Note: I had a lot of trouble with my internet when drafting this so while I am 98% sure that Substack is sending out the right draft here, there is a 2% chance something is going to go weird. Thankfully, Substack does not have a berserker mode.
“The Beast” takes its sweet time before it finally lets you know what happened in the battle between Shinji and the Angel that closed out “Angel Attack.”1 The ultimate outcome of Shinji’s fight with the Angel is not at issue—it’s plain Shinji lives and the Angel dies—but how he got there, after a very unpromising first few steps, it keeps under wraps for as long as possible.
Instead, it tells a lot about the aftermath. We know lies are being fed to the press and that SEELE, the people Gendo apparently answers to,2 aren’t happy about the damages and the amount of money required to fix things; we overhear a frightened conversation in a grocery store about how people are leaving the city. Ritsuko and Misato have a conversation about the uses of optimism and Gendo states to himself in what I can only mentally think of as “the SEELE Zoom Room” that humanity is running out of time.
But as far as the fight goes, we cut from Unit 01 getting shot and incapacitated to Shinji waking up in a hospital bed. Then Misato, outraged at the fact that NERV is going to send Shinji to live on his own, decides to have him move in with her. We see how Tokyo-3 is a special city that can retract and then emerge out of the ground; we meet Pen-Pen, the show’s adorable if also maybe pointless animal mascot.
We get to watch some iconic Misato drinking beer footage.…3
We even get a look at Rei’s Unit 00 and get the second (?) intimation4 that whatever wounded her so badly had basically nothing to do with an Angel attack and everything to do with something about the Evangelion units themselves. Unit 00 has ripped up a room and is frozen, mid-rampage, in Bakelite.
It’s not until the end of the episode that Shinji, lying in bed and listening to music on his headphones, finally remembers what happened. Even then, we don’t really see what happened from his perspective—it’s completely external—and it’s not clear (or at least isn’t to me) what he actually remembers of the fight itself.5
So… what happened? Unit 01 went “berserk,” acted on its own, healed its own broken arm, and neutralized the Angel’s own defense system (“AT Field”) before going to town on it. The fight is nasty and brutal and Unit 01 displays a real sadistic flair; everybody credits Shinji with the victory but it’s clear he was not operating the Evangelion in any meaningful sense. The fact that Evangelion units have a “berserker mode” that nobody seems to know… anything…? about is, you might think, a problem. Not to Gendo, though, who watches this fight with this expression on his face:
Generally speaking, “The Beast” sticks to the same emotional territory as the first episode: Shinji’s fraught relationship with his dad and with others. (Really, the first four episodes basically stay in this territory and then they start opening up.)
When Shinji briefly runs into Gendo on his way out the hospital and Gendo doesn’t say anything acknowledging anything that has happened—not the fight, not the hospitalization, nothing—it’s pretty unpleasant. Misato is totally thrown by the coldness of their relationship, and it seems like sheer irritation at their mutual behavior is why she ends up dragging Shinji back to stay with her.6
To me, the most interesting question to ask about “The Beast”—since it doesn’t really reveal much by way of new information to us, but rather lets us settle in—is why it has this particular kind of ice cream sandwich structure of fight part one / aftermath / fight part two. There are some obvious answers: it’s more suspenseful that way and it keeps the episode from having a comparitively high-budget first half followed by a second half that is full of basically still shots. It reminds you that Evangelion itself is taking place in the middle of a conflict that already started fifteen years ago. Etc.
Another thing that this episode structure accomplishes is that, while the focus is on Shinji, his hospitalization means we get to spend some time among the adults. One thing that this episode makes clear is that different people have different ideas of what NERV is doing and that even in the upper echelons of the SEELE council room there are still the people who really know what’s going on. The political wheeling and dealing in Evangelion can sometimes feel exasperating, I think, as a first time viewer, but in this episode it very squarely establishes that “fight the Angels” isn’t exactly everybody’s priority, even if it is a necessary tool in whatever their real priority (“the Human Instrumentality Project”) is.
A third reason, I think, that “The Beast” uses this particular structure is because ultimately Evangelion is not about the battle scenes but about its characters and their relationships. Particularly in the show’s middle stretch, I find I really savor the moments everybody just gets to hang out and we get to see these fourteen year olds act like kids. By making the battle a framing device to showcase the more mundane and human side of the series, it emphasizes that this is the part of the show that “really matters”—not the fights, as cool as they are. If I think about my favorite moments of this show, most of them don’t involve the actual battles, though some are certainly in there.
But, finally, I think yet another reason is that it creates uneasiness, which is similar to suspense but not quite the same. You don’t know what happened and you don’t even know what you don’t know—somebody watching the show for the first time might well assume that Shinji did something clever and resourceful that showcases some hitherto unrevealed side of his personality, instead of being basically unconscious. Since we don’t know that the Evangelions have “berserker mode” we don’t consider that the outcome of the battle has little to do with Shinji’s actions. Similarly, we don’t really know why humanity is running out of time or what the Human Instrumentality Project is, though we can guess that anything with that name is not good news.
So we spend the whole episode a little wrongfooted. What happened? What’s happening? When we get an answer to one question (“what happened?”) we get it in a way that just makes the situation weirder (“to what degree are these robots alive, exactly?”). We know the calm is deceptive.… but we don’t know what it hides.
Next episode: Shinji makes some friends at school.
Offhand observations etc:
SEELE getting mad at Gendo for giving the Eva to “his own son”… sort of wanted Gendo to go “don’t get it twisted… I hate my son.” Anyway, Shinji Ikari nepo baby.7
I think Sachiel (the Angel who gets beaten up by Unit 01) is one of the cuter Angels. Look at that face. Next episode’s Angel is also very cute.
Imagine being like a squirrel sitting on top of one of those Tokyo-3 sky scrapers and then BAM… up it goes. Worst day of your life, probably. We find out in the next episode that most of the world’s animal population is dead though so I guess it wasn’t much of a consideration.
Misato’s fridge full of beer and ice… inspirational.
As far as I can remember, there is no moment that Pen-Pen turns out to matter in the entire show. (We do find out why Misato has him, which is different.) I respect this more than I can say. In a world where everything feels fraught with hidden meanings, Pen-Pen is just what he seems: a penguin that lives in Misato’s home for some reason.
Reader
pushes back a little against my characterization of Mobile Suit Gundam in the last Evangelion newsletter. I think he’s right, I was strawmanning a bit. In a later installment (sometime after episode eight) I will try to get into why I think Evangelion is to mecha more like Twin Peaks is to procedurals than Watchmen to superheroes… this may be a debate that takes place only in my mind but well… welcome to my twisted reality.…
Anyway though that’s why I thought of the first episode of Mobile Suit Gundam. I also liked Scott’s comments about the bridge crew.
Not quite either
Reader
sent me this recently translated (?) roundtable featuring Hideaki Anno, Moto Hagio, and Shimako Sato. There are some great quotes in here!Some of my favorites:
Anno: You know, I don’t have much interest in concluding a story.
Sato: Do you hate wrapping a furoshiki? [trans note: a traditional wrapping cloth]
Anno: No, it’s that I think you can do more with a furoshiki than tie it up pretty. Like break it or tear it to shreds, all kinds of things.
…
Sato: When I watch Anno’s works like Eva I feel like you are more the kind of person who saves the world through hatred, what do you think?
Anno: I don’t know
…
Sato: Anno-san, you’ve said that you hate otaku, haven’t you.
Anno: It’s not hate. It’s just that I think otaku are uncool. To otherwise not notice that you’re uncool or purposefully suppressing that fact makes me feel disgusted.
Sato: What about The Matrix? Isn’t that a cool otaku movie?
Anno: That one is also uncool.
Hagio: Even though Keanu Reeves is cool.
Anno: Keanu is cool. Because he is not an otaku. The otaku are the Wachowskis. They can’t get out of the confinements of their otaku-ism. So for example, even if they make something cool, part of it will for certain be otaku-like Even though I say this I don’t hate it. If I truly did I’d quit being an otaku.
…
Anno: Well, a man without imaginary enemies is no good. For me right now, I think I want to make works that have Hayao Miyazaki beat.
Hideaki Anno… a nerd who hates nerds… truly a man after my own heart etc.
Realizing now that because I watched episodes one and two together I messed up the episode summary last time and included the beginning of episode two in there… ah well.
lol
The first being when somebody at SEELE mentions that there hasn’t been an Angel attack for fifteen years.
We do see a bewildered Shinji get an eyeful of Unit 01’s real face, freed from its armor, directly after the fight. Which he probably wishes he could forget, frankly.
It’s kind of funny how thrown she is because like—don’t you work with this guy? He’s like this to almost everybody! But… if she’s seen him interact with Rei I guess it would be pretty startling now that I think about it.
But every Eva pilot is a nepo baby, if you think about it.…
-wikis said that fan translations had it as the "human complimentarity project" but after poking around the japanese a little bit, i think "human telos project" would have been the best way to go
-i think every Meaningful Nerd Thing needs a bombadil, and pen-pen might be the best bombadil
-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvwoZ1Djnfo
[I think these are clips from the rebuilds? But not having seen them, the only scenes I could even parse are scenes from the original series, so I don't *think* there are spoilers]
The "I can enjoy these posts without re-watching" to "I should probably re-watch just to be safe" pipeline