FGC:Episode 25 Scene 01

The Case of Shinji Ikari

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Screenshots	Cut #	Description/Dialogue	Commentary
	001	TEXT:“Reason for existing, raison d'être”	UrsusArctos: Raison d'être is borrowed directly from French and spelled out in Katakana here.
	002	TEXT:“The reason why one is allowed to be here”
	003	TEXT:“In the Case of Shinji Ikari”	Dr. Nick: Now that the series has finally gone full art-house, we should briefly tackle the big production side question: why is the ending so art-house? Just by watching the show, it should be clear that we're dealing with a singularly director-driven, deeply personal work. It is also a famously well-known fact that the said director has claimed there was nothing wrong with the TV ending, as immortalized by his "Too bad" statement that probably cemented his auteur bonafides. Then again, it's no secret that the show had major production issues towards the end. The creators talk about this meltdown rather coyly, but they have no qualms admitting that they weren't able to follow the originally intended script. As detailed in the EoE movie pamphlet (AKA the Red Cross Book): The movie ep.25 "Air" is based on the script already in place during TV production originally intended for TV Ep.25. Because of various problems during production, this script was not used and the TV Ep.25 "The Ending World" was done in a same way as TV Ep.26 in which the drama was developed within an internal mind universe. Because of this, it could be said that this ep.25 is a return to the original intended story. In contrast, the movie ep.26, when compared with TV Ep.26, contains much more content on the story and plot, thus deepening the theme brought out in TV. It should therefore be uncontroversial to say that the last two television episodes are quickly cobbled-together replacement things that share a family resemblance with the more mundane clip show episodes of the era. But as with all artistic things, it's the reception that matters, and these two episodes were infamy boosters of the highest caliber. Consider a parallel world where the production issues weren't so overwhelming and the intended story scenario stayed on track, resulting in an EoE-lite TV ending, with perhaps two or three compilation movies afterwards. Somehow I doubt Evangelion would have gained the same levels of cult following in that situation. UrsusArctos: There's a rather heavy dose of reality subtext that Gainax wanted to avoid. Episode 25 aired on March 20, 1996, exactly a year after the infamous Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult killed 13 people and crippled many more on the Tokyo subway using sarin nerve gas. One major unspoken reason for not sticking to the original Episode 25 script was because the sight of the headquarters of a pseudoreligious organization being stormed by Japanese authorities - which happened to Aum soon after the gas attack - would have seemed like something ripped from the headlines and insensitively placed center stage in an anime series that already sailed disturbingly close to the wind when it came to referencing the state of Japan. Evangelion would have gained infamy, all right, but not of a sort anyone would've wanted.
	004		Dr. Nick: It’s easy to ask, how could have Anno been happy with an end result as rushed and messy as this? Here we once again must step outside of the in-universe narrative and look at what Anno was hoping to achieve with Evangelion. Going back to Krystian Woznicki's interview with Hiroki Azuma, the director's socially conscious motives are laid out as such: In other interviews [mit einschlaegigen Animemagazinen] he says that in the beginning of making >>Evangelion<< he wanted to enlarge the number of otaku. It was some kind of master plan for "otakuzation" in order to break the closedness. But towards the end [of the production process] he had to break that pattern and to diffuse it. This otakuzation plan will immediately ring familiar to anyone who has watched Otaku on Video, but the 180 messaging swerve was something new and radical. And certainly, Eva's TV ending was a jolt to the system and definitely broke some of patterns in the anime industry at least. The controversy over it was still hot and fresh in 1996 when Anno did his "Too bad" mic drop. The End of Evangelion wasn't out yet, so as far as the confused audiences were concerned, these two episodes were it. From our vantage point a quarter century later these otaku-reforming pretensions look like a massive dud, and Anno of course went on to pick up his mic to do a fancier mic drop with EoE, only to later pick it up again and so on. But in its original context, "Too bad" makes sense - Anno got his thesis statement out and managed to say what he wanted to say, let the reaction be whatever.
	005
	006	TEXT:“The boy wished for death of his own will”
	007
	008	TEXT:“The boy granted his wish”
	009
	010	TEXT:“The final Angel is gone”
	011		UrsusArctos: Evangelion, like Ideon, has no qualms showing brutal violence being inflicted on kids, or on referencing said acts of brutality again. Dr. Nick: We've mentioned Tomino's Space Runaway Ideon a couple of times, but it bears pointing out here how similar the endings of the two shows ended up being production-wise as well. Ideon got the famous Sunrise axe and its episode count was chopped just as its plot was starting to hit its endgame. This resulted in the TV show going out with a really unsatisfying whimper - imagine, if you will, if Anno had had roughly two minutes of runtime to cram his TV ending in, and you'll get the idea. After a fan backlash, an ending redo was greenlit for Ideon in the format of two movies, the first one, A Contact, recapping the TV series, and the latter one, Be Invoked, turning those final two minutes into a spectacularly violent apocalyptic mind trip of movie, complete with a short live-action sequence. While Eva's TV ending is almost entirely introspection, a little bit of this Ideon DNA leaks in during the parts where we get to glimpse the real world and the proto-EoE happening behind the scenes (or behind the stage in this case). }}
	012	TEXT:“But Shinji Ikari is tormented”
	013	TEXT:“Why did you kill him?”
	014
	015	TEXT:“Why did you kill him?”
	016
	017	TEXT:“Why did you kill him?”
	018
	019
	020
	021	TEXT:“Why did you kill him?”
	022
	023	TEXT:“Why did you kill him?”
	024	SHINJI:“Because I had no choice!”
	025	TEXT:“Why did you kill him?”
	026	SHINJI:“Because Kaworu was... He was an Angel!”
	027	TEXT:“Even though he was also human?”
	028	SHINJI:“No! An Angel! He was our enemy!”
	029	TEXT:“Even though he was human, like you?”
	030	SHINJI:“No! No! You're wrong!”
	031	REI:“Even though he was a person, just like me?” SHINJI:“No! He was an Angel!”
	032	REI:“That's why you killed him?”
	033	SHINJI:“That's right! If I hadn't, we would've died! Everyone would have been killed!”
	034	REI:“That's why you killed him?”
	035	SHINJI:“I didn't do it because I wanted to! I had no choice.”
	036	TEXT:“That's why you killed him”
	037	SHINJI:“Help me...”
	038	TEXT:“That's why you killed him”
	039	SHINJI:“Help me!”
	040	TEXT:“That's why you killed him”
	041	SHINJI:“Help me!”
	042	TEXT:“That's why you killed him”
	043	SHINJI:“Someone, help me!”
	044	TEXT:“That's why you killed him”
	045A	SHINJI:“Please, someone just”
	045B	SHINJI:“help me!”

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