We’re back! That’s right! After many steroids and even resorting to little roll-on essential oils / aromatherapy and going to an ENT who told me to see a chiropractor1 and a neurologist because she couldn’t do anything… the headache is gone.
It was like this. I was very brave.
This episode is a little low-key, though. We ease back into the LCL pool, take a deep breath… the creepy blood liquid is fine… though if it wasn’t fine, how would we know?
In episode four of Evangelion, Shinji decides to try switching up his personal mantra from “mustn’t run away” to… “maybe run away.” After Misato chews him out for going rogue in episode three, he decides this demon robot life is perhaps not for him. So he splits, then he gets caught, he resigns himself to having to pilot the robot only for Misato to say she’s got no use for him with that attitude. He’s expelled from NERV and sent back to… wherever the hell he was before the start of the show.
This is probably the episode where we get the best sense of what life outside NERV is like for most people—we see shopping districts, movie theaters, teens making out (to Shinji’s interest, then indignation). There are other moments when we get outside the NERV compound, but they’re still mediated through NERV—as when Misato and Ritsuko go to some sort of killer robot expo in episode seven.2
“Rain, After Running Away” makes a lot of use of public transportion in its emotional language: Shinji rides the subway on a loop while he listens to his two favorite tracks on a loop,3 he takes a bus out to the end of the line4 without any plans. When he and Misato eventually reconcile, it’s at a train station with a voice over the speaker warning anybody on the platform that a train is coming, so don’t step over the line.5 It also makes good use of the landscape: I’m particularly fond of a moment when Shinji wanders through some comically huge sunflowers without seeming to notice he’s left reality.
Misato’s main frustration with Shinji in this episode is that all approaches seem to end in shut down: you can’t build him up with kindness, you can’t order him into submission, you can’t hit him with some straight talk, you can’t just leave him alone. No matter what she does, she can’t seem to connect with him.
Some of her frustration does simply come the fact that Shinji is fourteen, as she herself admits in this episode. (Ritsuko’s like: yes, but we have no choice but to use fourteen year olds… we’ll put a pin in that.) But it also comes from the fact that Shinji is a “good kid” whose emotional responses are formed by a pre-emptive acceptance of rejection. He meekly accepts a scolding without argument but retains private thoughts which he has no interest in communicating to her (or perhaps no ability to). Unlike Rei, who really will do whatever she’s told, Shinji will mostly do what he’s told and then sometimes… do something else. Rei’s total and unquestioning compliance is unnerving but Misato is right that Shinji’s dutiful assents are worthless to her.
Similarly, Shinji wants to be needed, but he also wants to be left alone. He wants to be the only person who can pilot the Eva, and he also wants to be free to leave. The knowledge that he can be replaced is horrifying to him and yet he also wants to be reassured that piloting the Eva really is his choice and not something he’s being forced to do. The reason Misato can’t seem to find a winning tactic with him is because the moment you soothe fears on one front he shoots right to the other. Shinji cannot be both the absolutely necessary lynch pin NERV and his dad require to save the world and somebody who is there because he wants to be and for no other reason.
I think admitting to himself that he has these opposite impulses is part of why Shinji labels himself as a coward, dishonest, a sneak, a weakling toward the end of the episode. (It’s characteristic of him that the moment he stands up for himself in this episode it’s to put himself down.) He gets that he’s like a dog that demands to be pet and then runs for it the moment you reach out a hand,6 but he doesn’t know how to change. He’s dishonest because he can’t say “this is what I want” and mean it; he can’t, to quote Jesus for a moment, let his no be a no and his yes be a yes.
And Shinji understands “usefulness” is the only term on which he’ll ever have a relationship with his father, but that’s not the relationship he wants—it’s probably not the relationship anybody wants with a parent. He wants Gendo to say you’re my son and necessary to me for who you are, because I love you. But that will never happen. Gendo doesn’t even acknowledge him now… when Shinji is actively useful to him.
I see episode four as bringing to conclusion a mini-arc focused on who is Shinji and what is his deal. The next two switch their focus to Rei, and episode eight will introduce the third pilot, Asuka, who will get her own Asuka-focused series of episodes. When Shinji accepts his position at the end of the episode, it’s not because he’s fixed himself. (He’ll still be a bit of a waffling mess in Rei’s episodes.) One of the ways in which Evangelion remains true to life is that epiphanies don’t come with corresponding immediate changes.
What does change for Shinji here, though, is that he decides that this situation—with the Evangelion, with Misato—is where he wants to try to fix himself and learn how to be brave, honest, etc. Saying, at the end, that he’s come home is a way of saying he accepts all of “this”—NERV, his dad, the Angels, the demon robot—as the ground on which he’ll become a real person. Welcome home.
Next episode: Rei! What’s up with her?
We’re going to do episodes five and six together, since I think they’re better discussed that way. It’s Rei time!
Shinji’s sojourn in the movie theater is so funny… as is the indication that there’s some sort of schlocky Second Impact–themed movie genre. In general, I admire how much information Anno communicates through Evangelion without ever having somebody say it to you directly. (One of the best examples of this will come in episode eight.)
Though we do get a little bit of direct information when Shinji and Kensuke talk about how the cicadas are coming back from extinction.
I enjoy that the “reveal” that Shinji didn’t get on the train is staged in exactly the same way as the “toothpicks” gag—first as farce, then as… well… not tragedy. Sentiment?
Hitting somebody in the face as hard as you can really seems like such a good way to fix relationships in the movies but I have yet to try it in real life.
Kensuke playing soldier with himself out in the mountains is such a great little scene in Evangelion. Kensuke’s maybe the show’s least important character after like… Pen-Pen… but we get the occasional truly wild glimpse into his inner life.
- left a very interesting comment about his theory that Gendo is based on Miyazaki. Check it out! (I unlocked that post so non–paying subscribers can read it.)
I will never see a chiropractor.
In which we learn that everybody hates NERV.
I hope he’s listening to this:
Actually, since Evangelion is set in 2015, Shinji could be listening to Taylor. But he would not yet have been exposed to ATWTMVTVFTVSGAVRALPS.
Well, I think it’s the end of the line. It’s a bus to nowhere, anyway.
In an episode with many fine candidates, this scene also probably wins the “most creative use of saving money by just using a still frame for a long time” award. (It is not a candidate for the all time award, however. That’s Asuka and Rei in the elevator.)
Not to call anybody out… Buster.
Last time I got a haircut there was an old man waiting next to me listening to a conspiracy theory podcast out loud. At one point the host pivoted out of nowhere and goes “Antarctica: every government on earth is restricting people from traveling there—what’s down there?”
In our reality the Second Impact is going to be caused by a bunch of Joe Rogan listeners