Hogan Reviews

My review of the first half of the series can be found HERE.

The second half of Neon Genesis Evangelion is a hard one to crack. It has several episodes that are a bit more “introspective” which some fans try to spin as completely intentional but the creators themselves have admitted it was born out of necessity due to running out of budget and time. The most obvious example of this is the final two episodes, which when I first saw it back whenever it aired on the Sci-Fi channel I was pee’d off at how… nothing it was, but what about now? Has mentally maturing and being armed with the knowledge of what the ending was supposed to convey made me go easier on it? Let’s find out, with once again a “warning” that this is a very surface-level review, so no deep dive into religious themes and analysing every scene, I’ll leave that to those more engrossed in the series…

Episode 14 kicks off with half of it being a recap episode (start as you mean to go on!), then it focuses on Shinji trying out Rei’s Unit 00 and it violently flying into a rage, destroying a good chunk of the environment. Shinji is pulled from the machine and things go back to normal, including Rei taking the “Lance of Longinus”, a powerful weapon found in Antarctica where the Second Impact happened, down to the lowest level of NERV HQ. Episode 15 moves some of the characters forward a bit while not featuring any Eva action, and sees Shinji and Asuka get closer to each other via comical horny teen scenarios while Kaji and Misato rekindle their love which leads to the double revelation that Kaji is a spy sent to NERV to uncover its secrets and that he found a big one: NERV is keeping the first Angel, Adam, locked up in the bottom level of NERV, which understandably shocks Misato. Episode 16 is a classic example of the budget collapsing as it involves an Angel appearing and absorbing Shinji into itself resulting in a lot of the episode featuring Shinji going through an easily animated mental journey. The other EVAs defeat it and save Shinji, who is shaken by the experience.

“Shinji, as we stand here at our mother’s grave I feel I should tell you something…” “Yes Dad?” “You’re a constant disappointment and you should feel bad about letting me down all the time.” “*sigh*…”

Episodes 17 and 18 deal with some disasters at two American branches of NERV involving other EVA units, one of which is transported to the Japanese NERV and Shinji’s school friend Toji Suzuhara is selected as the pilot. Sadly the Unit is infected by a microscopic Angel that soon turns the suit into the EVA/Angel crossbreed with Toji still inside. It defeats Asuka and Rei leaving Shinji the last hope but he can’t bring himself to destroy it because he knows there’s an innocent pilot inside (not knowing it’s his friend) so his father-of-the-year Gendo turns off Shinji’s mental link and lets his EVA suit go berserk and rip the Angel to shreds, pilot and all. Having to watch this happen in the pilot seat was traumatic enough but when he sees who the pilot was it pushes Shinji over the edge even more leading him to leave NERV in an understandable huff once again the following episode. He soon returns though when another Angel appears and attacks NERV HQ directly, which Kaji reveals is because should an Angel reach “Adam” in the bowels of NERV it will trigger a “Third Impact” that humanity won’t survive. Shinji is nearly beaten but he allows his EVA to go berserk again, and this time has to watch as it not only rips the Angel to shreds but eats it as well.

Using devils to fight Angels…

The experience merges Shinji’s mind with the EVA itself, leading to another animation-stress-relieving mental journey where he seemingly meets the spirit of his mother. That’s followed by an episode that sees deputy commander of NERV Kozo kidnapped by rival group Seele and interrogated, leading to several flashbacks, before he’s rescued by Kaji who is then in turn killed by Seele, him having given all his findings about NERV to Misato and leaving her a voicemail message beforehand, showing he knew what was most likely to happen. Episode 22 deals with Asuka having a mental breakdown due to repeatedly failing, causing her synchronization with her EVA to fall and thus leading to more failure. It involves more animation-saving flashbacks covering her childhood and why she is who she is, so the good character development kind of simpler animation at least. It also sees a new Angel so powerful and so high in space that Rei ends up having to remove the Lance of Longinus from Adam and throw it at the new Angel, which while it does defeat it the Lance ends up floating away from Earth’s gravity well, therefore out of their reach. Asuka falls ever further into depression while Rei seemingly self-destructs herself to defeat another attacking Angel, but shows up later having “survived”, which leads to the first a few big revelations…

“Removing the Lance of Longinus” is a sentence I assume I’ll never write again…

As you can tell, and as I said in the opening paragraph, the show takes several breaks to delve deep into the psyche of the EVA pilots in order to free up the animating time, and sometimes it works but a lot of the time it kills the pacing a bit, especially the ending that I’ll get to in the spoilers. Character/mech design, voice work and OST are all still top notch though, so it doesn’t hurt the show as much as it could’ve (like the final episode of earlier Anno work Gunbuster I looked at a month or two back)

Overall Thoughts:

Everything looks more beautiful at sunset, even Evangelion duels!

The final half of the original Evangelion series is a bit of a mess. The designs, OST and voice work are still great but there are episodes where they stop all forward momentum to look at the mental workings of several characters that might be occasionally interesting but it’s so clear they’re just buying time because they’ve ran out money that it get annoying, and all these years later I still can’t stand the final two episodes, even if I now know what they were going for. While it may be fun to find one of many deeper dives into the series’ lore and give it a read/watch, for this more surface-level review I’m going to have to say I doubt I’ll be watching it again, as much as it’s a classic that influenced so many it just ends on such a weird and unsatisfying non-event that I doubt I’ll want to put it on again.

We find out from tech head Ritsuko that Rei is actually a series of clones that form the cores of all the EVA plugs, which she then destroys to get back at Gendo, who gave the okay for her humiliating interrogation by Seele. Meanwhile Asuka is so depressed she runs away and hides in an abandoned house pretty much catatonic so a new pilot for EVA 02 is brought in called Kaworu, who Shinji soon gets on great with, to the point of possible sexual tension between the two (made more explicit in the recent ReBuild movies…) but because this is Evangelion and he’s Shinji Kaworu turns out to be the final Angel and takes EVA 02 down to where Adam is to trigger the Third Impact, so Shinji reluctantly battles him in his own EVA. Shinji does eventually kill Kaworu, who actually encourages him to save humanity, but our protagonist is once again traumatised and finds no comfort in the comatose Asuka or the equally traumatised Misato, so everything looks bleak.

Everyone’s favourite short-lived character Kaworu.

Then we get to Episodes 25 and 26, which are entirely made up of barely animated cut-aways which explore the goings-on inside the heads of our main characters, especially Shinji who by the end of the double bill comes to truly understand himself and feel good, getting applauded by the rest of the cast as he declares this fact… Um, that’s it. The end! So briefly mentioned once or twice in the background of the last few episodes is the “Human Instrumentality Project”, which means merging the whole of humanity into a single entity and apparently entirely off-screen with no real way to know any of this, that’s what happened. The cast discovering a reason to continue existing in a mostly black or white void is them, I guess, settling into this mental gestalt entity by finding peace. When watching the series, especially blind with no internet to look this stuff up, I was completely baffled and even now it only made sense because I knew what the episodes meant beforehand, and you know what? They were still extremely underwhelming.

I’m not alone is this idea either (though there are some that will tell you it’s a masterpiece, we all have our own opinions and all that!) as the finale went down so badly that creator Hideaki Anno was pretty much forced to create a new ending with the film “End of Evangelion”, and boy did he ever make it clear he liked this ending better and resented having to make a new one, but we’ll get to that next time…