Beyond the mountains, a giant crater. All of the trees are burnt and leveled.
Kensuke (OFF):“Not only were Iruma and Komatsu dispatched, they brought in troops from Misawa and Kyushu. I'm sure there were more than 10 or 20 people injured. Even some killed…”
Reichu: This clearly isn't the epicenter of Sachiel's suicide explosion from #02, on the outskirts of Tokyo-3, so we must be seeing the place where Sachiel stepped on the N2 mine. Since they're talking about a "robot incident", here, I suppose that means Sachiel, and not just the Eva, is being considered a "robot" by the general populace. (Indeed, in the manga, a girl asks Shinji if "that monster" was another country's secret weapon.) In episode #01, the aerial view of the explosion site is cropped-in (C-127), so we don't see the trees on its outskirts.
Mr. Tines: But you'd expect to see flattened trees beyond the crater where the earth was excavated.
Dr. Nick: Not to mention there is no way that the power line could have survived the blast. Sometimes explosions in NGE tend to cause unrealistically minimal shockwaves compared to their size (as can be seen in cut 008 in episode #02 -- notice the seemingly undamaged buildings right next to ground zero), but if that indeed is the crater caused by the N2 mine, then we have a blooper here.
Reichu: Also, if Mt. Takanosu is where Sachiel stepped on the mine, I guess the Tonosawa region must be more extensive than I highlighted in the map.
Kensuke's throwing a bunch of new names of us here. We heard about Iruma in episode #01; Komatsu in Kanazawa Prefecture and Misawa in Aomori Prefecture are both air base locations; Kyushu is the southernmost island in Japan. Check out their locations relative to Tokyo-3 here.
Keisuke-kun: Kensuke is quite the conspiracy theorist. The news reports say that no one was hurt, but he comes up with all this info on troop movements and technical stuff and declares something else.
