Evangelion III: The End of Eva

This is the final part, on End of Eva. I hadn’t seen End of Eva when I wrote these, so there’s no reminscing.

November 30th, 2012: Episode 25’

The End of Eva is split into two parts, Episode 25’ and Episode 26’, probably because it was supposed to be the real ending of the TV series that would have been if money hadn’t run out. According to what I read on Wikipedia, this wasn’t the ending that Anno had originally planned for the series either; it was supposed to end with the Evas defeating the final Angel and Third Impact being initiated, but Anno somehow fell even deeper into depression and made this instead, and as anything was more satisfying than the ending of the TV series, it was accepted as the real ending.

At the opening of the movie, Third Impact has yet to occur, suggesting that the scene inside Shinji’s mind from Episode 26 actually takes place sometime during the movie (as Episode 25’ ends with Gendou getting ready to begin Third Impact). Shinji has sunk even lower into the depths of self hatred that he found himself in at the end of Episode 24. He goes to Asuka’s hospital room and tries to get her to wake up and call him an idiot like she always did, and make everything go back to normal, telling her that Misato and Rei scare him. (Rei is just a little more creepy than she ever was, so it must be that he now knows about her being a clone, and has seen all the other clones in the tank. He’s probably scared of Misato because of what she said to him at the end of Episode 24; Shinji found it cold-blooded and retreated from her even more, though I think she was probably trying to give him more confidence in his decision and spoke from a gladness that he was alive.) As he shakes Asuka, trying to wake her up, her blankets fall off and her pajama shirt is open. Asuka was naked when they found her, and the hospital staff just put her in a pajama shirt that wasn’t buttoned properly and a pair of panties; now she’s lying before Shinji, unconscious, with her breasts partially exposed. Shinji panics and then masturbates to Asuka; as he stares at his semen-covered hand afterwards, he whispers to himself “Saitei da”. The subtitles translate this as “I’m so fucked up”, which strikes me more as what the translators were thinking when they watched this scene than as a stylistically consistent way to translate this line; it’s not actually wrong, it just doesn’t sound like the way Shinji loathingly describes himself elsewhere in the series.

Now as to the meaning of this scene, that’s something that’s been endlessly discussed. I already knew this scene happened long before I thought about watching the movie because it was so controversial among fans. Personally, I think that over the series, Shinji has been slowly coming to a greater awareness of sexuality. I conjecture that Kaworu pushed him over the edge, to a point where he became aware of both his latent sexuality and the possibility of romance. Of course, Shinji is an incredibly confused and unstable person, not to mention just a fourteen-year-old boy; becoming aware of these things in a way just made it worse for him because he doesn’t know how to deal with them, and he has as little guidance in doing so as he did for any other part of his life. (Maybe even less, now that his relationship with Misato has been cut off.) In this scene, Shinji is even more confused than ever, feeling alienated from Misato and Rei and hopeless about the future. He’s at the point where he’s trying to shake awake the comatose Asuka just so he can feel like something is normal again. And Kaworu may have been the one who made Shinji aware of his sexuality, but Asuka was clearly the one who awakened it; from early in the series she was teasing Shinji with her body, and a few times even teased him with the possibility of romance, as when she kissed him. Now Shinji is aware of what those feelings are, and seeing Asuka again probably brought them all back. Unable to control himself and unaware of what’s appropriate, he masturbates to her. But Shinji also has strong repression, stemming from a feeling that he’s too worthless to be loved. It’s possible that when Shinji insults himself, he isn’t even commenting on the morality of masturbating to a comatose girl, but rather on the morality of masturbating in general; his strong repression might be giving him a feeling of horror at what he’s done.

Seele decides that with the Lance of Longinus gone, they can’t use Lilith to initiate their plan, so they are going to use Unit 01. Gendou doesn’t want to let this happen, so he battens down the hatches against Seele’s imminent attack. Seele tries to seize control of the Magi so it can get access, but Gendou gets Ritsuko out of imprisonment to fortify them against incursion, so Seele uses the Japanese government to send a JSSDF attachment to take Nerv Headquarters by force. The soldiers run through the halls, shooting everyone, looking for the Eva pilots. Misato knows they’ll kill the pilots and orders them put into the Evas for safety. It’s not clear why they intend to kill the pilots, but presumably the pilots aren’t necessary for Seele’s plan, making them dangerous, since they could use the Evas to fight back and would be impossible to defeat with conventional weapons. Misato has Asuka put into Unit 02 (still comatose) and puts Unit 02 at the bottom of the lake above the Geofront. She orders Rei found and goes to get Shinji herself, from where he’s huddling under a staircase being miserable. Three soldiers are about to kill Shinji when Misato finds him; Misato kills them and bodily drags him through the halls of Nerv towards the Eva launch bay.

As she drives him through the Geofront, Misato tells Shinji what she has learned about Nerv’s and Seele’s master plan. Second Impact was purposefully initiated by mankind to return Adam to an embryonic stage so there would be enough time to put the plan into action. (This also explains why it conveniently took place in Antarctica, where there was almost no one around to be killed; it’s unclear whether the conspirators knew how much damage would be done to the rest of the world as a result.) The Angels are the children of Adam and Lilith; each one was a prototype built on the way to creating humanity, the 18th Angel (in which case it’s odd that the Angels get further and further from humanity as they go—the third Angel was vaguely humanoid, the fourth was at least octopus-like, then we had a shark, a shark that lives in a volcano, a microorganism, a floating diamond that shoots lasers, a pool that leads to another dimension, an orbital mind-rapist, and then suddenly Kaworu, followed by humanity. I guess Adam and Lilith decided at the last minute that the direction they were going in was all wrong, and maybe they’d been on to something with those earlier tries).

As Misato brings Shinji to an elevator up to the launch bay, she is shot; she manages to drag him the rest of the way to the elevator and then has a talk with him. Shinji says that he hates himself, that he’s horrible, and that he deserves to die. Misato tells him that part of being a man is making decisions, and that even if your decisions hurt others, you have to just learn from your mistakes. She gives him her cross necklace, then a deep kiss, and tells him that was an adult kiss and they’ll do the rest when he gets back, sending him off to the elevator. As she dies of her wounds, Misato comments that if she’d known how it would end, she would’ve changed her carpet like Asuka suggested.

This was another scene that was furiously analyzed for its subtext, but I think it’s actually rather simple: Misato wants Shinji to live. She loves him, as a son or younger brother or something of the sort. Whenever he’s nearly died or said he wanted to die, Misato always reacted very strongly to persuade him not to think that way (except in Episode 4, before their relationship was completely established, when she was a bit more lackadaisical about it). Early in the series, when Misato was discussing her relationship with Shinji with Ritsuko, Ritsuko commented that it was an example of the Hedgehog’s Dilemma: because Shinji and Misato were both hedgehogs who had puffed up their spines to keep other people away and avoid being hurt, it was hard for them to get close. But at this point, Misato has learned how to lower her spines, so that Shinji was able, even against his own will, to get close to her. Misato did whatever she thought would work to get Shinji up that elevator and on that Eva so he could live.

Shortly after Unit 02 is put in the lake, the JSSDF figures out it’s there and tries to destroy it with depth charges. They not only fail to destroy it, they also seal their own fates, because the explosions cause Asuka to finally awaken from her coma. Asuka resynchronizes with Unit 02, realizing that her mother’s soul is inside it and saying that she’s figured out the secret of the AT Field. In Episode 25, it was stated that the AT Field guards a corner of the human heart from intrusion by other humans. The Evas contain the souls of humans—specifically, they seem to contain the souls of mothers. A mother would allow her child to get inside the AT Field in her heart if she would allow anyone to do so. That’s the meaning of the synch ratio, and the reason why only children can pilot the Eva. Perhaps Shinji’s and Asuka’s high synch rates come from their being the natural-born children of the mothers whose souls are inside their Evas; other children can pilot Evas because the mother’s soul can be gotten to bond with children that aren’t their own, though possibly with less success. This could be the reason Rei was never as successful as an Eva pilot as Shinji and Asuka were, and would explain why Unit 01 (Yui) rejected her as a pilot.

In any case, Asuka wakes up, and begins to wreak havoc on the invading forces. All the missile batteries and artillery that have been futilely deployed against the Angels throughout the series are now deployed just as futilely against Unit 02. The JSSDF severs Asuka’s power cable, but with no ability to damage her, five minutes is more than enough to completely destroy their forces.

Seele deploys the production Eva series, all nine of them. These are white Evas with wings and hideous slobbering maws, piloted by the dummy plug. Just before Misato goes off to find Shinji, she orders Asuka to destroy them all (she also tells Shinji several times that Asuka is up there fighting, once again awake; this doesn’t appear to make much of an impact, but given how much he wanted to see her again in the first scene, it probably had some effect on him). In a beautifully choreographed and animated fight scene, Asuka destroys all nine of the production models, going into a frenzy of battle. She just barely manages to kill the last one before her battery runs out. But the production series (which run on Kaworu-based dummy plugs) have S2 organs, so they regenerate and gang up on the immobile Unit 02, flying down and tearing at its guts like a pack of carrion crows. Asuka panics, trying to get Unit 02 to move again; it manages to regain some movement (as when Unit 01 previously went berserk and managed to move with no power), but it’s taken too much damage to be able to fight.

Earlier in the movie, Rei left her apartment, leaving Gendou’s glasses on the floor, shattered. This seems to indicate that she decided her resentment for Gendou was greater than her love. However, when he comes down to the clone tank room and finds her, she seems as pliable as ever, and comes with him without speaking. They go to Terminal Dogma, where Lilith is, and find Ritsuko. Ritsuko holds a gun on Gendou and says that she reprogrammed the Magi without him knowing. What this was intended to do is unknown, because it doesn’t work; Ritsuko seems to think that Casper (her mother as a woman) betrayed her and chose Gendou. More likely Gendou just knew he couldn’t trust her anymore and double-checked her work. Either way, Gendou pulls out his own gun and says something that isn’t heard. Ritsuko calls him a liar, and he shoots her.

Shinji has been in the Eva launch bay for a while, but Misato filled the halls with some sort of red crap called Bakelite that was meant to bar passage for the JSSDF invaders, and he can’t get over to Unit 01. Unit 01 suddenly activates on its own and stretches its arm out so he can get to it. Shinji gets into Unit 01 and launches, knowing that his mother is with him inside it. He comes to the surface and finds the Eva production series chewing on the remains of Unit 02 like a pack of vultures. Shinji screams, and Episode 25’ ends.

I’m not sure how intentional this was, but at the time the movie came out, it was quite common for the main characters to be members of some special governmental organization established to fight some threat, and then have them be labeled traitors somehow at the end and be forced to fight the JSSDF. (For example, Blue Seed and Silent Mobius used similar situations.) A lot of people complained about the JSSDF invasion and everyone dying, but I don’t know how they could complain about this when the alternative is the boring, static ending of Episodes 25 and 26 that concludes absolutely nothing and leaves one with no idea what the point of it all was. I’m sure Rei fans were also annoyed that Rei barely appears and doesn’t even speak (or maybe not speaking is a plus for them).

Well, I’ll admit I’m a little disappointed that Misato is dead. She’s always been a character I really liked (for the fan-service when I was younger, and for her sweet relationship with Shinji now). But I think the remark about changing the carpet showed that Misato didn’t have any regrets about dying, because she felt that she managed to do what she wanted: convince Shinji to live, and to take control of his own life and ability to make decisions. Perhaps in a way she was trying to make up for how Nerv has treated him as a tool all this time by telling him that he didn’t need to be their tool. When Shinji says something about wanting Asuka, Misato tries to shame him, saying it’s pathetic how he’s hiding behind a girl. Maybe she was obliquely trying to tell him that Asuka needed his help. As we see by the end, Misato did accomplish what she wanted; Shinji goes to the Eva bay, launches, and freaks out when he sees the state of Unit 02.

I’m satisfied with the development that Asuka experienced as well. I don’t know if she’s gotten over the problems that drove her to the state she was in after Episode 23, but she did manage to make some progress on her issues with her mother and realize that her mother had been in Unit 02 protecting her all this time, and hadn’t abandoned her or replaced her with a doll. I liked seeing Asuka snap back and get some payback for what happened to her, and her fight scene with the Eva production series was the best fight scene in Eva. It was a perfect example of what a good fight scene should be; it had impact, artistry, and emotion, fully showing off a facet of Asuka’s personality, her combat lust, that we’ve seen hints of before, but never seen fully in action. Unlike Shinji, Asuka enjoys combat, and it’s obvious in the way she fights—with brutal grace, efficient movements, and savage power, where Shinji tends to fire a gun and then go berserk. A good fight scene needs an arc, and this scene had it, with Asuka’s initial victory, followed by the horrible, but equally artistic, spectacle of the production Evas tearing apart Unit 02 with their slobbering, fang-lined mouths.

December 1st, 2012: Episode 26’

This is it—the real conclusion to Eva (except for the several spinoffs and the Rebuild movies and the…okay, it’s not the real conclusion to Eva. But it is the end of the story that began in the TV series in 1996, even if it’s not the final word on it).

Episode 26’ is sort of a letdown after Episode 25’. I was hoping for something really cool that would live up to the promise of Episode 25’ and the rest of the series, but what we got was much closer to Episodes 25 and 26 of the TV series. It opens with Gendou plunging his hand into Rei’s naked breast, saying he has fused with Adam and telling Rei to return to Lilith and make him the controller of Third Impact. Rei, in a move forecast by her breaking of the glasses that Rei II had kept as a souvenir, betrays Gendou and fuses with Lilith without him, telling him that Shinji is calling her.

The production Evas do some kind of weird ceremony with Unit 01 that makes a big tree in the sky (the Tree of Life from the opening sequence of the series), and then get hijacked by Rei/Lilith, who is spreading all over the world and turning everyone into LCL. She turns the people in the command center to LCL by showing them dead people who were important to them—Hyuga sees Misato, Fuyutsuki sees Yui, and Maya sees Ritsuko. This scene is the one that establishes that Maya had a lesbian crush on Ritsuko; while Misato jumps all over Hyuga, Yui just smiles at Fuyutsuki in a friendly manner, so there isn’t a rule that the apparition has to act in a sexual manner. Fuyutsuki was even implied to have romantic feelings towards Yui; I think that may be a bit of a stretch–it seemed more like an avuncular protectiveness to me—but if he did, his dream Yui didn’t act on them. But Maya’s dream Ritsuko embraces her and rubs her sensually, causing her to evaporate blissfully into LCL as described adverbially in the preceding sentence.

We also see the old men of Seele chanting some weird chant about returning to the original form of humanity as they get absorbed. Dialogue from them and from Fuyutsuki suggests that Shinji, as the pilot of Unit 01, is the one who will get to control this whole process and decide the fate of humanity. Unit 01 gets absorbed into the giant Reilith that covers the whole earth, and Shinji ends up in the final psychobabble situation.

At first, it was good psychobabble, like in Episode 16. Shinji sees a vision of Misato during the incident in college that we heard about in Episode 21 where she spent an entire week having sex with Kaji, and reflects on how you never really know someone fully. Then he goes back into his own pathology, complaining that no one loves him or is ever nice to him. His dream visions of Asuka, Rei, and Misato from the “Do you want to become one with me” scene reappear and claim they are nice to him. He zeros in on Asuka in particular, isolating her in a dream version of Misato’s kitchen and fighting with her as Pen-Pen looks on, responding to her accusations that he didn’t know her at all that he couldn’t possibly know her, because she never talks about herself, and how unreasonable it is for her to expect him to know her when she won’t tell him anything. Rei appears and asks if he ever tried, and Shinji responds that he did, but couldn’t. Asuka asks how she could like someone who doesn’t even love himself. Shinji responds that maybe he could learn to love himself if she tried being nice to him, gets angry and smashes a chair, then wraps his hands around her neck and strangles her.

We go into some of the bad psychobabble—the stuff that doesn’t make sense and is boring—and see some pointless live-action scenes. Eventually Shinji appears at the bottom of an orange sea, naked and facing Rei. He asks where he is. Rei tells him it’s an ocean of LCL, a primordial soup in which all humanity is one and the AT Field has been destroyed. Shinji thinks back to the times when he was happiest—during the middle part of the series, from Episode 5 up to Episode 16 or so—and decides that he doesn’t want to stay in this world; he wants to go back to reality, and reestablish the AT Fields between people, even though he knows that he might just end up hating himself and being hated again. He sees Rei and Kaworu, who tell him that they represent the bonds between people and the words “I love you”, and also that anyone can come back to life if they have the will. We flash back to a conversation between Fuyutsuki and Yui in which Yui says that creating the Eva is the greatest achievement of man, because it will last forever, so even in billions of years when the Earth, Moon, and Sun have disappeared, the Eva will still be there. Shinji speaks to his mother and tells him he can go on without her, and we see Unit 01 floating through space, implying that Shinji let it go adrift and metaphorically cut his Oedipal bonds to his mother.

In the final scene of the series, we see Shinji washed up on a beach next to an ocean. The orange tint suggests it’s LCL, but the broken streetlights suggest that it’s the crater formerly known as Tokyo 3, created when Rei blew up Unit 00 during the series. He nailed Misato’s cross to a piece of driftwood and created a memorial for her, and is lying on the sand next to an unconscious Asuka. Shinji gets up, looks at Asuka, gets on top of her, and starts strangling her; Asuka wakes up and raises her hand, brushing it against his cheek, causing him to stop strangling her and start crying. As his tears fall on her face, Asuka says “Kimochi warui”, translated as “How disgusting”, and the movie ends.

Like much of the series, this conclusion was extremely strange. In its own bizarre way, though, I think it represented a happy ending. It’s subject to many interpretations, but here’s the one I saw.

Nothing about Seele’s motivations made any sense. That’s my conclusion. It was a writing mistake that couldn’t be rectified in the remaining time. Similarly, the whole theatrics with the Tree of Life at the beginning of Third Impact was just empty show. Presumably, the apparitions Rei created to turn the command crew into LCL were apparitions of people who had been let inside their AT Fields; this opened them to the possibility of uniting with all of humanity. Gendou’s motivation was to see Yui again, so he either knew about this or didn’t know that Yui’s soul, trapped inside Unit 01, would not be part of the Instrumentality. By the way, there was an interesting scene just after the start of Third Impact where Gendou reveals that he believes the same thing about himself that Shinji does—that he causes only pain to others, especially to Shinji, and that he was better off not being involved with Shinji. I guess that was his excuse for everything he’s done. It’s a terrible one. He mercilessly used Rei, creating the relationship he had with her just so she would do as he wished when the time came; Rei III has figured this out and tells him before betraying him “I am not your doll”. (I don’t remember if it was this Rei or Rei II who was in the elevator with Asuka when Asuka screamed, slapped Rei, and said she hated Rei for being doll-like, but that might have had something to do with Rei’s decision to betray him.) Shinji wanted Gendou’s approval to the point where his entire life revolved around getting even the occasional compliment, and awkward interactions like the visit to Yui’s grave together in Episode 15 could make his entire day. Even being a mediocre father to Shinji would have been a better course than what he did; Gendou’s detachment, with the apparent belief that it was best for Shinji, was the cause of all of Shinji’s pain.

But something positive, though highly ambiguous and strange, happened inside Shinji’s mind during the psychobabble sequence. The key scene is the scene with Asuka in Misato’s kitchen. Like most of the psychobabble scenes, this Asuka was probably the Asuka in Shinji’s mind, just a way for Shinji to talk to himself and make guesses about Asuka. He tries to blame Asuka for their emotional distance, saying that she expects him to understand her when she’ll never talk about herself and that if she tried being nice to him he might be able to learn to like himself. But Rei appears, acting as devil’s advocate, and asks if he ever tried understanding Asuka in spite of her refusal to tell him. Shinji claims that he did, but I think he realized two things during this scene: that he didn’t try hard enough, and that even as he was trying, he was also trying to keep himself closed off so that he could avoid being hurt if things didn’t work out. He gets angry, finally showing her some of his own true emotions, and finally strangles her, probably as a way to show how aggravated she makes him.

These realizations about himself seem to be key to Shinji’s decision to rebuild the real world, to separate humanity instead of keeping everyone in a single consciousness. All of this is also probably the movie’s reinterpretation of what happened at the very end of Episode 26 in the series, when Shinji decided that he was going to try and like himself a little more. As the one controlling Third Impact, Shinji makes the decision to return things to their original state, but it also seems that the rest of humanity isn’t automatically returned to separate consciousness. Each person has to make that decision for himself or herself.

I’m not sure how to interpret what happened with Asuka. It’s unclear whether she was alive or dead after Unit 02 was torn apart by the production series. The most straightforward interpretation is that she lived through that (damage to the pilot of an Eva seems to only be the feeling of the damage to the Eva, not actual damage, so Asuka felt like she was being torn apart by carrion birds, but the production series didn’t seem to go for her entry plug). When she appears on the beach in the final scene, she is injured—her head and left eye are bandaged. Shinji probably found her and tended to her wounds, waiting for her to regain consciousness.

Though I postulated above that the Asuka who appeared in the psychobabble scene was Shinji’s perception of Asuka, it’s actually also possible that it was the real Asuka. All of humanity’s consciousnesses had been combined. Asuka was inside an Eva, so that might have shielded her, but on the other hand, it might not have, and the Eva was torn into pieces, so that also might have made her susceptible to Instrumentality. The final scene then makes marginally more sense than it would otherwise; within Instrumentality, Asuka and Shinji talked. Shinji finally told her what he really felt. Seeing her again in real life, he strangled her, possibly to remind her about what happened, or just to try conveying his feelings this way in real life. Asuka, remembering what he said about wanting her to be nice to him, strokes his cheek. Her final line could also be interpreted several ways (and has been, by scores of fans). There are two I find convincing: Asuka was commenting on how pathetic Shinji was, one minute strangling her and the next minute weeping, and trying to be a little like her old self, or else she felt strange because she’s not used to being kind to people, and didn’t like the feeling because it was so foreign. It could be some of both. I’ll pass on some of the more outlandish theories, like the one that says the line was supposed to imply Asuka was pregnant and the two of them would become the new Adam and Eve, either because Shinji raped her in her sleep or because they had been there for a while and had been having sex. I think Rei’s line that the rest of humanity can return if they have the strength shows that Asuka and Shinji aren’t going to be the only people left in the world; they’re just awaiting the rest of humanity making the decision to return.

On the other hand, it is a little puzzling why Asuka was in the real world. Either being in the entry plug did shield her from being taken into Instrumentality, or, under what I posited above about the Asuka in the psychobabble scene being the real one, maybe she also came to a realization about herself and became the second person, after Shinji, to find the strength to return to the world. Her injuries and the fact that she’s in the bottom layer of her plugsuit suggest that she stayed in the real world through Instrumentality, or else that people’s physical states remain the same as before when they’re reconstituted from LCL. (Shinji didn’t seem to think the dead were going to come back to life, since he made a memorial for Misato, rather than awaiting her emergence from the sea of LCL.)

Regardless, I think the ending is actually a weird sort of positive turn for Shinji and Asuka. It seems they’ve decided to try and know one another and become close as they wait for the rest of the human race to return. Rei and Misato are both gone, but otherwise, it actually seems like the ending moved in the direction I said I’d like to see when I discussed Episode 26, with Shinji deciding to try and be a better person and become able to get close to the people around him. Letting Unit 01, containing his mother’s soul, float off into space, symbolized his decision to grow up and have confidence in his ability to make decisions, just as Misato tried to get him to do in Episode 25’. I think Asuka’s realization that her mother was inside Unit 02 watching over her from Episode 25’ also contributed to her turn for the positive; so much of her personality was dedicated to making sure that no one could forget her and replace her with a doll as her mother had (similar to how Shinji’s personality was built around the idea of making sure no one could hurt him by abandoning him as his father had), so realizing that her mother was watching her the entire time must have been good for her. As Shinji told Rei when he decided to leave Instrumentality, he and Asuka will probably have their disagreements as they try to become close, but he now has the ability to make it through.

Eva was such a weird series that any ending to it would have to be weird, but I thought The End of Eva was pretty good. Some of it dragged, and Seele’s motivation never made a damn bit of sense, but it also had some real high points and was a much more satisfying conclusion than Episodes 25 and 26.