RITSUKO:“Yes, there is one child whose core
can be prepared immediately.”
UrsusArctos: Plot conveniences aside, it does raise the question of why there weren't other candidates for whom cores could be prepared at once.
Dr. Nick: There's a bit of a missed horror opportunity that we're never shown Nerv's core warehouse of fridged mommies. Ritsuko's line here would make more sense if Nerv was showing ethical restraint and keeping the cores unstuffed until the last moment, at which point they would need to stage an unfortunate accident to seemingly kill off a select mother of a Class 2-A kid.
Arisugawa: The conceit that all 2-A students are "fourth level candidates" feels....I don't know. I'm wrestling with this as I re-watch the show right now. It feels like a concept that wasn't properly fleshed out, or was in the initial planning in a different form and when they decided to call back to it some of the architecture of the show had shifted.
How many contact experiments were run? Or, to put in another way, after Yui, who was crazy enough to volunteer? And after the woman after Yui, who was crazier, and so forth? And more to the point, if someone is strapped into the contact experiment against their will, what kind of crazy Eva would that produce? Would it berserk instantly, the mother horrified that not only is she trapped inside, but they put her child in there as well?
dzzthink: It was previously highlighted that Toji and Kensuke don't have moms, which might suggest none of the other children have moms either. However, it would be highly suspicious and unsettling if there was an entire classroom of children with missing moms who were involved in top government contact experiments, so it remains quite unclear what the selection process was for 4th level candidate pilots.
