i don't have anything else
neon genesis evangelion (episode four, "rei, beyond the heart" / episode five, "showdown in tokyo-3")
Sending this one a day early because I think (?) I have a thing coming out tomorrow (?) but if I don’t then… uh… we’ll pretend this never happened.
In episode four, somebody (Ritsuko?) refers to Shinji as the “Third Children,” meaning, presumably, that there are two other children. (Also, from here on out we’re just saying “Third Child,” etc even if it’s technically incorrect… my tolerance for Evangelion English has its limits.) The First Child is Rei Ayanami, she of the blue hair, red eyes, and unreadable silence.1 The Second Child will arrive in episode eight.
But now, it’s Rei time: episodes five and six are devoted to the question of who Rei Ayanami is, exactly. Since she’s spent the first four episodes injured, it’s only now that we get to see her acting on her own. Her main narrative role has been to remind Shinji that he can be replaced with this girl who is almost as if Gendo, finding his own child so disappointing, made a perfect one for himself out of thin air: a child who has no emotional needs and always does what she’s told.2
Rei is so quiet and compliant that when we see the flashback that explains why she was so badly injured in the first episode—her Unit 00 (the prototype Eva) went berserk during a test and tried to kill Gendo3—it’s almost laughable when Ritsuko suggests that this might be because of personal mental instability. Surely not. But the readings certainly indicated that the instability (and presumably the rage and hatred) were coming from her.
Shinji, meanwhile, is disturbed to discover that not only did Gendo heroically save Rei’s life after Unit 00 went berserk, burning his hands and breaking his glasses in the process, but also that Gendo has conversations with Rei in which his affect communicates things like “I’m proud of you” while smiling.
It’s got Shinji feeling like this:
So when he gets an excuse to drop by Rei’s apartment, he’s happy to do so. Maybe he’ll discover why his dad likes her so much. Or at least, he can get to know her a little.
The visit is a disaster. Shinji steps in when Rei doesn’t answer the door. Things get worse from there:
her apartment is a mess
she didn’t answer the door because she is showering
he ends up somehow on top of her
while she’s naked
and also covering them both in her underwear
The amount Rei doesn’t even sort of care about any of this both undercuts and then builds up the comedy—you might expect her to freak out and show some vulnerability, but she’s just like “…” such that Shinji has to freak out for both of them. Even the fact that he realizes it’s an embarrassing situation and she doesn’t makes it more embarrassing, as if realizing this is inappropriate marks him out as some kind of pervert.
And while (technically) breaking into her home and then (accidentally) sexually harrassing her doesn’t get a rise out of Rei, Shinji does get a reaction from her when he says his father is kind of a bad dad. At which point she turns around and slaps Shinji in the face.
Rei is a character whose legacy I have mixed feelings about. She herself is fantastic and, in the end, tragic.4 Rei’s alien qualities—the blue hair and the red eyes—don’t really register as that weird because after all, this is an anime. But at some point it should start to register that only Rei has such unusual features.5 Rei is set apart from everybody else in ways that can look like favoritism, but, as she’ll say in a later episode, she doesn’t get special treatment… and she should know. She accepts her remoteness, or she thinks she does, but the outburst of Unit 00 suggests that on some level she knows she’s been screwed over and she knows who’s to blame.
After Evangelion, though, Rei would become a character everybody wanted their own take on. And as a widely imitated type… she’s terrible. The ersatz Reis are often pure nerd fetish material in ways that give me hives. At best, they’re just emotionless geniuses. Good and bad, the post-Reis are mostly not memorable characters in the same way that she is.6 They aren’t mysteries because they all have the same character arc of learning to loosen up. But Rei’s problem is not that she needs to loosen up.7
Part of what distinguishes Rei from the generations of monotone genius girls who would succeed her is evident when Shinji steps into her apartment. It’s so disgusting you can see that Shinji, Mr. Rule Following People Pleaser himself, seriously thinks twice about taking his shoes off before he comes inside.8 It’s full of unopened mail, the floor is visibly dirty, and there are old bloody bandages just… sitting around.9 Rei is feral. Her quietness, her submissiveness, her unreadability—these are not because she’s sooooo smart, though she is smart, but because she’s basically unsocialized to other human beings outside the institutional context of NERV. She has never existed outside of it.
A Rei 2.0 would not live like this—she would probably have a very neat and spare apartment, instead of living in a trash heap. She would be perfect at everything, instead of just sort of bored and compliant and minimally functional at everything that is not her job.10 Something strongly communicated in this episode that there’s something messed up going on with Rei, on a level she may not even be able to admit to herself, but which is obvious to Shinji the moment he steps into her apartment.
And obvious to Ritsuko, too, even if she keeps her mouth shut. Something in Unit 00 wanted to kill Gendo. If not Rei, what? (Of course, even after the pilot was ejected, Unit 00 kept hitting itself in the face, so… that’s a real question, one feels.)11
Not all the Angels are representative of the personal dramas in any given set of episodes, but the Fifth Angel—a giant reflective geometrical solid that is (to quote Misato) “impenetrable and deadly as hell,” reflecting back any attack and automatically evaporating anything that enters its range while also steadily drilling through all of NERV’s defenses—sure is. This Angel is obviously, on some level, Rei. As such, Shinji’s first attempt to take the Angel out ends in defeat (and near-death).12
Thus, episode six echoes episode five in various ways: this time, Rei walks in on Shinji naked when he’s recovering in the hospital (though he’s still the only one who cares).13 Shinji again expresses his doubts about the project to Rei and is again rebuffed, but she’s a little kinder to him this time, telling him that she won’t let him die. And before they start their mission, she does, finally, open up a little bit, telling Shinji the Evangelion is her “link” to the rest of the world. She pilots it because she does not “have anything else.”14
Here Rei sort of echoes Ritsuko’s description of her in episode five as “all thumbs…at living,” but there’s a distinction here. Ritsuko views Rei’s standoffish-ness as a kind of social incompetence. Rei views herself as fundamentally isolated from the rest of the world. She connects only when she’s performing some service, then she’s gone again. She is basically right. Even the person in her life who is most important to Rei—that is, Gendo—ultimately values her for her utility and for nothing else. But since she is supremely useful, she keeps that bond.
And then, of course, the episode ends with Shinji rescuing Rei from her entry plug in much the same way as his father did in the flashback that opens episode five. His echoing of this action is clearly not conscious—he wasn’t there when Gendo got Rei out of the entry plug—but it indicates to Rei that maybe more than one person cares if she lives or dies. Shinji tells Rei to value herself more and begins crying with relief that she’s okay; when she asks what she’s supposed to do, he tells her to smile. She does.15
Playing against Rei, Shinji discovers certain qualities in himself: that he can be the person who reassures and cares, and isn’t just asking other people to do that for him.16 I think we touched on this before, but that people are not themselves in isolation but rather also made up of what emerges in their interactions with others is sort of a “core theme” of Evangelion and it’s nice to see it in a subtle form here. (Because it is also going to show up in some not so subtle forms.)
Next episode: Misato and Ritsuko go on a field trip.
I love Shinji’s dumb little hat. I also love that Misato’s like no I am not wearing the safety equipment… if I die, I die.
Here we discover that the Angels’ “wave pattern” and human DNA are 99.89% similar. For comparison, a chimpanzee is 98.8% similar to a human being and human beings are 99.9% similar to each other.
I enjoyed the scene where the girls and the boys are sort of kind of flirting at sports except when we actually hear what they’re saying the boys are being total pervs and the girls are like “they’re soOOOOooOOOo gross.”
This pair of episodes’ “most money saved in a shot” award goes to:
Real question for those who have seen the whole show: why does Gendo make a show of saving Rei from the entry plug in the first place? is it something he actually needs to do…? I can never quite decide if his displayed affection for her is sincere or manipulative or both.
Her first name means “zero,” so if you are watching it in Japanese you will hear a lot of REI REI REI REI REI ______ PERCENTO, and I have never been able to figure out if that’s on purpose or not.
Of course, this is wrong. Rei doesn’t come out of thin air. Ha ha.
slay queen (literally meant) (kill him girl)
Rei is the one character for whom a happy ending seems unreachable. If things go the way Gendo wants, it’s a bad ending for her; but if Gendo is thwarted, that’s also a bad ending for her, I’m pretty sure. This is part of what makes Shinji’s weird vision, at the end of the show, of all of them in a normal high school comedy moving as well as hilarious. (But unlike everybody else, who appears in the sketch basically the same as they do in “real life,” the Rei in that vision is totally unlike Rei.)
I expect that the Rebuild movies are going to complicate this statement but I still sort of expect Rei is going to be stuck with a shit sandwich… well, we’ll see.
(Btw… I never thought about this, but… why isn’t Kaworu in the high school alternate reality? Or is he and I just forgot. He’s there in the opening credits so it’s not like he was a last minute addition.)
Misato’s hair can look purple but it’s clearly black.
Asuka, the Second Child, has her own descendants that are also obnoxious, but less so to me only insofar as they are not such submissive fetish material… they are rather fetish material for guys who like the idea of being punched and screamed at all the time. Much more tolerable type of guy. But we’ll get to that.…
Rei’s problem is that she’s a cog in the machine of Gendo’s insane master plan in a way that quite literally dehumanizes her.
There’s a pair of shoes sitting right next to Rei’s bed, but I wasn’t quite sure if the implication was that Rei herself does not follow this rule (hence why the floor is so nasty) or if they were just “house shoes.”
If Shinji opened up Rei’s fridge, I expect he’d find something very like Misato’s fridge full of beer and takeout, except it would be like… well I don’t know if food replacement shakes were around in the mid-nineties. But today Rei would just have a fridge of like… Soylent.
Sort of an odd point of comparison, but a reason I bailed on the Netflix version of The Queen’s Gambit was that Anya Taylor-Joy’s character was somehow a chess prodigy drug addict who was also perfectly groomed, into fashion, kept a clean house, and was, finally, a great cook. Obviously, that character is not modeled on Rei, she is from a book, but it really irked me.
Unit 00 is sort of a problem when it comes to “things making sense” in general. When
finished the show he sent me a DM that was like “Unit 00???” and I was like… “don’t ask me man.”Obviously, this is also an echo of episodes one and two.
Actually, I think this moment might indicate she is warming slightly to Shinji, because she makes a joke like “don’t forget to put on your clothes and show up naked.” However, she needs to work on her delivery.
Shinji is ultimately able to defeat the Fifth Angel through Rei’s shielding him—one impenetrable being against another…
This is a very moving scene that was, for reasons I do not know, reanimated later in a “remastering” of the show. The first TV smile is the most awkward looking which I personally think works… she’s like uhhh how do you smile… like this right… yeah I think I nailed it.
I am pretty kneejerk opposed to Shinji and Rei as romantic partners. But I think the way in which they steadily slip into an understanding with each other makes them function as a definite pair—it’s just more like siblings.
“I can never quite decide if his displayed affection for her is sincere or manipulative or both.”
Yep.
I don't remember in the actual scene in the high school AU, but I'm pretty sure he's a character in the (video games? comics?) that expand on that scene
as far as Gendo saving her, I really don't know, but it seems like he doesn't *have* to. But I don't really think it's manipulative either; why would he be willing to manipulate her that way, but not Shinji? I think, in that moment at least, he does genuinely think of her as a person and care about her, regardless of how those feelings shift before or later.