WOMAN:“Shannon Bio, a chemical firm
funded from overseas.
It's been here for nine years,
but it also hasn't changed in nine years.
The Marduk Institute has
108 affiliated companies.
106 of them turned out to be
dummy corporations.”
Dr. Nick: I wonder if this conspiracy detail bit about the dummy corporations is actually a sneaky reference to the Aum Shinrikyo cult, which used dummy companies to covertly buy land for their bioterror labs. Evangelion's originally planned plot famously had to be tweaked in order to make the apocalyptic cult business less eerily similar, but this very small thing feels like it could be an actual ripped-from-the-headlines addition.
UrsusArctos: Since 108 is a massively sacred number in Buddhism (and Hinduism and Jainism), this sneaky reference stops being so sneaky and starts to look a whole lot more like an overt reference to that purportedly Buddhist doomsday cult.
