a kid the same age as me
neon genesis evangelion (episode eighteen, "ambivalence")
Hoo boy.
If you think about it, it’s surprising that nobody human in Evangelion has died. Killing somebody is sort of a universal way to say, in a television show, that you’re getting serious, and Evangelion has plenty of minor characters who could be sacrificed to this end. But nobody dies. That doesn’t actually change in this episode either, as we find out at the last minute. But, in some ways, our cast of characters has gotten by up until now not only by being resourceful and brave, which they are, but by being lucky. And like all luck, you don’t know you’ve lost it until it’s too late.
What do I mean by “lucky”? For instance: the Angels are weird and eldritch and hard to fight (and impossible to fight by conventional means) but they don’t seem very intelligent. They tend to have one move and once you figure that out you can win. There are no “two move” Angels.1 They are also not “emotional.” They don’t have faces that you can read. Where they come from, if they communicate with each other… these are questions without answers. They don’t seem to want to hurt people in some sadistic sense—they are just pursuing a goal. But it will be the end of the world if they get what they want, so they have to die. It’s sort of impersonal.
And yet—here’s the thing, right? We know the Angels are almost human. They are like some sort of alternate evolutionary path. And that means that presumably communication and emotion are things they possess, even if we have yet to see them.
The Thirteenth Angel is a different story. It is smart and isn’t stuck with one limited move. It is the first Angel that feels “human”… because it is, sort of, merged with one.2
“Ambivalence” divides very clearly into its pre and post commercial break components. Before the break, it’s a fairly low-key episode. The kids who know Toji is the new pilot either throw a fit (Asuka) or attempt some sort of odd reach out (Rei). The kids who don’t—Kensuke and Shinji—speculate. Asuka tries to help out Hikari (the class rep) with her crush on Toji. Kaji tells Shinji people try hard to understand each other because they’ll never understand each other.… etc etc etc.
Then Toji goes off to his activation test and it turns out the Thirteenth Angel has stowed away in Unit 03. This opponent is vicious. Unlike the other Angels, which have been frightening but impossible to really assign emotions to, there is something that feels malicious about it—like it wants to hurt people. The way it moves in the Eva is creepy beyond belief. It easily wipes out Asuka and seems to take enjoyment in hurting Rei (and attempting to contaminate Unit 00). Both of them are incapacitated before they have any ability to respond.
That just leaves Shinji, who still doesn’t know who the pilot is, but who finds himself completely unwilling to hurt another person. As the Thirteenth Angel strangles him, he says he would rather die than kill somebody. So Gendo turns on the Dummy Plug. The auto pilot system he’s been developing with Rei’s “personality.” Something nobody, except for possibly Rei, even knows he can do.
And if the Thirteenth Angel was vicious, the dummy plug Eva unit is worse. Much, much worse. It rips the limbs off of Unit 03 with glee while Shinji tries desperately to stop it, or get Gendo to stop it. He screams and screams and screams, but it doesn’t matter. He sees Unit 01 pull out the entry plug and crush it. And then he sees them pull out the pilot.
This episode is brutal. There’s not really another way to put it. When it’s over, I just feel shaken up and terrible. Even the fact that Toji lives doesn’t really help.3 There’s such a deep sense of helplessness here. The image of Unit 01’s hand crushing the entry plug while Shinji is powerless to stop it is one of the show’s indelible images. One thing I thought the second time through was that there were a lot of completely avoidable forced choices here. If Misato had run this operation, she would have figured out how to do it while minimizing harm to the human trapped inside Unit 03. And that the pilot is somebody they know is part of why Asuka and Rei get taken out so easily—even Rei is just a little off her game here. Misato would have understood that too. But she’s injured and out of commission, so the person running this specific battle is Gendo, who has no interest in anything but removing a problem.4
And there’s something really sad, but kind of noble too, about how Shinji refuses to fight against a kid like himself when he doesn’t even know that kid’s name. The discovery that it’s one of his best friends is a final twist of the knife—but if Shinji had known, he still would have acted the same way.5 Fighting an Angel is self-defense. But killing another human being.…
Yet the cold truth is that this would not be the first time Shinji’s hurt another human being. That’s the whole reason Toji entered the story in the first place—because his sister was hurt during the fight in episode one. The Evangelion units create a lot of collateral damage.6 The material reality of the robots has always been stressed in this show, down to their carefully detailed power sources. One thing this episode makes abundantly clear (and not for the first time) is that while it is (probably) unfair to blame the pilots for such collateral damage, the people who made these robots don’t really care who gets hurt. Gendo doesn’t care if Unit 01 has to stomp on every bed in every children’s hospital. People don’t matter to him.
Back in episode four, Shinji ran away from NERV. Then he came back. At the time, I wrote:
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.… 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.
Revisiting this comment, I am first aware that this is literal ambivalence. In colloquial usage “ambivalence” now means something like “vacillation with an ultimately slightly negative attitude,” but it also means feeling I WANT TO BE NEEDED 100% simulanteously with I WANT TO BE FREE 100%. So good job, past me, for anticipating the title of the episode.
But you can also say Shinji’s two big desires can be reconciled into the single desire: I WANT TO HAVE A CHOICE. Every story about teenagers is in some way a story about emerging into adult life, adult responsibilities, and adult sexuality, and Evangelion is no exception, but when Shinji tries to make an adult stand, it’s always undermined. He wants to choose to be where he is, but he never can quite manage it. Every time he tries to exercise his own free will, something intervenes. He tries to make a stand, but the ground under him dissolves. (Sometimes literally.)
Here he really does try to make a choice, even if it means his own death, only to discover he’s finally disposable. As a buzzword, I feel very hostile to “agency,” but I’m not sure if there’s a better way of describing his situation except as a lack of agency—he has all the responsibility, but none of the power. Unlike Rei, he can’t really accept his status as (essentially) the thing Gendo needs to aim and shoot his weapons, but which otherwise should exist as little as possible.
In this episode, however, the big punchline is that he isn’t even that thing anymore. Gendo sent for Shinji because he needed him. Now he doesn’t. He has an ersatz Rei, who was already (emotionally, from Shinji’s perspective) an ersatz Shinji. In reality, Rei is something even weirder than that,7 and Shinji has also come to see her as her own person (something Gendo cannot actually do). But up until now, at least Shinji was useful. Now he’s just vestigial.
All of these problems will really come to the fore in the next episode, but they’re apparent here, too. It’s not that Shinji is unwilling to accept the consequences of refusing to fight. He is—he’s ready to die. But it doesn’t matter.
Next episode: Shinji runs away again. (Maybe it will stick this time.)
I hope Megumi Ogata got hazard pay after all that screaming.
A gesture Shinji has often made in the last few episodes is closing his hand into a fist, then opening it up again. He does this, unconsciously (I suspect), when he’s thinking about synchronizing with Unit 01. Toji starts to do it during this episode himself when he’s remembering hitting Shinji in the face. Of course this is part of the fundamental weirdness of piloting the Evangelion units—the way you’re using a hand that is, and is not, your hand. But what it also makes me think of are some favorite lines of mine by Robert Lowell, when he writes that he has
plotted perhaps too freely with my life,
not avoiding injury to others,
not avoiding injury to myself—
to ask compassion.…my eyes have seen what my hand did.
It’s hard to focus on anything but the appearance of the Thirteenth Angel here, but I enjoy Toji’s little conversation with Rei where he gently explains to her that she thinks she’s concerned for him but she’s really concerned about Shinji.
Small moments of comedy here: picking Kaji, of all people, as a babysitter. He doesn’t get to do much, but asking Shinji “is this your thing, asking everybody about your father” is pretty funny.
I love all the awful TV that features in Eva. “So, I’m a long dark tunnel?”
I feel like we should have gotten more mileage out of the name “Idiot Trio.” Debuting it in this episode is simply cruel.
The complete savagery of the dummy plug system in this episode mirrors the fallout of Asuka’s battle against the Eva series in End of Evangelion much more closely than I remembered (spoilers here for anybody who is reading these without having watched this show ever, I guess)8:
The dummy plug is supposed to mirror Rei’s “personality” which once again makes you wonder what that the anarchic violent presence in Unit 00 is exactly. (The mass-produced Eva series is based on somebody else.)
Gendo’s cruelty in this episode is largely directed at Shinji… but causing Rei to feel as her arm has been severed is up there.
Every once in a while I notice an odd point of overlap between Evangelion and Revolutionary Girl Utena,9 two shows that I am pretty sure have zero to do with each other10 aside from being (1) weird and (2) from the 90s11 and (3) licensed in the US in a time window that made them canonical for American nerds, even ones that weren’t particularly into anime.12 The upside-down city is their biggest shared image… but in this case I found myself remembering Utena’s duel against Wakaba in the Black Rose arc:
Toji is not responsible for what happens when the Angel takes over (whereas while Wakaba becomes a sort of “possessed” person she becomes so willingly). At the same time, you wonder if certain kinds of resentment bleed into the way the Thirteenth Angel takes on each of the pilots—knocking Asuka out without even a protracted fight, torturing Rei, slowly strangling Shinji.13
I threatened to make a list of every Evangelion character’s Taylor Swift song by the end of the TV show, and let me tell you… I am making good on that threat:
What if I told you I'm back? / Unit 01 was a drag / Worst sleep that I ever had
I guess you could argue Ramiel had two things.
The image of Toji we get at the very end of the episode sort of suggests that there are muscles or something attached to his plugsuit.
I think he dies in the manga.
His lack of interest in human motivation seems to win out for him here, but it is going to bite him in a big way in the next episode.
An echo of Toji’s comment in the previous episode that when he met Shinji, he didn’t seem like somebody who would go out of his way for others, but he is (or has become such a person).
There is a real moral distinction between accidentally causing a person to be harmed and doing it on purpose, of course, and I guess if NERV had a Jesuit on call he could walk Shinji through the idea of “double effect” (you aren’t doing it to hurt the kid… you are doing it to hurt the alien…) and resolve his dilemma here. But they don’t (budget issues I suppose).
As I wrote in my notes on The Tale of Genji: “the ideal wife is a woman who is your daughter, but also your mom.”
I have all-but-decided to do a rewatch of Utena when we finish Evangelion… but I reserve the right to change my mind!!! I’m collecting some pre-Utena material right now while I make up my mind.
Actually, per Wikipedia, they shared some staff. The more you know.…
Possibly true to say that Evangelion:Gundam::Utena:Sailor Moon (with a bit of Rose of Versailles and Princess Knight thrown in I guess).
That’s more true of Eva (which played on Adult Swim I believe), but still true of Utena. While most of the big shows here are big shows there (or such is my impression), there are lots of big “canonical” shows that never get licensed here for various reasons.
This is also the order in which they each find out about who the new pilot is.
I get the hostility toward “agency” because it’s been overplayed but it really is fundamental to this show. As you say, the children are *never* able to exercise agency without it being undermined, if they try to at all. Or rather, their only avenue for agency is piloting the Eva, which is to say, by both controlling another being but also making oneself a small dependent part of it. Gendo is the puppet master but it’s marionette strings all the way down
forgot how brutal that Asuka scene is from end of eva.... ahhhh