You already know this story. March 20th, 1996, fifteen-ish million Japanese citizens—children, parents, homebodies, salarymen—sit down looking for an explanation to the year’s most popular anime. The boy hero just killed his friend, the evil council closes in, the beach is dark and there’s only one episode left after tonight.
So why’s it so weird?
Everyone with a name has already outlined possible answers: production ran out of budget, or time, or both; Director Anno didn’t know how to frame the ending, didn’t have an ending, didn’t want an ending. Pick whatever combo of explanations most suits your taste.
The aspect we can all agree on, is once deadlines came around, choices had to be made. The phenomenon that was Evangelion could go out with either a bang, a whimper, something decent, something exceptional, or something else entirely.
The only real question, as far as I’m concerned, is when the hammer comes down, how do you choose to break?
Intro begins, cutting out with a skipping tape as V.O. comes back in.
This finale is not intended to be understood, in the traditional sense. I think it’s important to remember that.
Episode 25 actively and deliberately destroys the show’s formatting, eluding classic story structure as it focuses, laser like, on the empathetic outcomes of our characters’ arcs, leaving the mechanics of the world to disintegrate. We are subjected not to the subversion of a narrative, but the absence of one, forced to define the nonexistent with only the tools of the previous, much like our cast grappling with themselves when all other tethers break away. Character and viewer alike are made to sail uncharted waters with old maps.
[Despite its voiding of format, however, Evangelion’s final two episodes work in tandem under a surprisingly careful structure. The focus on Shinji opens each of our four acts, keeping the central strata of his arc set up but untouched until the end, as Episode 25 reflects and concludes the personal subplots of our supporting female trio.
Even ignoring this technical plotting, from a philosophic angle, the themes reflected in our deuteragonists have to be syllogistically rebuffed as to discern the truth by the time only Shinji remains. At their most reductive, Asuka represents domination, Misato hedonism, and Rei nihilism. I find SEELE’s absence and Gendo’s narrative facilitation fascinating, their own Anti-Natalist philosophy posited as self-evident with the trios’ worldviews dismantled. Argumentatively, the whole finale works as an inverted persuasive essay, opening with the refutation and working back to the central thesis of self-agency.]
Episode 25 is the first of our two-part conclusion. It and Episode 26, notably, were not revised along with the previous quartet, no Director’s Cut clarifying imagery or offering new insight, leaving our original ending untouched by rerelease. Part of that decision was simply logistical: Gainax couldn’t reedit every single episode, but it also clearly defines the bounds of where the series diverges into the Internal and External climaxes. What results is a television conclusion that remains distinct from its cinematic counterpart not only thematically, but visually, and it uses that strength to its fullest extent.
When earnestly diving into the series conclusion, also remember the original script for this episode looked a lot more like the Episode 25 that was folded into the End of Evangelion film—a high octane action sequence taking place in NERV headquarters as SEELE enacted their takeover plan. However, due to impossible deadlines and the complicating political variable that was the horrific and very real Aum gas attack, Gainax chose instead to completely revise the script mere weeks before the air date, reusing footage much like Episodes 14 and 20 to achieve an introspective and reflective climax, and confirm many of the theories the show had put forth. In hindsight, this drastic creative choice not only saved production but enshrined Evangelion permanently in public consciousness, as the creative choices made herein stripped the story down to its barest thematic essentials as we moved into the end of the world.
Episode 25: The End of the World / Do you Love Me?
This episode at its core is about identity crises. Shinji struggles with duty, Asuka with inferiority, Rei with alienation, and Misato with sexuality. That’s it. And although it appears to break from the stylistic foundation of the rest of the series, there are actually remarkably few new motifs presented here, most of our visual information conveyed through typical framing, composition, and negative space.
With that in mind, our opening three shots are definitional, philosophical, and expositional. The content itself, the words Raison d’etre and their meaning, serve to pull us out of the immersion we were expecting, mimicking similar openings like Episodes 1 and 14, in which we are drawn out of the central story, priming us to delve into a metaphysical space.
And that’s exactly what we see: it’s set up for this entire finale, the unbeknownst triggering of the Human Instrumentality Project launching viewers and characters into a collective dreamscape akin to the core of an Evangelion. But we’re not there yet.
First, several shots from the previous episode’s finale remind us of where last week left off—as if we need the reminder—but also reassure us that the show doesn’t intend to fully dislodge itself from its reality quite yet: we are addressing these few loose strands first.
Where things get really dicey in terms of narrative dissonance is when the title cards swap color palettes, the inversion accompanied by the words “why did you kill him?” going from expositional to interrogative statements, which implies a conscious entity asking these questions. So who’s talking?
I see three possible answers, all cheeky: either it’s Shinji’s inner thoughts, the showrunners looking in on their own story, or the voice of the audience itself, Anno giving us a part to play in the series as it concludes.
The question repeats five times, building persistence as we see the aftermath of Kaworu’s death, before we move into the iconic endless void surrounding the spotlight peeling back our characters. When Shinji finally responds to the question, the words shift to become more personal and intimate, just like the camera which punches in and moves around his figure: the same technique we saw in Episode 22 during Asuka’s violation. And this makes a lot of sense when you consider an entity, either the audience or studio, is surrounding and intruding on his inner thoughts just like Arael.
Shinji rebuts the accusations by asserting Kaworu’s identity as an Angel, reaffirming the societal-hostile complex he outlined in Episode 20. Of course, that complex was complicated by Gendo’s categorization as an Enemy, just as this situation is complicated when Rei appears to contend with her own inclusion within the Society despite her Angelic nature. She’s in the Society, so why isn’t Kaworu?
This answer isn’t immediately given. Instead, the reality of the situation seeps in, slow acceptance spliced into tighter and tighter shots that Shinji has no argument against, simply begging for a release from his own thoughts as he finally starts up, and the frame fades away. The sequence mirrors Shinji’s interrogation by Leliel in Episode 16, in which he defended the achievement of his own happiness via self-deceit. In that regard, the issue of Kaworu becomes a stand-in for the more central issue of voluntary engagement underlying the series, and therefore the scope of this encounter broadens as we return to the beach, the place of unity.
Here, the episode uses montage, Beethoven’s Ninth, and more flashbacks to readdress Kaworu’s death. Now that we understand it’s parable for overcoming self-deceit, we can properly answer the question. Misato posits the antithesis of acceptability, now Shinji grapples with it as some extremely distorted imagery wipes away all details except Shinji’s image. The new stylistic choice may be a cue that our boy is slipping deeper into the confines of his mind, retreating within himself like Asuka, although it bears remarkably little similarity to any other sequence in the series, just as Instrumentality and the visual technique itself is unlike anything humanity or we have ever experienced.
The title cards are translated “Anxiety” and “Fixation,” with alternate translations of “Uncertainty,” and “Haunting Uncertainty.” The persistent inserts and noisy abyss used to frequently in the opening scene of the episode really conveys how different this installation aims to be, our episodic format losing definition along with Shinji in the cacophony he’s allowed to envelop him.
Then the critical question: “What are you afraid of?”
Keep in mind, this question is posited in response to Shinji asking how he should cope with these emotions, insinuating he already knows the answer and must merely overcome his anxiety. He freely admits he is afraid of others’ hatred, specifically from his father—or rather his father’s hatred sowed the foundational fear that others will baselessly hate him as well, hence his people pleasing tendencies. This realization coincides with the familiar shot of Shinji’s eye when he glimpsed the Evangelion’s nature in Episode 2—in other words, looking beyond the shell he inhabits to see the monster within that needs conquering.
The first step in finding solution is addressing the existence of the problem.
We arrive at the deadwood in the fog, an illustration of Shinji’s clouded thoughts, all color drained from the world as he reverts to split thinking. He calls the names of his Society, in the same order as when trapped in Leliel, adding the name of his mother, but even Yui’s power can’t save him this time.
Perhaps the most telling section of this sequence occurs with Unit-01, whose black silhouette in red mirrors Gendo in Episode 20, during his categorization as an Enemy. Paired with the parallel imagery of Kaworu’s death, it’s impossible not to see Shinji framed as his own victim, his progression stalled by his inflexible sense of identity, again reflected in Kaworu’s murder. His decision to eliminate Kaworu was as much a selfish choice as a moral responsibility. He killed his only friend for his society’s thirty-silver approval and now faces the dilemma of having to do so again in perpetuity—being an Eva pilot is the sole defining feature he has adopted, and it compromises his morality in a way he fears will continue indefinitely.
The title card “Why do you pilot the Eva?” is asking “Who are you?”.
A question worth returning to the void for, Shinji now upright and acknowledging the camera. We’ve moved on from denial. When he tries folding again, reverting to the argument of duty, Asuka appears to correct him, revealing his selfish motivations, which we see weighing on him like all the negative space above his head. This ridicule continues for a minute until Rei appears and accuses Asuka of doing the same thing, and ‘congratulations! We are in an ouroboros of despair’.
The episode broadens its topicality as Asuka is brought into the introspective, the opening shot one of the most powerful in the series: Unit-02, drifting underwater. The power cords hover like an umbilical, tethering her back to an infantile state—
Asuka: “Aww, you want to crawl back into the womb?”
Asuka, the girl who excelled in everything, the girl who walked on water, is drowning. Under the surface, the place of connection has become her pit of despair, the girl within the Eva within the lake regressing into herself, sickness unto death.
Her diagnostic cards affiliate “Separation anxiety” and “attachment behavior,” terms from her violation in Episode 22. We’re brought to the elevator, and now Rei’s lines about fearing a loss of identity if intensional and comparable factors are rescinded parallel Shinji’s central struggle and reaffirm Soryu’s personal arc as a doomed foil to Ikari’s. The more telling line, however, comes from Asuka’s younger self, where she exposes her own need for validation from others before her present self retaliates with the line “I don’t want to hear from a puppet like you,” before we cut back to Rei. Now, whether the puppet line was directed at Asuka’s younger self or Rei is irrelevant; the show is conflating the two by sandwiching the sequence.
Asuka doesn’t hate Rei because they’re opposites. She hates her because they’re identical.
And so we progress to the case of Rei Ayanami. Her three iterations struggle with her series-long dilemma of forlornness, now accepting she is an artificial body with an alien soul, remade so many times she’s unable to link one fragment to another. I deeply enjoy how each iteration presents itself: Rei III, our Rei, wears the school uniform and flashbacks to her bandaged hospital reintroduction, visually tying us back even earlier to her very first appearances in the street and on the stretcher, both her chronological earliest and latest manifestations. Rei II always wears the plugsuit, the girl without enough identity to define herself, reliant on Gendo’s guidance and formation. And Rei I continues the trend, portrayed as the child and the splintered spirit within the Eva, her psyche chaotic and undefined.
The dialogue is almost entirely between the first and third, cyclical and sensical, both fully spirited iterations grappling with their purpose. Rei the First argues that persisting under the identity or name of Rei is fruitless, as their consciousness belongs to Lilith, an entity represented by kaleidoscopic inkblots: shifting, formless, and undefinable. Hilariously enough though, the very presentation of this argument by the medium of the show undercuts the logic she puts forth, as each Rei pictured with a distinct image reaffirms the terminological deviations of each version. Each Rei made independent choices and formed their own identity regardless of the fractured soul they share. Rei III can define her own person, walk free of the previous identities trying to shackle her. Repentance and rebirth are her decision.
The cut to black and sound of Rei rising from her chair, coupled with her expression of contempt, implies she is perhaps standing to resist the Instrumentality project, the first of our cast to lead the charge against Gendo. The following shot appears a confirmation, Gendo leering frame left, a stand-in for his own ideas of regression, as Rei in frame right holds the action of the sequence. When she could oppose him, though, she concedes. Fulfillment means obsolescence, the granting of peace. Just as Shinji had his father’s approval when he thought he didn’t need it, Gendo is finally offering Rei the disintegration she’s spent her whole life chasing. The incentive structure is impossible to overcome. Ultimately, she chooses to be his.
Then, the world ends.
What a frame to leave on before commercial break, am I right?
[“We see throughout the show the existential stress that piloting an Evangelion can incur, as Shinji and Asuka especially grapple with basing their entire identities on that responsibility. I can’t say I wouldn’t succumb to the pressure myself, having to navigate the intricacies of an engagement, remain mindful of your arsenal, and execute strategies to perfection at the risk of incredible loss, and if you think you could handle that role better, you can prove your worth on the battlefield in Mecharashi, today’s sponsor.
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Our second subtitle, Do You Love Me?, comes from the R.D. Laing novel of the same name, wherein characters advance the plot through dialogue, much like our episode. Keep in mind, because the project commences in the second half after Gendo uses Rei, it’s implied everything we’ve seen so far was in the characters’ minds and not yet influenced by the merging of souls. The interruptions of different characters within another’s mind are not objective; it is the character as perceived by the subject intruding in their thoughts. As individuality dissolves, however, Shinji’s vulnerable body blurs into the world surrounding it, an explanation of his sensation expressed in the title cards as the project takes hold.
We cut to Gendo correcting the title cards, however, which poses the possibility that every card we’ve read up to now may be subjective. No longer omnipotent musings but general suggestions, if Gendo is the authority above the title cards, they must exist within the universe and truly emphasize his power above all in this moment, right? Otherwise, the title cards are a stand-in for the audience or showrunners themselves, the line between us and the fiction of the show blurring alongside Shinji’s body.
Ritsuko and Misato are dead, their bodies eliminated in what was at the time some unknown catastrophe as we witness their last debate. Their final fight reveals the mechanics of Instrumentality: to substitute the inadequacy of a single human soul with the rest of them, negating the need for any further exploration of enlightenment, salvation, or God. Again, Ritsuko takes the side of regression, just like Gendo, as Misato tries condemning her, before her hypocrisy is called out.
The case of Misato is one of my favorites, not only because of the steadily building blocks representing Misato’s initial childhood attempt to maintain parental relations, but because of the slowly wearing down of her photo, constantly patched with more and more tape until it resembles the note Gendo first sent to Shinji: a token of the father repaired in hindsight by the child—repaired but never truly renewed. What says recurrent self-destruction more than a torn and retaped image of yourself, right? Her low central framing within the chair is also evocative of her flashback in Episode 21, where she confessed her fear of the dark. Nudity is not an indicator of vulnerability for Misato like it is with other characters, so the camera works to show her head-on instead in a hostile environment in which she is forced to open up to the audience.
Here Misato explains her sexual overtness was a conscious rebellion against the expectations of her father, an act of annihilating the parental faith to institute her own, just as Shinji has tried this whole show. Ritsuko and her childhood self, voices of hypocrisy and innocence, unfurl the self-deceit of Kaji’s romance as the show itself begins breaking her motivation apart.
The entire sequence featuring Misato is, like the rest of these episodes, a series of confirmations obscured by presentation. Looking beyond the disparate voices, the pixelated flashback of Kaji and Misato’s Episode 20(?) embrace and the reuse of their Episode 15 encounter reaffirms Misato’s own Oedipal Complex in using Kaji, who she conflates with her father, as a means of making peace with her family dynamic. She shies away from this revelation, despising the sequence as it works to unveil her inclinations to Shinji, finally revealing why she advanced on him in Episode 23. Misato is fighting in a contradiction here, both wanting to sully herself in defiance but not reveal said defiance—she wants to fell the tree but remain absent for the crash—a self-absorbed practice she can no longer hide.
What I find most telling after this sequence is the open documentation including her ID card, the age no longer scribbled out, a further show of all her impurities brought to light. She criticizes the men in her life for using work to escape harsh reality before admitting she does the same, using men and sex to fill the emptiness in her soul.
Entirely unlike—
Case 2
Asuka’s stark drive for individuality is here highlighted by a conversation between her father and stepmother overheard in childhood. Using the same frame as when she overheard their affair in Episode 22, the image now dissolving into a sketch format and then further into blurriness conveys how foundational this instance was for her. Now Asuka’s cries for her mother to “stay [her] mommy” take on a new meaning, as we understand not only Kyoko but also her stepmother threatened to disassociate themselves with Asuka in any relationship.
Asuka, Misato, and Shinji reach the same conclusion: relationship is inherently risky, but independence is impossible. We are social creatures unable to escape our design. So a third option is proposed: eliminate the risk by eliminating the exclusivity.
When Shinji understands that Instrumentality is taking place, he is separated from the selves on stage, a depiction of mindfulness as he interprets the project. The case studies we just witnessed are instrumented to highlight Shinji’s faults to himself; that revelation is instrumented by the show to highlight the subjective rules and standards of narrative to the audience; that shift in perspective is instrumented by the showrunners to highlight our own inequities and agency to us viewers.
Shini has created and plunged himself into a subspace not only of the show’s reality but of narrative’s preconceived laws. It is a place where the character alone decides the outcome of his arc, where truth must be divulged from farse, and it is painted to look like the stage of a theatre.
The theatre is such a fascinating set piece for this final trial. It outlines the distinction between fact and fiction, but unlike a movie set, it doesn’t correlate to the medium of the show itself, allowing the characters to perceive their illusions without yanking the audience from their immersion. The camera placement within the theatre is also critically nuanced: when within the house, we see Shinji from every angle, close and all encompassing, from the perspective of every other audience member. When on stage, we literally see behind the curtain, the marks and lights and wings emphasizing our move into a place the viewer should not be allowed into, but now fully inhabits.
More often than not, we are on stage looking at Shinji looking at us, forcefully spectated by the character we’ve been spectating as he deciphers the performance that we are also playing in our lives. Fictional character and factual viewer are fellow travelers in this struggle to untangle our performance from our person. This is a subspace Shinji alone is plunged into, created entirely from the subjective truths he holds, yet he is anything but alone: every member of the cast and fifteen million children, parents, homebodies, salarymen, joining him in his most defining, most difficult, weirdest challenge of his life.
This is only one possible ending. Will Shinji succeed?
Better yet: Will we?
Outro
Wow, that was something, wasn’t it. We’ve got one more! This series concludes this year. That is… absolutely insane, definitely will be a wild transition. Obviously I will not be vanishing into thin air afterwards; we will go over the End of Evangelion film, as well as many other wonderful topics, but who knows when that will be.
Thank you again to Mecharashi for sponsoring this video, it was incredible working with you and I hope to do it again in the future. Highly recommend you all check them out, they’ve got an awesome project going. And thank you, all of you, for watching this video, waiting patiently for its long-delayed release, and making this series genuinely as good as it can be. We wouldn’t be here without you.
The train is pulling into the station, and I do not know what awaits beyond its doors. But I do know I will be very thankful for your company along the trip. In the meantime, I’ve been Jir0, y’all have been amazing, and I’ll see you all on the bright side.
God Bless.
They say, “To live is to change.” I started this production with the wish that once the production complete, the world, and the heroes would change. That was my “true” desire. I tried to include everything of myself in Neon Genesis Evangelion-myself, a broken man who could do nothing for four years. A man who ran away for four years, one who was simply not dead. Then one thought. “You can’t run away,” came to me, and I restarted this production. It is a production where my only thought was to burn my feelings into film. I know my behavior was thoughtless, troublesome, and arrogant. But I tried. I don’t know what the result will be. That is because within me, the story is not yet finished. I don’t know what will happen to Shinji, Misato or Rei. I don’t know where life will take them. Because I don’t know where life is taking the staff of the production. I feel that I am being irresponsible. But… But it’s only natural that we should synchronize ourselves with the world within the production. I’ve taken on a risk: “It’s just an imitation.” And for now I can only write this explanation. But perhaps our “original” lies somewhere within there.
July 17, 1995,
TimberWolf Studios 