that's not a zero or a negative

neon genesis evangelion (episode thirteen, "angel infiltration")

Ritsuko Akagi is a side character and she’s happy that way. She likes to slide in, collect her data, and slide out. Even though we first meet her in a swimsuit, she’s almost always buttoned-up and put together in the impersonal uniform of a professional woman: sensible heels, red lipstick, lab coat.¹ Even her chain smoking is a professional sort of vice (maybe put more bluntly, a masculine vice). Nicotine is a way of staying alert and keeping your edge, not a way of cutting loose and dropping your inhibitions. Ritsuko doesn’t get sloppy.

There she is—the cool as a cucumber scientist. Ritsuko excludes herself from the narrative or, rather, she believes she can exclude herself and remain an eternal observer of data and facilitator of science. Impossible to imagine her doing something stupid, or losing control of herself, or behaving erratically.²

At the start of this episode, Ritsuko is conducting tests involve putting the (naked) pilots into entry plugs which then go into fake Eva bodies. Asuka refers to this as a step in developing an “autopilot”—this is the beginning of the creation of the “dummy plug” system that will allow for remote override of the pilots (something that will matter a lot later, but does not matter all that much now).

While Ritsuko is testing the pilots’s ability to sync without plugsuits, Fuyutsuki is annoyed because some contamination that looks like some mold on the wall is present in “Wing B” of NERV. But attempts to clean it up fail—the contamination spreads down to the testing chamber—and it attacks Rei’s “unit,” because it is, you guessed it.… an Angel. Ritsuko ejects the entry plugs to keep the pilots safe and the Angel-mold mutates into a computer virus, attacking the Magi, the tripartite AI that helps to run NERV. Its goal is to get all three of the Magi computers to vote for NERV HQ to self-destruct.

Ritsuko believes that the way to defeat the Angel is to accelerate its mutation such that it peacefully coexists with the Magi (and/or kills itself).³ Nobody has any other ideas… so she gets to work. As she nestles in the depths of the Magi system she talks to Misato a little bit about her mother, who designed the system. Once she’s successfully executed the computer program and neutralized the Angel, she tells Misato that the Magi are meant to represent “three facets” of her mother, and they all have different programming: “The scientist in her. The mother in her. The woman in her.” Ritsuko adds that while she’s never understand her mother as a mother, and respected her as a scientist, “as a woman, there was a part of me that hated her.” Casper, the Magi computer that held off the Angel the longest, was the “woman.” “The woman in her held on to the bitter end,” she says. “That’s so like her.”

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This is one of my favorite “Angel of the Week” episodes. The premise is creative and forces the story to shift from our normal crew of “the pilots and Misato” to Ritsuko. (I like the part where it cuts to where the pilots have been hanging out in their entry plugs with no news this entire time—Rei is asleep, Shinji’s confused, Asuka is mad.) And as we’ve noticed with many episodes in this middle stretch, “Angel Infiltration” also plants the seeds of concepts that will matter later. Here, those seeds include not only that there is an “autopilot” system being built, but the idea of technology imprinted with an individual’s personality.⁴

It’s also clear at this point that the Angels don’t really care about anything except destroying NERV, even if it’s not clear why. The contaminant in “Angel Infiltration” is basically laser-targeted to take out NERV and only NERV (though presumably blowing up NERV HQ would take out a lot of Tokyo-3). Finally, Ritsuko’s discussion of her mother indicates that NERV itself is something of a multi-generational project. The adults of Gendo’s generation are more than authority figures—they are intimately involved in constructing everything about the world of the last fourteen years. Even the ones that are dead (or gone) will turn out to matter.

But also… I love hanging out at NERV! I love their coffee cups and the chatter and the cluttered desks. I like how NERV is somehow both incredibly high tech and looks like it’s made up of tin cans and string. I like how dedicated and idealistic the bridge crew is, or the little touches like Maya’s cute “cat” item sitting on her empty chair:

But really, the moment Ritsuko says that in a sense we’re looking at her mother’s brain and then removes a cover to show an actual human brain in the Magi computer innards isn’t even given a beat in the narrative… but it’s practically a jumpscare to me.⁵ Even though I love hanging out at NERV it’s a reminder that something is seriously wrong with this place.

Something that stands out in this episode is that only two people in it don’t panic; one is Gendo, whose emotional register is so limited that I’m not even sure how he’d communicate “panic” if he wanted to. But the other is Ritsuko, and her calmness feels like it’s not only her personality and intense ability to focus. When the Angel first appears as a mold and takes over the fake Eva body, Misato has to drag Ritsuko out of the room and to safety as it attacks. I felt as if Ritsuko sort of wouldn’t mind if she died and NERV blew up, as long as everybody else died too.

When she does finally kill the Angel she reveals how stressed out she was, and I do think once Misato drags her to safety Ritsuko “snaps to” and recovers her sense of purpose. From that point on she’s as motivated as everybody. But her standing there and not moving is very interesting to me. It will be echoed in the very next episode when there’s another Eva unit malfunction.

Ritsuko is is the character who attributes aggression and anger to Rei; as will come out much later, her mother had her own history with Rei; Rei is the one whose Eva “unit” is compromised and attacks here. Does Ritsuko feel as if, all things being equal, it would sort of serve her right if Rei snapped and killed her? I’m not sure.

What are we to make of Gendo’s weird comment in this episode that the end point of evolution is death (rather than survival)? I don’t think it’s too complicated—much as he loves sterile Antarctica, Gendo views evolution primarily as a wiping out of an inferior form of life. The “supreme” form of life might be, to the viewpoint of already-extant life, indistinguishable from non-existence.⁶

Next episode: Gendo has to make a PowerPoint presentation.

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• Unlike “AT Field,” “Pribnow box” is a real term.

• They mention in this episode that the construction of “Wing B” of NERV is “shoddy” but I think you really need another word for whatever the hell this floorplan is. What even happens if Kaji doesn’t make that jump?

  

• Ritsuko feels some level of professional and sexual competition with her mother (who is, let us remember, dead). I wonder why.…

• I want a NERV coffee cup so bad.

• How creepy is Rei’s scream when the Angel-mold attacks her? I am pretty sure it is the only time she screams… ever. What did that look like inside that entry plug?

• Because I was taking the unusual step of poking around some Evangelion websites this time around (see footnote three), I discovered that this episode is considered (by some) to be the one where the show starts to go off the rails and diverge from its original proposal. However, after looking at the original proposal.… It just doesn’t seem all that different to me.⁷ I don’t think Evangelion ever goes off the rails. I think it’s just weird. That’s allowed.

• However, if you do think it went off the rails, please enjoy this incredibly cranky interview with Michael House, the show’s translator.

• The people have spoken: they want Evangelion for the holidays. I am going to split the difference here and plan to do an episode over next weekend, but not Christmas weekend.

1. I’ve always sort of assumed she dyes her hair blonde (hence her dark eyebrows), which, if true, is a funny departure from her otherwise personality-less professional self-presentation.

2. Or any of the other things that she’s in fact going to start doing in a few episodes.

3. The details of how exactly she does this are a bit vague, as is even exactly what the endpoint of her action “is”—she says peaceful co-existence which Gendo interprets to be self-destruction. I did a slightly unusual thing for these recaps, which I try to do quasi-“blind” and went to look up how other people have summarized this episode… and… I found it summarized both ways. At the end of the episode the Angel is neutralized as a threat and it does seem to die.

However, if we are to take Ritsuko’s solution at face value what is mostly interesting is the apparent suggestion that Angels can be co-opted or co-existed with instead of just killed.

4. And, specifically, your mother’s personality.

5. I guess it could be technology designed to look like a brain for no clear reason but let’s be real here… that’s a brain.

6. A somewhat spoiler-y reflection: a recurring question when it comes to Evangelion is how seriously to take all of its Christian imagery. My opinion is that it shouldn’t be taken all that seriously (though I’m open to changing my mind)—a lot of it is just sort of esoteric and cool.

What I do sort of wonder about, though, is Evangelion’s relationship to Buddhism. Its fellow beloved nineties weirdo show, Revolutionary Girl Utena, is deeply Buddhist, for instance. But the ending of Evangelion (TV), as I see it, is the rejection of Gendo’s attempt to brute force a paradise in which people attain something not unlike nirvana. Instead, the ending enthusiastically embraces the world of strife, suffering, differentiation, and attachment (i.e., samsara).

In other words, I wonder if Christianity in Evangelion functions less as itself and more as a kind of anti-Buddhism. But I’m not really sure… and frankly I don’t know enough about Buddhism to say. The above paragraph could just be thuddingly wrong.

Gendo’s appropriation of various Christian elements is also interestingly Christ-less, even though there is crucifixion imagery etc. He wants to redeem mankind in his own way but it’s a redemption that, of necessity, cannot involve a “personal” savior. In any case, this footnote stands for my current thoughts about the show’s use of Christian imagery and concepts—I’m not sure it’s meaningful on a detailed level that there’s i.e. a “Lance of Longinus” but I do think Christianity is meaningful in the wider scope of the show (though, again, not necessarily as itself). In any case, there will be more to say about all of this later.

7. Obviously, the last couple episodes are different in that they have “events” that “happen.”