko mentions that they must use 14 year olds to pilot the Evas. So she does know.
Gendo tells Ritsuko to reconfigure Unit-01 for Rei, despite problems with Unit-00. It seems that complications arise when trying to get Rei to pilot?
Toji tells Shinji to punch him. This whole scene and the scene after this at the train, I don't remember at all, but I really enjoyed it, I like it a lot. After so much of both Misato and Shinji not saying what they mean or want, they finally get a moment where they can simply be truthful and close through the pain, and it shines. It's a nice, glowing, warm moment. And then there's Toji. In a series full of deception and hiding your true feelings, there's this guy who's up front and wants to play fair. I rather like him, I didn't get that feeling at all in Rebuild, he's a really good friend. And they have a touching moment before Shinji has to leave, Toji tells him that no one can blame him for his choices, Shinji tells him that he's weak and flawed. It's just a sweet moment.
Unless this show has more minute long quiet staring moments, then it would just be this scene with Misato and Shinji staring at each other over across the train station and train tracks, and the scene in episode 24 with Shinji and Kaworu. There's something that I like about this long moment of pause. It's like they both know what they feel, and they both somewhat understand that the other is also feeling something close that they're not saying, but they both don't know how to proceed. So they settle for "I'm home" and "Welcome home", and it perfectly manages to convey what they're feeling without actually having to say it out loud. Not that they probably know how to put it to words, only to butcher it and pepper it with meaningless apologies that the other had already forgiven them for.
I don't think it's entirely fair of Misato to be mad at Shinji for going nuts shooting at the first thing he sees after she's been teaching him that Angels vaporize the second bullets touch them.
To be fair, she was criticizing his decision to keep shooting when it was creating a cover of smoke that would hide the enemy.
Also now that you explicitly mention it, I took it for granted that pilots had to be 14 years old, as it's the oldest age that any child that was born after Second Impact could be, but I either seem to have forgotten why it had to be kids born after Second Impact, or I've forgotten that I've never known. Weird. Guess we'll find out. I don't remember there being anything super significant about it, besides awakening Adam and the angels.
Kensuke doesn't interest me much. I like Toji a lot more since he's a good friend to Shinji. Kensuke to me is just that guy that wishes he could pilot an Eva.
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Episode 05: Rei, Beyond Her Heart
So it occurs to me that Rei has done very, very nearly nothing so far. She's been in like five scenes, and has she even had any lines? If you asked me when Rei first becomes important-ish to the series I wouldn't have guessed it would be as late as episode five.
This is not technically the first time we've seen Unit 00, but it's the best look we've gotten at it so far. For being the widely accepted lamest Eva, Unit 00 still looks really cool. The robot designs in this show are so great. Even the least among them are some of the coolest-looking robots ever.
I guess I forgot that it makes a similar roaring/screaming noise to Unit 01 in the berserk scene. Does it have a mouth under that helmet? I guess it would have to, wouldn't it?
Man, fuck Gendo and how much of a badass he is. Just standing there while Unit 00 punches at him.
The opening scene is incredibly well-done on seeing it again. The animation is excellent, and the way Gendo comes off as a completely different person once shit goes down really stands out. He has expressions other than "disapproval" and "seemingly not paying attention" for once. It's interesting how little of that side of him we see, but given that Shinji is the semi-POV character it makes sense, and the few times we go get to see it it's a big deal. Rei still gets to do absolutely nothing whatsoever, but everything going on around her is great.
Shinji in the scene with Ritsuko explaining the link between Angels and humans to Misato made me laugh. He clearly has no idea what anybody's talking about and it getting distracted easily, and again the animation is excellent. Eva's animation quality varies wildly, but this episode is the first time it's really stood out to me as exceptional.
I wonder whose idea it was to have Rei live in a desolate apartment block in the middle of nowhere? I'm surprised she doesn't live with Gendo. Obviously he would prefer that and she probably would too. Is he worried that that would just be too weird? And for that matter, what does she do all day? We see her reading sometimes, so does she just read in the dark? What books does she read?
Rei's entry plug console has "Evangelion 2014 00 Prototype" engraved on it. I never noticed that. Guess that's when Unit 00 was built, not that I was particularly wondering.
Fuyutsuki: "Unidentified object approaching. It may be the fifth Angel". May indeed. Or it might be a standard, non-Angel giant flying blue octahedron.
Following the general shittiness of Shamshel, Ramiel is one of the cooler Angels. Certainly one of the most iconic. It's one of those that suffers a little bit from comparison to the Rebuild redesign (some people have said that Rebuild Ramiel is overdesigned, but I think it's just right), but it's still cool and appropriately weird. Ramiel is apparently a reference to a robot from a 1983 anime called Future Police Urashiman, and that robot actually had the shapeshifting power that Rebuild Ramiel has that TV Ramiel does not, which is kind of interesting.
Episode 06: Showdown In Tokyo-3
This episode famously has several animation errors that people like to point to as indications of the budget problems the show went through. The first is in the scene were Ramiel is blasting Unit 01 with its laser on the launchpad, and the laser seems to be coming from the building that it's shooting through rather than from Ramiel itself. The second is Ramiel's drill, which is spinning in the wrong direction for the way it's threaded. Upon review though, I think both of these are very minor complaints if they're complaints at all. The laser shooting through the skyscraper looks pretty natural to me the way the shot is set up, and that shot only lasts for a moment. I wouldn't have even noticed it if it hadn't been pointed out to me before. The drill thing is technically true, but the tip of the drill is made of lasers and the threading doesn't look like it necessarily even does anything, so I don't think the direction it spins probably matters very much.
I think this is one of the best episodes in the series, if not maybe the single best standalone episode. Maybe I'll take that back when we get to some of the standout later episodes, but there aren't many that have the narrative drive that this one does. The plot is extremely compelling. I love "We have a weird problem, let's do some experiments to figure out what's going on and then make some kind of crazy plan to solve it" stories (which is one of the reasons I liked Aldnoah.Zero so much, that whole show is just a string of those). It's almost unfortunate that this episodes takes place when it does in the series, because I think the episodes immediately following it are some of the weakest ones in the series anyway and they look quite a lot worse by comparison. This plot line is also one of the reasons I like Rebuild 1.0 so much. It has such a natural conclusion with this fight that it totally works as a standalone movie.
Eva armor is tough as shit if a sustained blast from a laser that can melt mountains didn't even pierce all the way through it. Is it made of something special? I guess NERV does have access to some Angel/progenitor technology in the Lance Of Longinus and possibly Lilith's ship, so maybe they reverse-engineered something from those or salvaged materials from them that they used to make the armor or something.
The name "Operation Yashima" is a reference to the medieval Battle Of Yashima, which featured a legendary archery contest.
Rei is pretty low on my list of favorite characters, but it is really sweet when she smiles at the end.
It seems that complications arise when trying to get Rei to pilot?
Well yeah, inevitably I think. Unlike Shinji, Asuka, and Toji she doesn't have a person who cares about her who can be used as the soul for her Eva. She probably has the same ability that Kaworu does to forcibly commandeer any Eva if she has to, but I think he says something in the scene where he's controlling Unit 02 about how he wouldn't be able to do it ordinarily and only can in that case for some extraordinary reason that I can't remember. Unit 01 might accept her because she's still technically kind of related to it, but it also might freak out because of what she represents. We never really find out, but I think there's a lot of inherent risk.
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Ep 05: Rei, Beyond the Heart
It just occured to me that Kaworu's in the intro
This scene with Gendo showing great concern over Rei to be a little odd, considering his treatment and referring to her as a spare back in ep. 01.
I wonder how nerves connect from the pilot to the Eva. There are no cords from the plug suit to the entry plug, and the entry plug doesn't seem to physically connect directly into the Eva either.
It took me by surprise, how lackadaisical and friendly a gesture inviting Ritsuko over for dinner together was. The scene feels warm. Since Misato and Ritsuko grow apart later, it's somewhat happy but sad seeing them together as friends early on here it is.
She mentions that Rei is like Shinji's dad, clumsy at living
REI I
It's rather creepy how you can plainly tell that Rei is messy and doesn't bother much with cleaning, what with simply tossing her clothes off to the side, but even then her room is hopelessly desolate. It really emphasizes that she literally has nothing. Another creepy thing is that although she seems to be very attached to Gendo's glasses, holding them with affection, they're simply tossed onto her dresser, and upside down at that. Like she didn't even bother to place it nicely on top. Strikes me as a bit alien almost. or like Ritsuko said, clumsy/awkward.
It's followed up by a twist on that stupid classical MC meets naked heroine trope. She really doesn't seem to regard her own self at all. In a way, she's similar to Kaworu in not really understanding personal space. Kaworu goes to hold Shinji's hand in the bath, and here Rei doesn't seem to understand her own sense of personal space. Or that people expect others to have personal space or a little privacy over their bodies. I wonder if that scene in EoE is a call back to this scene. Except there, Rei is on top of Shinji. Maybe it means something. Here, Shinji is really curious about Rei, but by EoE, Rei is really curious about Shinji.
Rei seems a little mad at Shinji? Seems to take the ID keycard from him a bit forcefully.
"Re"-activation test? Did something happen to shut it off for awhile?
This might be at least the first blatant break from the classical monster of the week show, since Ramiel appears a week early.
Ep. 06, Decisive Battle in Tokyo-03
Unlike Rebuild, Misato was able to lower Unit-01 back down the elevator shaft. Also, Maya mentions that 3 more seconds and Shinji was a goner. Which makes the Rebuild scene seem funny since he was under fire for like a whole minute.
The 1/1 scale Unit-01 dummy balloon made me laugh. Like you said, this part where Misato sends in random stuff to see how Ramiel would react was rather interesting. In Rebuild, Ramiel's self defense system was revealed off hand through the briefing, but here they show the process, which is nice.
Also Ramiel's AT Field here is a blue hexagon, odd. And not shiny or pulsating with light either, just a solid blue. Does it have something to do with the fact that Ramiel's AT Field is strong enough to visibly warp light? Maybe a physicist might have the answer. Since the strongest AT Fields completely block out particles, and electromagnetic waves, and no AT Field would let everything pass through.... A moderately strong AT Field like Ramiel's would be somewhere in between......??? I don't know. Something about how the sky is blue?
Nerv's positron rifle is reminds me of Armored Core's Karasawa mk II
Interesting is that Shinji doesn't get a cheer up or motivation to pilot the Eva again. Rebuild has him listening to that voice message left by Toji and Kensuke. Here he sees Rei willing to pilot it, which convinces him to do it instead.
Rei answers that the Eva is her connection to everyone when asked by Shinji why she pilots it. Which makes it seem like she's also just a human being who wants connections and friends. And again, like Ritsuko said, she may be awkward at living. Wanting connections but not knowing how to make more. Or being satisfied with the little she has, not knowing what more there could be.
In the TV series Ramiel detects the immense build up of energy on the mountain and fires and starts to charge up, making it in time to shoot at Unit-01 right when it fires. I've seen praise in quite a few places about how the beams behave like they probably would in real life, warping each others' paths as the magnetic fields collide. It's certainly cool and very science fiction-y to see.
The last scene has Rei smiling when Shinji says she should smile. The part I don't remember is that she sees a flash of Gendo's smiling face when he says that, which is what seems to prompt her to smile as well. I think it's an important tidbit to include that I dont' remember Rebuild including. Her connection to Shinji starts off little by little. Here, it starts by her seeing a resemblance to Gendo in Shinji's smile. And thus, seeing Gendo's caring side in Shinji.
Overall, these two episodes were pretty great. They introduce Rei in a rather unconventional way as one of the female main characters of the show. Which may make a rather sort of sense. I read somewhere that the creator was wanting to give her a sort of uncanny valley vibe. I'm not sensing it at all, but that may very well be because of how much of a character trope her general personality has become. Here, it's not treated as a trope, but as an introduction of something that was new at a time. Rei is mysterious, quiet, and hard to understand. Alien-like almost, I can't imagine any normal human being that would behave like she would, and we see Shinji struggling to connect with her. Perhaps out of a mix of jealousy and curiousity, since she brings out a smile out of Gendo when he only shows coldness to Shinji.
One last thing I remember is Ritsuko saying that the Unit-00 going berserk may have had primarily to do with Rei's mind becoming contaminated or defiled. A little unstable. I wonder what that was about. About her starting to develop emotions or something?
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I skipped a week, that was bad. But I wasn't near my computer Sunday night and those episodes are probably the worst in the series, so... I'll be get them for sure next week.
This scene with Gendo showing great concern over Rei to be a little odd, considering his treatment and referring to her as a spare back in ep. 01.
Yeah, that is weird. I would say he's putting on airs of not caring about her so that people don't get suspicious of him or whatever, but there are obviously times when he overtly doesn't do that.
I wonder how nerves connect from the pilot to the Eva. There are no cords from the plug suit to the entry plug, and the entry plug doesn't seem to physically connect directly into the Eva either.
LCL, presumably. Maybe inside of the Eva as well as inside of the plug.
It's followed up by a twist on that stupid classical MC meets naked heroine trope. She really doesn't seem to regard her own self at all. In a way, she's similar to Kaworu in not really understanding personal space. Kaworu goes to hold Shinji's hand in the bath, and here Rei doesn't seem to understand her own sense of personal space. Or that people expect others to have personal space or a little privacy over their bodies. I wonder if that scene in EoE is a call back to this scene. Except there, Rei is on top of Shinji. Maybe it means something. Here, Shinji is really curious about Rei, but by EoE, Rei is really curious about Shinji.
It's always been my groundless assumption that Kaworu's childhood was similar to Rei's, but with the Seele dudes instead of Gendo. I guess it makes sense that they have similar dysfunctions.
Also Ramiel's AT Field here is a blue hexagon, odd. And not shiny or pulsating with light either, just a solid blue. Does it have something to do with the fact that Ramiel's AT Field is strong enough to visibly warp light? Maybe a physicist might have the answer. Since the strongest AT Fields completely block out particles, and electromagnetic waves, and no AT Field would let everything pass through.... A moderately strong AT Field like Ramiel's would be somewhere in between......??? I don't know. Something about how the sky is blue?
Huh, I never noticed that. Neat.
One last thing I remember is Ritsuko saying that the Unit-00 going berserk may have had primarily to do with Rei's mind becoming contaminated or defiled. A little unstable. I wonder what that was about. About her starting to develop emotions or something?
Or maybe to do with her being imperfectly constructed. Her body is obviously always on the verge of falling apart because the technology that made her doesn't seem to be great, so I guess it makes sense that her mind is too. I've always assumed that Ritsuko wasn't necessarily right and that Unit 00 went berserk because it was jealous of Rei's relationship with Gendo, but I guess those two things could be linked if "starting to feel human emotions toward another person (Gendo)" can be equated to "contaminated". Maybe Gendo knows that's a risk and that's why sometimes he treats Rei badly and why he doesn't let her live with him, but sometimes he can't help himself and is friendly with her anyway against his better judgment. Maybe.
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I've always assumed that Ritsuko wasn't necessarily right and that Unit 00 went berserk because it was jealous of Rei's relationship with Gendo, but I guess those two things could be linked if "starting to feel human emotions toward another person (Gendo)" can be equated to "contaminated". Maybe Gendo knows that's a risk and that's why sometimes he treats Rei badly and why he doesn't let her live with him, but sometimes he can't help himself and is friendly with her anyway against his better judgment. Maybe.
Rei represents Yui to Gendo right? Somewhat, like I think she's based off of her physical dna or something? And that's a neat angle to consider for the berserk thing, hadn't considered it.
Since I skipped a week, I'll have to be posting this one quite a bit soon after that last one. I assume you meant today, this Sunday, when you said 'next week'?
Ep: 07 That Created by Humans
I noticed that there's an image of the Tree of Sephirot on the ceiling of Gendo's room place.
Couldn't really make out the small print, but some looking up of words showed that the document is titled:
使徒と呼称される物体及び人類補完計画(仮称)に関する第1次中間報告書
First progress report concerning the beings designated "Angels" and the Human Instrumentality Project (temporary name)
The anime 'puhaaaaa' thing when people drink sake in anime is a little annoying, I'm finding recently. Irks me just that little bit.
I'm going to remember when this cheerful everyday music plays in each episode so I can figure out when it plays last and the series starts going downhill.
Misato says "that's ironic." What's ironic? That Shinji is being colder to Misato now that he's opening up to his emotions more? Or maybe that now that Misato is treating him like family, he's starting to find her embarrassing.
She has guards watching over him? Helicopter mom lol.
Ramiel is being deconstructed, just like the mecha genre is at the hands of this anime.
US opposes the Unit-06 construction budget, and Unit-08 is in some other country, the country of this fellow drinking Nikka Whisky here. I googled it and apparently its a real brand in Japan. What do you know.
Second Impact is finally explained.
The question and answer session between Ritsuko and the guy is pretty funny I find. Both bring up excellent points, but in the end sounds just like spite from the side of the robot creators. Now that I think about it, this thing uses a nuclear reactor. Which is odd, since the technology to create N2 explosives exists. Since an explosion is essentially a release of energy and N2 explosions are much more powerful than nuclear weaponry in the Eva-verse, it would seem more reasonable to create a reactor/power source out of whatever powers the N2 explosives. Or maybe its not self sustaining or viable as a prolonged energy source. The Jet Alone people seem to think that the Eva's biggest problem is the short operation time, which is why they seemed so proud of the JA's 150 day operational time. The AT Fields are obviously the biggest problem. And even though the guy seemed confident that they would eventually find a way around dealing with the Angel's AT Fields, the JA itself not having an AT Field is severely detrimental. Unit-01 just barely managed to survive Ramiel's attack and it had an AT Field. Clearly the biggest flaw, in both directions. Not to mention, autonomous robots are very unreliable. We can't even create robots that can reliably and autonomously navigate through and assist people in disaster-ridden terrain, how can we expect to leave the fate of humankind to robots expected to fight aliens of utterly incomparable and unprecedented design? Ridiculous.
The Jet Alone itself, though, probably doesn't look terrible except that it suffers the fate of having to share its screentime in the same show as the Evangelion units. I wonder if the control rods sticking out of the back is where the idea for BEASTO MODO came from. Even the HUD and graphs back in the command control look lamer compared to the epilepsy-inducing visuals at NERV headquarters.
I forgot that the Module-F(?) jetplanes used to transport Evas was in the TV series.
A book ends episode. At the beginning of the episode, Misato accidentally offhandedly mentions that going to Shinji's parent teacher conference is part of her job. To which Shinji reacts with a little disappointment. At the end of the episode, Toji and Kensuke tell Shinji that she shows this side of her to him because she considers him family.
You said that these episodes were some of the lamest in the series, but I rather liked them. This one too. And also when I first saw it. It was neat to see NERV just being cool and one-upping this lousy competitor.
Ep: 08 Asuka Arrives
Just realized that the oceans are blue in the TV series.
Asuka's first appearance! I have trouble deciding my favorite Eva character. Aside from Kaworu, since I think he's my favorite based on my last watch years ago. Might change this time around. I'm already re-liking Asuka, she's got a lot of problems and a lot of personality and character. My first time watching I liked Rei more because in general I like the trope she's spawned off, but my views may have changed with age. It's kinda sad to like a character because of their archetype anyway. I guess you could say Asuka if anything aligns with the tsundere archetype, though a bit insulting to put it that way.
Kaji is playing footsie with Misato and it's cracking me up. Him dropping the bombshell was also hilarious. Everyone's like WTF?
Asuka's had a lot of training, apparently, but hasn't fought any real angels yet. Come to think of it, every angel past the 2nd (so Sachiel on) was defeated by Shinji or Shinji/Rei. Kanji says that Shinji had a >40% synchro rate on his first activation without any training. Probably the start of her inferiority complex and rivalry. She also made a big deal of pointing out that what she was piloting was a 'real' Evangelion, and not one of those Prototype or Test-type play toys.
For a while I was confused about why Gaghiel was here, since I thought Angels only cared to go after Adam. And then I remembered a few minutes later. With that stored away though, why do the other countries need Evangelions anyway? It's not as though the Angels will go attack and even if they don't know that they wont be fighting any Angels, they would think something fishy was up since all the Angels so far have only been invading Tokyo-3.
Shinji has to dress up in Unit-02's red plug suit. He's hiding his crotch area though, I wonder if he's like trying to hide a certain something because the suit is skin tight. Also I really want that Unit-02 red duffle bag Asuka was carrying.
The music playing during Unit-02's activation/launch is the same as the one they play in Rebuild 2.22, nice. So this is where they got it from. And I have to say Unit-02 with a cape looks badass.
If they're fighting over some sunken Pacific island, I guess it would make sense that the sea bottom isn't too deep. If all the ice from the polar caps melted, it couldn't be too many dozens of meters worth of water to wash over the highest peaks of islands.
Can't decide if Unit-01 or 02 looks cooler. Also this is probably the first close shot of the cockpit's controller thing. I wonder the point of the latch is.
And I really enjoy these friendly chat scenes between Misato and Ritsuko. The episode ends with Fly Me to the Moon Asuka ver?
Gaghiel is one of the lamer Angels on the list, design-wise. But the fight was pretty cool, what with Asuka hopping around on ships and ending with a mouthful of battleships to the throat kaboom. Animation this episode was really nice too.
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Rei represents Yui to Gendo right? Somewhat, like I think she's based off of her physical dna or something? And that's a neat angle to consider for the berserk thing, hadn't considered it.
It is my understanding that Rei is an imperfect attempt to clone Yui, yes. The idea that Gendo sees her as Yui is interesting. I've always thought of it as him seeing Rei as his daughter, but it's entirely possible that he doesn't make that distinction.
Since I skipped a week, I'll have to be posting this one quite a bit soon after that last one. I assume you meant today, this Sunday, when you said 'next week'?
Yes, I'm planning on doing episodes 7 and 8 tonight.
You said that these episodes were some of the lamest in the series, but I rather liked them.
Fair enough. I've always thought of these as the worst two episodes in the series and remember them as being a low point whenever I watch it, but it's entirely possible that that isn't the fault of the episodes themselves. I'll go into them as unbiased as I can this time and see what I think of them. I remember episode 7 being the most unnecessary one in the series, but given how ultimately pointless episode 4 is and how monster-of-the-week a few of the latter episodes are, maybe that's unfair. And these episodes do introduce two of my favorite (possibly my top two) characters in Asuka and Kaji. It'll be interesting to revisit them and see what I think this time.
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I finally noticed a way to change the thread title. I've been meaning to do that forever but I just never figured it out.
Episode 07: A Human Creation
As I've already made clear, my assertion has been that this is the least necessary episode in the series. In my opinion it doesn't add almost anything to the plot and is kind of a waste of time. But is that just fallout from the fact that it has to follow up arguably the best episode? Maybe.
I guess I forgot that this episode, not the next one, is the first appearance of Kaji. Or first cameo appearance, as we say in the comic book market.
Misato with bed hair is cute. I don't have much more to say about that, but it's true.
The gradual teardown of Ramiel's body is a cool detail, and one that's interestingly subverted/lost in Rebuild. As fond as I am of the whole blood rain/rainbow thing, it's a shame to miss out on this part of it. Especially when it's technically sort of plot-relevant, since it's partially responsible for the S2 Engine.
"Keeping the Earth safe" is a pretty dramatic way of describing Shinji's job, but it is ultimately accurate (at least as far as he knows). Sounds a lot more like sci-fi stock standard giant robot fare than Eva usually does, but it's undeniably true, even if I don't usually think of it that way.
"Disposing of the dead Angels costs a bundle" made me think of X-Com. Maybe NERV should create a gray market for Angel body parts to help finance their operations. Unless they have a plan for them, which it's never clear if they do. And holy shit do I ever want someone to make a doujin X-Com/Eva game now.
The line "They used to think there were no more Angels" regarding 'the Comittee' (does that refer to Seele?) is interesting. Does that imply that people knew that there were Angels at some point but that they went away for a while? This goes back to my incomplete understanding of what different factions and the public do and don't know about Second Impact. In the next scene Misato seems to imply that all information about the Angels has been concealed from the public, but I wonder how far that goes.
All of the conference stuff is pretty great. It shows an aspect of the world that we don't get very many windows into, which is great.
I forgot just how ridiculous Jet Alone looks. It's supposed to, obviously, but my memory of it wasn't quite so lanky. It looks ridiculous, the way it moves is ridiculous, I can only assume that the way it fights would be ridiculous if it ever got the chance. Given that that was probably the point of the design, it's very successful.
I wonder how much time the action scene takes place over. Even if NERV had Shinji and Unit 01 on standby, which my guess is they probably didn't (they were the ones who caused this problem, but I'm guessing they were planning on letting Jet Alone melt down and kill a bunch of people as a means of proving their point, and it was only Misato's intervention that stopped that from happening*) it would still take quite a while to physically get them there, wouldn't it? How far is Tokyo-3 from Old Tokyo? My assumption then would be that Jet Alone's rampage actually went on for quite a while, especially given the scene where the director guy is making all those phone calls.
*It's unclear whether they intended for Jet Alone to fizzle out right before exploding from the start or whether they intended for it to explode but called it off because they didn't want to kill Misato. It could very well be either, but I'm inclined to think it's the latter because it would look much more suspicious to have it go berserk but not explode without outside intervention. Ritsuko's dialogue to Gendo seems to indicate the former, but she might have been talking about the ultimate results rather than the way they were executed when she said that everything went according to plan.
Shinji's expression at 21:07 made me laugh out loud, then again at 21:16. I can't say that I would be able to handle Misato's shenanigans any more gracefully than he does, but it's pretty funny.
So what's my ultimate impression of this episode? Is it unnecessary? Yes and no. It doesn't really add a ton to the plot aside from giving us a little bit of exposition about Second Impact and establishing that NERV is ruthless, but neither one of those things were exclusive to this episode. It gives a lot of worldbuilding though, which is very valuable since so much of the series focuses on a relatively small area with a relatively small cast of characters. Is it among the worst episodes? Maybe, but if so it's only in the sense that it's the least of a fantastic series, which still leaves it head and shoulders above most things that have ever been televised. There's a lot to like in this episode, it moves nicely and it has some great scenes. I can certainly say that I enjoyed it more than episode 4, and it's gone up in my estimation quite a lot after this viewing. Not one of my favorites by a long shot, suffers a little from having to follow up arguably the best episode in the series, but totally good and worth watching.
The last major question that I have about this episode is regarding why Gendo bothered to sabotage this project in the first place. The easy answer seems to be that he was worried about it diverting interest and funds from NERV, but in this episode we learn that he isn't having trouble getting the Committee to increase his budget. It seems like the easy thing to do would have been to let Jet Alone try to fight an Angel. Best case scenario it gets completely destroyed and he can swoop in, save the day, and look great doing it. Worst case scenario it actually wins and he doesn't have to worry about repair or cleanup costs, although at that point his budget might actually be in danger in the long run. So it sounds to me like he actually thought it stood a chance if he was threatened enough by it to destroy it. That's interesting.
Episode 08-Asuka Arrives in Japan
Once again, I've mentioned before that I don't really remember liking this episode that much. I like Asuka just fine, she's one of my favorite characters, but my memory of this episode is that it and the fight scene that makes up much of it are on the pedestrian side. But I take back many of the negative things I've said about episode 7, so how will this one fare?
Seems pretty bold of Toji to pull down his pants and his boxers when flashing Asuka, given that he just got an eyeful of her panties. I guess if he was going to get slapped that many times he might as well deserve it.
Misato's expression on her NERV ID card is pretty funny. She looks like she's trying to look cool and almost pulling it off, but not quite.
Is Asuka taller than Shinji? She looks like she is in a couple of the shots in this episode where they're standing close together. That's entirely possible, I never really noticed if either of them was especially short or tall.
Maaaan, Kaji is so cool. All things considered he may be my favorite character. It's kind of a tossup between him, Ritsuko, and Asuka. But I might prefer him by just a little.
Asuka's German sounds off to me. Does anyone know if her voice actress is handling the German well or not? She seems like she's speaking too slowly for someone who's actually fluent, but I don't speak German so I have no idea if it's supposed to sound like that. The few times it comes up though I think it sounds odd.
Is this the Angel battle with the most fatalities? I know we never really get a good impression of if anyone is dying in the collateral damage in any of the fights, but a lot of ships get sunk in this episode.
Gaghiel is definitely another one of the lamer Angels. Not the very worst, but it doesn't feel very inspired either. They could have done some interesting stuff with an aquatic Angel and making it some kind of sea serpent or cephalopod or crazy deep-sea fish or something, but all we got was this fairly mundane whale-looking thing. This is the first time I ever noticed the Sachiel mask on its head though.
The sunken city is super cool-looking. It doesn't come into play as much more than set dressing, but it's a great detail.
Shinji's response of "That's because it's an Angel" to Asuka's surprise at seeing Gaghiel open its mouth is pretty dumb. None of the Angels so far have even had mouths that we could identify. Get it together, Shinji. That's some weak banter.
Unlike the previous episode which I liked a lot more than I was expecting to, I still don't really care all that much for this one. It's fairly plot-important since it introduces a few new characters and major concepts (like that weird Adam briefcase), but the worldbuilding is much smaller-scale and I think the fight scene is fairly weak. I appreciate a convoluted plan, but the solution to this fight doesn't seem plausible enough for me to really buy it. Combine that with the slightly disappointing Angel that doesn't get to do very much, and I'm still not that big a fan of this episode. I can't point to a specific part where it really drags, but it also doesn't feel like it's moving along very smoothly. It's not awful, but it's not particularly good either. Probably my least favorite episode so far.
For a while I was confused about why Gaghiel was here, since I thought Angels only cared to go after Adam. And then I remembered a few minutes later.
Same here.
With that stored away though, why do the other countries need Evangelions anyway? It's not as though the Angels will go attack and even if they don't know that they wont be fighting any Angels, they would think something fishy was up since all the Angels so far have only been invading Tokyo-3.
That's a fair point. Misato's best guess as to why they were attacked was that the Angel was after Unit 02, which I suppose assumes that the Angels are intelligent enough to actively try to take out an Eva while it's in a compromised position. I guess it makes sense that everyone else around the world also might be assuming that Tokyo-3 is being targeted specifically because the Angels are trying to destroy the one place that has weapons that can fight them, but that seems like a stretch. It may be the case that other countries are suspicious that something weird is going on. That probably made it easier in EoE for Seele to convince the UN to destroy NERV, clearly they look like they're up to something. And, to be fair, they are.
Animation this episode was really nice too.
Parts of it were, certainly, especially with Unit 02 landing on that aircraft carrier and all of the planes sliding off the deck. But overall I thought it was a little lacking. The whole scenario with the sinking battleships landing in Gaghiels' mouth is fundamentally ridiculous, but excellent animation might have helped make it a little more believable, and I don't think the animation team really succeeded in doing that. It's not the animation's fault that it couldn't make something completely crazy look right, but I wish it had managed somehow.
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As I've already made clear, my assertion has been that this is the least necessary episode in the series. In my opinion it doesn't add almost anything to the plot and is kind of a waste of time. But is that just fallout from the fact that it has to follow up arguably the best episode? Maybe.
Least necessary? Yeah, probably. That's fair. Worst episode? Not sure, arguably, those would probably go to episodes 23 and 24.
The gradual teardown of Ramiel's body is a cool detail, and one that's interestingly subverted/lost in Rebuild. As fond as I am of the whole blood rain/rainbow thing, it's a shame to miss out on this part of it. Especially when it's technically sort of plot-relevant, since it's partially responsible for the S2 Engine.
Oh was it? For the MP Evas? Did they have S2 Engines as well?
The line "They used to think there were no more Angels" regarding 'the Comittee' (does that refer to Seele?) is interesting. Does that imply that people knew that there were Angels at some point but that they went away for a while? This goes back to my incomplete understanding of what different factions and the public do and don't know about Second Impact. In the next scene Misato seems to imply that all information about the Angels has been concealed from the public, but I wonder how far that goes.
Yeah I was wondering who the Committee was. I don't think it's Seele because I think Gendo refers to them as 'those old men'. Consistently? I forget. Nerv can't only be financially supported by Seele, and they must have existed in the main political realm since they were first founded. They have higher authority in dealing with emergency situations (concerning Angels) than the UN forces. Since Nerv was founded to deal with Angels, that would mean that whoever was in the know would know the Angels. 'In the know' must be the committee members, and perhaps other higher-ups. So it would be odd that they would think that there would be no more Angels since dealing with them is precisely why Nerv was founded to begin with anyway. It may be that after Seele revealed the true reasons behind 2nd Impact with the (not Secret) Dead Sea Scrolls, they were able to convince the world governments to found Nerv to deal with the future threat. So it may be that the Committee was losing trust in the Dead Sea Scrolls since 15 years had passed with no Angels showing up to wreck stuff.
*It's unclear whether they intended for Jet Alone to fizzle out right before exploding from the start or whether they intended for it to explode but called it off because they didn't want to kill Misato. It could very well be either, but I'm inclined to think it's the latter because it would look much more suspicious to have it go berserk but not explode without outside intervention. Ritsuko's dialogue to Gendo seems to indicate the former, but she might have been talking about the ultimate results rather than the way they were executed when she said that everything went according to plan.
Seemed like only Gendo, Ritsuko, and Kaji were the ones involved with the sabotoge. Since Misato said that the miracle was premeditated, I assumed that the plan was to have the nuclear reactor run until it was on the very verge of a meltdown, then abort it at the last minute.
The last major question that I have about this episode is regarding why Gendo bothered to sabotage this project in the first place. The easy answer seems to be that he was worried about it diverting interest and funds from NERV, but in this episode we learn that he isn't having trouble getting the Committee to increase his budget. It seems like the easy thing to do would have been to let Jet Alone try to fight an Angel. Best case scenario it gets completely destroyed and he can swoop in, save the day, and look great doing it. Worst case scenario it actually wins and he doesn't have to worry about repair or cleanup costs, although at that point his budget might actually be in danger in the long run. So it sounds to me like he actually thought it stood a chance if he was threatened enough by it to destroy it. That's interesting.
Since the JA was not even prepared to deal with AT Fields, it seemed to be very far from actually being to be used on the battlefield. Maybe Gendo's plan was to remove even a single factor that could possibly divert funds to another project. This looked like it was JA's first public showcasing of its functionality. If this was a success, the Committee may have been interested in testing the possibilities of a weapon that on paper would be more reliable. Pruning the tree so as not to divide the nutrients, you could say. Get it out of the way as early in development as possible, while it's easier to introduce errors without raising suspicions of sabotage, before it actually could be more tempting for the Committee to fund.
Asuka's German sounds off to me. Does anyone know if her voice actress is handling the German well or not? She seems like she's speaking too slowly for someone who's actually fluent, but I don't speak German so I have no idea if it's supposed to sound like that. The few times it comes up though I think it sounds odd.
Lookie what I found (https://youtu.be/mkt_Nwu3vLw?t=1m13s). Compare it to the very beginning of the video if you weren't confident. I had no doubt that her German was terrible in the sub. It can't be helped, pretty sure there's a very limited supply of bilingual VAs in Japanese and German. Reminds me a bit of that scene in Hellsing with Rip van Winkle singing Der Freisch?tz, also in German, except that was more easily passable because pronunciation is more ignorable when you're singing.
Is this the Angel battle with the most fatalities? I know we never really get a good impression of if anyone is dying in the collateral damage in any of the fights, but a lot of ships get sunk in this episode.
I wonder how many Zeruel killed? I forget if they were able to get the people evacuated in time.
Shinji's response of "That's because it's an Angel" to Asuka's surprise at seeing Gaghiel open its mouth is pretty dumb. None of the Angels so far have even had mouths that we could identify. Get it together, Shinji. That's some weak banter.
Oh right, that completely slipped my mind. I guess none of the angels so far had mouths. Unless it was about how Angels show unexpected features. Still kind of weak, like the writers were trying to play up his 'veteran' angle.
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This brings us solidly into the "monster of the week" part of the show, which I'm looking forward to. I have positive associations with most of these episodes, with one exception (and it's one of this week's episodes, so I don't have to wait to find out if I was being unfair toward it or not).
Episode 09: Both Of You, Dance Like You Want To Win!
Rei appears to be reading some sort of technical manual. That makes sense I guess. She's always seen reading but it doesn't seem to fit her character that she would read anything, you know, interesting. Does the stuff she learns from those books ever come up? I can't explicitly remember, but I feel like it probably does at some point. I don't have the engineering knowledge to know what subject the book is on, if it is actually identifiable from the diagrams we can see.
Man, I love the Kaji/Misato/Ritsuko dynamic so much. I would watch a show about the three of them in college in a second. Or just an alternate universe thing where they live in the same apartment complex or something. I don't care, I want to see more of them just goofing around. And yet when the manga tried to flesh out Kaji's backstory I was bored to tears by it, so maybe I don't actually want that. Or maybe the manga just sucks.
Unit 02's spear is cool. I wonder if there's a Revoltech-scale version of that weapon? I have most of the major weapons and a few inexplicable ones that I can't remember ever actually appearing in an episode, but I don't have that one.
Israfel is a straightforward monster. The design is simple, being basically just a shuffled Sachiel. It has a cool power but is also pretty weak compared to a lot of the other Angels. Nothing incredibly special or memorable, but far from being one of the worst Angels. Great monster of the week fodder.
I wonder if Israfel can keep splitting into more parts if it keeps getting attacked, or if two is the limit. The design of it kind of implies a duality, but we never get to see it do much so it's not clear.
The scene with the summary of the battle is really funny. It's also slightly interesting that we haven't seen Gendo at all yet this episode. Fuyutsuki has done everything by himself so far. I assume Gendo is busy doing whatever it is that one does with Adam right now and can't be bothered.
Ritsuko lampshades this in the next scene. "If he'd been here, you'd be fired before he ever saw these". For some reason I doubt that. I think it would take a lot for Gendo to fire Misato. I don't know if that's because I think he's a good judge of character or if it's because he knows the right buttons to push to manipulate Misato into doing whatever he wants, but I think she's valuable to him. Maybe that's not true, but I have that impression.
I forgot that this insane plot was Kaji's idea. Usually ridiculous plans are Misato's wheelhouse. Which just goes to show how similar they are, I guess. And Misato seems to be completely on board with the whole thing remarkably quickly. I wonder if she actually believes in the plan or if she's just desperate to try anything at all?
I don't recognize any of the locations in the scene with Hikari, Toji, and Kensuke or the scene after that. Are they still in Misato's apartment? She seems to have a living room, storeroom, and balcony that I don't remember seeing before. The room Asuka runs into looks like a convenience store. Is that a thing that Japanese apartments have? Have these places been in episodes before this and I just never noticed them?
I don't have much to say about the scenes with Shinji and Asuka, Misato and Kaji, or Misato and Ritsuko except that they're all obviously important bits of character development. None of them had to be in this episode necessarily, but when answering the question "How important was this episode?" all of those scenes could be pointed to as reasons that it's fairly important. They had to go somewhere, and the episode makes a plenty adequate plot and thematic framework to put them in.
The fight scene is mostly unremarkable except for two things:.
-Israfel seems to be extremely weak, or at least its beam attack is. The beam can't even penetrate through a thin layer of whatever material the Evas hide behind. Maybe it's stronger when combined, but it's clearly much, much weaker than Sachiel (to say nothing of Ramiel) in that regard.
-The Evas do a Super Inazuma Kick together, which I believe is the first explicit Gunbuster reference in the series. And nothing makes me happier than a robot doing a Super Inazuma Kick.
Lol at the hologram phone that Unit 01 apparently has on its back. Does it have those hidden all over the place, or did Shinji just get lucky that he happened to be by the only one when it rang? This episode is too silly.
This whole episode is basically just a completely contrived excuse to get Asuka moved in with Misato and to develop her relationship to Shinji a little, but I like it despite how goofy it is. It seems to know that all of this is implausible even by its own standards, so the end result is surprisingly sincere for something so dumb. I complained about how the animation of the last episode didn't succeed in depicting the ridiculous scenario in a way that made it more believable, but in this episode I think it completely succeeds. Everything comes together to make what could have been a total dud of an episode work very well. It's still silly as hell, but I'm okay with that. I'm glad the series didn't hit this wacky of a tone very often, but I don't think this episode is too out of place in the grand scheme of the series.
Episode 10: Magma Diver
I mentioned before that this pair of episodes contained one that I remember disliking, and this is it. In fact, this is the last episode that I remember having a negative opinion of.
I shouldn't even have to say this, but it's to Kaji's credit that he shuts down Asuka's advances so consistently and thoroughly. Given that he's an anime character and comes of as a bit of a creep with Misato a few times, that wasn't a given.
I think this is the first good look we get at NERV's bridge trio (Hyuga, Ibuko, and Aoga), isn't it? Or at least it's the first time we see them all together like this? I think Hyuga had a few lines in an earlier episode and we've definitely seen all of them in background shots and stuff, but this is the first time I've explicitly noticed them doing their thing like this. I'm fascinated by these three, and I know I'm not the only one. I think every other conversation I have with friends about Eva is about them in some way. I would love to see an OVA or a miniseries or something some day that shows pivotal moments in the series from their point of view. Or maybe ever just fairly mundane moments like this episode. At any rate, I wish we saw a little more of them.
The whole thing with Asuka being a super genius is a little odd. She consistently gets shit on by the show, almost always being the one who fucks everything up or jumps to wrong conclusions. We never particularly get to see her excelling at anything. It makes sense to me that Rei, a person with nothing in her life except her work, would be able to out-perform her a lot of the time, but I feel bad for her about how she always gets trumped by Shinji. This is something that Rebuild does differently, and I have a lot to say about that when we get there, but it's an interesting facet of the series and of her character. I don't necessarily think this is an oversight or anything, I think it's an intentional part of her character, but it's brought up surprisingly infrequently for how much it seems like it matters to her motivation.
I'm finding myself liking Shinji a lot more at this point in the series than I did in the first couple of episodes. I remembered having a positive opinion of him overall, so when we first started this viewing I was surprised how much of an ass he was early on. I don't know if he's just mellowed out by this point or if he's still a bitch and Asuka's personality just makes him look better by comparison, but I thought he was very reasonable in this episode. Maybe he's just deliberately staying on his best behavior to make Asuka look worse.
The plot of this episode has interesting implications for the series. If all of the Angels are just hanging out in places waiting to hatch, I wonder where the rest of them are? Are they all in volcanoes? Are most of them under the ocean? It's an interesting idea, but again it's never really addressed again that I remember.
I wonder what NERV would have done with an Angel if they had caught one? Would it have been like that skeletal Angel from Rebuild 2.0, where they would have eventually tried to graft an entry plug onto it?
Once again there's discussion of Rei piloting another Eva, and again I wonder if she could actually do it. She at least has a blood tie to Unit 01, but she's not related to Unit 02 at all. Kaworu could do it though, so she might be able to, but I don't know if she knows how to do whatever it was that he did.
Up to this point I haven't had any problem at all with this episode, but I found the second half to be as boring as I remembered. It's confined to a small area, there's no dynamic action, and it's visually uninteresting. The drama of this part hinges on whether we find the scene to be tense or not, and I don't really. Either it stops being tense after the first time you've seen it or it never was. I'm not sure the series has earned the right to ask us to believe something might actually go seriously wrong at this point. At any rate, I think this scene is much, much too long for how little happens during it.
I have no idea what to think of Sandalphon, since we never really get to see it and it doesn't do very much. It looks a lot like Gaghiel from the very little we ever see of it, but I think it has a humanoid arm or tentacle with a hand on the end and mushroom-like growths on its back? I also wonder if it was going to keep growing and changing for a while before surfacing if it hadn't been hunted down like this. Maybe it would look completely different by the time it got around to making an offensive move.
This episode shot itself in the foot visually, so it's one of the least interesting Angel fights in the series just because there isn't much to see. Now that I think about it, I wonder if the lack of interesting visuals in this episode is for budget reasons? It's probably much cheaper to animate some blurry red shapes than something that might be, you know, fun to look at. Given Eva's infamous budget problems, maybe this was just an attempt at a creative way to save money for more important episodes. If so, fair enough I guess.
But yeah, ultimately I didn't enjoy this episode much. There was some character stuff in it, but a lot of it was spent on that one boring scene. I'm also not sure what the point of all of the Okinawa trip stuff was, aside from just showing the different ways Shinji and Asuka react to the news that they won't be able to go. That seems like a slight payoff for how much time was spent talking about it.
Least necessary? Yeah, probably. That's fair. Worst episode? Not sure, arguably, those would probably go to episodes 23 and 24.
You think so? I disagree completely, although it'll be interesting to look at those episodes with that in mind when we get there.
Oh was it? For the MP Evas? Did they have S2 Engines as well?
I think so, right? Or was that just speculation on my part?
Lookie what I found (https://youtu.be/mkt_Nwu3vLw?t=1m13s). Compare it to the very beginning of the video if you weren't confident. I had no doubt that her German was terrible in the sub. It can't be helped, pretty sure there's a very limited supply of bilingual VAs in Japanese and German. Reminds me a bit of that scene in Hellsing with Rip van Winkle singing Der Freisch?tz, also in German, except that was more easily passable because pronunciation is more ignorable when you're singing.
Ha ha wow. That's fair enough, anime (and even Eva, thinking about Kaji's English in Rebuild 2.22) has a horrible track record for foreign languages. But yeah, comparing them side by side like that is amazing.
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Ep:09 Momentarily Unite the Hearts
Haven't noticed the 3-shot of Misato, Ritsuko and Kaji in the OP before
I wonder if Asuka always wearing her Eva ear hair clip things could have been an early indicator to first time viewers of her somewhat troubled personality. Besides, isn't is like confidential equipment? Why would Nerv let her wear it in public?
Asuka being popular. I wonder why they changed her middle name to Shikinami in the Rebuild series. Also she says 'hello' and not 'halo' or however you say hello in German.
Asuka stands above Rei, and she moves her book out of Asuka's shadow. Then she moves her shadow back over Rei's book. Kind of a lol moment. A bit revealing, perhaps.
First indication of Ritsuko having some kind of unrequited love with somewhat, as mentioned by Kaji.
Scene of Ramiel being deconstructed.
Shinji calls Asuka 'Sohryu' yet. Seeing Shinji assertive like this when he's arguing with Asuka is both a bit surprising and a bit of a relief, seeing how repressed he is in most other appearances. It shows how much he's grown since his first appearance, and I suppose how much he will regress later on.
Somehow I always had the impression that one of them lost first, then the other was double-teamed by the Angel. But no, they were both defeated by one of the halves within a 20 second span of time. Also there was a downtime of about 4.5 minutes of both Eva pilots losing and Nerv yielding command to UN, in the meantime of which the Angel was doing... something.
Asuka has a really big red motif going on everywhere. She has a deep wine red towel and soda can, etc etc.
Class Rep, Toji and Kensuke come to visit.
The room Asuka runs into looks like a convenience store. Is that a thing that Japanese apartments have? Have these places been in episodes before this and I just never noticed them?
Must be one of the convenience stores nearby. Presumably the one that Misato buys all her food from.
That scene where one of the dots on the DDR pad lights up in front of Shinji's face and, all other limbs occupied, tries to hit it with his head cracks me up. Rei is also really amazing in a subtle sort of way. She manages to play the game perfectly her first time. When Misato tells Asuka that she might consider switching her with Rei, she looks very distraught.
Shinji almost steals a kiss from Asuka. Wth Shinji, you don't just take advantage of a sleeping girl. Then Kaji forces a kiss, somewhat, on Misato. She drinks with Ritsuko. Misato says that he hasn't changed since 8 years ago and that he's still a kid. Which seem to be the theme of the episode, people acting like kids or not considering themselves kids or whatnot.
The Yashima operation was ridiculous but this one is just outlandish. What's funny is that there wasn't even the slightest bit of tension in this battle either. Even the Gaghiel battle had some tense moments. This one they just fight to the music and win. Just like that. It wasn't bad though, just out there. Pretty cool to watch too. And are they broadcasting their phonecall throughout the city, lol? The amount of teacher/sensei vibe I get from Fuyutsuki is pretty amusing. From the little we've seen of him so far, he looks like he could be pretty good at looking after kids, at least better than Gendo.
Israfel sits in the middle to mid-low section on the design list. It's not that interesting, but at least it's humanoid (making it more kaijuu-y and monster of the week-y). The battle was pretty out there, which saves him from obscurity. Altogether, the episode was a pretty cute one where we get to see characters interacting with each other.
Ep: 10 Magma Diver
I shouldn't even have to say this, but it's to Kaji's credit that he shuts down Asuka's advances so consistently and thoroughly. Given that he's an anime character and comes of as a bit of a creep with Misato a few times, that wasn't a given.
Though it didn't occur to me consciously, I have to agree with you. It's just become so commonplace for underage girls (or girls that look underage) in anime to be seen as some acceptable target of advances that it really is responsible of him to so categorically shut her down like he does while still treating her with respect.
I'm surprised that Okinawa and the other lesser islands had survived Second Impact and the tidal floods.
Asuka has bad grades, she calls Japan's grading system old fashioned. Do they use some different system in Germany? I remember my elementary school switching to some weirdo grading system using ME and EE (Meets Expectations, Exceeds Expectations) instead of the usual A B C D F system back in 5th grade.
Asuka and Shinji not being able to go on the school trip obviously also means that Rei wont be able to go. I wonder if she's ever been outside of Tokyo-3? Also she's swimming here, I wonder if it's a hobby or something, I wouldn't expect her to be someone who would make up for not being to go on the trip by swimming in a pool here. Even in all the scenes we've seen her in her school swimming suit she's just been sitting off to the side. And speaking of f'ing which I just realized that Rei isn't in her school swimsuit here, she actually has her own. I really do not expect someone as pragmatic and clumsy as she is to actually buy her own swimsuit when she can just use the school one. Who bought it for her? Unless she really did decide to buy her own. Also interesting was how the light on the ceiling reflecting underwater as Rei swam underneath resembled a silhouette of the moon.
Here we get to see the three people on the bridge. Maya reading a slim novel, Hyuga chuckling at a comic, and Aoba strumming along on an air guitar with some guitar books on his desk. Really wish we got to see more of these three in the series. Kind of like the Dollars otaku van group in Durarara.
Funny how waiting for an attack is safer than launching an attack on an infant angel. Possibility of Second Impact? I wonder if this is true. They aren't as informed as Gendo would be. I forget what specifically caused Second Impact, but I don't think it had to do with tampering with an embryo Adam.
I wonder what A-17 is.
How is Shinji fine under all that magma? Unless he isn't, which would explain why Asuka called him a show-off.
Misato reveals a chest scar from Second Impact. Certainly don't remember that.
Both episodes had pretty shoddy animation quality. Liked the first one more than the second one. The latter was pretty forgettable. Imo the most forgettable so far. Maybe the most interesting tidbit was of the Angel embryo maturing in some remote location on Earth. Which like you say brings up interesting questions about whether this can apply to the other Angels. Do they exist somewhere, maturing, before they appear? I'd say it makes sense, it's not like they simply pop into existence when they decide to invade. And it need not be limited to Earth either, since I doubt that Arael would have started out on Earth. This was probably the least interesting episode I've watched so far.
You think so? I disagree completely, although it'll be interesting to look at those episodes with that in mind when we get there.
Oops I meant episodes 25 and 26.
Man, I love the Kaji/Misato/Ritsuko dynamic so much. I would watch a show about the three of them in college in a second. Or just an alternate universe thing where they live in the same apartment complex or something. I don't care, I want to see more of them just goofing around.
There's (http://i198.photobucket.com/albums/aa305/secondgryphon/Sketches/EVA/EvangelionYouth.jpg) this (http://i198.photobucket.com/albums/aa305/secondgryphon/Sketches/EVA/PainCanBeAWeapon.jpg) pretty interesting idea that I found a few years ago where the main cast of Eva is swapped age-wise. So we have the Kaji/Misato/Ritsuko trio be the Eva pilots while Shinji/Rei/Asuka are the head personnel of Nerv. Makes for some really interesting dynamics, especially involving who would replace who position-wise. The whole thread was pretty fun to read, though it was waaay too long to actually go through entirely.
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Ep:09 Momentarily Unite the Hearts
This episode seemingly has like a dozen different titles. I actually spent like fifteen minutes trying to figure out the title and I couldn't find a conclusive answer. I was looking throughout the episode for a title card and I didn't see one, although maybe I just missed it.
I wonder if Asuka always wearing her Eva ear hair clip things could have been an early indicator to first time viewers of her somewhat troubled personality. Besides, isn't is like confidential equipment? Why would Nerv let her wear it in public?
I don't know that those belong to NERV. She had them in her first appearance, so it's possible they belong to whoever constructed Unit 02 (or did NERV actually still construct Unit 02, just outside of Japan? I don't know).
Asuka being popular. I wonder why they changed her middle name to Shikinami in the Rebuild series. Also she says 'hello' and not 'halo' or however you say hello in German.
I have a theory about her name change too that has yet to be confirmed or denied. I don't know when the correct time to talk about that is, but it's probably somewhere in the last couple episodes or End Of Evangelion. Or maybe Rebuild 2.22. Anyway, I think her name change is for a very specific reason and it ties in to her different introduction and personality in Rebuild.
Shinji calls Asuka 'Sohryu' yet. Seeing Shinji assertive like this when he's arguing with Asuka is both a bit surprising and a bit of a relief, seeing how repressed he is in most other appearances. It shows how much he's grown since his first appearance, and I suppose how much he will regress later on.
Yeah. Poor kid. I'm really rooting for him at this point.
Asuka has a really big red motif going on everywhere. She has a deep wine red towel and soda can, etc etc.
Obviously that's linked to Asuka's self-branding as Unit 02's pilot, and she has all of that stuff for the same reason she wears her plugsuit hairpins all the time. But I wonder if she associated herself with the color red before she became a pilot and demanded Unit 02 be red to match, or if she started leaning into the red theme after she saw the finished robot.
Class Rep, Toji and Kensuke come to visit.Must be one of the convenience stores nearby. Presumably the one that Misato buys all her food from.
Is that what happened? The cinematography does nothing at all to indicate it if that's the case. I'm still very confused about that scene.
The amount of teacher/sensei vibe I get from Fuyutsuki is pretty amusing. From the little we've seen of him so far, he looks like he could be pretty good at looking after kids, at least better than Gendo.
I actually had a conversation with my roommate this morning about this. To the effect of, I would love to see an AU where Fuyutsuki just adopts Shinji. He and Shinji do father-son activities together and Gendo just lurks around jealously. But yeah, I like Fuyutsuki a lot. He seems like a good guy. Would be interested to know a little more about him.
Ep: 10 Magma DiverThough it didn't occur to me consciously, I have to agree with you. It's just become so commonplace for underage girls (or girls that look underage) in anime to be seen as some acceptable target of advances that it really is responsible of him to so categorically shut her down like he does while still treating her with respect.
One of the bigger examples of that (or maybe it's a reversal, because the genders are flipped?) is in this very series. Although unlike a lot of anime it's not glorified at all and we're supposed to be shocked and appalled by it.
I'm surprised that Okinawa and the other lesser islands had survived Second Impact and the tidal floods.
That's a source of minor controversy. Some people claim that when they say they're going to "Okinawa" they must mean the flooded former site of Okinawa, hence the scuba diving. But apparently scuba diving is a popular tourist pastime in Okinawa anyway, so we're not really given any indication that that's the case.
Funny how waiting for an attack is safer than launching an attack on an infant angel. Possibility of Second Impact? I wonder if this is true. They aren't as informed as Gendo would be. I forget what specifically caused Second Impact, but I don't think it had to do with tampering with an embryo Adam.
I assume they're just wrong. If not, the only thing I can imagine they could be referring to is both Evas getting destroyed in the precarious situation they're forced to put themselves in, so the world will be destroyed by extension because there's nobody left to protect against the Angels. But that doesn't make much sense because Unit 00 would still be around and there are several other Evas in at least semi-open production. So yeah, I assume they're just wrong about that.
How is Shinji fine under all that magma? Unless he isn't, which would explain why Asuka called him a show-off.
My impression was that it was mostly the pressure from being so far under the surface, rather than the heat, that was the most dangerous to the Evas, so since Shinji didn't have to dive very deep he doesn't have to contend with that. He's a show-off because if he failed he would die, and I guess the lava probably hurt Unit 01 some, but I don't think it was the bigger threat.
Both episodes had pretty shoddy animation quality. Liked the first one more than the second one.
I thought episode 9 had pretty solid animation. It was very expressive and there was decent action. Nothing about it struck me as shoddy. Not like episode 10, which yeah, is shoddy as hell.
Oops I meant episodes 25 and 26.
Fair enough. I still like those episodes, but I can't fault anyone who doesn't. Especially anyone who had to watch those without immediately being able to pop in End Of Evangelion as soon as they were over and then immediately go read an analysis online. That was never the end of the series for me, so I don't think I have the resentment toward it that a lot of older fans do, but I don't begrudge people that resentment one bit.
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Alright, bring on the monsters of the week!
Episode 11: In The Still Darkness
The opening scene is kind of bizarre. Do all of the NERV personnel hang out together all the time when they're not at work, or is Tokyo 3 such a small town that they can't help but constantly bump into each other. I like it a lot, seeing the characters in a different environment is fun, I'm just not sure what I'm supposed to take away from it.
I think this is the first time we ever hear what Magi is aside from it being mentioned (hence Maya apparently not even being sure what they are, despite working a few feet from them).
I don't like the repainted Unit 00 that much. I'm glad it doesn't have this design in Rebuild. Orange and white looks much cooler, although obviously the blue is to match Rei's color scheme.
The scene with Shinji calling Gendo is so sad. Once again, I am 100% in Shinji's corner at this point in the series. Poor kid. I wonder what the significance of the fact that he called from a pay phone is though. Doesn't Misato own a phone? Usually I would assume that he doesn't want anyone to overhear him, but who is he worried about and why? Does he not want Asuka to hear how nervous he is?
I just noticed for the first time that there are markings on the roads pointing out where the Eva launchpads are, presumably so nobody gets smashed by one of the launch bays popping out of the ground underneath them. Parking in Tokyo 3 must be terrifying, what with the robots shooting out of the ground and the fact that buildings appear and disappear periodically.
All things considered, I would say that this is the first "real" monster of the week episode in the sense that it's the first time the whole main cast is together and the first time the three robots fight together. It's not really introducing us to any major new concepts (Magi is not major at all in the grand scheme), it's just character development and checking another Angel off the list. The Shinji-Rei-Asuka dynamic is pretty well-developed despite the fact that we've barely seen the three of them in the same room up to this point because there has been so much work done to develop how they interact in pairs, so it's almost not even noticeable that this is their first real adventure together.
Matarael's first appearance is really cool. The scene with it sliding around in the water looks great. In fact, Matarael looks great overall. It may be the shittiest Angel in the series, bar none, but it's fairly memorable. Too bad we never got to see a Rebuild version of it. I bet that would have been cool.
The scene with Gendo and Fuyutsuki trying to be cool in the heat might be straight-up the funniest thing in this show so far. I loled.
Obviously Gendo is putting enough faith in the pilots that he expects them to show up in time to get in the Evas, but my first impression was that it almost seems to be that he's planning on doing it himself when he leaves to get them ready. Oh god I want to see that.
We talked before about how it was incongruous that Gendo seemed to favor Rei, but he still treats her like shit a lot of the time. I think we wrote it off as potentially being early script weirdness, but this episode actually seems to lampshade that. Rei claims that she isn't treated any better and at first it sounds like she's just trying to save face, but she's probably actually right. Gendo might be nice to her sometimes, but he still ultimately abuses her and she knows it. I'm not sure if it's sadder if she knows she's being mistreated or if she doesn't, but either way, that's really sad.
This is another one of those episodes that seems like it fudges the timeframe a lot. Seems like even with a lot of people and an existing game plan getting the Evas ready by hand would be a massive undertaking, and Matarael is already in the city when Gendo leaves to prepare them. Seems like he would have had to get them ready to go in a matter of minutes, which doesn't seem very plausible. Matarael does suck though, so maybe it's so slow that it took hours to squeeze between the buildings to get into position or something.
It's a well-established fact that Matarael is the worst Angel, but it has to have had some extra power that we never saw it use. I can't believe the only means of attack it had was crying acid on things that just happened to be directly below it. Maybe it had power absorption abilities, or a super-powerful AT field that has a blind spot directly beneath it or something. I assume it had some more tricks than we got to see. As it stands, it has the dubious honor of being the only Angel ever to be killed by bullets.
I forgot that the winning plan was actually Asuka's idea. That makes me feel a little bit better about how consistently she gets made a fool of in most episodes. At least one time, out of all of the many, many times she fucks everything up, she got to be the hero. At least a little bit. She's just lucky to have found the one Angel with a crippling bullet allergy then, since her plan seems to have just assumed guns would be enough to take it down.
I forgot about Unit 00's weird rocket thruster things that we see for like a second when it jumps down the shaft to pick up the rifles. Is this the only time we ever see those? Do the other robots have them too?
I think this is one of those fight scenes where the animation doesn't quite pull off the ludicrous scenario. Asuka's plan was sketchy anyway, but the way it's animated didn't do much to help me buy into it. The fact that Unit 02 absorbs all of the acid and none of it drips down is weird, and the quick cuts between closeups of the individual robots made figuring out where everyone was supposed to be tricky. A few zoomed out cross-sections of the whole shaft showing everyone in motion at once would have been nice. Seems like the animation budget just wasn't there, which again makes me sad for the Rebuild version of this that never was.
So we never do find out who actually sabotaged Tokyo 3 during this episode, but it seems pretty clear that it was probably Seele. Probably using Kaji. Weirdly it actually doesn't end up being important. I suppose maybe it's a plot point that's sort of relevant to End Of Evangelion, but I don't think anyone would have raised an eyebrow if this episode wasn't here. It's ultimately pretty inconsequential. I've got to say though, I like it a lot despite how little important stuff happens. The mood of it is great, except for the fight scene being weak the animation shortcuts aren't nearly as unfortunate as in the previous episode, and there's plenty of dynamic stuff going on. I don't think any major character breakthroughs originate here, and in fact there doesn't seem to be much character development to speak of, but I'm still glad it's here. You could throw the whole thing out and the series still works (which is why I assume Rebuild doesn't draw from any of it) but I wouldn't.
Episode 12: The Value Of A Miracle Is...
We get our first glimpse of the actual events of Second Impact, which is never something that I've found to be that interesting. The imagery of Adam's wings is cool (on a related note, what's up with the shot of Unit 01 with the same wings in the opening? That never gets called back to that I remember. Is that a scrapped End Of Evangelion design or something?) and the goings-on are technically important to Misato's character, I just don't think we really needed to see any of it. The juxtaposition of kid Misato with adult Misato strikes me as being especially weird, since it highlights her scar and yet we missed an opportunity to see how she actually got it during Second Impact. She doesn't seem to have a chest wound when we see her as a kid, so why point it out? I forget, is that scar ever actually directly explained?
I can't help but notice that Misato's room is very tidy for once. I assume that's a direct result of her promotion. She got commended so now she feels like she has to try to be less of a fuckup.
The animation this episode seems pretty sketchy. Nobody looks quite on-model and a lot of the backgrounds look a bit off. The food in the part scene, for instance, looks bizarre. There's some kind of meat-on-bone dish (maybe chicken wings?) that looks bizarre. Unless that's some weird Japanese dish I'm not familiar with the bones are too thin and the meat is too round and it doesn't look right at all.
"Nothing can exist in the world of death we call Antarctica. Or should I simply call it Hell?" Christ Fuyutsuki, dramatic much?
Sahaquiel is awfully silly looking. I don't remember thinking this episode was ridiculous the first few times I watched it, but after the stunning Rebuild version of it I can't help but find it kind of pedestrian. Maybe a slower reveal of Sahaquiel would have made it less goofy, but the first time we see it it's a full-on clear satellite image. Maybe a blurry or zoomed-out first look with a full reveal later would have been better. Or maybe it just looks dumb and was destined to be silly no matter how the reveal happened.
I'm a little surprised that Ritsuko still puts stock in Magi's calculations regarding how likely Misato's crazy plans are. She's got a virtually impossible success rate already if they're to be believed, so the natural assumption seems like it should be that they're just not properly measuring the capabilities of the Evas. Maybe this is the last time she puts any faith in their predictions about the Angels though, because I can't remember the ".00001% chance of success" stuff ever being brought up again after this. Another thing to watch out for I suppose.
I guess the fact that Rei is a vegetarian means that she has at least some likes and dislikes. Or maybe she doesn't actually care and meat is just incompatible with her weird body. If there's a food that she dislikes I wonder if that means that there are some she actively likes?
For how off-the-walls implausible a lot of the Angel fights are, I think this one actually makes a lot of sense. The plan is simple and straightforward, if apparently risky. So the animation didn't need to do any extra work to make it easy to understand, which is good. It's interesting that Rebuild did choose to do a rendition of it, because again it's not really necessary to the story, but they needed to pick something to be the first time all three pilots work together and I guess this was the one with the most potential for improvement.
Not a ton happened in this episode, but I think ultimately it is more important to the story than the previous one. Some of the characters moved forward a bit more, and we got some useful (though probably not fully necessary) information about Second Impact and the Lance Of Longinus. I didn't like it quite as much as episode 11, but it's still just fine.
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Matarael's first appearance is really cool. The scene with it sliding around in the water looks great. In fact, Matarael looks great overall. It may be the shittiest Angel in the series, bar none, but it's fairly memorable. Too bad we never got to see a Rebuild version of it. I bet that would have been cool.
Clockiel's probably the closest we'll get.
"Nothing can exist in the world of death we call Antarctica. Or should I simply call it Hell?" Christ Fuyutsuki, dramatic much?
The subs make it seem rather dramatic, yeah. What Gendo says right after as a response sets off some ticks and tocks in my head though. He says "But here we stand, mankind, still living as lifeforms", or something like that. The latter half is kind of suspicious. Still alive as living beings? Or as lifeforms? That almost makes it seem like the anti AT Field the Giant of Light/Adam set off is still in effect. Especially since Fuyutsuki says in response to this that it's 'because they're under of protection of the power of science'. Which if it were the case, would mean that there exists a way to neutralize the anti AT Field waves, possibly how Misato survived in the capsule if it were equipped with that.
And this dialogue in general is what made me understand why I thought that Fuyutsuki seems like he would be good at taking care of kids. While Gendo continuing speaks of science as the power of mankind and what not, speaking as if he were above everything, as if he represented mankind or something, Fuyutsuki speaks like an old retired professor who's tired of all the experiments and is in deep regret and atoning for mistakes he's caused through his research. Fuyutsuki, rather than mystical science stuff, simply would rather be with people and likes them. He almost reminds me of one of the professors at my college who's technically retired but is still on contract who's very friendly, laid back and is quite popular with his students. Fuyutsuki also seems like the type who would be popular with his students. He and Gendo seem like polar opposites. Something about the way they converse to each other almost strikes me as a parallel of Misato and Ritsuko's light-hearted banter over serious matters. Though here it's as if they're just on the same team even though their personal viewpoints are very different. In fact, Gendo's definitely in charge, Fuyutsuki seems to just be reluctantly tagging along.
Anyway
Ep. 11: In the Still Darkness
Ritsuko, Maya, Aoba at coin laundry and run into Fuyutsuki in the train. Yeah I rather like these sort of off-work run-ins among the Nerv staff because it's nice to see how they interact. I think it's these small gems that make Eva shine, really, I really like these small talks. Also I just realized that Fuyutsuki calls Gendo 'Ikari', which probably makes him the closest person to him in the show atm.
Yeah that phone call with Shinji and his father is really sad. I don't really get Gendo's deal with Shinji is. The manga, I haven't actually read it, I believe made it seem like he was too scared to interact with him, scared to screw it up or get too close. Here he seems really brash and treats him like someone would treat a little dust on their shoulders.
The pacing of this episode is pretty hilarious. Black out. Is it Ritsuko's fault? "It's not my fault...". Well backup should be up soon. "What? Backup is also cut?" Would be terrible if an Angel showed up. "Unidentified object detected on radar." lol
JASDF detects the Angel but they aren't at all concerned because, "it's definitely headed towards Tokyo-03 anyway". I wonder it they're a little suspicious of why though? Also I realized that they called it the 8th Angel, and yeah, Matarael is actually the 9th. So this would mean that Nerv/Seele is keeping one of them secret. Which I assume would be Lilith, since we don't know about that one at all yet, and really don't at all until like at the very end. Well actually, Kaworu didn't know about Lilith. So either Seele did know and didn't tell him because they needed to get rid of him, the last Angel, or Gendo wants to keep it a secret from Seele because he needs to get his hands on Adam in secret. Well actually it would be ludicrous for Seele not to know, because they discovered the Black Moon in Japan along with Lilith. So what's with the cover-up? I guess so the Angels don't find out? But it doesn't seem like they react specifically to Adam, since they all think Lilith is Adam, meaning they just instinctually set out for one of the Seeds of Life, whether it's their own progenitor or not. Then again, Gaghiel attacked where Kaji was at presumably because it was sensing Adam. So if they can all sense both (or maybe it can only sense the closer one?) why would they all go for Lilith? Because it's bigger? Looks like I derailed on peripheral questions.
That scene with Gendo and Fuyutsuki standing with their feet in buckets of water is hilarious. And the way the candles are placed on the desk makes it seem like some cultist gathering. This whole episode is full of funny scenes, for having the lamest Angel, it's pretty good. And as you say, it's the first episode that all 3 pilots work together.
When Fuyutsuki remarks that the first attack on the HQ was not an Angel but rather some person, Gendo replies that mankind's greatest enemy is itself. Maybe 19th Angel/Lilin foreshadowing?
Rei says that she's not favored among the pilots by Gendo. It could be as you say. My initial thought was that Gendo favors noone. My next thought was that since she says "I can tell", maybe it could also mean that she can tell that secretly Gendo regards Shinji with more favor.
Asuka whispers to Shinji that she thinks Rei is rather scary since she wouldn't hesitate on any options to accomplish her goals and then calls her a self-righteous/justified type. The sub said "self-righteous bitch" which I think is an overexaggeration, if possibly a mistranslation. I don't really get the phrase anyway. Considering what she was saying to Rei, I guess she considers Rei to be too dutiful in accomplishing her objectives? If I just hear Asuka call her that, my initial reaction is, wow that's a bit ironic. But would that be true? Asuka is a bit damaged and prideful, but all things considered she is pretty normal. Rei is kinda the oddball in how she behaves how she does and just does things without any hesitation.
And I just realized that Asuka brings out the best in Shinji on a regular basis. I think they're good friends, even if they don't realize it. Shinji even gets into arguments with her, which says a lot. Good friends argue, as they say. Misato I suppose takes care of the back-end stuff of Shinji, opening up his heart to allow connections like the one he currently has with Asuka.
The fight scene is odd. If they dropped the gun, then Matarael show have cried it to sludge. And it seemed like it stopped crying only to start crying when Asuka went to go defend. And she said her role was to neutralize the Angel's AT Field while blocking the acid. Yet she only just stays in place. Does simply being in range of the Angel's AT Field automatically allow the Eva to neutralize it with their own? Doesn't seem like she's doing anything in particular. In episode 1, Unit-01 had to pry it open with its hands. Yeah, all odd.
Shinji makes some silly comment about maybe how being afraid of the dark and carving away at it with fire to live on is why humans are special and why Angels might be attacking them etc etc. Which sounds like total BS and Shinji just trying to get in some clever word. Or maybe just random musings.
Overall a pretty funny episode. The fight scene was lackluster and confusing, but the episode itself, all the rest of it, was pretty good. Either had nice interactions, nice atmosphere, or humor. Matarael itself wasn't as bad as I remembered either. It's not terrible. Losing to gunfire automatically makes it the lamest, but technically so did Gaghiel. Sandolphon died to fricking cooling fluid, I think that one was the lamest and least entertaining. That whole episode was pretty uninteresting. This was was at least filled with good stuff all throughout, and was also the first 3 pilot episode. And Shinji starts to wonder what Angels are and what not, which I think starts to break at the standard conventions of monster of the week shows, not that I've seen too many. Ironic that he would start wondering about why Angels attack them and the such in one of the first monster of the week episodes.
Ep 12: The worth of a miracle is
The Giant of Light/Adam has the shoulder binder thingies that the Evas store their prog knives in, odd.
Misato was placed in the emergency capsule. I think it's useful to note that her father immediately closes the hatch when she calls out to him. No last words, no nothing. Then he calls over and dies. Rather unromantic and not something I see often in shows. Though in this case, the action of saving her itself spoke volumes.
Plug Depth prototype here, from the Rebuild movies? The show calls it Graph Depth, where going to far risks mental toxicity/contamination. I wonder what it means though. The container itself is only half submerged in LCL fluid, while the plug inside the container is what lowers into the deeper end. Which I guess makes sense, since you don't want the whole entry plug moving up or down the Eva's neck, only the cockpit plug thing. Mental contamination from what? And also harmonics and sync ratios are different things, where Shinji's current Harmonics are 50 points lower than Asuka's.
One of the operators mentions that Shinji was 'born to pilot an Eva'. Some foreshadowing? I don't exactly remember the details of his birth and circumstances of Yui.
This is the episode that focuses on how similar Misato and Shinji are to each other. I wonder if we can extrapolate some details about either based on information from the other. Like when Shinji wonders why Asuka got mad at him for slowly catching up to her sync ratio and harmonics, Misato tells him that it's because he's always cautious and attentive to other's impressions of him. Could it be that she always was or is like that? Also while Shinji improving his test scores isolates him more from Asuka, Misato getting promoted starts to isolate her from her friends. In this episode, Ritsuko calls her 'Major Katsuragi' when trying to tell her how reckless her 'plan' is. First signs of friction?
Oh there we go, the South Pole has red oceans. And the big air carrier is carrying a long wrapped pole thing, which I assume is the Lance of Longinus.
Sahaquiel, I don't remember having either a negative or positive impression from my first view. The Rebuild adaptation really blew my mind though by how epic and awesome it was. A little ambivalent on the humanoid Angel within the Angel though. The animation for the Angel battle was pretty great, I'm surprised by the amount of action there was. Perhaps not as much as the one against Israfel, but with the budget restraints slowly revealing itself, I was pretty impressed. I totally forgot that the AT Field assisted mach dash was in the tv series.
Sahaquiel first destroys observation satellites with its AT Field, which Ritsuko mentions is a new way of using it. So this would be the first offensive utilization of it. Prior to this point, we only saw it as a defense, for neutralization of that defense, and sometimes for flying. Well, hell the AT Field assisted sonic boom run is in this episode, so I'm sure she's familiar with the general application of the AT Field, including destroying stuff, so maybe she meant new for the Angels. Crushing things with AT Fields seems pretty reasonable compared to like, say Leliel or Ariel. And when the bridge team is examining the small droplet bombs, Misato says something like, "such destructive force, as expected of an AT Field", which means that the little droplet bombs also had AT Fields on them. I wonder how that works. Remote AT Fields? Unless Sahaquiel can preserve some of itself when it splits off droplets like that, so that it can retain its AT Field.
I rather like the small Misato and Ritsuko banter scenes, here they're joking about how much destruction Sahaquiel might cause when it falls, like creating a new lake or what not.
Rei doesn't like meat? Maybe it goes beyond just being a vegetarian and her subconsciously not wanting to eat her 'descendants'. Though in that case, I suppose vegetables are technically Lilith based too, so that wouldn't work.
Seeing as Unit-00 uses its prog knife to cut open Sahaquiel's AT Field, it must be one of the weaker ones. I wonder how AT Fields expands anyway. Unit-01 in this episode was able to project the typical hexagon shape ones by pushing it to the max. Or maybe that was Sahaquiel's AT Field. Because in episode 11, Asuka tanked the acid tears without projecting the AT Field and just blocking it with her body. Makes sense that the smallest area of the AT Field would be the shape of the body, the shape of the ego. Sachiel tanked the JASDF gunship fires without projecting the hexagons but did later project them to block berserk Unit-01. Hm...
Shinji gets praised. Finally, a bone to the poor puppy! He seems so happy, and the episode ends on happy note. Shinji is happy, Misato and the three children are eating together, with Asuka managing to pick an event where Rei wouldn't feel uncomfortable joining. Almost a bit anxious, seeing him so happy like that.
Sahaquiel's design does look a bit wacky and silly compared to the Rebuild version. Or even by itself comparing it to the previous Angels, just a blob of orange makes it look like a really bad kindergarten crayon drawing or a clump of play-doh. Liked both episodes though, even though some of the character models looked a bit off sometimes.
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The subs make it seem rather dramatic, yeah. What Gendo says right after as a response sets off some ticks and tocks in my head though. He says "But here we stand, mankind, still living as lifeforms", or something like that. The latter half is kind of suspicious. Still alive as living beings? Or as lifeforms? That almost makes it seem like the anti AT Field the Giant of Light/Adam set off is still in effect. Especially since Fuyutsuki says in response to this that it's 'because they're under of protection of the power of science'. Which if it were the case, would mean that there exists a way to neutralize the anti AT Field waves, possibly how Misato survived in the capsule if it were equipped with that.
You know, I've never really thought about the mechanics of Adam's anti-AT field. I guess that probably is what Fuyutsuki is talking about, isn't it? My assumption was that he was talking about the water, since I have the vague impression that the blood ocean (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kA-vex7jBQ) is poisonous, or at least harmful to humans. But now that I think about it that's just based on information from Rebuild as far as I remember. There very well may be a literal zone of death around Antarctica that they've somehow figured out how to stave off.
In fact, Gendo's definitely in charge, Fuyutsuki seems to just be reluctantly tagging along.
I think that's a reasonable description of their entire dynamic, yeah. My impression has always been that Fuyutsuki is more following Gendo to try to keep him from getting too out of hand more than because he believes in Gendo's ideals or methods. And Gendo is probably well aware of that.
Also I just realized that Fuyutsuki calls Gendo 'Ikari', which probably makes him the closest person to him in the show atm.
Oh yeah. I didn't directly notice that.
The pacing of this episode is pretty hilarious. Black out. Is it Ritsuko's fault? "It's not my fault...". Well backup should be up soon. "What? Backup is also cut?" Would be terrible if an Angel showed up. "Unidentified object detected on radar." lol
It's a funny episode. Much more so than I remembered. Lots of great subtle comedy.
JASDF detects the Angel but they aren't at all concerned because, "it's definitely headed towards Tokyo-03 anyway". I wonder it they're a little suspicious of why though? Also I realized that they called it the 8th Angel, and yeah, Matarael is actually the 9th. So this would mean that Nerv/Seele is keeping one of them secret. Which I assume would be Lilith, since we don't know about that one at all yet, and really don't at all until like at the very end. Well actually, Kaworu didn't know about Lilith. So either Seele did know and didn't tell him because they needed to get rid of him, the last Angel, or Gendo wants to keep it a secret from Seele because he needs to get his hands on Adam in secret. Well actually it would be ludicrous for Seele not to know, because they discovered the Black Moon in Japan along with Lilith. So what's with the cover-up? I guess so the Angels don't find out? But it doesn't seem like they react specifically to Adam, since they all think Lilith is Adam, meaning they just instinctually set out for one of the Seeds of Life, whether it's their own progenitor or not. Then again, Gaghiel attacked where Kaji was at presumably because it was sensing Adam. So if they can all sense both (or maybe it can only sense the closer one?) why would they all go for Lilith? Because it's bigger? Looks like I derailed on peripheral questions.
Yeah, that is all weird. I don't know. The mis-attribution of which Angel Matarael is has been a well-known aberration, but I haven't ever heard an answer to it that I thought fully made sense.
My next thought was that since she says "I can tell", maybe it could also mean that she can tell that secretly Gendo regards Shinji with more favor.
Fair enough, I didn't think about it that way. Does he? I suppose he does.
Shinji makes some silly comment about maybe how being afraid of the dark and carving away at it with fire to live on is why humans are special and why Angels might be attacking them etc etc. Which sounds like total BS and Shinji just trying to get in some clever word. Or maybe just random musings.
He's basically right even if he doesn't know why, they're being attacked because they're Fruit Of Knowledge and they're getting in the way of the Tree Of Life crowd. And science and progress is the most direct representation of what makes Angels and humans different. But the way he says it is pretty goddam dramatic and dorky.
Ironic that he would start wondering about why Angels attack them and the such in one of the first monster of the week episodes.
I'm actually amazed that there hasn't been more discussion of this. The Angels are so bizarre that if I was being attacked by them I would be thinking about nothing other than why. Especially given their attack pattern of always homing in on locations immediately around NERV, clearly they're doing it for some kind of reason, but that reason is completely unknown to most people. Maybe the fact that they are so alien and seemingly uncommunicative makes writing them off as mindless kaiju monsters easier than trying to figure out their psychology, but I was preoccupied with that the first time I watched.
The Giant of Light/Adam has the shoulder binder thingies that the Evas store their prog knives in, odd.
That makes me assume that part of the purpose of that base that sprung up around him was to try to restrain him and maybe even control him. Again we see bits of this in Rebuild with the entry plug grafted onto that skeletal Angel Mari kills, but I think it's seeded in the original series. They probably experimented on Adam extensively, including I guess grafting prototypes of those shoulder pylon things onto him.
One of the operators mentions that Shinji was 'born to pilot an Eva'. Some foreshadowing? I don't exactly remember the details of his birth and circumstances of Yui.
I don't know what that means, but I think it's just a red herring, or accidental roundabout logic at best. As far as I remember there's nothing special about his birth whatsoever, unlike Rei who actually was born to be a pilot.
Oh there we go, the South Pole has red oceans. And the big air carrier is carrying a long wrapped pole thing, which I assume is the Lance of Longinus.
Yes, it is. There's an image somewhere (the Japanese laser disc maybe, or Death And Rebirth?) of Adam impaled by the Lance in Antarctica. So that's definitely where it came from.
Sahaquiel, I don't remember having either a negative or positive impression from my first view. The Rebuild adaptation really blew my mind though by how epic and awesome it was. A little ambivalent on the humanoid Angel within the Angel though. The animation for the Angel battle was pretty great, I'm surprised by the amount of action there was. Perhaps not as much as the one against Israfel, but with the budget restraints slowly revealing itself, I was pretty impressed. I totally forgot that the AT Field assisted mach dash was in the tv series.
During my Eva viewing immediately prior to this one I was disappointed with how bare-bones this fight was compared to the Rebuild version, but I didn't feel that way nearly as much this time. The actual fight is basically nothing, but the whole race leading up to it is still exciting. I re-watched the Rebuild version after I finished this episode and was surprised to see how much they matched up, at least at certain points.
Shinji gets praised. Finally, a bone to the poor puppy! He seems so happy, and the episode ends on happy note. Shinji is happy, Misato and the three children are eating together, with Asuka managing to pick an event where Rei wouldn't feel uncomfortable joining. Almost a bit anxious, seeing him so happy like that.
With how much of an ass Asuka usually is she's surprisingly thoughtful about this. She goes out of her way to try to include Rei (maybe indicating that their rivalry hasn't developed to the toxic levels that it will later) and even to spare Misato's wallet. She's probably in a good mood because she didn't get trumped by anyone this time out. In fact, in both of these episodes she seems perfectly happy to fight alongside Shinji and Rei as equals and share more or less equally in the credit. It's when she starts to fall behind them that it really starts to wear on her, I guess.
Sahaquiel's design does look a bit wacky and silly compared to the Rebuild version. Or even by itself comparing it to the previous Angels, just a blob of orange makes it look like a really bad kindergarten crayon drawing or a clump of play-doh. Liked both episodes though, even though some of the character models looked a bit off sometimes.
Like I said before, I think the design could have worked better than it did if the reveal was more gradual. That would have given it more of an inhumanly bizarre, surreal vibe than just making it look silly. And I forgot until I rewatched it that that's exactly what happens in Rebuild. The Sahaquiel is shrouded in an opaque AT field until it nearly reaches the ground, which gives less time to think about how goofy it is.
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Like I said before, I think the design could have worked better than it did if the reveal was more gradual. That would have given it more of an inhumanly bizarre, surreal vibe than just making it look silly. And I forgot until I rewatched it that that's exactly what happens in Rebuild. The Sahaquiel is shrouded in an opaque AT field until it nearly reaches the ground, which gives less time to think about how goofy it is.
Except Rebuild Sahaquiel doesn't look goofy. I think in addition to what you said, they should have emphasized how absolutely ginormous (http://img11.deviantart.net/c6d4/i/2012/093/4/e/angels_of_evangelion__scale_by_mindmechanica-d4up2za.jpg) it is. Probably would have helped stave off the bizarro design aspect, because now that I look at it again, it looks silly but it's not terrible, there's a very surrealness to it.
Also there's this (http://nicogachan.net/watch.php?v=sm12514993) neat video I found a few years ago after watching Rebuild 2.22 that added some rain and night effects to Rebuild Sahaquiel's appearance, and it really adds to the atmosphere.
I'm actually amazed that there hasn't been more discussion of this. The Angels are so bizarre that if I was being attacked by them I would be thinking about nothing other than why. Especially given their attack pattern of always homing in on locations immediately around NERV, clearly they're doing it for some kind of reason, but that reason is completely unknown to most people. Maybe the fact that they are so alien and seemingly uncommunicative makes writing them off as mindless kaiju monsters easier than trying to figure out their psychology, but I was preoccupied with that the first time I watched.
It really would be interesting to see what the other Nerv staff think of the Angels, especially the bridge trio. How'd they get recruited? Asuka comes out and hangs a lampshade on the whole matter, saying exactly what first time viewers may have been thinking subconsciously: that the Angels are unknown things attacking us, and that of course we have to fight back. Which is to say, no thought at all --They're just monsters coming to attack, so we go defeat 'em first. Which in the context, immediately after Shinji's wondering out loud, seems more like poking fun at the whole usual monster-of-the-week business.
And maybe they already did have that discussion, how long has Nerv been around? How long have the bridge trio been around? Since they're part of the Second Impact generation, they might just be thinking that it's the repercussions of Second Impact, and they might have simply accepted that the Angels will come to attack because wondering why doesn't really affect anything. A kind of fatalism, perhaps.
The Angels aren't really out to attack either, they just want to get to Adam right? Funnily enough, I remember Kaworu even wondering if 'all things born from Adam must return to Adam', maybe even the Angels themselves don't know.
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And maybe they already did have that discussion, how long has Nerv been around?
Since the day after Gehirn was shut down, right? So like ten years? I'm pretty sure we're told exactly eventually.
The Angels aren't really out to attack either, they just want to get to Adam right? Funnily enough, I remember Kaworu even wondering if 'all things born from Adam must return to Adam', maybe even the Angels themselves don't know.
One of the persistent questions I've had about Eva is "What would the world look like if an Angel won?". The idea is that only one race can have dominion over the Earth, but what does an Earth where Sahaquiel is the dominant species look like? Would there just be a bunch of Sahaquiels flapping around, or is the ability to reproduce a Lilim thing? Or at least does it require two of the same Angel? Would additional copies of the victorious Angel hatch from somewhere to join the winner? Would all of the other latent Angels keep emerging to continue battling for Adam? Are non-human species factored into this at all? Would there still be wildlife in Sahaquiel World? Clearly some Angels are capable of conscious thought, and I assume all of them are on some kind of abstract alien level. Do they have culture, or would they if they had enough time to evolve? Can they even evolve further, or is that again a feature of Fruit Of Knowledge only?
That's only tangentially related to what you said, it's just something that I think about a lot and hadn't had an opportunity to bring up yet. Maybe this is answered in a roundabout way, but if it was I missed it.
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One of the persistent questions I've had about Eva is "What would the world look like if an Angel won?". The idea is that only one race can have dominion over the Earth, but what does an Earth where Sahaquiel is the dominant species look like? Would there just be a bunch of Sahaquiels flapping around, or is the ability to reproduce a Lilim thing? Or at least does it require two of the same Angel? Would additional copies of the victorious Angel hatch from somewhere to join the winner? Would all of the other latent Angels keep emerging to continue battling for Adam? Are non-human species factored into this at all? Would there still be wildlife in Sahaquiel World? Clearly some Angels are capable of conscious thought, and I assume all of them are on some kind of abstract alien level. Do they have culture, or would they if they had enough time to evolve? Can they even evolve further, or is that again a feature of Fruit Of Knowledge only?
That's only tangentially related to what you said, it's just something that I think about a lot and hadn't had an opportunity to bring up yet. Maybe this is answered in a roundabout way, but if it was I missed it.
I don't think it's that the 'species' of Angel that contacts Adam rules dominant, but rather that if any Angel manages to contact Adam, then Lilith-based lifeforms are completely wiped out and the right to the dominion of Earth goes to the Adam-based lifeforms, ie: the Angels, all of them.
I've never thought of reproduction before. If Lilith-based lifeforms have the Fruit of Knowledge, then Adam-based lifeforms have the Fruit of Life. That is, presumably they would have eternal lives. If we generalize the reproductive processes as simply a way for a species to continue to live on and exist, then any lifeform with eternal life wouldn't need to have that ability. You wouldn't need any posterity because you yourself would continue to live on as your own species forever. Seeing as one of the main themes of Eva is loneliness, and how AT Fields are physical manifestations of separations of egos and how it separates lifeforms, Angels with their powerful AT Fields would probably be very lonely and alone. Which I think is validated by the Armisael episode later on.
Another question popped up in my head just now though, which is: why are there only 15 Angels (17 -2)? Is that the totality of the Adam-based offspring? It appears that Adam, at least, can spawn off descendants somehow, maybe it only created 15? If the Angels won, would the Angels that subsequently appear be the only ones that wander the Earth?
Randomly musing further: I know Anno said that he only drew themes from Christian mythos without really explicitly trying to depict any of it literally, but technically the Fruit of Knowledge was the Fruit of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the bible. If we go off that, then the Angels who don't have this would not have any sense of morality, simply existing to suit the whims of their egos, in a way. Sentient, yeah. Such thought processes would indeed be very alien to us. It also means that Angels aren't stupid, ie: not they they don't have Knowledge. Perhaps untainted by sin? Since such things wouldn't apply to them. One of the temptations that the Serpent used in Genesis to get Eve to eat the Fruit of Knowledge of Good and Evil was that if she ate it, then she would 'be like God, knowing good and evil.' I wonder how 'intelligent' these Seeds of Life, Adam and Eve are. All we see of them is through their souls within Lilin containers. Random musings.
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Oh shit I forgot today was Sunday. Had a four day weekend so I lost all concept of time. I'll watch tomorrow afternoon I guess.
Edit: Okay, starting now. I only have time for one episode today, I'll do the second one tomorrow. Laterer and laterer.
Episode 13: Angel Invasion
Is this the first time we've seen those weird test Eva torso things? They're really creepy. I assume they're parts salvaged from failed Evangelions, but I suppose they could just be fully mechanical too. It's slightly interesting that the pilots are able to synchronize with them since (I assume) they don't have souls. Have these been used before to gather data about sync rates? Maybe that explains why the Magi are always wrong in their calculations about the success rate of Eva operations. If they're using information collected from useless, incomplete models with no souls then maybe they don't have the necessary information to know how a real Eva will operate. I believe we do see tests being performed on the production models sometimes too though, so maybe not.
I wonder if the fact that Asuka says that she can only feel her right arm has something to do with the fact that she's synchronized with an Eva that only has one arm? The test Evas only have a torso and a right arm, with no left arm, legs, or head. All three of them are like that too, so it's probably not just because that's all they could salvage. It's probably for some weird reason.
When people keep saying "protein wall" I assumed at first that they were talking about the Evas, since they have organic parts. But it looks like they're actually talking about part of the Geofront's structure. That's weird. Does the Geofront have biological elements to its architecture? Or is "protein wall" a term that I'm just misunderstanding.
It's cute that Fuyutsuki and Ritsuko both use exactly the same phrasing about Gendo "jumping all over their asses". I wonder who learned that from who?
It seems that "Pribnow Box" and "polysome" are real-life concepts in DNA, but I couldn't figure out what they were from the Wikipedia descriptions. Something very technical, anyway.
Does the fact that Rei's simulation Eva is the only one that moved foreshadow Kaworu's power to override a soulless Eva later on? It also appears to have bones when Misato breaks breaks off it's arm, which seems to support the idea that they're organic.
Gendo rising up out of the floor around 8:40 is not only a bizarre/funny visual, but his desk blends into the background in such a way that I had to rewind and look closely to see that he wasn't just a floating, disembodied torso.
I think this is our first indication that Gendo places higher value on Unit 01, isn't it?
Kaji's line is suspicious. Is it supposed to imply that he knew this was coming, and by extension that he had something to do with it? I guess it would make sense that he created an opening to help an Angel get into the Geofront under SEELE's orders, but he didn't know what form it would take. Presumably this was a gambit by them to do something with the Magi, or to the Magi while everyone was distracted.
Iruel is certainly among the most unique Angels, if not the most unique. That's kind of a hard title to lay legitimate claim to with weirdos like, well, every single remaining non-Zeruel Angel floating around, but Iruel is certainly weird. It seems to be the only Angel that can reproduce, if that is in fact what it's doing (and assuming we don't count Israfel, which I don't). Can Iruel really multiply? I assume it still shares one soul between all of its individual microscopic components, if for no other reason than that it's singularly referred to as "the 11th Angel" and not "Angels 11 through ???".
As hokey as the visual representation of "hacking" with the Magi icons changing from blue to red is (shouldn't that be the other way around, since Angels are "code blue?") it's certainly effective. This episode is reasonably tense despite the fact that there's no fight scene.
The design of the Magi is great. The brain-like pipes and the notes all over the interior are super evocative and cool. They kind of remind me of Junji Ito backgrounds the way they're drawn.
I wonder who told Misato that the Evas use the same technology as the Magi for their "AI"? I'm assuming she's just wrong about that, but is that the common explanation among NERV personnel to avoid telling them the truth?
I remember never understanding why Iruel tried to self-destruct the Magi, since it's using them as a host, but this time around it made more sense to me. If it's goal is to get to Adam/Lilith then it makes sense to clear away obstructions in the form of people working against it and possibly literal physical barriers, and an explosion seems like an efficient way to do that. And since it has an AT field presumably it wouldn't be harmed in the process.
Iruel's death is weirdly anticlimactic. Seems like having it explode or melt or something would have been nice, just to get some closure on it. I wonder if NERV was able to salvage it and use it for anything? We don't have any reason to assume that the microorganisms that make it up disappear at any point, so presumably they could recover and study them.
Despite the hokey premise and lack of action, I really like this episode. Maybe it's because Ritsuko is possibly my favorite character, but I think this episode is super interesting. The relationship dynamic between Ritsuko and Misato mostly borders on hostile, but we see them really getting along in this episode despite butting heads and it's sweet. And for all of the times Misato has trumped Ritsuko with her crazy, risky plans it's nice to see Ritsuko get to be the one with the good idea this time. I don't miss the main cast much at all for just one episode. The plot relevance of this one is debatable, since a lot of the revelations we get here are reiterated in later episodes and the potential plot point of SEELE maybe using this as a pretense to do some espionage isn't particularly required, and I can't even remember if it's even explicitly referred to at any point. So it might not be necessary, but I'm glad it's here. I don't think too many episodes like this would have been a good thing, but one is great.
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Okay, time to finish up what I should have done two days ago.
Episode 14: SEELE, Throne of Souls
Fuck I forgot the clip show was this early. :V Does this episode even have any content? I'm pretty sure I've never seen it. I hate clip shows.
Well, might as well watch it on fast forward and see if there's anything to see.
First mention of the Angels' actual names, notably.
Boring boring boring, fast forward fast forward fast forward. I don't have any idea if I'm missing anything.
Okay, at the halfway point there's sort of some new stuff. Looks like reused animation, but the story is new.
I'm assuming SEELE is just playing dumb about Iruel, right? If they didn't send it how else did it get in?
Is this the first time the Dead Sea Scrolls was mentioned? Or has Gendo referred to it before to Fuyutsuki or Kaji or somebody? I can't remember it coming up before, but this seems like a weird place to drop some relatively major plot shit.
Rei's weird rambling always bothers me. It seems out of character for her. I guess this is a glimpse into her thought process or whatever, but I can't reconcile her actions with her lines here. And it rings of filler to me. Arguably some of this is sort of character development for her, but I think it only exists as an excuse to recycle existing footage.
Her vision of a lineup of dozens of herself is sneaky foreshadowing, but not really in an interesting way. And I suppose her monologue inside of Unit 01 could be interpreted as a reference to Yui and the true nature of the Evas. Maybe it was even intended that way, but again, I can't bring myself to really take Rei seriously enough here to worry about it. I guess I just have a low opinion of her, because this all sounds ridiculous coming from her.
We get confirmation that Unit 00 and Unit 01 have very similar personalities, which makes a lot of sense although I don't remember having ever read that before. Possibly because I've never seen this scene before, or if I have I forgot about it.
The fact that Misato knows that Rei and Unit 02 couldn't be interchangeable with the other Evas and pilots is kind of interesting. I wonder how she understands that to work? She apparently thinks that the Evas are controlled by AI along the lines of the Magi, so I guess it follows that she knows that each of them is patterned after a dead person, just not the mechanics of how. But does she know the details of which people are associated with which Eva? Does she actually know the Yui or especially Rei I are involved?
The look Maya gives Ritsuko in the scene where they talk about the dummy plug system is great.
Is the Unit 00 berserk scene just straight-up reused animation but with the new color scheme? I understand that it's supposed to parallel the first time, but that is some bold use of animation recycling. In kind of a bad way.
Seems like Ritsuko let something slip when she wonders aloud if Unit 00 is trying to absorb Shinji. I don't think that phenomenon is common knowledge, even among the NERV staff.
Okay, I must have seen this episode before. I remember the Math Puppy stuff. Ha.
It took me a second to realize that Fuyutsuki is setting up a scenario from a Shogi magazine during his meeting with Gendo. At first I was like "Wow, he is committed to not paying attention. He's reading a book and playing a game with himself at the same time". But it turns out those two things are linked. Still, that is some impressive cold shouldering.
And to cap off the surprising number of introductions of plot-relevant concepts in this episode, we get the first direct show of the Lance Of Longinus.
I gotta say, I found that painful to sit through. And even then I skipped like half of it. I suppose it's kind of admirable how much the plot moved forward in an episode with such little original animation, but I don't think that's a good thing. Recap episodes shouldn't try to be things they're not, because then I'm obligated to watch them and I really don't want to do that. Whenever I talk about my least favorite episodes, assuming I'm not even counting recap episodes.
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Argh, late again, this has been a rather crappy week.
Ep. 13 Angel invasion
Magi episode. The animation quality for this episode is a great improvement from the past few episodes, the characters look great and also on model. Though maybe a little young looking.
We get introduced the actual nature of Magi and learn that it's more or less Ritsuko's mother, but beyond that I didn't notice anything else that was a gamechanger. Except, what's Kaji doing way down in Central Dogma? He mentioned work, but I forget for what. Yeah, Gendo shows his priorities concerning Unit-01.
Asuka mentions that this is for some 'Auto-pilot test', which combined with the next episode mentioning the Dummy Plug system for the first time, is nice foreshadowing for its actual use later on.
And I believe it's the first time 'Adam' was actually mentioned?
Misato seems to think that the Evas are machines with personalities implanted into them, which obviously isn't true. So more of her not being informed. Although it is rather odd, since she knows it's an android/biological. Maybe she thinks the biological parts of the Evas exist simply to make the personality OS easier to use?
I was wondering, maybe Iruel is a colony of a species, a species of one of the Adam-based creations. Kind of like how we have cats, dogs, and other animals, Iruel represents a species. Even Ritsuko calls it 'they'.
Maya fangirling over the Magi notes was pretty cute, but it seems at least partly inspired by her whole 'Notice me sempai' thing she has going on strongly.
Not much to say.
Ep. 14 Seele, Throne of the Soul
Oh a recap episode, I forgot we had one.
Oh Ramiel has that Ramiel "aaah" cry in the TV series too.
Seems odd that Seele didn't notice the Iruel invasion. If they know the schedule of the Angels' arrivals, then they should assume that it was an Angel, and yeah, they do find out at the end of the episode that it was an Angel invasion. Though Gendo tried to hide it from them, I assume just to mess with them or throw them off a little. Seele doesn't have any reason to feign ignorance with Gendo, and even if they were, that wouldn't be the place to feign ignorance at. If they really did send in Iruel, then that's what they should be feigning ignorance about if Gendo decides to ask them about it. I somehow doubt that Seele really has this omniscient knowledge of Angels and even the ability to simply 'send' an Angel whenever they feel like it. It really seems like they're just the committee to complain to Gendo when somethings goes slightly awry. As Gendo said, he holds all the cards.
The train of consciousness bit did seem like an obvious ploy to save some of their remaining budget, though it didn't particularly bother me. I took it as Unit-01 showing images to Rei, similar to how Unit-00 started showing images to Shinji, and her just responding to them with the first thought that came to her mind, as a sort of Rorschach test. It's an interesting way to show a glimpse into her bizarre psychology, since this episode and the previous episode start to ask questions about Rei that invites suspicions about what her deal is. Asuka wonders at the end of the episode what she is, Ritsuko mentions the Unit-00 must have been trying to kill her, of which the berserk itself was caused immediately after Shinji sees an apparition of a Rei with a really creepy face. The one bit that interests me is where she says 'a women who doesn't bleed'. I assume 'bleed' here refers to menstrual cycles. Does Rei not have those? That would be really interesting. And then there was that bit where she starts saying something about how she's melting away and feeling the presence of others, which I wonder is a subtle introduction to her Lilith powers in EoE.
Not so much 'not paying attention', his playing Shogi probably simultaneously portrays two facets. One of which is the whole Chessmaster position they hold in the show. The other, I interpreted differently. I wouldn't say that he isn't paying attention, but more a showing of his casual accompanying along Gendo's project like some kind of club adviser. Gendo frequently says 'our plan', but when talking about Unit-00 going berserk, Fuyutsuki says that it wasn't in 'his plan'. Which could very well simply saying that he certainly didn't see it coming, but may also be a subconscious slip of the tongue.
Rei carrying the Lance of Longinus. I almost wish they showed her unraveling it first, so we can connect it to the scene it was shown in before.
Another Maya and Ritsuko scene. I probably wouldn't have noticed how fixated Maya is towards Ritsuko if I hadn't watched EoE already, but it's pretty cute. And then another scene of Ritsuko and Misato butting heads, which is coming up far more frequently now, though little by little. Is it just me or does it seem like Misato is usually the one setting off the sparks? She's starting to pull in rank more often now, which doesn't work out well for their friendship. It would probably be fine if she wasn't so unable to separate her professional work from her personal mission, and hence, her personal life. Every time Ritsuko has to stay silent on some confidential, important matter that doesn't concern her, Misato takes it as an affront to their relationship. Because honestly, the operational chief or whatever her title/rank was has no need or business knowing about whatever it is information she's trying to pry out of Ritsuko.
Episode 13 was pretty great, really great use of tension without fight scenes. Episode 14 I didn't hate. As far as recap episodes go, it wasn't terrible. But obviously a filler episode.
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Aaaah shit I forgot again. Sundays have been weird lately. Will try to get to it tonight.
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Ep. 15 Lies and Silence
First mention of Marduk Institute? Something about how they select the Eva pilots, and it's controlled by the Instrumentality Committee. I wonder how that process works. Kaji snooping around to try find out what happened 'here' 16 years ago. About Second Impact?
Fuyutsuki says one of the Seele guys came to complain about how the Instrumentality Plan was behind schedule. But then, what is there to do? They also don't seem to know about the Adam plan or the Lance of Longinus, or if they do, they don't seem to think it's connected with the plan since Gendo says that they are indeed all connected.
Shinji remarks to Rei that she reminded him of a mother, and then blushes when he says that she might make a good wife. I remember my roommate asking why she blushed. Which I'd never thought of.
Shinji and Gendo visiting Yui's grave together. He plays cello back in the apartment, which is the first time we see it. Rather odd to suddenly throw it in there, but whatever.
Rare scene of Kaji, Misato, and Ritsuko together. I can't seem to like Misato that much, maybe because of how violently she reacts the more she learns about Nerv's secrets. Or maybe in general, I don't really care much about her outburst towards Kaji either.
I'm surprised that Shinji rises to the challenge when Asuka goads him into kissing her by asking if he's scared. Shows how much he's grown. Then in the next episode he gets a bit overconfident, but for someone like Shinji I think it's good medicine, if only the show showed him some mercy. He starts to get confident and suddenly we start getting Angels like Leliel after all.
And why is Asuka surprised to smell Misato's lavendar perfume on Kaji? She knows she was dead drunk and likely needed to get support from him. Unless she was surprised that she used the perfume at all, like it's some kind of date perfume or something.
We see Rei in a massive tank and the show starts to be more open about her mysteries.
Kaji reveals 'Adam' to Misato, which surprises her. If she didn't know that 'Adam' was down in Terminal Dogma, then what did Nerv tell her was down there that they needed to keep the Angels away from at all costs?
Ep 16: Deadly illness, and then
Oh haven't heard this happy theme playing in a while. Misato and Kaji seem to be on good playful terms since the last episode, since he's inviting her out to drink.
Surprisingly enough, Shinji is looking forward to his results on the Harmonics test. He got the best score, which makes Asuka rather bitter and spiteful. When she's asked by Rei if she pilots the Eva to get praise from others, she replies that it's to praise herself. In other words, to boost her own self-worth and self-confidence. Since she's literally broken without it and all.
Leliel has an awesome design, and it's the first Angel that really starts to reach across into the bizarro realm. I was looking up inversions of geometries in the higher dimensions, >2, but couldn't find anything that would help me understand the sucking in inverse AT Field business. Though if I remember right, Rei inverses the AT Field of her Unit-00 in the Armisael episode to suck in the Angel too. So I guess if normal AT Fields keep stuff out, then it makes sense that inverting it would suck stuff in. Wonder why they didn't explore that more. I wonder if doing so is dangerous in a psychologically polluting sort of way, considering what AT Fields are.
Misato and Ritsuko have a big argument and probably would be the point where their friendship stops being one.
LCL purification wears out and Shinji starts to smell blood, which may start to answer questions about what the LCL is, if anyone had any doubts since the first episode as to what exactly it was.
Aaand Shinji starts to talk to the Angel. Halfway through, he screams as he questions why it's so bad to do something that he's found he likes doing. Presumably about piloting an Eva, since he's realized that he's good at it and it's giving him pretty much what he's always wanted. Stuff like his father's recognition and attention, recognition from others, etc.
I'm glad that we get to see some flashbacks about his parents. Gendo was suspected of killing Yui, interesting enough and we start to see that maybe Yui didn't die some natural death. And then he sees an apparition of his mother. With long blond hair for some reason. Maybe it's how he envisions his mother since there are no pictures left? Since he seems to have forgotten about his past, younger memories.
And then there's this interesting scene where Yui, scribbled out with black lines, leans over a young, smiling Shinji who is holding out a small, red and pulsating orb towards her. When she asks if 'this is enough', he says something though the audio is muted, and she replies 'really, well good for you'. I wonder if this is Leliel handing over its core to Yui, and thus to Unit-01 to destroy. Which if this is the case, it brings up a lot of interesting questions. First, once it ate Shinji at the beginning of the episode, it expanded itself to 600 meters and stopped growing and not moving from its place. Why didn't it try to go to Terminal Dogma like all the other ones? What made it satisfied to hand over its life after it finished talking with Shinji?
Unit-01 has no energy so it goes into berserk to burst out of Leliel's 3D 'shadow'. Ritsuko and Asuka are in shock, both over different reasons. This seems to have mellowed out Asuka a bit, since she wonders what exactly it is they're piloting. Ritsuko is disturbed about the originals that they copied the Evas off of, which she remarks to Gendo that it's the first time she's felt fear about them.
Rei is watching over Shinji when he wakes up in the hospital, and she says to him the same thing Yui did when he says he's fine, which makes him gasp. So our first clues to what her deal might be, and her connection to his mother. Asuka was hiding behind the door when it suddenly opens as Rei walks out. She seems embarrassed but also concerned. For all that's happened, we get a weird sort of happy ending to the episode, despite the mysteries deepening.
So these 2 episodes are the beginning of the deconstruction phase of the show in full force. Leliel being a very good indicator of that, as the Angels only get either stronger or more bizarre. We went from mook-y kaijuu to bizarro alien lifeforms. Animation was pretty good both episodes, especially the latter.
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You beat me to these ones. I have a weird cold and it's making me tired, so I fell asleep before I had the chance to get to them. These are great episodes so I want to watch them.
Edit: Okay, only one episode today. I got sidetracked by cleaning the kitchen and now I'm tired. But I really want to get at least one in, so I'm going to.
Episode 15: Lie And Silence
If SEELE dismissed Gendo who would they replace him with? Fuyutsuki? One of their people? Kaji even? I suppose they're probably not even remotely serious about firing him, so I guess they probably didn't think that through.
When Kaji reaches into his jacket in the warehouse is he reaching for a gun? Or does he just want any would-be assassins to think he might have one? I have a hard time picturing him owning a gun for some reason.
I can't remember if the Marduk Institute has been mentioned before now. I think it was, in an early episode regarding either Asuka or the members of Shinji and Rei's class, but maybe not. If it was mentioned before and someone was able to connect those dots I suppose they wouldn't be able to gain much information from it.
I'm not really sure what to take away from the scene with Shinji and Rei in the elevator. I'm guessing Shinji is basing his idea of what a mother would act like on TV and movies, since he doesn't have one and neither do any of his current friends. I wonder if he had friends before he moved to Tokyo-3 who had mothers? He's so awkward at first that it's easy for me to imagine him not having any friends before Misato forces him to open up, but maybe he's just that way because he's having a hard time because he has to see Gendo all the time. Maybe he had a bunch of friends before. As for Rei, the only thing I can guess from her reaction is that she knows about the nature of her relationship to Shinji and that's why she's uncomfortable with what he said? Rei seems hard to embarrass, so I'm surprised something like that got to her. Or maybe she's just starting to open up too.
Misato's advice to Shinji before he has to hang out with Gendo seems like good advice, but I can't help but wonder what her best-case scenario is. She talks about how nothing will change unless he takes initiative, but what kind of change is she expecting to see? Is she hoping Gendo will just get over his Gendo shit and start treating Shinji like a person? I was going to say that she should know him better than that, but now that I think about it that might actually be a reasonable thing for her to hope for. She hasn't actually seen them interact that much, she's mostly just seen Shinji avoid him. Granted most of the interactions she has seen between them have been very negative, but she's also seen Gendo doing some pretty good stuff. Maybe it's not weird that she really does hope that they can get along.
During the scene at the graveyard Shinji says something about "the teacher" being right. I'm pretty sure he's talking about the teacher that he lived with before he moved in with Misato. I've always wondered what that person was like. I wonder if Shinji had much of a relationship with them.
Gendo does seem the most open he's ever been with Shinji in that scene. It seems like he actually is trying to open up, but I think it's clear at this point that what he's actually trying to do is to stay closed off. He's gone out of his way to carefully keep Shinji at arm's length, and he almost slips up here. But then he has to fly off in his fancy hovercraft and not even offer Shinji a ride, giving the impression that Shinji has to walk all the way home. There's nobody else to pick him up right now, after all.
First appearance of Shinji's cello that I can remember. Going back to what Shinji was like before the first episode, I think this lends a little credence to the idea that he used to be a normal person with a relatively normal life. I can't easily picture the Shinji we met in the first episode having a hobby like this, so he very well may have just been a completely different person before. He says he never quit playing because nobody ever told him to stop, but I think/hope it was really just because he enjoyed it.
I've seen this episode a bunch of times, but when it cuts to that quick shot of Misato and Kaji in silhouette in an alley my first thought was not "she's throwing up". :V
When Misato talks about how similar Kaji and her father are I had to think about it for a minute to understand what she might be talking about, but from what little we know about her father I suppose she's right. His only defining feature was that she believed up until he died that he cared more about work than he did about her or her mother. We never find out what work Kaji was involved in when they were originally dating, but based on how we see him act in the present I can understand why she believes that of him too. After all, it is his work that ultimately kills him, and even after he's been explicitly warned. So for what little we know about Misato's father they do have a lot in common.
Asuka briefly teasing Shinji about his mother seems pretty low. But given that she's coming from a similar situation, arguably even a slightly worse one since she remembers her mother and was much more traumatized by her death than Shinji was, I suppose she knows how serious saying something like that is.
What exactly is Gendo doing with Rei in that weird tube? Is this just general clone maintenance, or is it something more specific to do with Gendo's plan?
First appearance of Lilith. I'm still unclear as to why she's misidentified as Adam for as long as she is. Is that because Kaji's information is incomplete? He knew about Adam because he helped procure him for Gendo, so did he just assume that any alien he found in Central Dogma must then be Adam in a full-grown state? Or is he lying on purpose? This is one of the biggest things I've never been able to keep straight about this series, so I'm going to try to actually figure it out this time.
This episode is great. There's no action, no robots at all, but it's fantastic. At this point in the series everybody looks like maybe they'e going to be okay after all. Everybody except maybe Rei (and that's just because of a lack of screentime, not a lack of development) turns a corner this episode and things are looking up for all of them. Even Gendo maybe. Which only makes what happens next that much more devastating. Because I always watch this part of the series in such quick succession I've never been that clear on when shit starts to go wrong, but it's clearly not here.
I really want to watch the next episode right now, but I know I'll regret it if I do. This episode probably took me the longest to watch and take notes on of any episode since the first. It's very dense, and they tend to get denser from here forward. I'll be kicking myself at work tomorrow if I stay up much longer.
Rare scene of Kaji, Misato, and Ritsuko together. I can't seem to like Misato that much, maybe because of how violently she reacts the more she learns about Nerv's secrets. Or maybe in general, I don't really care much about her outburst towards Kaji either.
She's not one of my absolute favorites, but I do like Misato a lot. In a way she's actually kind of the POV character for much of the show. I feel like we see Shinji through her perspective as much as through his own perspective, especially at this point in the series. She's all kinds of flawed, maybe irredeemably so, but I can't really bring myself to blame her for most of her actions. As the show points out a few times, she and Shinji are a lot alike. I can imagine an adult Shinji being very much like her.
I'm surprised that Shinji rises to the challenge when Asuka goads him into kissing her by asking if he's scared. Shows how much he's grown.
I don't think she was going to give him much of a choice. She clearly wanted to do it quite a lot and probably wasn't going to take no for an answer. In fact, at this point I think Shinji saying no would have been an even bigger indicator of growth if not for the fact that he probably wanted to do it too.
Kaji reveals 'Adam' to Misato, which surprises her. If she didn't know that 'Adam' was down in Terminal Dogma, then what did Nerv tell her was down there that they needed to keep the Angels away from at all costs?
My best guess is that she thinks it's something integral to the Evas. She clearly puts a lot of faith in them, so if she thinks it's the Eva equivalent of the Magi or the secret Eva factory or something it makes sense to me that she would place extremely high value on protecting it and that she would easily believe that the Angels would have a reason to target it. Although I can't remember, has she ever advocated blowing up the headquarters when an Angel got too close? I think she has, so if she thinks it's something mankind needs to be able to fight back she wouldn't be so quick to consider destroying it.
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Aaaaah I'm so late.
Okay, gotta finish this shit. Almost time to do the next two. :V
Episode 16: Deadly Illness, Then...
I relate to Shinji so hard in the first scene.
Hey, Rei is starting to develop social skills. Before she would have just walked away from Asuka's rant without saying anything, but now at least she interrupts her to say goodbye. At this rate I legitimately feel like given a few more years she could be holding conversations with people and everything. Too bad the time skip in Rebuild 3.0 worked in such a way that we didn't get to see Rei II after many years of social interaction. That could have been really interesting.
Now we see Leilel, who might be the absolute strangest Angel, and one of the more important ones too. My younger brother is into physics and he watched with me during my second viewing, and he tells me that this design is basically scientifically sound. At least as far as what a four-dimensional object/being might look like.
It's a minor thing, but when Shinji clenches his fist while he's impatient waiting for the fight I noticed that the glove of his plug suit made a sound exactly like a latex glove. I've always just kind of assumed that the plugsuits were some kind of cloth/spandex-like material. Are they actually made of rubber or latex? I don't know what that changes, just that they might be a little more uncomfortable.
Why can't the plug be ejected this time? Usually it's because the Unit 01 is berserk at the time, but I don't think anything should be interfering at this point. Does that feature even work with Unit 01? We've seen it work with Unit 00, but maybe Gendo (possibly at SEELE's insistence?) had it disabled on Unit 01 because the robot is more valuable than the pilot.
Once again, I find myself really relating to Shinji here. He acts like a little bit of an asshole, granted, but not that much. As someone who has a little bit of an inferiority complex I can totally understand his risky behavior immediately following a modest success. If you're the kind of person who just isn't good at anything and people see you succeed you feel like you have to prove that it wasn't just a fluke. But that often means taking risks you shouldn't to try to prove yourself and just fucking everything up. Yup, I relate very strongly to that. Poor kid.
But yeah, I don't really feel like this was Shinji's fault all that much. He kind of charges into the fight, but at some point somebody was going to have to engage and they were probably going to get trashed no matter how carefully they went about it. It would have been interesting if this had turned into another Ramiel scenario, with a near miss, a retreat, and some kind of complicated long-shot Misato plan, but ultimately somebody was going to have to be the bait to see what Leilel even is, and it ultimately does work out for Shinji this time.
It's pretty cold-blooded of Ritsuko to ask Misato to trust her while lying to her face. Which brings up something I never really considered before-Why is she so invested in Gendo's plan? She's sleeping with him at this point, we know that for sure (I've always kind of wanted to see what that's like, by the way. Now THAT is a big extant mystery of Eva. What on earth is sleeping with Gendo like?), and she's in love with him I guess, so is that it? She's just doing this to try to make him happy? Or does she know about and believe in Gendo's ultimate crazy scheme? She does try to stop him in the end, so I'm not sure if she really knew what he was trying to do or not. Maybe she really did believe in it on paper but didn't like what she saw when it ultimately started to come together.
Shinji's flashbacks to other people talking about Gendo behind his back are kind of interesting, in the sense that I never really thought of Gendo as a public figure before. I always just assumed that he managed to lurk so deep in the shadows that nobody knew who he was. And maybe that's actually the case and the people in those flashbacks were just former colleagues or even current colleagues, but that does at least raise the possibility that I never considered before that average people might know who Gendo Ikari is and have an opinion about him. Those flashbacks also kind of imply that maybe Shinji remembers something about his mother's death, which I didn't think he did. So maybe he has that in common with Asuka after all.
Yup, we're definitely firmly in "phase 2" of Eva at this point.
Misato and Ritsuko have a big argument and probably would be the point where their friendship stops being one.
Yeah, Misato knows that she's being manipulated at this point. It would be hard to come back from that.
And then there's this interesting scene where Yui, scribbled out with black lines, leans over a young, smiling Shinji who is holding out a small, red and pulsating orb towards her. When she asks if 'this is enough', he says something though the audio is muted, and she replies 'really, well good for you'. I wonder if this is Leliel handing over its core to Yui, and thus to Unit-01 to destroy. Which if this is the case, it brings up a lot of interesting questions. First, once it ate Shinji at the beginning of the episode, it expanded itself to 600 meters and stopped growing and not moving from its place. Why didn't it try to go to Terminal Dogma like all the other ones? What made it satisfied to hand over its life after it finished talking with Shinji?
Oh yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
So why did Leilel die? The only potential clue I can think of is this line, spoken by Leilel: "No one can justify life by linking happy moments into a rosary. In particular, I cannot." I can't believe that Leilel is talking about its own experiences and happy memories. Maybe it's naive or narrow-minded of my, but I just can't picture a four-dimensional shadow monster having happy memories. So that leads me to believe that it's talking about Shinji's memories, having read his mind. I think Shinji's shitty life made Leilel so despondent that it just decided to die. :o The one interaction it's had (that we know about anyway) with a sentient being and all it saw was a life that it can't accept, so it just gave up. Or maybe that's not true at all, but that's all I can think of off the top of my head.
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Okay, so I tried to post this yesterday but the forum was broken or something and it wouldn't let me log in on any of my devices so I copied it to a text document and just forgot about it until now. But here it is.
Episode 17: The Fourth Child
What makes SEELE think Leilel was communicating with Shinji? Did he say something to that effect? I would've though that the more natural assumption was that it was just trying to eat him.
So NERV's second branch was in Nevada in the United States. I wonder what they were like? Were they also in a Geo-Front? I'm assuming they probably were, since we couldn't see any of their facilities from that satellite picture. They get completely destroyed in the activation test for Unit 04 as it blows up on the launchpad. I assume sabotage, probably by Gendo and probably for the same reasons he sabotaged Jet Alone. Unit 04 also had an S2 engine (salvaged from the remains of one of the intact Angels, I assume?), so maybe Gendo or SEELE shut it down because of that. Or maybe it was just an accident, but I have a hard time believing that.
It would have been interesting to see how the dynamic of a more powerful, foreign Eva being thrown into the mix. I assume it would have had an American pilot, and it probably would have been moved to Japan since that's where all of the Angels are. Or maybe the US would have kept it there just in case. It would have been a fair assumption that Angels might start attacking the second branch, since the presence of Evas has been the most common-sense explanation for all of the previous Angel attacks for anyone who doesn't know about Adam and Lilith.
Although we never see it on camera there is a canon design for Unit 04. It looks basically like Unit 00, but it's chrome with red and black trim. I have a Unit 04 Revoltech action figure on a shelf next to my desk, and it came with some weird make-em-up weapons like Eva-sized tonfas and a plexiglass riot shield thing. The recent re-release had it packaged with a red Lance of Longinus, because why not? I know spinoffs sometimes make Kensuke the pilot of Unit 04, which doesn't make that much sense to me given that it was made in America by Americans, but I kind of like the idea of Kensuke getting the way more powerful robot and just showing everybody up all the time and becoming the new main character.
I think it's interesting that Unit 04 really did just disappear, and we really do never see it again. When I watched Eva the first time that seemed pretty suspicious and I just assumed that it would show back up and some point. When Kaworu was introduced I was like "Oh finally, that must be Unit 04's pilot". But nope, actually gone as far as we know.
I like Ritsuko's coffee mug. Somebody has to have made one of those, right? For cosplay purposes if nothing else.
I notice that Rei's pillowcase is no longer covered in blood. Is that because she was injured last time we saw her apartment, or is that because Gendo has been maintaining her better with that brain tube thing? At any rate, I'm surprised she hasn't cleaned up her space a little thanks to the new social skills she's been slowly developing. Which I suppose it a lot of the point of this scene.
Rei is acting weird in this scene even for her. She's completely unfazed that other people would just be congregating in her bedroom and making themselves at home, but she's surprised that Shinji cleaned up. I suppose it speaks volumes about her mindset that the only thing that surprises her is people being civil toward her.
I'm still unclear on who, if anyone, I think sabotaged the second branch after the scene with Gendo and Fuyutsuki. Gendo does legitimately seem to think it was an accident, but he might be feigning ignorance. He does seem awfully smug about it. And it sounds like SEELE is not happy with the results, but again that could be a smokescreen. I suppose it could be a third party, but at that point we're well into the realm of "it doesn't matter, who cares".
Once again, Shinji's teacher is rambling on about Second Impact. It really is the only thing he ever talks about.
I'm just now noticing for the first time how Unit 03's color scheme matches Toji's track suit. Weird.
This was probably technically the slowest episode since like episode four, but I didn't really notice. A lot of stuff happened, even though there was no action and it was all just setup for the next episode. I don't love that it doesn't stand by itself very well, but it doesn't matter too much because the episode is fine.
Episode 18: A Life Choice
Hey, English in an anime that's actually good! They must've gotten real North Americans to do the voices, which for some reason doesn't happen very often.
Apparently the implication of the lightning in the clouds that the plane carrying Unit 03 flies through is that Bardiel was hiding in that cloud and that's the point at which is infected Unit 03. Or at least I've been told that that's the case based on some interview that I can't source.
Ha ha what, Rei is doing the Gendo pose in the scene in the classroom. Has she done that before and I just missed it? Crazy.
Everybody looks very slightly off-model so far in this episode. Which is surprising this late in the series.
Why are Kaji and Shinji sleeping on the floor in the living room (at least I think that's where that is)? Shinji has a bed, right? I guess I understand that Kaji wouldn't want to sleep in Misato's room, but why are they both out there? Is that some kind of Japanese hospitality thing I'm not familiar with?
First appearance of Bardiel. It's kind of similar to Iruel in a lot of ways, so despite the fact that it's a pretty out-there concept for a creature it's not anything especially new to the series at this point.
I notice that the attempt to force-eject the entry plug almost works. The plug cover pops off and a bunch of steam or smoke shoots out, it's only the physical presence of Bardiel that prevents it from ejecting. Which I think lends a little credence to my theory that Unit 01 just doesn't have that feature.
At first I thought it was kind of weird that Unit 03 managed to get the drop on Asuka given how slowly it was moving out in the open, but just as I was about to type that it did the same thing to Unit 00, but on camera this time. I guess it's just a combination of how fast it suddenly started to move with the fact that all of the pilots are still trying to figure out what's going on that let it close in that fast.
This is the first time we see that the Evas can basically be remotely self-destructed, or at least remotely dismembered. Or is that a feature that only Unit 00 has because it's been so hard to control in the past? Seems like they could just use that to disable Unit 03, clearly they're still able to at least receive signals from it because they can still monitor Toji's vitals. It probably wouldn't work, I assume it would just grow weird extendo-fungus limbs, but it seems like it would be worth trying.
In some ways Bardiel acts like a berserk Eva, but the telling sign that it's more intelligent than that is the way it just immediately abandons Unit 00 as soon as it's clearly crippled. Unlike an Eva it knows exactly what it wants and isn't driven by bloodthirst at all.
Given that the sun is a visual motif of Asuka, often with her being silhouetted against the sun, I wonder if there's any significance behind Unit 03 lumbering toward Shinji silhouetted against the setting sun? Weirdly that reads as kind of a call-forward to this scene in Rebuild 2.0.
Now that I think about it, is the extendable arms a feature of Bardiel or of Unit 03? I've always assumed that it was Bardiel's corruption that let it do that, but now I'm not sure why I thought that. We do clearly see that Bardiel is mutating it somehow when it oozes acid onto Unit 00 I guess, and Rebuild makes that more clear with it sprouting extra, unarmored arms that probably weren't part of the original robot, but I don't think it's ever really made clear in the original series. The more logical assumption is probably to assume that this isn't normal, but I think it's weird that the armor on the arms seems to stretch along with them, and I kind of like the idea of the American Eva having weird features like Mr. Fantastic arms.
This is the first indication we get, or at least that I picked up on, that the dummy plug was intended for Unit 01. Makes sense, but I kind of forgot about that even though I know how this episode ends. I wonder if Unit 02 has a dummy plug system. Since it's based on Rei's personality it probably wouldn't work for anything but Unit 01 or Unit 00, right?
The fight between Unit 01 and Unit 03 is, by my understanding, probably the second most iconic/infamous scene in the entire series. The Rebuild version is considerably more gruesome, but I forgot just how brutal the TV version is. Unit 03's head exploding is brief but incredibly graphic with brains and eyeballs splattering everywhere. I had been told at one point that this scene was responsible for a much of the budget trouble that the series had toward the end, with the extreme graphic nature and violence against a child causing a lot of sponsors to withdraw and forcing the show to move to a later, less profitable timeslot for later episodes. I've never been able to confirm that though, or really find any information about the original airing schedule for the show. I spent quite a while looking tonight in preparation for this episode and I couldn't find anything. Do you have any idea if that story is true? It sounds kind of made up to me, but I haven't ever seen confirmation one way or the other.
Part of that story is that the original version of the script had Toji dying in this scene, and that I do kind of believe. I mean, his entry plug gets completely crushed. It's amazing that he didn't die (although I believe the pilot is at one of the ends of the plug and most of the damage was to the middle, so maybe it looks worse than it is). I believe it is semi-canon that he loses a leg, but we never see that. I think there was an unfilmed or deleted scene where he plays basketball with Shinji in a wheelchair and it's clear that he's missing a leg.
It's probably not that important, but I think it's a little notable that everyone takes it as fact that Bardiel is dead. It didn't have a core to destroy and I don't see any reason to assume that mutilating Unit 03 would particularly hurt it, so it's a little strange that it seemingly just dies anyway. Rebuild goes out of the way to make it clear that this is the case, but the TV version surprisingly doesn't. In fact I'm almost surprised it never pops back up. With all of the talk of the pilots becoming contaminated by contact with the Angels and the to-do about exactly that with Bardiel and Asuka in Rebuild it would have made a lot of sense for Toji to be infected and do some Angel shit later on.
I don't usually watch the end credits or the next episode preview, but I just happened to leave it playing and I notice that there was no promise of fanservice from Misato this time. When did that stop?
I don't think there's any question about it, this episode is great. It's slow to start, but it's all obviously building toward one of the more pivotal moments in the series. These two episodes weren't quite as much of a two-parter as five and six, but they definitely have to be watched together and tell a single story.
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It's finals week, but I already watched the episodes and took notes on Saturday so I'll write stuff up sometime I get time
e: Ugh this week was unprecedentedly busy, so here I'm going to do 4 episodes worth
Ep 17: Fourth Children
It's been a week since I watched these 2 episodes so I forget most of the stuff I was meaning to comment on. Well at least I have my notes.
Lots of details of the Dummy Plug system. Either Gendo or Ritsuko mentioned that the dummy plug sends the copied thought processes to the Eva to trick it into synchronizing. Which seems to me to implicate that the Eva doesn't actually need a living soul to sync with, but that it needs to 'think' that it's syncing with some living, thinking being. Which is somewhat odd, why does it need that? Is it that the soul in the Eva needs to be assured that it wont go berserk if it activates and that it needs someone to control/pilot it?
And then they mention that there is "one child whose core can be prepared immediately" which sounds incredibly suspicious and ominous. What does that mean and how does that work? That either of Toji's parents are immediately available to embed in the Eva? Or maybe... his sister? I wonder if the 'donor' of the soul needs to be aware of the intricacies of the working of the soul, what the Eva is and all that before being sucked in.
Gendo asks Rei how school is going and even seems to imply that they eat lunch regularly. I wonder if this was always a thing or that Gendo is getting more attached to her as time goes by. Ritsuko begins to show jealousy towards her.
Amusingly, this episode has both Asuka and Rei blushing in it. Asuka after arguing with Shinji over the lunch not being made and Rei when thanking Shinji for cleaning her room.
Oh ok so the Marduk Institute doesn't exist. Somehow forgot that. Nerv has complete control over the process of choosing the pilots. Then Kaji invites Shinji to drink. Shinji is strangely open around him even though they hadn't had much interactions together. Kaji says he's open towards people he trusts. And maybe it has something to do with the fact that Kaji is the only adult male around. Helps that he's close to his dad and receives affectations from both Misato, his authority figure, and Asuka, a close friend. And he seems to have changed his answer a bit since the Leliel incident, since when Kaji asks him if he's found something he likes, he can't answer.
Toji's the 4th pilot, the number of death, seems convenient.
Ep 18: The judgement of life
Yeah English was surprisingly good. And he says 'roger and out' as opposed to 'over and out'. I know the latter is definitely wrong, though not sure about the former. Seems right though, which is funny since Hollywood can never get it correct.
Toji points out that Rei is worried about Shinji. By this point, she's developed enough emotions to be concerned about him firstly, and secondly to realize that what he's saying is true. Which is to say that the feeling he pointed out was something she recognized within herself, a huge improvement over what she started out with.
I always wondered if Toji still kept the nerve connections with his Eva while Bardiel was in control. It seemed to cause pain through the nerves judging by Rei's reaction when it started to get infected by the liquid thing. Except that Toji is completely soaked with that thing, that must be painful, even if he didn't feel everything else.
Ep 19: A man's battle
I lol'd at Shinji in triple handcuffs. Like one isn't enough.
Zeruel slips past Unit-02 after lopping off its head and arms even though Asuka was still alive inside. Seems a bit odd to me considering how much it goes out of its way to cause destruction. Like trying to kill the bridge staff. Though maybe it was just trying to reach the actual Adam.
So Kaji casually mentions something very important and dangerous for him, that they found out his other job and was taken off the combat thing. I forget who 'they' were. Since he's an espionage spy agent, seems pretty bad for him.
Huh Evas have cores. I forget if the Angels' cores were their S2 engines. Does that mean that the Eva's core is the fruit of knowledge? I wonder if it's technically possible then for an Angel to eat and obtain one of the fruits of life, which now make totally sense to be able to eat the S2 engine: you eat a fruit to obtain its 'nutrients'.
At first I thought that Shinji and Kaji not being very affected by the blast of the N2 bomb making much sense, since Shinji and Misato were waaay further in episode 1 and felt huge shockwaves. But then I figured that Rei was only carrying 1 bomb (which by the way, Sachiel took almost no damage from N2 mines, how would this work on Zeruel?), and also Shinji and Kaji would technically be behind Unit-00 more or less. Rei did expand her AT Field to maximum before setting off the bomb, which may have prevented the blast from going out as much behind her.
At sync rate over 400%, Ritsuko wonders if 'she has awoken'. Which would imply that Yui is either normally asleep, or was asleep and is finally awake. Also it occurred to me that one of the reasons why Gendo places so much more priority over Unit-01 may simply be due to the fact that it contains his beloved wife's soul.
Ep: 20 Shape of the Heart
First time seeing Seele's emblem? Interestingly, the committee hadn't even considered the possibility of the Eva consuming an S2 engine. They word it interestingly too, they say 'the Eva which cannot grow an S2 engine on its own', which perhaps hint at their plans to supplement an Eva with an S2 engine in their own way, leading to the MP Evas in EoE.
Nerv moves to their secondary HQ and leaves Magi for awhile. I wonder if this is outside Geofront, since that's in a wreck, but that would mean that they would have to rush to meet the Angel at Geofront when they appear. I feel like that isn't the case though since they seem to be right there when they launch in the subsequent episodes.
Shinji realizes that he knows the Eva and that he ran away afterwards from his father and his mother. So he ran away after seeing the Eva while his mother was still alive? That's weird, I figured it was after she died and all the troubles were flying around. Unless it was metaphorically he meant that. And he's talking to an apparition of Rei, which is also weird. Why would it be Rei? Is it actually her? And the Leliel Shinji also briefly makes an appearance. I've been wondering about Leliel's words actually. Angels don't seem to be the type to randomly muse and philosophise about stuff, so when Leliel mentions that Shinji inside Shinji and the Shinji inside others, maybe it was talking about something that was actually 'true' or something it perceived to be an actuality or truth. Maybe that was the Leliel inside Shinji talking. I wonder if the Rei talking is the Rei inside Shinji, and sufficiently powerful beings can to some extent reach within the ;themselves within others', or 'sync' with the 'themselves within others'.
I feel like looking up oral stage in freudian psychology but I'm really tired so I might do it later.
This is the first indication we get, or at least that I picked up on, that the dummy plug was intended for Unit 01. Makes sense, but I kind of forgot about that even though I know how this episode ends. I wonder if Unit 02 has a dummy plug system. Since it's based on Rei's personality it probably wouldn't work for anything but Unit 01 or Unit 00, right?
That actually makes sense, I hadn't thought of that. Since all the Dummy Plug does is send an imitation or copy of Rei's thought processes, it wouldn't at all be able to trick Unit-02 into activating.
I had been told at one point that this scene was responsible for a much of the budget trouble that the series had toward the end, with the extreme graphic nature and violence against a child causing a lot of sponsors to withdraw and forcing the show to move to a later, less profitable timeslot for later episodes. I've never been able to confirm that though, or really find any information about the original airing schedule for the show. I spent quite a while looking tonight in preparation for this episode and I couldn't find anything. Do you have any idea if that story is true? It sounds kind of made up to me, but I haven't ever seen confirmation one way or the other.
This is the first time I've heard of this, I have no idea. Would not surprise me that the sponsors were taken aback by the sudden change in tone and direction of the series, even if the hints were there.
Ok well I just checked the Japanese wiki and there's no mention of the episodes being moved to a different time slot, they all aired every week on Wednesdays (I checked the dates) from 6:30pm to 7:00pm. The only two exceptions to this are episodes 13 and 14 which had to air either slightly earlier or later because their slots were taken up by special New Years shows or something, so completely random reasons. So probably false, can't find anything about episode 18 in particular either, though the article did mention that that episode and some other episode with Misato and Kaji were both criticized as not being kid-friendly. I've heard stories about how the mythical budget problems weren't actually a thing or something or something either.
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Lots of details of the Dummy Plug system. Either Gendo or Ritsuko mentioned that the dummy plug sends the copied thought processes to the Eva to trick it into synchronizing. Which seems to me to implicate that the Eva doesn't actually need a living soul to sync with, but that it needs to 'think' that it's syncing with some living, thinking being. Which is somewhat odd, why does it need that? Is it that the soul in the Eva needs to be assured that it wont go berserk if it activates and that it needs someone to control/pilot it?
My understanding of that is based on conjecture and possibly misunderstanding, but here it goes: Evas need pilots and are able to generate AT fields because the entry plug system is built to exploit their feelings toward the person in the cockpit. That's why the pilot and the Eva need to be related, the Eva's soul has to have existing protective feelings toward the pilot so that they will violently defend them. The AT field is a natural extension of their protective instincts in this case. That's why parent and child relationships seem stable and the one outlier we know of, Unit 00, has a lot of problems. So the Dummy Plug works by tricking the Eva into thinking "Your child is in danger, fight back and protect them".
And then they mention that there is "one child whose core can be prepared immediately" which sounds incredibly suspicious and ominous. What does that mean and how does that work? That either of Toji's parents are immediately available to embed in the Eva? Or maybe... his sister? I wonder if the 'donor' of the soul needs to be aware of the intricacies of the working of the soul, what the Eva is and all that before being sucked in.
I was watching these episodes very closely with the "Unit 03's soul is Sakura Suzuhara" theory in mind and I don't think it holds water. There's a reference made by Ritsuko to the fact that Toji would only agree to be a pilot of his sister was placed under NERV's protection way too late in the process for them to have already had her killed and stuffed in an Eva. I suppose Ritsuko could have been lying to Toji and Misato about that and Sakura really is dead at that point, but that seems incredibly risky since Toji would find out about it eventually and probably either throw a destructive robot tantrum or just withdraw. I'm confident in guessing that the soul of Unit 03 is Toji's mother, and that when they say it can be "prepared immediately" that line is there more for plot convenience of picking a pilot than as a hint that Sakura is dead or is going to die.
And as for whether the soul needs to be aware of what they're getting into, I doubt it because of Rei I's age. She probably did know some stuff about the Evas because she was around them and Gendo a lot, but even if she was very precocious I doubt she had a nuanced understanding of how they worked. Maybe again that has something to do with why Unit 00 is so crappy and unpredictable and if she did know more it would work better, but my headcanon(?) is that the Evas only have the most basic emotions and instincts of their souls, not all of the memories, so I don't think they would remember anything that they knew about themselves in life.
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I'm a day late, but I wasn't home yesterday and I didn't think to watch anything in advance. Oops.
Episode 19: A Man's Battle
What exactly is Toji seeing in that scene where he's watching Shinji and Rei argue? The common sense answer seems to be that he's just hallucinating as he listens to them talking in the same room that he's sleeping in, but the fact that they're on the same train from the Leilel scenes is weird. Is this possibly the result of some kind of contamination from his exposure to Bardiel? Are the people he's seeing actually Shinji and Rei? They seem to be, or at least Shinji does. Rei is harder to pin down because she doesn't have a well-defined personality anyway, but the way she's talking here reminds me or Leilel. Rei is also shown silhouetted against the sun in this scene, what's the significance of that? Is it because she's becoming more aggressive, confronting Shinji about the way he talks about Gendo? Or is it meant to call back to a similar shot during Shinji's confrontation with Unit 03/Bardiel in the last episode?
It's clear from the shot of Toji in bed in the next scene that he has indeed lost a leg. I couldn't remember if that was ever made clear in the series itself or not. Not like it matters, but it is there.
Misato says that "Suzuhara was a mistake that can't be mended with words alone" and I'm not entirely sure what she means by that. I suppose she probably means what happened to him was a mistake, but nothing he did contributed to that. It's not like picking a different candidate would have changed anything. Does she maybe mean picking someone who Shinji had such a close relationship to? Is she accepting that Bardiel and the new candidate getting maimed was inevitable, but the mistake was picking someone who would cause Shinji to quite after he was forced to almost kill them? Is she assuming that Shinji wouldn't have had as much of a problem nearly killing a different member of his class? Or is she just being hard on herself and blaming herself for somehow causing all of this by approving him as a pilot, as though if she picked someone else everything would have been okay somehow? Or was approving a fourth pilot at all the mistake because it put another child in danger?
The second part of the episode is titled "Introjection". In psychology introjection is when a person adopts behaviors of other people, often as a defense mechanism. I'm not sure what that refers to in this case, but my best guess is that it's talking about Shinji mimicking Rei and Asuka's willingness to go into battle as a means of coping with him newfound helplessness in the face of an attack.
First appearance of Zeruel. Zeruel is one of the most important Angels, and certainly one of the most memorable. The design is kind of a regression back to the weird alien kaiju designs of the earlier Angels, and the original TV design in particular looks pretty silly. This guy wouldn't have been out of place in the first handful of episodes. And yet it manages to be important and memorable because of how strong it is and the events surrounding it. Zeruel seems like it's widely regarded as the most powerful Angel, although Armisael is the only Angel to actually kill an Eva (sort of, by forcing it to kill itself) in the TV canon.
Early on we had talked about what the Angel battle with the highest death toll is, and after watching this again, it pretty much has to be this one, right? Zeruel causes a series of massive explosions throughout the city before it's been fully evacuated, so there's no way it didn't kill a lot of people. Unless the citizens of Tokyo-3 have become so adept at evacuating that they were all able to get well out of the way in the brief time between when Zeruel appeared and when it started blowing things up, it certainly caused a lot of deaths. Probably more than Gaghiel, who I think is the only real contender for second place.
Christ, Unit 02 gets it worse in this episode than it does in Rebuild. I forgot about that. So apparently TV NERV is better at putting Evas back together than Rebuild NERV, since Unit 02 basically looks the same after this despite being completely decapitated. In Rebuilt it loses one arms and gets it's head bashed in and it ends up looks substantially different for all of the extra mechanical parts they need to get it working again.
Kaji is such a badass. Seriously, did he plant those watermelons just so he could do that if shit got real? What a cool guy.
I have to assume the timeframe of Shinji getting into Unit 01 makes no sense. Apparently Zeruel just stands here over Central Dogma for quite a while as Shinji runs to the bay where Unit 01 is, gets in, and powers on. Whatever, it's a minor inconsistency that doesn't really hurt the show, but it is technically a plot hole.
Zeruel breaking into Central Dogma and targeting the bridge staff makes it among the most bloodthirsty Angels that I can remember. Again Gaghiel is the only other one that comes to mind as far as Angels that go out of their way to kill people, and I believe Gaghiel may have only been doing that because the ships it attacked were firing on it. Zeruel actually slows down long enough for Unit 01 to catch it for seemingly no reason than that it wanted to kill some more people. Again, much more traditional monster behavior than we've seen from an Angel in a while.
Actually that comes up again in the next scene, where Unit 01 becomes incapacitated. As my understanding of the Evas goes, Unit 01 would not have gone berserk if it didn't think Shinji was in danger, so the fact that Zeruel wasted a bunch of time trying to kill Unit 01 rather than just abandoning it and heading straight to Terminal Dogma is the sole reason it doesn't succeed. After Bardiel explicitly doesn't do this in the last episode it's quite a contrast. Zeruel behaves more like Unit 01 than like any of the Angels we've seen lately.
The way Unit 01 moves after going berserk is decidedly more simian than we've seen before. It really reminds me of a gorilla. I suppose maybe that's meant to highlight absolutely for certain that it's a living thing, not a robot. It's really horrible. That noise it makes made me physically uncomfortable as I was watching this just now.
I've always considered this episode to be one of the most important in the series, but looking at it again I guess it's technically not. The main thing that happens here is that Unit 01 awakens, whatever that means exactly, and absorbs both the S2 Engine and Shinji. That could technically have happened during any Angel fight, or at least any Angel with a visible S2 Engine (so probably not Bardiel, Leilel, or Iruel). Even the stuff with Shinji resolving to be a pilot again isn't probably strictly necessary since it's again kind of a response to a problem that only existed this episode. So while this might not actually be one of the most plot-significant episodes, it is one of the best. I basically mark "the last part of the series" as anything that happens after this.
Episode 20: Form Of The Mind, Form Of The Man
So how did NERV re-capture Unit 01? Did it just go dormant again after a while? How did they move it? I feel bad for anybody on that work crew, I would be scared it would start moving again at any moment.
What do SEELE mean when they say "This is all because we didn't put a bell around Ikari's neck"? I can't figure how this really could have been Gendo's fault. He got sucker punched by a bullshit-powerful Angel out of nowhere. Are they talking about his failure to keep a shorter leash on Shinji? Or when they say "Ikari" are they actually talking about Shinji? They're probably just aimlessly scapegoating, but I do wonder if they blame this one any particular decision of Gendo's.
Lol, Kaji is sitting on Gendo's desk in the next scene. Again, badass. :D
Why is Shinji's empty plugsuit in the cockpit? He wasn't wearing it in the last episode. I mean, the obvious answer is "the animators forgot", but that's a minor error.
I don't think I ever noticed this before, but the exposition scene about what happened to Shinji is actually one of Eva's infamous minute-long static shots. Aside from a flashing light in the background it's just a still shot of Unit 01's head with Ritsuko and Maya silhouetted against it. Unlike the most iconic examples of that phenomenon this one has dialogue over it so it's less noticeable, but it definitely qualifies.
Shinji's psychedelic freakout sequence has a brief shot of Rei I, which is the first we see of her in the series and presumably the first indication that Shinji actually knew her as a kid, even if he doesn't remember. That could be read as his extrapolation of what Rei probably looked like when she was younger, but I believe her outfit is exactly right, so clearly he actually is remembering.
Is the Rei that Shinji is talking to this whole time supposed to be Yui? At first I just assumed this was his internal dialogue with himself, but if that's the case I think he would just be talking to himself. The fact that he's talking to Rei could mean that she represents his mental construct of her (and by extension probably other people, and she's just coming to mind because of where he is when he's doing all of this), or she represents Yui and Rei is just the closest thing to Yui that Shinji can picture.
The dramatic music in the scene where the bridge crew is trying to salvage Shinji strikes me as ridiculous. The technobabble actually hasn't struck me as that gratuitous so far for how often people complain about it, but this scene has it real bad, and the fact that that she seems to expect me to be excited by it is silly. It's not very dramatic and it's not interesting. Maybe all of this terminology actually does mean something that makes this less of a waste of time and it's just going over my head, but I don't like it.
In describing Unit 01 (weirdly by calling it an android, which surely she can't still believe at this point) Misato says "It's man-made, but who knows what lurks inside that black box?". Maybe this is common knowledge, but I just learned a few years ago what a "black box" is. It's a rhetorical device based on a concept in electronics in which the input and output of a process are known, but nothing else is. In electronics a black box is an educational tool in which a circuit is covered up and students have to determine what's underneath the cover by monitoring the input and the output. So in a broader sense a black box is any process in which the first and last stages are known, but something in the middle is unknown. In this case Misato means that NERV built the Evas, and they've seen what they can do, but they don't know how they work.
I was on board with this episode at first, but by the end I kind of hated it. I understand the need for a buffer between the last episode and the rest of the series, but this just comes off as a momentum-killer. It has massive amounts of animation recycling, large parts of it either don't make sense or are just too complicated or deliberately obscure for me to follow right now, and it doesn't bring much to the table aside from retreading things from past episodes and foreshadowing some upcoming stuff in a way that's too obtuse to be useful. I think a lot of the common criticisms leveled at Eva are present here. There is plenty of important stuff involving Yui and Misato that does matter to the plot quite a lot, but it's kind of buried in what's basically just wordy filler. I wouldn't count this below the worst episodes in the series because the important stuff in it is important and interesting, but a lot of it isn't great.
So Kaji casually mentions something very important and dangerous for him, that they found out his other job and was taken off the combat thing. I forget who 'they' were. Since he's an espionage spy agent, seems pretty bad for him.
I think he's talking about Misato, after she caught him in Terminal Dogma and he showed her Lilith.
At sync rate over 400%, Ritsuko wonders if 'she has awoken'. Which would imply that Yui is either normally asleep, or was asleep and is finally awake.
My understanding of that is less than she was asleep and more that she was just unaware. Maybe she's beginning to remember things on some level.
Also it occurred to me that one of the reasons why Gendo places so much more priority over Unit-01 may simply be due to the fact that it contains his beloved wife's soul.
I'm sure that's true to some degree. He sees Unit 01 as his only chance to get her back, but it also is literally her as well. So he's got a lot invested in Unit 01, to the extent that I'm surprised he or SEELE actually uses it in combat. Maybe they consider this a do or die kind of thing and don't believe they have any other choice.
Nerv moves to their secondary HQ and leaves Magi for awhile. I wonder if this is outside Geofront, since that's in a wreck, but that would mean that they would have to rush to meet the Angel at Geofront when they appear. I feel like that isn't the case though since they seem to be right there when they launch in the subsequent episodes.
I'm guessing secondary HQ is still within the Geofront, just a different part. It's hard to say though, since we never get a great idea of how big the Geofront actually is, how much of it is in use, and what's actually down there. We probably don't have that information partly because the geography just doesn't make sense, but it seems pretty risky to fully move operations out of the immediate proximity of Terminal Dogma in the inevitable event that more Angel shit does down.
Shinji realizes that he knows the Eva and that he ran away afterwards from his father and his mother. So he ran away after seeing the Eva while his mother was still alive? That's weird, I figured it was after she died and all the troubles were flying around. Unless it was metaphorically he meant that.
I think when he talks about his mother in this case he's (subconsciously?) talking about Unit 01, in the sense that he tried to quit being a pilot and therefore ran away from his mother. Alternatively he may mean that in the sense of running away from his mother's memory, since we've already seen that Gendo is the only link Shinji still has to that memory. Running away from him could also mean running away from her.
And he's talking to an apparition of Rei, which is also weird. Why would it be Rei? Is it actually her? And the Leliel Shinji also briefly makes an appearance. I've been wondering about Leliel's words actually. Angels don't seem to be the type to randomly muse and philosophise about stuff, so when Leliel mentions that Shinji inside Shinji and the Shinji inside others, maybe it was talking about something that was actually 'true' or something it perceived to be an actuality or truth. Maybe that was the Leliel inside Shinji talking. I wonder if the Rei talking is the Rei inside Shinji, and sufficiently powerful beings can to some extent reach within the ;themselves within others', or 'sync' with the 'themselves within others'.
That never occurred to me, that does make some sense. The Rei in this episode could be Quantum Rei from End Of Evangelion, reaching back to Shinji at different points in time. My money's still on Rei representing Yui here, but that makes sense too.
This is the first time I've heard of this, I have no idea. Would not surprise me that the sponsors were taken aback by the sudden change in tone and direction of the series, even if the hints were there.
Ok well I just checked the Japanese wiki and there's no mention of the episodes being moved to a different time slot, they all aired every week on Wednesdays (I checked the dates) from 6:30pm to 7:00pm. The only two exceptions to this are episodes 13 and 14 which had to air either slightly earlier or later because their slots were taken up by special New Years shows or something, so completely random reasons. So probably false, can't find anything about episode 18 in particular either, though the article did mention that that episode and some other episode with Misato and Kaji were both criticized as not being kid-friendly. I've heard stories about how the mythical budget problems weren't actually a thing or something or something either.
I've been asking around about this for the last week, and every single person I talked to had heard the same story I had. I'm pretty sure one of them was the person who told me that though, and they all know each other, so maybe they all got it from him. Seems like it might be a persistent myth, but yeah, I haven't been able to find any evidence at all and you found some to the contrary, so there you go.
As for the budget problems not being a thing at all, I have a little bit of a hard time believing that. The animation problems and the nature of the last two episodes scream "budget problems" all over to me. Maybe not relative to other shows at the time, and maybe it's more a case of budget mismanagement than actual budget problems, but there was so much corner cutting that clearly something was going on at some point.
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Something i don't understand 'bout this show: Why do they use kids and not, idk, solders?
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Something i don't understand 'bout this show: Why do they use kids and not, idk, solders?
All we know for sure is that there is a reason, we don't know what the reason is. Ritsuko explicitly says "We have to use fourteen year olds to pilot the Evas" in the fourth episode, but that's all she says. There are a lot of theories beyond that of various levels of credibility:
-One of the more common theories is that there's something fundamentally different about the bodies and/or minds of people born after First Impact. Some people have claimed that there's evidence that anyone born after Second Impact has no soul, and somehow that's why they're able to interface with the Evas. I don't believe that for a second, but it's a popular theory.
-Because NERV and SEELE's different plans both revolve around Unit 01, and because of the circumstances surrounding Yui and Unit 01 Shinji and Rei are the only ones who can pilot it, the other pilots are deliberately kept around the same age to avoid questions.
-Younger pilots are easier to trick and manipulate. Gendo's plan involves conditioning Shinji into making certain decisions at certain times, and it might be harder to dupe an adult pilot that thoroughly.
-My personal theory is that it has to do with the relationship between the pilot and the Eva. The two more functional Evas, Unit 01 and Unit 02, have a parent/child relationship with their pilots, and I believe that's why they're able to take autonomous action to protect them. I think the whole concept of the Eva was built to exploit the natural protectiveness mothers have for their children, and that feeling is stronger when the pilot is younger. Maybe this wasn't originally intended, but after the accident with Yui I think it became part of the plan.
-It might have something to do with the mental state of people at that age. In order to mentally interface with the Evas via the entry plug they may need to have less fully-formed personalities. There might be too much mental feedback from an adult with a more developed mind that might make that link less stable.
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No episodes for me today, I just bought a new computer, so all of my machines are occupied transferring files. Didn't occur to me to just watch the DVDs on my TV until right now, I assume my old laptop could handle transferring files and me typing text into it at the same time, but oh well. I'll get to them tomorrow.
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Alright, this will be my third time attempting to do this. This next episode is a big one, possibly the single most important and densest episode in the entire series, so I've decided not to watch it a couple of times because I didn't think I would have the time to give it the attention it deserves. But I don't have anywhere to be tomorrow morning and I've hopefully fended off everyone who might distract me, so here goes.
I should point out that the next handful of episodes (21-24) have two versions, the TV edit and the Platinum director's cut. I will be watching the director's cut for each of them because it is better. That makes these episodes considerably longer, which is a double-edged sword because they're already pretty dense, but whatever.
Episode 21: The Birth of NERV
So very first frame of the episode and we've already got something significant. I believe this is the first time S2 is stated to mean "super solenoid". A solenoid is effectively a spiral or coil, which I suppose probably makes the S2 engine some kind of DNA structure. Ha. Reminds me of Gurren Lagann.
If I'm not mistaken, this scene at the research base is originally from Death And Rebirth, and the placement of it here makes that movie a complete waste of time, rather than just tedious. Not every single bit of original footage from Death And Rebirth made it back into the series, but all of it that matters did as far as I know.
Christ, there's so much going on in this research base scene, I could spend like an hour just unpacking this one clip. Somewhere in the wall of sub text there's something about the Lance of Longinus, which is "still where it was brought ashore after arriving from the Dead Sea last week". Was the lance found in the Dead Sea? I don't think I ever knew anything about where the lance is from then. I thought it was found near Adam. Why was it in the Dead Sea? Also there's a line buried in there about how "The physical contact experiment is scheduled for the 13th of next month". If it wasn't physical contact that set Adam off, what was it? I would say proximity to the spear, but apparently it was near him for at least a little while without anything happening. Maybe it was being moved closer to him and the speaker in this scene didn't know about it. I could continue picking this scene apart forever because there's so much dialogue and much of it is semi-important, but in the interest of this not taking eight hours I'll move on.
"The DNA that dived into Adam is physically uniting". I guess that probably has something to do with what went wrong, but what does it mean? What DNA? Lilith DNA maybe? Or Lilith DNA by proxy of a human?
Someone offscreen says "Pull back the lance" after the reaction that leads to Second Impact begins, so I guess they did get it closer to Adam after all. Maybe even touched him with it.
"Even if only for half a second, we have to put an anti-AT field around him! Get enough energy to generate an anti-AT field!" Wow, these researchers can do that? I don't think even NERV can do that. I mean, I guess probably not since they all die, but they at least have the potential to do that. Or they think they do.
You know, now that I think about it, I'm not sure what the significance of the SEELE monoliths is. The monoliths are obviously a reference to 2001: A Space Odyssey, and if I recall in 2001 weren't they the mechanical vessels of aliens who had transcended physical bodies or something like that? Is the implication that the SEELE members are no longer human? I could easily believe that except we see Keel in the cyborg flesh in End Of Evangelion. Fuyutsuki says "Not the committe, but SEELE itself has finally appeared". Is he implying that the committee are just puppets, either literal or metaphorical, and that the monoliths are separate from them? He calls the 01 monolith Keel, so clearly they share an identity. If I had to guess I'd say Fuyutsuki is talking about their actions in kidnapping him being representative of "the real SEELE" and not necessarily their forms, but it's sort of ambiguous.
I don't think I ever explicitly noticed that the flashback to Yui in college was in 1999. I just assumed that it was a number of years before Second Impact, but no, it was shortly before. Not that that really changes anything, but it does make her and the other characters in that timeline younger than I had always assumed.
I believe this is the first time we ever actually see Yui, or at least the first clear shot of her? It's not much of a dramatic reveal. I can see her resemblance to Shinji, but she really looks a lot like Rei. More than I remember. That makes sense of course, but it really is a close parallel.
And holy shit, I really never noticed how much young Gendo looks like an adult Shinji. Again, makes sense, but wow, I can't believe I never noticed that.
Yui calls Gendo "such a cute man, it's just that no one knows it". What could she possibly be talking about? I would love to see just a scene or two of that. Of Gendo being a cute man.
Fuyutsuki accuses Gendo of having been interested in Yui, at least originally, to get to SEELE. I wonder if this is true. What motive could he have to want to get to them at that point? If that was originally his plan then he must have accidentally fallen in love.
Apparently Gendo was at the research base the day before Second Impact. I assume the fact that he left just in time means that he was already operating under the guidance of the Dead Sea Scrolls at this point. How long was that the case? Was he already aware of them before meeting Yui? Probably, hence his alleged interest in SEELE.
There's a lot happening in the middle here concerning Gehirn, the production of Unit 00, Misato and friends in college, Naoko Akagi, etc. that I have surprisingly little to say about. I guess it all goes by pretty fast and is pretty straightforward. Important stuff, but not a lot to talk about that I can think of.
I suppose it's worth briefly noting that Gehirn is German for brain. That makes SEELE (soul) the ultimate driving force behind instrumentality, Gehirn (brain) the planners, and NERV (nerve) the physical executors.
Yui dies offscreen, and Gendo immediately shifts gears and becomes Modern Gendo. He also suddenly starts wearing glasses.
The last time Ritsuko and Naoko see each other they say "Good work" instead of "Goodbye". Not sure if that's nice or terrible.
How did Naoko figure out what Rei is? Did she learn it from Gendo between their first meeting and now, or did she just figure it out by connecting the dots? I'm not really clear about how much she ever knew. The same way I don't really know how much Ritsuko ever knows, I guess. Probably everything I suppose.
As Kaji is freeing Fuyutsuki he says "All I want is to get closer to the truth... within me". I wonder what he means by that. It seems to me that he's in the espionage business because it's the only way to piece together anything resembling the truth, but that truth is decidedly outside of him. What internal truth is he looking for?
Kaji's death has been one of the biggest sources of controversy in the series. A few shots in the director's cut were very deliberately altered because people got the false impression from the cinematography of the TV version that it was implied that Misato killed him. In the manga it's explicitly clear that Gendo is the killer for some goddamn reason (one of the many reasons I don't care for the manga). I think it's third-tier canon that Kaji was killed by an unnamed security officer who we've never met before and whose identity doesn't matter at all to the series, and it's better that way. It's the circumstances he's gotten himself into that ultimately kill him, not the choices of any other particular person. I suppose it's technically ambiguous whether he's even dead or not, but I don't think anything would be gained by assuming that he survived somehow. He's served his purpose as "mechanism by which secrets can be revealed" and now he can't do that anymore, so it's kind of uncharted territory from here on out, even more than it was before.
I think Shinji and I have the same earbuds. I swear his are identical to the ones I'm wearing right now as I watch this episode.
Misato knows right away what Kaji's message means. Seems that everyone knew this was inevitable. Fair enough, I can't really see how it could have ended any other way. If Kaji cared about living and not uncovering as much information as possible he would have booked it a while ago.
Well, that took a long time. This may be the single most information-dense episode in the series, and I suppose in a way it's kind of to the episode's detriment that it's basically just an exposition dump, but I like it a lot. It's one of the most straightfoward presentations of facts and events we get in the series, which makes it invaluable for piecing together a lot of the more arcane stuff. And we get to see a lot of things that we don't see anywhere else in the series. It also revolves around Fuyutsuki, who I've been finding to be one of the most interesting characters this time through.
I considered just calling it a night after this episode because it took me so long to watch, but fuck it, I don't have anywhere to be early tomorrow because I have work off for the holiday. I'll push on and do the next one too.
Episode 22: At Least Be Humane
This episode opens with another scene from Death And Rebirth. This seems like a perfect place for it, it's a thematic bridge between the last episode and this one. Almost seems like it was intended to be here. Was it? Were all of the re-introduced director's cut scenes written for these episodes but cut for time and budgetary reasons only to be reintroduced much later, or is it just a nice coincidence that they fit in so well?
We see Asuka's backstory, which is horrifying. I know a lot of people don't like Asuka because she's such a bastard, but I can't help but to like her knowing the kind of awful shit she's been through. I can't really hold how fucked up she ended up against her at all.
Kyoko's accident is the opposite of Yui's in many ways, and I suppose that sort of directly informs the ways in which Asuka is the opposite of Shinji. Yui died because she took a risk in an experiment for Shinji's sake. Kyoko died for her own sake, because she was too busy being wrapped up in her work to think about what would happen to Asuka if something happened to her.
The man and woman who are talking about Asuka in this scene are her father and his mistress (and her eventual foster mother..?), right? I'm not sure why I have that impression, but for some reason I'm pretty sure that's the case. Where is her father, anyway? Is he still alive?
The weird parallel of Asuka's understandable aversion to dolls in this continuity and that doll she talks to in Rebuild 2.0 is really interesting. I have theories about that, and I'll get to them eventually.
There's a brief shot of NERV technicians reconstructing Unit 02 after it got mutilated by Zeruel. I guess I forgot about that.
The scene with Asuka and Rei in the elevator is another one of those infamous extremely long static shots. It certainly serves a purpose, but it does feel a little gratuitous in length. They could have trimmed it in the director's cut, but I suppose those are such a part of the show now that it would almost be a shame to.
We see Arael for the first time. Along with Armisael it's one of the most obviously biblical Angels, and arguably a contender for strongest Angel with Armisael and Zeruel since it takes such extraordinary measures to defeat.
The first part of Asuka's hallucination/mind journey made me really, really uncomfortable. To the point that I wonder if maybe it went a bit too far.
Is the later scene of her talking to a younger version of herself supposed to imply that Arael is trying to communicate with her the same way Leilel did with Shinji? The show doesn't really seem to use imagery consistently enough in this sort of scene for that to be entirely clear, but the dialogue would sort of fit.
The crew of that boat that's floating in the ocean of LCL around Lilith have the strangest job in the world.
The scene where Unit 00 throws the lance is one of the coolest pieces of animation in the series. It's short, but it looks fantastic. Kind of an odd contrast to all of the re-used animation and other shortcuts in this episode, but hey, it worked.
I think we're safely into the point where every episode (pending how you feel about the last two) is absolutely plot-necessary. This is another important episode. The series wouldn't really be able to work without it. Ultimately I guess not that much happens for all of the filler in it, but it sets a mood for Asuka that's important.
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Ugh, sorry again for lateness. This has been a most emotionally exhausting week. I'm drained. I'll try get to them as soon as I can.
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No worries. Take your time.
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Funny enough I just watched Evangelion again from start to finish while cramming for my exams a few weeks ago. And this time was the first time I watched the director's cut versions of 21-24 and I never realized how much more they added and how much more of a mindfuck they were.
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Funny enough I just watched Evangelion again from start to finish while cramming for my exams a few weeks ago. And this time was the first time I watched the director's cut versions of 21-24 and I never realized how much more they added and how much more of a mindfuck they were.
Yeah, the director's cut it really remarkable. We're lucky to have gotten such a substantial addition to the main canon that long after the show was over. I'd like so see the same treatment on every single episode some day, but I think that's pretty unlikely since a lot of the current director's cut was re-introduced material that was already finished for other projects and that kind of thing just doesn't exist for most episodes.
If you have any specific thoughts, observations, or questions feel free to weigh in, especially if it concerns episodes we're currently talking about. In theory I'll be covering 23-24 this afternoon (but more likely I'll get distracted or not carve out the time for them and end up doing them later in the week).
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Oh there was a director's cut edition. Ah, well I've watched the TV version just now. Might make for an interesting comparison for how much more lacking it is compared to the former though.
Ep 21, Birth of Nerv / He Was Aware That He was Still a Child
I found a lot of the information very interesting. Like you say, exposition episode, but it was so welcome after all the mystery starting arise in the last couple of episodes, in addition to adding some much needed backstory to very interesting characters. And despite that, I don't have any too much to comment on, at least in the TV version (or maybe my eyes and mind weren't sharp enough to catch anything).
So we find out that the Instrumentality committee =/= Seele, judging by Fuyutsuki's comment. Which I'm having a hard time understanding. Every scene with Keel, we see him in the dark room with colored lights, with the other members of what we presume is the committee. I specifically remember that one guy with that high-pitched, weird gait of talking with the long nose and droopy eyes. I forget if any of the outsider characters specifically mention Seele, or continually refer to the 'upper brass' as "the committee". I know in this episode Misato was discussing with Hyuga and she only mentioned the committee. The monoliths before Fuyutsuki speak through a voice mask, to conceal their identity. All the monoliths but Keel's. It doesn't appear that Keel, whenever he was speaking with the other old men, that he was with anyone higher. Nor did it seem like there was anyone above the committee by the way they were conversing with each other. The way they speak in a really round about way and constantly use metaphors to me would suggest that the committee actually is Seele. I wonder what point there is to use faces in the committee and monoliths as Seele. Why differentiate them? Why use that buffer, the committee, between Nerv and Seele? Regardless, Keel we know is part of both. It appears that he is the main spokesperson of both the committee and Seele. Maybe the committee is a portion of Seele that specifically deals with the Instrumentality project, while other members deal with other projects, like the MP Evas, or hell, Kaworu, or whatever. Or maybe that was the point of Fuyutsuki's comment, that not only did the Instrumentality committee 'division' of Seele show up, but the actual upper brass of the whole of Seele itself. Which, considering that the Instrumentality plan is probably the most important objective of Seele, it wouldn't surprise me if the upper ring of Seele consisted of all of the committee members, plus perhaps a few of the head directors of the other 'committees' of other project.
And then they say that they have no intention to create a god. Unit-01 is by this point every bit a god, though not using its powers. Has both the fruit of life and fruit of knowledge. Perhaps an interesting peek into Seele's version of 3rd impact that they were desiring. When Gendo first mentions to Fuyutsuki that he submitted the proposal of the Instrumentality project to Keel, he says that the project is something that 'has never been done, the path to god (or become a god)'. Maybe its the former, the 'path to god' that he submitted, he submitted a proposal to a path to 'god' and not to create a 'god', even though he may have intended the latter from the beginning.
Which would also mean that before this proposal, Seele was funding Gehirn for research into Project E, which I believe was... "reviving Adam". Whether Gendo meant this literally --actually reviving Adam-- or metaphorically --cloning Adam to create Unit-00 -- I don't know. I assume the latter though, since though I forget why 2nd Impact was deliberated, I get the feeling it was to do something about Adam. If Gendo was in charge at the time around 2nd Impact, and since Seele we assume doesn't know about embryo Adam, then we can assume that Gendo manipulated some of the experiment to allow the creation of embryo Adam. Since Gendo would know that Adam is 'revived', we can assume he meant the phrase metaphorically. Now the question remains, why? Since they had the dead sea scrolls, they knew about the Angels. They knew that this was their only way to fight against them 15 or whenever years from now. Which I would assume that Project E's purpose was to create clones of Adam, Evas, to fight against the Angels. And that's it, and that it was only until Gendo's proposal that Seele decided to use the Third Impact to their own advantage. This would also explain Seele's mention of their having no intention to create a god. They would simply manipulate Third Impact (or cause one) to achieve the results they were seeking.
If Gendo manipulated the events of Second Impact to create embryo Adam, then he had to have some intention of some kind of Instrumentality plan then. Perhaps he also explained that to Fuyutsuki at some point, which is why Fuyutsuki knew about it when Gendo mentioned that he submitted a proposal of a new plan to Keel. That would explain Gendo's motives for working for Project E. Then why would Fuyutsuki want to work with him? Gendo's offer of 'work[ing] with him to create a new history of humanity' (or something like that) doesn't seem like the sort of ambition that he could bait Fuyutsuki with. Maybe Fuyutsuki felt threatened into it after being shown such clearly top-secret confidential things? Maybe that and the fact that Yui was involved in it? Or perhaps it was because of his initial determination to seek the truth behind Second Impact after he saw past the fabricated information of the meteorite explanation by the UN. Maybe all three. Like you say, Fuyutsuki is being a really interesting character through watching this. He's very much involved.... and yet not involved.
Kaji's death is probably necessary, and his going out is rather convenient. Who is it? we ask. The TV version definitely makes it initially seem like it was Misato, even though it becomes very apparent, to me at least, that it wasn't her. She becomes overcome with grief; she doesn't break from her actions.
Ep22 Don't be (At the least, like a human)
Now that I'm commenting about it, it amazes me how smoothly I watched through Asuka's flashback. I don't know how much more the Director's cut edition adds to it, but occurs to me that the level of trauma she must have experienced is utterly alien to me. I don't even understand but just to feel 'omg that's fucked up'.
Your comparison between Yui and Asuka's mother is interesting, though I wonder about the 'died for herself' part. We don't really know her intentions behind being the subject of the contact experiment. We don't even know if it was her intention to, though presumably they did have her consent. The man did call it ironic that she became the victim to her own proposal. Victim would imply that there was something about it that wasn't entirely her intention to happen. And I wonder what was different about her contact proposal that was different from the one with Yui's. Perhaps the one with Gendo them was confidential and it was developed independently by Asuka's mother? Could perhaps be another reason why the dummy plug may be incompatible with Unit-02.
I'm liking the subtle facial expressions. Maya throws Ritsuko a conflicted look after she mentions that they will prioritize repairs on Unit-00 after Asuka does poorly on her synch tests. Ritsuko makes a hurt, nasty one because Misato makes a retort taken too far about her home and cats.
I was fine with the long scene in the elevator with Rei and Asuka. After all the dismal events, it almost comes as a moment of peace and quiet in all the depressing, gloomy stuff. At the same time, it's a dreadful moment. You know Asuka's in a terrible mood and Rei can't possibly defuse her. And Rei ends up making the first comment, interestingly enough. She wants to help since what she offers is advice. Says a lot about her development, perhaps.
Asuka launches to the surface from her Eva, which would imply that all the pilots have the privilege/authority/clearance to launch without permission from Misato.
In addition to the sync-boosting qualities of LCL, it also apparently has a mind contamination barrier effect.
Very interesting dialogue between Fuyutsuki and Gendo about the latter's decision to use the Lance. Like you, I really liked that throwing animation. Those few short hops, I can feel that visceral, kinetic energy in that throwing motion. It must also be the one moment where an Angel was so 'easily' and quickly disposed of. Barring Matariel anyway, I feel that's slightly different because they still had to work for it. The Lance of Longinus shows up for just a few short scenes and disappears just as quickly, but manages to establish itself as this really alien, incomprehensible weapon that simply, kills an Angel. Just like that. So tasteful. Also I vaguely remember watching this scene before where the Lance collides with the AT Field, and then howls and morphs before piercing through. I assume that was the scene in the Director's cut? Or maybe I'm remembering wrong.
Altogether some really neat episodes, though I couldn't find too much to talk about some of the new information.
All that stuff of the scene from Second Impact I've totally missed, I'll have to find the Director's edition and watch it at some point.
Yui calls Gendo "such a cute man, it's just that no one knows it". What could she possibly be talking about? I would love to see just a scene or two of that. Of Gendo being a cute man.
Perhaps Gendo is secretly quite like Shinji? He did say he wasn't used to being liked, maybe he had very awkward and shy moments with Yui whenever it became more (positively) emotional. I'm thinking like the Shinji around Gaghiel/Israfel episodes, except slightly more brash.
Apparently Gendo was at the research base the day before Second Impact. I assume the fact that he left just in time means that he was already operating under the guidance of the Dead Sea Scrolls at this point. How long was that the case? Was he already aware of them before meeting Yui? Probably, hence his alleged interest in SEELE.
This is one of the mysteries that confounds me too. How and why was Yui tied to Seele? And how did Gendo know about it? And though it depends on how much he knew, why did he try to be a part of them?
The last time Ritsuko and Naoko see each other they say "Good work" instead of "Goodbye". Not sure if that's nice or terrible.
From my understanding, "good work" comes off as a very thankful sort of "aaahhhhh", releasing a big sigh after a long day of work sort of phrase. Like a "you/we worked very hard today, let's make a toast to a hard day of work", sort of loosening of tensions sort of thing. Though it might be a little distant(?), I don't know, I think it shows that they're fairly close, I mean they were exchanging letters, even if their mother-daughter relationship wasn't necessarily that close. That they were very close as colleagues, but were rather awkward about their familial relationship.
As Kaji is freeing Fuyutsuki he says "All I want is to get closer to the truth... within me". I wonder what he means by that. It seems to me that he's in the espionage business because it's the only way to piece together anything resembling the truth, but that truth is decidedly outside of him. What internal truth is he looking for?
My subs say "All I want is to get closer to the truth. / To have it in my grasp." which agrees with what I'm hearing.
Huh I don't remember anything about Asuka and dolls in Rebuild 2.0, I'll be looking forward to it.
Well that's all for those 2 episodes. That was a mouthful. Finally some answers, more questions, in the series.
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Oh there was a director's cut edition. Ah, well I've watched the TV version just now. Might make for an interesting comparison for how much more lacking it is compared to the former though.
Have you seen the director's cut before and you don't have it now, or have you never seen it at all? It's worth hunting down, but it's found on the Evangelion Platinum box set which is hard to find for a decent price right now. Should become a lot more accessible after the Blu-Ray release. As far as I remember there are only really two extremely plot-relevant bits, the opening to episode 21 and a brief shot during episode 23. The rest is either helpful but non-crucial background or just redrawn animation.
So we find out that the Instrumentality committee =/= Seele, judging by Fuyutsuki's comment. Which I'm having a hard time understanding. Every scene with Keel, we see him in the dark room with colored lights, with the other members of what we presume is the committee. I specifically remember that one guy with that high-pitched, weird gait of talking with the long nose and droopy eyes. I forget if any of the outsider characters specifically mention Seele, or continually refer to the 'upper brass' as "the committee". I know in this episode Misato was discussing with Hyuga and she only mentioned the committee. The monoliths before Fuyutsuki speak through a voice mask, to conceal their identity. All the monoliths but Keel's. It doesn't appear that Keel, whenever he was speaking with the other old men, that he was with anyone higher. Nor did it seem like there was anyone above the committee by the way they were conversing with each other. The way they speak in a really round about way and constantly use metaphors to me would suggest that the committee actually is Seele. I wonder what point there is to use faces in the committee and monoliths as Seele. Why differentiate them? Why use that buffer, the committee, between Nerv and Seele? Regardless, Keel we know is part of both. It appears that he is the main spokesperson of both the committee and Seele. Maybe the committee is a portion of Seele that specifically deals with the Instrumentality project, while other members deal with other projects, like the MP Evas, or hell, Kaworu, or whatever. Or maybe that was the point of Fuyutsuki's comment, that not only did the Instrumentality committee 'division' of Seele show up, but the actual upper brass of the whole of Seele itself. Which, considering that the Instrumentality plan is probably the most important objective of Seele, it wouldn't surprise me if the upper ring of Seele consisted of all of the committee members, plus perhaps a few of the head directors of the other 'committees' of other project.
Yeah, I really don't understand this dynamic. Hopefully End Of Evangelion explains it better and I just forgot. There's also a bizarre wrench in the works (that weird extra monolith) in episode 24 that completely throws off the whole thing, but that may be an animation mistake and not actually canon.
Which would also mean that before this proposal, Seele was funding Gehirn for research into Project E, which I believe was... "reviving Adam". Whether Gendo meant this literally --actually reviving Adam-- or metaphorically --cloning Adam to create Unit-00 -- I don't know. I assume the latter though, since though I forget why 2nd Impact was deliberated, I get the feeling it was to do something about Adam. If Gendo was in charge at the time around 2nd Impact, and since Seele we assume doesn't know about embryo Adam, then we can assume that Gendo manipulated some of the experiment to allow the creation of embryo Adam. Since Gendo would know that Adam is 'revived', we can assume he meant the phrase metaphorically. Now the question remains, why? Since they had the dead sea scrolls, they knew about the Angels. They knew that this was their only way to fight against them 15 or whenever years from now. Which I would assume that Project E's purpose was to create clones of Adam, Evas, to fight against the Angels. And that's it, and that it was only until Gendo's proposal that Seele decided to use the Third Impact to their own advantage. This would also explain Seele's mention of their having no intention to create a god. They would simply manipulate Third Impact (or cause one) to achieve the results they were seeking.
Gendo's motivation remains completely unclear to me, but at this point I guess I'm just okay with the fact that we're not supposed to understand it. We would have to know more about what Gendo was like as a young man to understand him, the show does not give us that, and he'll just have to remain mysterious in a lot of ways. Fair enough.
Your comparison between Yui and Asuka's mother is interesting, though I wonder about the 'died for herself' part. We don't really know her intentions behind being the subject of the contact experiment. We don't even know if it was her intention to, though presumably they did have her consent. The man did call it ironic that she became the victim to her own proposal. Victim would imply that there was something about it that wasn't entirely her intention to happen. And I wonder what was different about her contact proposal that was different from the one with Yui's. Perhaps the one with Gendo them was confidential and it was developed independently by Asuka's mother? Could perhaps be another reason why the dummy plug may be incompatible with Unit-02.
I don't think Kyoko intended for her accident to happen, just like Yui presumably didn't. I think it was either an accident or design by someone other than her. But she seemingly put herself at risk for her own purposes, while Yui seemingly put herself at risk for Shinji's sake (not that I'm particularly judging Kyoko on that, mind. We don't know enough about her for it to be fair to call her truly selfish, but Asuka seems to remember it that way).
Also I vaguely remember watching this scene before where the Lance collides with the AT Field, and then howls and morphs before piercing through. I assume that was the scene in the Director's cut? Or maybe I'm remembering wrong.
Yes, that's in the director's cut. It can't pierce the barrier at first so it morphs into a drill shape (again reminding me of Gurren Lagann) and shreds through it.
All that stuff of the scene from Second Impact I've totally missed, I'll have to find the Director's edition and watch it at some point.
Do you have Death And Rebirth? If you do I'm pretty sure that scene it in there somewhere. It might be the first scene, I don't remember.
My subs say "All I want is to get closer to the truth. / To have it in my grasp." which agrees with what I'm hearing.
Oh, okay, I'll just chalk that up to a bad translation on my end then. That makes complete sense to me, unlike the line in my version.
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I'm just watching it with subs online. My friend has a copy so I might have to borrow it from him if it comes with the Director's Cut scenes. Or just watch the Death and Rebirth movie.
Ep23: Tears
So the Armisael episode. It tries to contact Rei and does. I wonder if the apparition here means anything. In Shinji's case he sees a younger self, in Asuka's case the Angel shows her memories (or maybe the Angel is exploring her memories?), and here Rei sees an apparition that's identical to herself, only half submerged in LCL. Also this would be the first time we see the Angel talking for itself, talking about its feelings. And it's wanting to share its heart and feelings with Rei. Before that it asks Rei if she wants to become one with it. And anyway it brings up the feeling before Rei and she calls it loneliness. Though the Angel simply calls it a pain in its heart, when she elaborates the Angel says that that feeling is Rei's own.
All the Angels so far that took interest in humans never tried to approach Terminal Dogma. Leliel stayed in place, Arael stayed in space, and Armisael just hovered in place.
Oh and Rei says something interesting too. When asking Armisael if it's lonely because "we are many but you are alone/one", it would seem like 'Angel' is a pretty general classification of Adam-based beings. That or she was referring to the general reality that only a single is ever around at a time. Or that the Angels haven't really met each other. Or whatever.
Armisael was oscillating between pattern blue and orange. There's bound to be a list of all instances of not-pattern-blue moments somewhere where we could identify some kind of pattern but I didn't make one.
Rei reverses her AT Field which confines the Angel and then self destructs. The other time was with Leliel when it inverted its AT Field to suck in Unit-01. I guess technically reversing and inverting is different though, though I don't know if those specific terms are errors in my memory or random translation kinks. She self destructs and sees a quick flash of Gendo smiling. Which means that Rei II most cared about Gendo, or wanted affection from him though she just realized that she also cared about Shinji, or at least wanted to be with him to relieve her loneliness. Or that not being able to be with him was causing some amount of loneliness.
The retrieval team finds something in her Entry Plug, but Ritsuko orders to keep the findings a secret and to destroy every related thing. Is there something in the Director's Cut that elaborates on what they found here? I imagine something Rei clone related. Oh right I just remembered, the 'Angel Tree' is also only in the Director's Cut edition isn't it? I forget what context that appears in.
Misato tries to 'soothe' Shinji by offering herself to him. Shinji is disgusted and/or afraid and refuses her. On her part, probably a mix of guilt and loneliness. Still rather creepy though.
We get Rei III. And apparently the committee doesn't know about the Rei clones because Fuyutsuki says her 'being alive' might cause trouble with them. Either that, or it's the same as before when Shinji was contacted by Leliel and they wanted to interrogate him about that too. Because if they have Kaworu clones, then it wouldn't make sense for them not to know that Rei clones may also exist. Unless they don't know that she has the soul of Lilith. Which, how'd they get that again? They got the soul of Adam from Second Impact, how'd Gendo get Liliths?
So Ritsuko's little story about mankind finding god was pretty interesting. It would almost seem like they found a god before Adam, and then tried to resurrect it which became Adam. Gendo did say they called the Giant of Light Adam, which means that there was some other being before it? Shinji asks if the Evas are humans which surprisingly enough is answered with a 'yes' from Ritsuko. Which is odd, but ok.
And then the part about how only Rei, 'Rei', was able to generate a soul for herself, and how the Room of Guf was empty. Now what's that about. I feel like there was some other reference to Guf some other time but I don't remember. Lots of psychobabble (holy crap that's an actual word? No red squiggly lines) that I don't really understand. And you know what? This whole thing about creating clones or creating copies from things about something brings up something interesting about this universe and cloning. The cloning process. You can make physical copies, but those physical copies don't come with souls. In the whole moral, ethical debate about clones that we have in real life about whatever business about their treatment or their souls, or about how people shouldn't 'play god' or whatever else religious, ethical, moral, humane arguments and whatever ever ever. Anyway, all that, the clones that are created in this universe don't come with souls, those souls have to be generated or provided for somehow. Since Rei's soul is Lilith's, that's explained, and why only 'Rei' is the only Rei, the only container, that had a soul. Even the Evas, copies, ie: clones, of Adam don't come with souls, ie: clones without souls, have to have salvaged human souls to be able to have a soul. Which is all pretty interesting and stuff I just now thought about. I forget the name of that branch of science in this series, was it metaphysical biology? For all that can be done with souls, manipulation, transferring, salvaging, etc., it's interesting that souls don't just come from nowhere in this universe. Some lucky accident that happens when some physical thing is made or copied. Has to be pulled from somewhere. Some... Room of Guf? Is that what it is? I remember Kaworu saying something about closing the doors of Guf in the 3rd Rebuild movie.
Ep: 24: The Final Angel. The Beginning and the End, or "Knockin' on Heaven's Door"
So Kaworu may be my favorite character, or at least the favorite of the children.
I believe there was some controversy about what Seele wanted to do with sending in Kaworu. From the TV version, it seems like they wanted to get the Angel defeating business over with already and sent him in to Nerv to get defeated. I vaguely remember there being more ambiguity with Seele's intentions with their conversation with Kaworu in the Director's Cut edition.
Seele, the monoliths, call Gendo a "good friend, comrade, and conspirator", meaning they did actually trust him. Which would explain why they weren't too sure if he was doing his job properly or not or whether to trust him or whatever. Or perhaps they were exaggerating to pay respects for his work for them before they off him.
Kaworu reveals that everyone has an AT Field, which must have been a bit reveal for real time viewers. Then later says that he wanted Shinji to stop Unit-01 because otherwise it might have "lived on with her"? ? ? ? ? Who living on with whom?? Unit-02 and Asuka? Unit-02 and her mother? Her mother and Asuka?
And finally we have the famous minute long silent scene of Shinji struggling with the decision to kill Kaworu. His throwing a quick (gentle?) glance at Rei is also intriguing. I wonder what he wanted to tell her, if any. Maybe a look of handing over his life to her, in a weird sort of way.
I wonder what's special about the Angels when they contact Adam that differs from Evas (Unit-00) coming in contact with Adam that doesn't cause Third Impact? Although... 'Adam' is actually Lilith, which could be why Unit-00 contacting Lilith doesn't do anything. So if Unit-01, based on Lilith I believe? comes in contact with Lilith, would that cause something? Would be funny if it could cause a Third Impact for the Angels that wipes them all out, as opposed to a Third Impact for humans which wipes out all Lilith-based life.
For being the last Angel, it wasn't a big fight or anything, but perhaps the most impactful. The epitomy of Angels showing self-awareness, I suppose. Of Angels showing interest in humans.
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I was all ready to get this in on time tonight, but my roommate was like "Hey I just bought a new fight pad, let's play Blazblue so I can try it out" and we played for over four hours. :V So I guess I don't have time tonight after all. Oops. Will watch tomorrow.
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Episode 23: Rei III-Tears
In the first scene with Misato listening to Kaji's voicemail over and over we can see that she owns a skateboard. I can't remember if we've seen that before and I commented on it then, but I find Misato skateboarding hard to picture. Between that, the poster of a sportscar over her desk, and the general messiness of her room I guess the takeaway is supposed to be that she's ultimately an immature person and isn't equipped to deal with this situation.
I guess everybody's having a terrible time. Asuka is depressed, Hikari has to deal with the awkwardness of having Asuka impose on her, nobody's around to talk to Shinji, and Ritsuko's cat died. This is all on-theme with the episode, I suppose. :V
Seele's like "Gendo, the things you have done recently are too bold" and he just ignores them to answer his phone and ends the conference. Bold indeed. Either he thinks he's too important for them to actually touch, or he already knows he's going to get End Of Evangelioned and he knows he's fucked regardless.
I've basically already said everything I have to say about Armisael. It's part of the trend of the Angels becoming increasingly literally biblical. It's also arguably the strongest Angel being the only one to successfully kill an Evangelion and a pilot. It continues the spiral/DNA theme that's been popping up a lot lately, giving a hint to the true nature of the relationship between Angels and each-other, and Angels and humans.
This episode also has one of the most significant additions from the director's cut in my opinion, or at least one of the most often discussed. Toward the end of the fight (if you can even call it that) between Unit 00 and Armisael, Unit 00 begins to mutate and this weird growth sprouts out of its back that contains elements of all of the dead Angels up to this point. Fandom has dubbed it the "Angel tower". It's a much more direct hint to the aforementioned relationship between the Angels, and also possibly indicates that the reason Armisael wanted to make contact with Unit 00 was that it was trying to deal with its own loneliness by trying to recreate another Angel somehow to be with.
It occurs to me that Rei II's death sort of parallels Asuka's death, with both of them and their Evas reaching up toward the sky in the last moment before they die. But Rei is reaching toward a vision of Gendo in a loving way, whereas Asuka is reaching out toward the Mass Production Evas trying to kill them.
Is the brief scene where Unit 00 briefly mutates into a giant naked white Rei with a halo for a moment right before it explodes new to the director's cut? I don't remember that at all. It's weird and I'm not completely sure what the point of it is. Does it indicate a connection to Quantum Rei somehow, or is it a result of Armisael's power?
I just noticed the full implications of the episode's title. It's the third numbered episode named after Rei following episodes 5 and 6, but it's also the introduction of the character Rei III. Interesting.
The scene of Ritsuko finding Rei's body is chilling. Ritsuko doesn't talk about her like she was a person at all, but whether that's professional detachment, a psychological defense mechanism, her own personal dislike of Rei, or a genuine belief that what she is isn't human is unclear.
Is the song Shinji's listening to on his tape deck the Gunbuster theme song? It's hard to make out, but it sounds very similar if it isn't.
That device with the glass tube and the metal brain that we see Rei hooked up to periodically is for backing up her mind, isn't it? I think I wondered earlier what it was for, but that seems pretty clear to me now. It stores Rei's memories in case a new one has to be put into use, so Rei III's memory goes up to the last time Rei was put into that thing. I can't remember when the last time we saw her in it was, although I'm not sure if we should assume that that was the last time it was used or if it's possible it was used since then and we just didn't see it.
There are STILL construction sounds outside of Rei's apartment. I suppose that's because the construction never stops in a city that's constantly being destroyed by monster attacks. This seems like a weird time to bring this up, but how long has it been since we first saw this place, anyway? Obviously it's impossible to tell exactly how long of a period of time Eva takes place over because the season never changes and we rarely get specific dates for current events, but I think general consensus is usually that the whole series takes place over around a year. I guess that means the first time we saw Rei's apartment was about a year ago, since we see it early on and there's not much in-universe time left before the end of the series. Even though Rei has changed some, her room has not changed almost at all. The only thing that's different is the lack of blood on her pillow.
And yet another thing that I'm realizing for the first time is the implication of Rei III's line "Are these tears? I'm seeing these for the first time, but it doesn't seem to me to be the first time". I think she's indicating that she has some of the memories Rei II had right before she died that shouldn't have been able to be saved. Whether this is because they share a soul (do they even share a soul? Or parts of one fragmented soul maybe? If the widely held "Unit 00's soul is Rei I" theory is true they should each have distinct souls, but maybe they're linked because of their shared origin) or because of something to do with Quantum Rei and that weird giant halo Rei I don't know, but it seems likely that that's what she's talking about here.
The Rei Factory scene is important for a lot of reasons. There's the obvious plot significance of revealing approximately who and what Rei is, but also the fact that Ritsuko continues to conflate Adam and Lilith in this scene, when she has no reason to lie. This indicates that she doesn't seem to know about Adam at all, and possibly never will. I've wondered a few times what Ritsuko does and doesn't know, and to me this seems to indicate that she knows less than I though maybe she did. If Gendo kept Adam from her then she doesn't know the full implications of his plan. There's also the much rumored but seldom seen alternate cut of this scene on the Japanese laser disc, which is the one cut of Evangelion I don't own and have never seen. I've been looking for it for years, but it tends to go for $300+ and I don't own a laser disc player.
Before now I had never even seen this scene, but I looked around a little further this time and found it on Youtube. So here it is, the rare missing footage from the Japanese laser disc: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKLyrhgNiVA
In the real version those images are visible in the background of the scene with all of the creepy floating Rei clones. I'm not going to take the time to try to figure each one of them out at this point since that seems like it would take too long, but it looks like a rough summary of the events of episode 21.
Episode 24: The Final Messenger
Aaaaah I don't want to watch that scene with little Asuka again, don't show me that again! Christ! Although this time I noticed she says something about not being lonely anymore "Even though I don't have a papa", so I guess that answers my question about where her dad is and whether or not the male voice talking over this scene the first time is him. I don't remember if she said that the first time, I don't think she did, but maybe I missed it.
The scene of Asuka in the bathtub is controversial, in the sense that it's unclear if she was trying to kill herself or if she was just laying there thinking. Due to the visual juxtaposition with her mother's suicide I think we are supposed to understand that she's attempting suicide. That also explains the fact that she's literally comatose at the beginning of End Of Evangelion a little bit more than assuming that she was just so despondent that stopped responding.
First appearance of Kaworu. I don't really have particularly strong feelings one way or another about him. He certainly leaves a lasting impact on the series for how briefly he's in it, but we don't learn almost anything about him. Was his life similar to Rei's, growing up in a lab? He seems to be better at talking to people and he seems to know what's going on far more than arguably anyone else in the series, so I'm inclined to think it wasn't. Based on the way he talks to Seele and the amount of information he has my headcanon is that they raised him more like an actual child, or at least had him raised that way by someone and had a lot of contact with him. He seems to be a partner to them or even one of them, rather than being a human tool like Rei.
I will forever associate Ode To Joy with this episode.
I notice that the sub I'm watching spells Kaworu's name "Kaoru". I've seen it spelled both ways, but the former more than the latter, and I believe the former is the one the official subs use.
I always forget how explicit the homosexual understones between Kaworu and Shinji are. These things are so often a product of fanon that it's easy for me to forget and assume that here, but no, Kaworu is very clearly making advances on Shinji. I don't see that much room for an argument that the intention is anything else. So retroactively I suppose that means the parallel between Kaworu taking Shinji's hand and Misato doing the same thing earlier probably implies impure intentions on Misato's part. Which is consistent with End Of Evangelion, of course. Whether that means that Shinji is attracted to Kaworu or is just flattered/shocked is a little more up for debate, but hey, who am I to deny the dreams of a million fangirls (and plenty of fanboys too I'm sure)?
I mentioned much, much earlier that I've always disliked Pen Pen because I don't think he fits well into the tone or aesthetic of Eva, but that there's one scene that sort of justifies his existence to me. The scene with Misato saying goodbye to him before she gives me to Hikari's family is that scene. It's not much, but Pen Pen is something for Misato to be able to give up to indicate that something serious is about to go down, and that she intends to get serious and follow through on the opportunity Kaji gave her. Maybe the same effect could have been achieved with her just thinking out loud or something, but I like this scene.
This is a weird observation and probably completely meaningless, but the scene with Kaworu talking to the monoliths at the lake opens with some shots of rubble seen through a web of downed power lines, and the shapes and color palette gave me a very strong impression of, once again, Gunbuster. I think it's more Anno's visual style than any kind of direct reference, but I see a lot of similarities between the composition of that shot and organic-mechanical metal bones and organs that are occasionally visible under Gunbuster's outer skin.
The scene with the monoliths at the lake is yet another controversial thing about this episode. Maybe it's an animation error or maybe it's a confounding element of the plot that I just don't understand the significance of, but there are 15 monoliths (including one numbered "SEELE 15 Sound Only") when there are only 14 members of Seele. What does that mean? I have no fucking clue.
The shot of Misato spying on Kaworu seems to indicate that the monoliths weren't visible to her. Unless she just spotted him the moment they disappeared, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Weird.
Hyuga sort of reveals his feelings for Misato, believing that he's going to have to self destruct the geofront at any moment, and she says "Thank you". I wonder, did she know he loved her this whole time? I imagine she probably did and just didn't care much, but by her own admission she's so desperate to have contact with anyone at this point that she would probably be happy to give him a chance now if she had the opportunity. I wonder if they would actually get along?
The fact that Rei was able to get down to Terminal Dogma that quickly on foot suggests to me that she can use her AT Field like Kaworu does now and just flew down there. Maybe not, since the bridge detected Kaworu's AT Field but didn't notice hers until the last moment, and Eva isn't ever terribly concerned with geography or the amount of time it takes people to get from place to place, but she clearly has some super powers now.
This episode's minute-long static shot (actually 57 or 58 seconds) is probably the absolute single most iconic image from Eva in my opinion. I think the only other contender is upcoming, and both of them are certainly referenced and parodied often. This shot was the desktop wallpaper on my computer for several years.
There's another brief shot of a power line, this time in silhouette, that looks strikingly organic to me. It's like a nerve cluster or something. Classic Anno visuals, it's really interesting and effective.
The director's cut interestingly replaces the original next episode preview, which has images from episode 25, with a preview for the first half of End Of Evangelion. A bit telling, maybe?
Taken by themselves I don't like either of these episodes quite as much as 23 and 24. Obviously they're absolutely essential and the series doesn't work without them, and there's no question that they're great, but I think they're just a little bit too occupied with tying up loose ends and covering story ground to quite work as stories themselves. The flow of them is a little weird.
The retrieval team finds something in her Entry Plug, but Ritsuko orders to keep the findings a secret and to destroy every related thing. Is there something in the Director's Cut that elaborates on what they found here? I imagine something Rei clone related. Oh right I just remembered, the 'Angel Tree' is also only in the Director's Cut edition isn't it? I forget what context that appears in.
I'm pretty sure they just found Rei's body. Possibly it was mutated from contact with Armisael, but I don't think so. Pretty sure Ritsuko's reaction just had to do with the fact that she knew Gendo was going to get another body ready, so she had to cover up Rei II's body to keep people from realizing what was going on.
We get Rei III. And apparently the committee doesn't know about the Rei clones because Fuyutsuki says her 'being alive' might cause trouble with them. Either that, or it's the same as before when Shinji was contacted by Leliel and they wanted to interrogate him about that too. Because if they have Kaworu clones, then it wouldn't make sense for them not to know that Rei clones may also exist. Unless they don't know that she has the soul of Lilith. Which, how'd they get that again? They got the soul of Adam from Second Impact, how'd Gendo get Liliths?
The main thing about the Adam/Lilith confusion and subterfuge that I'm still not clear on it what Seele does and doesn't know. Do they know that Adam and Lilith are separate things? They know that Gendo has something in his basement, and they don't seem to know about the Adam embryo. The fact that Kaworu is surprised to find Lilith instead of Adam in Terminal Dogma makes me think Seele thought Lilith was Adam just like Misato and Ritsuko do, but where do they think Gendo got it from?
As for where Gendo got Lilith's soul, I'm guessing he used whatever was learned from Second Impact plus the principle Kaworu talks about by which he can synchronize with anything that doesn't have a soul to forcibly syphon bits of Lilith's soul off into waiting vessels. Or maybe her entire soul, that much is unclear.
So Ritsuko's little story about mankind finding god was pretty interesting. It would almost seem like they found a god before Adam, and then tried to resurrect it which became Adam. Gendo did say they called the Giant of Light Adam, which means that there was some other being before it? Shinji asks if the Evas are humans which surprisingly enough is answered with a 'yes' from Ritsuko. Which is odd, but ok.
I think the god she's talking about is Adam.
As to what she means by saying the Evas are human, I'm guessing she's referring to their human souls. Or she mistakenly believes that the Angels and the humans are all products of Adam, since she seemingly isn't aware of the difference between Adam and Lilith.
Has to be pulled from somewhere. Some... Room of Guf? Is that what it is? I remember Kaworu saying something about closing the doors of Guf in the 3rd Rebuild movie.
The doors of Guf/chamber of Guf was mentioned in that director's cut scene of the security footage of second impact, and will be mentioned again in End Of Evangelion (I believe the doors of Guf are literally Quantum Rei's hand vaginas, which suck up all of the human souls from the Earth). If I'm not mistaken "Guf" is a concept in Kabbalah that refers to the place where unborn souls reside before they enter human bodies and are born on Earth. Or something like that. I believe it's also featured a couple of times in Rebuild but I don't remember the specifics.
So Kaworu may be my favorite character, or at least the favorite of the children.
Interesting. Shinji is definitely by far my favorite this time around, but I've just never really given Kaworu that much thought because of how little screen time he gets.
I believe there was some controversy about what Seele wanted to do with sending in Kaworu. From the TV version, it seems like they wanted to get the Angel defeating business over with already and sent him in to Nerv to get defeated. I vaguely remember there being more ambiguity with Seele's intentions with their conversation with Kaworu in the Director's Cut edition.
In their conversation in the director's cut the Seele council members talk about how Gendo is planning to "open Pandora's box" just like Seele themselves are planning to, but unlike them he intends to close it before Hope can come out. So to take them at face value, they seem to know that Gendo has some kind of apocalyptic plan, but they don't believe he has the best interest of humanity at heart like they do so they have to stop him from enacting his vision.
Kaworu reveals that everyone has an AT Field, which must have been a bit reveal for real time viewers. Then later says that he wanted Shinji to stop Unit-01 because otherwise it might have "lived on with her"? ? ? ? ? Who living on with whom?? Unit-02 and Asuka? Unit-02 and her mother? Her mother and Asuka?
I interpreted that as "he will use her to go on and live" rather than "he will live on alongside her". I think he's saying that he's glad Shinji defeated Unit 02 because now he can't use it as a tool to defend himself.
I wonder what's special about the Angels when they contact Adam that differs from Evas (Unit-00) coming in contact with Adam that doesn't cause Third Impact? Although... 'Adam' is actually Lilith, which could be why Unit-00 contacting Lilith doesn't do anything. So if Unit-01, based on Lilith I believe? comes in contact with Lilith, would that cause something? Would be funny if it could cause a Third Impact for the Angels that wipes them all out, as opposed to a Third Impact for humans which wipes out all Lilith-based life.
My tenuous understanding of this is that all of the Evas are made from Lilith to varying degrees, but Unit 01 more than the others (I don't know if that means Unit 01 has more flesh and less machine, or more similar DNA or what). Remember that an Eva coming in contact with Lilith does indeed cause Third Impact in End Of Evangelion, although I think the Eva has to be awoken at the time or the restraints on it prevent the contact.
As for Angel Third Impact versus human Third Impact, my understanding of that is that Third Impact is for all beings except the initiator, so in theory it should effect all Angels and all humans except whoever comes in contact with whatever to trigger it in the first place.
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Ep 25: Do you love me? Beginning of the End/Instrumentality Begins
I haven't actually fully watched either of these last 2. I don't think I can handle 2 at once, so I'll do one today and another tomorrow.
I can't really say much. It's a lot of self-evident character explorations. The really new stuff is Misato's introspection since we never were able to get that in the series. Though it was shown previously that she split from Kaji after she realized he reminded her of her father. I think there was some subtle thing about Misato trying to find her father in him, but here they really play out her Oepidus complex. Also interesting shot of her shot to death, which gets explains in EoE.
Seems the man and woman speaking over the still of child-Asuka was her father and step-mother. And he didn't love her actual mother, so Asuka sided with her mother-mother. Would explain that thing about not needing her father or whatever earlier.
The characters around Shinji accuse him of wishing for destruction, death, and a return to nothing, a world where no one could be saved. He says it was because no one saved him. This gets to explain his deeper (more subconcious?) motivations for initiating Third Impact in EoE, which I appreciate.
And all this the theme of 'the people within others' hearts' is played with. It reminds me of Leliel's words again. I guess Leliel really was serious. But this, this theme that finally becomes literal ?or as literal as it could be in this Instrumentation psycho realm? I guess Leliel really was serious when speaking. It makes me wonder if the Angels themselves have the each other within their hearts. It would almost help to explain the Angel tree/tower that Armisael made. Except that would ruin Armisael's loneliness a bit I guess. It also makes me wonder when the others-within-the-heart is born. When they meet? If so, the Angels we assume never met, so that would almost debunk my little theory.
Oh yeah, even Rei is interrogated by 'Rei', this might be the quantum Rei thing you talk about? Makes more sense here, since Third Impact is finally initiated.
I've basically already said everything I have to say about Armisael. It's part of the trend of the Angels becoming increasingly literally biblical.
Might have missed asking, can you elaborate?
Is the brief scene where Unit 00 briefly mutates into a giant naked white Rei with a halo for a moment right before it explodes new to the director's cut? I don't remember that at all. It's weird and I'm not completely sure what the point of it is. Does it indicate a connection to Quantum Rei somehow, or is it a result of Armisael's power?
It's not in the TV version for sure. But that's interesting, that would find a parallel in the Rebuild movies when Zeruel ate Unit-00/Rei. In both cases it's Rei and and Angel 'combining'. And then doesn't Rei turn into the Giant Naked Rei in EoE when Rei combines with the embryo Adam? Seems to always be that whenever Rei combines with or is combined with an Angel, she/it turns big and naked. Oh yeah, Kaworu briefly showed up as big and naked in EoE as well. I guess the Adam (or angel) and Lilith merging always results in the more dominant of personalities showing bigger. Those worthy of causing the Impacts or whatever I suppose.
And yet another thing that I'm realizing for the first time is the implication of Rei III's line "Are these tears? I'm seeing these for the first time, but it doesn't seem to me to be the first time". I think she's indicating that she has some of the memories Rei II had right before she died that shouldn't have been able to be saved. Whether this is because they share a soul (do they even share a soul? Or parts of one fragmented soul maybe? If the widely held "Unit 00's soul is Rei I" theory is true they should each have distinct souls, but maybe they're linked because of their shared origin) or because of something to do with Quantum Rei and that weird giant halo Rei I don't know, but it seems likely that that's what she's talking about here.
Huh, yeah, that's interesting. Never thought about that. And cool find with that video.
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Might have missed asking, can you elaborate?
Oh yes, I did miss that. What I mean by that is that the last few Angels are the most consistent with descriptions of Angels and their particular classifications in the Bible.
Arael resembles a Seraphim, the highest order of angels in some hierarchies. Seraphim are creatures with three sets of wings that are associated with the sun, and Arael arguably has three sets of wings (it's hard to tell) and appears to be made of light.
Armisael is consistent with the Ophanim, which are described as "wheels of burning fire". Technically Ophanim are usually depicted as two nested wheels forming a sphere and are described as being covered in eyes, but I don't think the resemblance is an accident.
The other Angels draw their visual identities from a bunch of different places (for example, the eye motif seen on Matarael and Sahaquiel is commonly considered a reference to Nadia: The Secret Of Blue Water, one of Anno's earlier anime) while these last few seem to be the only ones directly inspired mostly by their namesake.
It's also worth noting that Zeruel, while not based on anything from the Bible visually as far as I know, is named after a specific angel from Abrahamic lore. Zeruel was the angel sent by God to help David slay Goliath. Some of the others may be named after specific angels from lore, but I'm not aware of it if they are. Their names are all legit Hebrew and do have meanings consistent with their powers and themes, but I don't know if they draw those names from pre-existing mythological angels like Zeruel does.
Edit: Take all of this with many grains of salt by the way. I'm not a biblical scholar and I've never even read the Bible, the Talmud, or any other applicable text. This is all sketchy unsourced stuff I've picked up or been told in the course of Eva fandom.
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I will also be doing one episode today and one tomorrow because I fell asleep and now it's too late for me to get both in. Also I have no idea how long to expect this to take.
Episode 25: The World Ending
So I don't know if this is really quite the place to talk about this yet, but I think it's important in how I choose to understand these episodes. One of the biggest questions people ask about Eva, and one of the most contentious, is "Are TV ending and End Of Evangelion different endings?". Are they mutually exclusive, or are they just the same events from different points of view? The TV ending could be interpreted as an elaboration on the journey Shinji goes on in the last half of EoE, or it could be seen as an entirely separate journey. I know people who strongly believe both ways, and in my case I believe that everything up until the ending is consistent, or may as well be, but the ultimate outcomes are two separate things. In the TV ending Shinji's line of thought causes him to embrace instrumentality, and in End Of Evangelion he rejects it, but I don't see any reason why everything up to that point shouldn't be considered applicable to both versions of the story. That being the case, I think everything we're seeing in these two episodes is taking place after Unit 01 merges with the Tree Of Life, meaning that Rei has already become Lilith, Shinji has already seen Asuka and Misato die, and everyone's souls have been vacuumed up by Third Impact. This means that I feel like I can't really evaluate this episode on its own merits, I can only look at it as it relates to the events of End Of Evangelion. Which is too bad, I'm interested to see how much sense it makes without that extra context, but I don't think I can be the one to pull that particular analysis off.
The very first thing in this episode is the text "THE REASON OF EXISTENCE. WHY WE ARE ALLOWED TO BE HERE". Is that just a weird translation, or is that the actual intent of the text? That's a very strange and, to me, kind of sad way to phrase the "why are we here?" question.
I wonder how much of the animation in this episode is actually new. Shinji walking in that foggy place with all the dead trees is new, or at least the decor is, but I kind of suspect all of the character animation is just stripped from other episodes.
So I'm not certain, but I believe the voice interrogating Shinji is the interface of the Tree Of Life trying to figure out what he wants it to do. Due to Gendo's scheming he has been given control over the progenitor race's world-making machine, but he doesn't realize that so he's not using it right. I'm not sure what the other characters speaking to him are supposed to be though. When Rei talks to him it sort of makes sense that it could really be her, since she is now in all times and places simultaneously, including this one. When Asuka talks to him though is that the real Asuka('s soul), or just an image created by the Tree Of Life from Shinji's thoughts and memories to try to straighten out his intentions?
For Asuka's segment we get an establishing shot of Unit 02 under the lake, meaning that if my Tree Of Life theory is correct this part takes place out of sequence with Shinji's part. In Asuka's case the person questioning her is not the Tree Of Life interface, but Rei, presumably post-Lilith time traveling god Rei. Part of quantum Rei's job is to harvest souls, and we see in End Of Evangelion that she does that in different ways with different people, but mostly she tries to entice them to give up their souls with something that they may find comforting. I don't think that's what she's doing here though. She seems to be trying to get Asuka to wake up and fight the MP Evas, presumably to buy Shinji enough time to reach the final stages of Gendo's plan. This is something of a time paradox, so presumably Shinji dies or is otherwise unable to complete the plan without Asuka's help, but Rei is still able to merge with Lilith, causing her to alter the past by speaking to Asuka in order to help Shinji and by extension Gendo. I think.
So what does that make Rei's segment? There are a lot of Reis to go around, so the idea of two of them talking to each other isn't that surprising. But which two? Given that Asuka's segment is out of sequence with Shinji's, and we aren't given much of an establishing shot of Rei's segment, it could take place at basically any time. My best guess, and this is a HUGE stretch, is that this case is similar to Asuka's, where quantum Rei is unsatisfied with the outcome of Instrumentality for some reason and is speaking to someone in the past to alter how things play out to try to get a better ending. In this case though she's talking to herself. I think this is Rei III as Lilith speaking to Rei III at some point shortly before she becomes Lilith. I don't know what she's trying to convince herself to do differently. Maybe she let Gendo live the first time and decided that he should die, or maybe she used the Tree Of Life herself instead of letting Shinji do it.
During Rei's conversation with herself there are periodic shots of her sitting in a folding chair with a spotlight on her. The spotlight is white, so it looks like the moon. When we see Asuka in a similar position her spotlight is red, and is reminiscent of the sun. For Shinji it's purple, possibly representing Unit 01 or the colors of Rei and Asuka combined, and in his case there are patterns on the floor or in the light that make it look like the Earth.
Rei's segment ends with Gendo telling her that "This is the day for which you were created" followed by the text "AND SO THE HUMAN INSTRUMENTALITY PROJECT BEGINS". That actually makes me a lot more confident in my guess about what's happening in Rei's segment, since the timeline is consistent with my guess. This does indeed seem to be happening in the moments before Rei merges with Lilith.
The shots of Ritsuko and Misato's bodies are a bit inconsistent with the events of End Of Evangelion. Misato doesn't actually die from a bullet wound (although she's clearly dying), she actually dies in an explosion of some kind, I think from a grenade. This might just be the result of End Of Evangelion being a few years out and a few things changing during that gap, or it might be telling of the fact that the events of the two different endings are actually different. In this ending Misato appears to be lying dead in front of a wall as opposed to in front of the elevator she puts Shinji on in the movie, maybe indicating that she actually dies in a different place doing something different. This might be changed by Rei tinkering with the past. I wonder if that's supposed to indicate that these two endings are divergent at an earlier point than I thought?
So far my theory about who is talking to who when seems to be mostly staying consistent, so if that's the case what does Misato's segment mean? If I'm right, my guess is that this is quantum Rei in the process of harvesting Misato's soul by showing her something that will make her want to surrender it. That would mean that all of the people who speak to her except Rei are images created from her memories, or maybe Rei in the forms of different people.
We see Misato sitting in the same folding chair we've seen all of the other characters in as she's being questioned, but this time the spotlight is white again. It's not the same solid white moon as Rei, though. This time it has a pattern that looks like water, or maybe fog. I don't know if this is further evidence that Rei is the one doing the questioning, but it might be.
Child Misato's clothing is bizarre. She's wearing a tiny child overcoat. Weird.
Shinji's judgmental face when he's watching Misato and Kaji having sex made me laugh. One eyebrow is ever so slightly raised.
Back to Asuka, and it's unclear if this segment is a continuation of the earlier one with Asuka or if it's a new thing. I'm inclined to guess it's a new session, since the framing is different. I think Asuka is now dead or dying, and this is another case of Rei harvesting her soul by convincing her that she wants to give it up.
I screencapped the image of Asuka's mother holding that doll. I want to compare it to Asuka's doll in Rebuild 2.0 to see if it's possible to tell if it's the same doll. I don't know if I expect it to be or not, but it'll be interesting to see.
There's an additional bit of weird framing at the end where it seems like Shinji has been watching the scenes with all of the other characters this whole time. Does that mean that Rei hasn't been involved after all, and that all of this has been Shinji using his omnipotence to see into the minds of his acquaintances to try to gain some insight into what he should do next? Maybe. Or maybe the Rei stuff still makes sense, but Shinji is viewing that process. Hmm... I'm still not sure I know what's going on, but I think I might be close. Maybe with the next episode I can definitively make a guess. Or maybe I'm completely delusional, I can't tell at this point.
Do you have any insight into what watching this episode without trying to relate everything back to End Of Evangelion is like? Does it make any sense at all? I really feel like I can't tell any more, but I think that is kind of important to consider. A lot of people hate the TV ending, and I can kind of see why. It's about as clear as mud even with tons of additional details that would have been unavailable for years after it aired. But then again, maybe I'm just making it way more complicated than it should be.
Yeah, there's no way I could do the last episode right now. That took forever and was exhausting. I'm excited to get to it tomorrow though to see if my theories hold any water and to see if I can figure out what actually is going on.
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Alright, last episode!
Episode 26: The Beast That Shouted Love At The Heart Of The World
This episode's title is taken from the title of a Harlan Ellison short story. I can't decide what I think of Harlan Ellison, I don't know if he's smart or trashy. Probably both I guess. I haven't read the short story in question so I don't know what it's about. I assume it relates somehow.
Oh, so this episode takes place in 2016. I didn't realize. That doesn't actually give us much information that we didn't have before, but it might be a useful clue to maybe figuring out a rough timeframe.
So if we weren't able to piece it together before now (and I think we probably did technically have enough information to figure it out as of last episode) the truth of what the "Human Instrumentality Project" actually involves is finally revealed. It will eliminate the boundaries between people's minds, creating one cohesive "humanity" with no individual identities, or something like that. That's certainly not a strictly terrible ambition. If this is what Gendo was after the whole time then I don't think there's any way we can call him evil. Misguided certainly, his vision of humanity sounds a bit too Junji Ito for me, but clearly his heart is sort of in the right place. I'm sure he's doing this for selfish reasons but clearly there are people who want him to succeed.
I don't know if I think the people talking to Shinji at this point are actually there or not. I'd guess they probably aren't and Shinji is just imagining them or being tricked, but I'm not confident about that.
Shinji says that "If I run away, nobody will respect me", then we get a string of people not respecting him even though he didn't run away. The poor kid can't win. I wonder if anyone would have respected him if he had run away? Misato might have, on some level. He probably wouldn't have respected himself for doing it, at least not right away. But maybe if he had run away he could have escaped from Gendo's abusive influence and might have learned to respect himself eventually. Does Shinji respect himself by the end of the series though? I don't really know. If he does then maybe Gendo's abuse is part of the reason for that.
There doesn't really seem to be anything additional in this episode that confirms or denies my theory from the last episode yet. I guess the part with Shinji experimenting with the different versions of reality is a strong confirmation that he's fused with the Tree Of Life at this point, but I don't see anything that explains what was going on with any of the other characters in the previous episode.
I feel like I should have something to say about the weird alternate reality high school comedy fantasy sequence, but I don't. I'm glad it's here anyway. And I guess it goes to show that these shows never change ever. Aside from the color palette being a bit more muted than contemporary anime this might as well be a modern parody.
I've said a number of times that different parts of the series were nearly the most iconic thing in Evangelion, and the very last scene of the series was always the thing I had in mind as being the most iconic. It's probably the single part that I see homaged and referenced most often, and when I think of Evangelion it's among the first things I think of.
Now that I look closely at it, though, I'm not sure I fully understand what happened. This episode is widely regarded as being the ending in which Shinji follows Gendo's plan and carries out Instrumentality, but does he? This isn't what I would have expected to see based on what we're told Instrumentality will be, and his thought process leading up to it seems to break free of his earlier mindset that wanted to lose its ego. All of the characters at the end still seemed to be defined individuals. Why would a Shinji who finally understands that he has value as an individual want to throw away his new sense of identity, and why does he still seem to have it afterward? Maybe my understanding of what Human Instrumentality is supposed to be is just inaccurate.
I really identified with Shinji's journey in this episode, even in a way that I didn't last time I watched it. It occurs to me that he doesn't really receive a satisfying solution to his doubts and problems. He never gets a reason why he deserves to have self respect even though he doesn't think he's earned it, but rather he learns about the problems that other people have and gains perspective more than answers. That seems like a realistic and grounded way to end his arc, and I actually find it pretty satisfying even though it objectively isn't. Where that ultimately gets him is slightly unclear to me, but I appreciate the journey.
For the most part I think this ending is widely liked. Most of the people I know prefer this ending to End Of Evangelion (I am not one of them). But at best it's very controversial, and I can see where that controversy comes from. I can get something out of this ending with the context of End Of Evangelion behind it, but had this been the last piece of Evangelion that I thought I would ever be getting I don't think I would like it very much. Nobody's journey feels quite complete yet.
So with that we have to figure out what we're going to do now, viewing-wise. I'm going to watch End Of Evangelion next obviously, but there's no way in hell I could do the whole movie in one sitting. That would take many, many hours and I don't think I could pull it off. The movie is divided into two "episodes", so I guess we could watch those over the course of two weeks. Doing that even divides the movie up into two ~45 minute segments, which is about the length of two episodes each. There's also Death And Rebirth to consider, and I'm inclined to just skip it. I don't think it has much merit at this point. Maybe I'm just biased against clip shows, but I don't remember it being especially coherent or well edited and all of the important parts made it back into the series. As far as I know the only remaining part that isn't integrated into the director's cut is the concert scene, and I'm pretty sure that isn't canon because it involves characters being in the wrong places at the wrong times to be able to fit into the timeline in any way.
This has been quite a journey so far. I feel like I've learned a lot so far. I still have questions left, mostly regarding Lilith and Seele, but I think End Of Evangelion should at least help address those. I love EoE, so I'm looking forward to revisiting it again.
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The very first thing in this episode is the text "THE REASON OF EXISTENCE. WHY WE ARE ALLOWED TO BE HERE". Is that just a weird translation, or is that the actual intent of the text? That's a very strange and, to me, kind of sad way to phrase the "why are we here?" question.
What the text actually says is:
Reason of existence, Raison d'?tre
A reason to be here / A reason to exist / Why we are allowed to be here / Why we are allowed to exist / etc
It's essentially saying the same thing in three different, redundant ways. Goes with the whole Rei repeating the same thing multiple times to dig further at the question sort of thing that's going on now.
Do you have any insight into what watching this episode without trying to relate everything back to End Of Evangelion is like? Does it make any sense at all? I really feel like I can't tell any more, but I think that is kind of important to consider. A lot of people hate the TV ending, and I can kind of see why. It's about as clear as mud even with tons of additional details that would have been unavailable for years after it aired. But then again, maybe I'm just making it way more complicated than it should be.
What exactly is happening in-context and how we got there is mystifying, but the actual content itself isn't confusing. It plays out like an in-depth psychoanalysis of each of the characters and how they all share the same sort of struggles. In other words, I don't know what happened in the background that led the episode into this sequence (other than, oh Third Impact must have started. But even this is from general outside knowledge, except when Gendo and a few other characters explicitly mention Instrumentation), but what's being shown isn't nonsensical. It's almost even a bit more straightforward than the Leliel episode because here we have characters talking amongst each other rather than Shinji and Angel?Shinji. Watching the second episode today made me wonder whether these were the actual characters or some weird psycho-projection of the characters from Shinji's viewpoint of the events of Instrumentation doing its work on his psyche, but other than that, it seems straightforward. Trying to glean the truth behind what is actually happening in-context from the little tiny nuggets of hints and truths the show scatters jealously is probably very much not-straightforward, but I'm not trying to do that like you are, with all the analysis about what phase of Third Impact we're at and Quantum Reis or interfaces of Tree of Lifes and whatnot. I don't know. The show allows for further examination from that angle but it doesn't seem to invite the viewer, or me at least, to try to have to pry open that can of answers. Just going along with the flow.
And anyway, I'm late but here it is, last episode.
Ep 26: Take care of yourself. The beast that shouted 'love' from the center of the world
I think we finally get an explanation, a direct one, of what instrumentality is, everyone melting together to fill in each other's cavities, gapes, and holes, their weaknesses.
I was always wondering why Shinji, a self-proclaimed coward, would have a mantra like 'musn't run away'. And then here they finally explain it's because he knows the pain of running away. He also says no one respected/will respected him if he does. I wonder if Gendo was always cold towards him, or he became more cold after he ran away. I wonder if Gendo also thought that 'resurrecting' Yui would allow his family to come back together again, though I find it a little romantic for it to be true.
Shinji rationalizes that because he hates himself, so everyone else must also be hating him.
There must be a gif of that cool segment of metamorphosing shapes.
And here is that romantic comedy sort of Evangelion scene. Oh it's so weird and bizarre. It's weird enough as it is to see all the characters being loose, generally upbeat, and off. The juxtaposing with everything else makes it even more accentuated and weird weird. Something feels so off. Like it's almost a parody, a mocking of the AU Evangelion spinoffs or fanfics.
And then Shinji recognizes/embraces his own self worth and decides he wants to continue to live and 'stay here'. Which sends cracks running across the space of his isolation, finally breaking him free, standing among his friends/family/colleagues, being congratulated, in a bright open sky above some planet. Really weird. EoE-wise, accepting his will to live on would break him free from Instrumentation and actually refortify his 'isolation', or at least the isolation of his personal ego. And I don't know what they're congratulating him on either. On finding his self-worth? It's a really happy end though, rather uplifting after everything even though I don't know what's going on in-context. Are these the actual characters? Did all the other characters also have to go through this? It did say 'Case of Shinji Ikari' at the beginning. Oh wait, the episode started with 'reason to live', and when Shinji found his self-worth and accepted his 'allowance' to remain, the sky fell and everyone applauded him. . . ...? I guess that was the point?
I really identified with Shinji's journey in this episode, even in a way that I didn't last time I watched it. It occurs to me that he doesn't really receive a satisfying solution to his doubts and problems. He never gets a reason why he deserves to have self respect even though he doesn't think he's earned it, but rather he learns about the problems that other people have and gains perspective more than answers. That seems like a realistic and grounded way to end his arc, and I actually find it pretty satisfying even though it objectively isn't. Where that ultimately gets him is slightly unclear to me, but I appreciate the journey.
Yeah I can agree with that. Seems more realistic that not all the answers are provided for every nagging bit of insecurity any individual might face or hold. Life does seem to be more about perspective than answers.
I'm down for whatever you have in mind. First time I watched EoE, I was so unable to grasp the flow of what was happening that it turned into some stream of consciousness sort of river of images that I barely remember now.
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And here is that romantic comedy sort of Evangelion scene. Oh it's so weird and bizarre. It's weird enough as it is to see all the characters being loose, generally upbeat, and off. The juxtaposing with everything else makes it even more accentuated and weird weird. Something feels so off. Like it's almost a parody, a mocking of the AU Evangelion spinoffs or fanfics.
I don't think Evangelion spinoffs or fanfics probably existed yet when this was shot, and especially not when it was written (although I suspect what was written was probably very different than what got filmed). This scene probably inspired tons of spinoffs if anything. Although it may very well have been a prescient reference to the kinds of fan fiction people tend to make as well as being an obvious jab at a different kind of anime. You could definitely read it as being a little mean-spirited, so I wonder if that says anything about Anno's taste. Does he look down his nose at school comedy anime, or is this intended as a loving tribute?
I'm reminded of the first chunk of Puella Magi Madoka Magica: Rebellion in a lot of ways (Madoka being, in my mind, the most direct spiritual successor to Eva). It's clearly a reference to a tamer kind of story, sort of an indictment of that kind of story, but also just a little bit genuine.
I'm down for whatever you have in mind. First time I watched EoE, I was so unable to grasp the flow of what was happening that it turned into some stream of consciousness sort of river of images that I barely remember now.
Yeah, EoE is weird. I think a lot of trouble people have with it comes from the juxtaposition of the fairly straightforward first half with the much-less-straightforward second half, and the way I intend to watch it for this project those pieces will be kept separate. Not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing.
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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.
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I'm sick today and yesterday so I won't be doing that today. It sucks since I actually had stuff to do :V ohhh welll
I don't think Evangelion spinoffs or fanfics probably existed yet when this was shot, and especially not when it was written (although I suspect what was written was probably very different than what got filmed). This scene probably inspired tons of spinoffs if anything. Although it may very well have been a prescient reference to the kinds of fan fiction people tend to make as well as being an obvious jab at a different kind of anime. You could definitely read it as being a little mean-spirited, so I wonder if that says anything about Anno's taste. Does he look down his nose at school comedy anime, or is this intended as a loving tribute?
I'm reminded of the first chunk of Puella Magi Madoka Magica: Rebellion in a lot of ways (Madoka being, in my mind, the most direct spiritual successor to Eva). It's clearly a reference to a tamer kind of story, sort of an indictment of that kind of story, but also just a little bit genuine.
Oh I'm sure they didn't exist yet. Haven't seen any of the Madoka movies, but from the little I've read about them, I know what you mean. It just feels like a mockery of them, whether retroactively watching it or in actuality. A lot of what makes the characters complex and interesting is necessarily stripped out and instead what you get is high school romantic teen comedy feat. Evangelion. The genuine part of what you mention for me stems from the fact that I want the characters to take a break from all their problems and enjoy themselves. A bit of a duality.
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Oh I'm sure they didn't exist yet. Haven't seen any of the Madoka movies, but from the little I've read about them, I know what you mean.
Without spoiling anything or getting two detailed, Rebellion (I won't comment on the other movies, I'm not a fan of them but that's another can of worms) begins with a drastic shift in tone that seems to be a blatant reference to cheerful Madoka doujins that reduce the series to a run-of-the-mill magical girl story. That section is for a specific reason and it totally pays off, but it reads as a measured acknowledgement from Urobuchi to the kind of story some people seem to wish Madoka was, rather than what it is. It's not a slam on them or a celebration of them necessarily, but it uses them as a plot device in an interesting way. If you like Madoka at all I highly recommend watching Rebellion, it is stupendous.
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(http://i.imgur.com/QizuAJ5.jpg)
So the legends were true. It is real!
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?? ?? ?? do not get ??
Sorry for not doing this yet btw, I'm so late, I bet you've forgotten about the first part already :/ : ( :/
I haven't read your post yet because I was intending on watching it without any biases. I'll ask though, how many minutes in did you stop? Or maybe after some easily recognizable scene?
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?? ?? ?? do not get ??
The home video release of this movie has been delayed so many goddamn times that I basically stopped believing it was ever going to happen.
Sorry for not doing this yet btw, I'm so late, I bet you've forgotten about the first part already :/ : ( :/
I haven't read your post yet because I was intending on watching it without any biases. I'll ask though, how many minutes in did you stop? Or maybe after some easily recognizable scene?
Don't worry about taking a while to get to this, it's a pretty daunting project so you can of have to have a substantial block of free time to set aside to work on it. I know that can be hard to come by.
There's an obvious intermission in the middle, I stopped there. Specifically at 0:42:00.