now we just need the children
neon genesis evangelion (episode eleven, "in the still darkness")
This episode continues the “summer break” feeling of “Magma Diver” in its opening minutes as we watch NERV staff hang out, do their laundry, and chat. Shinji calls his dad to ask him to show up for a school thing. Then just as Gendo is instructing somebody never to put through calls from Shinji, the power cuts out all over Tokyo-3 and NERV HQ. And then an Angel shows up. (This one looks like a big ol’ spider. They stopped sending the cute ones.…)
The pilots are trapped above ground with no means of communication, the bridge crew are mostly trapped in different locations in NERV HQ, and Misato and Kaji are… trapped in an elevator together. Evangelion really borrows a lot from comedies, I think; it is very visible in this episode, not only as we watch people extract themselves from wherever they’re stuck, but in the way it cuts from scene to scene. If it weren’t for the vague threat of human extinction, this could almost be an episode of Frasier.1
As the kids figure out how to break into NERV, the adults (once they’ve received word of the Angel’s presence) start to set the Evangelion units for manual launch. Once the pilots arrive (more on that below) Ritsuko tells Shinji that his dad set them up because he had so much faith in him.… Shinji’s all like oh… maybe my dad loves me after all… He doesn’t, Shinji! It’s a trap!
The journey into NERV, though, is a great series of scenes. They crawl through air ducts and try to figure out what the hell is going on, and for some reason this appears to be the moment Shinji actually asks: uh, does anybody know what we’re doing here?
When they actually fight the Angel, it is leaking acid into NERV HQ, and the only way to strike back is to use one Eva as an acid barrier—which is, naturally, pretty dangerous to the pilot. Asuka devises this plan and overrides Rei when she volunteers to be the barrier; she wants to pay Shinji back for saving her life. The plan works and they all live.
This is the first episode where we really watch all three pilots work together, and it works better than you might expect. The ending of this episode, with the three pilots hanging out and looking at the stars, is genuinely very sweet and gestures at a future where they could all be friends. Sure, Rei is distant and odd, but she’s friendly in her own way; sure, Shinji can be a bit needy, but he always comes through; sure, Asuka needs to be bossy, but some of her strident behavior is just teasing. They’re all going to be okay. This mood will persist for a few more episodes…. But it won’t last.2
The two themes of this episode are separation and teamwork—that is, everybody gets split up by the power failure and then we watch them work with what they have to try to overcome their situation. For all the secrecy and paranoia that cloaks NERV, one thing that comes through in a big way here is how much everybody trusts everybody else to have their back when it counts. Nobody sits around and waits to be told what to do and they all trust that everybody else is working hard, too. They’re right.
Hyuga taking over a car with a megaphone atop it is one of the episode’s highlights for me because we’ve never seen him do anything but get ordered around up until now.3 Asuka aggressively asserts herself as “team leader” when it comes to breaking into NERV; while she is not actually all that great at being Team Leader, probably because it’s more of a declaration she keeps making than something she’s doing, she does devise a plan to kill the Angel on the fly and signs up for the most dangerous part.4 Gendo throws himself into the manual Eva launch.
Meanwhile, Misato and Kaji… never manage to get out of the elevator. But of course they don’t—they’re a dysfunctional unit. Misato doesn’t trust Kaji and he doesn’t give her much reason to try. He seems determined to remind her of their past sexual history—feel free to take off your shirt, it’s nothing I haven’t seen before—at moments when he has to know it would be the worst possible thing he could say. Misato’s wavering attitude toward Kaji, where she’s alternately into him and hostile to him, is easy for us to understand. But what’s Kaji’s deal? What is it that he wants?
Next episode: Misato gets some backstory.
The official English title of this episode is “The Day Tokyo-3 Stood Still” and I think that it functions as both a nerdy reference and as an indicator that Shinji’s question—why are the Angels attacking us—may have an answer that’s not very flattering to mankind! (I can’t remember if I ever saw The Day the Earth Stood Still… I think I did?)
Unit 00 is still not completely normal (though it seems to work fine for Rei).
I enjoyed Asuka’s little attempt to comfort Shinji about his jackass dad apparently hanging up on him by being like oh, maybe it was a misunderstanding, maybe he was busy, which is immediately overridden by her impatience (“grow a pair”).
Quite a bit of conversation in the early minutes of this episode laying out exactly what the Magi computer system is (essentially, three super computers that each have a vote as to the advisability of a course of action). There have definitely been references to the Magi before this moment, but not in such detail. The Magi will matter in a big way in episode thirteen and it’s a nice example of how the show times its explanations. Something standing out to me on this rewatch is how well-constructed Evangelion is, despite its reputation for “going off the the rails.”
I never see Aoba in any episode without remember that he supposedly (per End of Evangelion) doesn’t love anyone—every time he gets some little bit of his own (last episode, air guitar; this episode, smiling at children) I think: there he goes, the man who doesn’t love anyone.…
Is this the first episode in which somebody indicates there’s a part of NERV called “Central Dogma”? In any case, while it’s just a passing line, Fuyutsuki’s insistence power to Central Dogma be preserved over life support makes it clear that whatever is in there, it’s very important.
I’m interested in the way the Angel operates in this episode—it really seems like its aim is to reduce human casualties to a minimum, doesn’t it?
I wouldn’t say insight into others is her strong suit, but Asuka’s comment that Rei is the type that “believes the ends justify the means” is actually pretty perceptive, I think.
It’s basically impossible for me to know how a first time viewer in the nineties would respond to anything Gendo does—I could see this episode and the next (in which he actually says something nice to Shinji) seeming like the moments Gendo is showing himself not to be such a bad guy after all.… And it’s true. He’s worse!
I ended up looking up when Frasier ran and it predates Evangelion by two years, but I am not seriously proposing it as an influence (I’m not even sure if it was licensed to Japan). I do really wonder about Twin Peaks, though.…
Asuka and Rei never manage to have an interaction where Asuka isn’t a little hostile—even at the end, where she’s really just teasing, it’s still teasing that has an undertone of look at you, Miss Perfect.
I also love the moment he tells the driver to smash through a road closure and you can tell this is the greatest day of that guy’s life… whoever he is.
Her failures at guiding them into NERV also produce some funny moments—I like when she opens a door that just leads back out onto the street and encounters the Angel and then says well, now we have visual confirmation.…
Great write-up as always—this is basically what you were saying but this strikes me as an example of how to do a midseason expositional workhorse episode with flair. Its function imo is mostly to explain the Magi and start seeding more conspiratorial ideas, like NERV having human enemies and what is in the Dogma (definitely its first mention btw).
But it pairs it with so much great character work—Asuka and Rei’s first sustained interaction, Shinji asking The Question the audience has been asking the whole time, a surprising amount of Fuyutsuki. I love his shorthand communication with Gendo, when they have their feet in the water and Fuyutsuki says “Lukewarm” and Gendo replies in his full serious commander voice “Agreed.” So good.
As for the Frasier question. I’m gonna agree that the timing doesn’t work but I think of a great post Katie McVay wrote called Frasier Loves Doors and So Do I that was about the forms that produced the sitcom like vaudeville and French farce (standout line: “The sitcom did not burst forth fully formed from the head of Norman Lear”). Can’t link because she nuked her archives sadly. I have no idea the history of comedy in Japan but it’s conceivable that Anno is pulling from a lot of shared sources.
with the magi coming into greataer focus, my overriding question about the show is: do all the mystical allusions/ vocabulary actually *mean* anything? Does Hideako Anno actually know about the Sephiroth and the three wise men, or is he just using this vocabulary because of that one episode of Ultraman where they crucified Ultraman and then all nerds in Japan for the rest of time decided that Jewish/ Christian imagery and vocabulary was Cool