Episode 11

Episode Information
Episode #11
Title 1: 静止した闇の中で Seishishita Yame no Naka de In the Still Darkness Title 2: The Day Tokyo-3 Stood Still
Written By	Hideaki Anno, Yoji Enokido
Directed By	Tetsuya Watanabe
First Aired	12-13-1995
Video Release Date	7-5-1996 (Japan-Video/LD), 1-23-2001 (US-DVD)
Angel Appearances	Matarael
Eva Sorties	Eva-00, Eva-01, Eva-02
Episode chronology
← Previous	Next →
"Episode 10"	"Episode 12"

Overview

Tokyo-3 comes to a standstill when sabotage knocks out all power, and the personnel must scramble to launch the Evas manually when an Angel appears in the middle of the blackout.

Synopsis

The episode opens as Ritsuko, Maya, and Shigeru Aoba, are doing their laundry. They then board a train and meet Vice Commander Fuyutsuki, who complains that he must meet with the city council that day, even though they are just figureheads and the Magi supercomputers make the actual decisions. He also mentions that Ritsuko will be conducting an activation test on Unit-00 that day.

At Nerv HQ, Misato boards an elevator. Kaji runs after her, and despite her pushing the "close" button, joins her. At this time Shinji calls Gendo to tell him that Shinji needs Gendo to show up for a career discussion interview at Shinji's school. Gendo starts to tell him that all those parental duties have been delegated to Misato when they are suddenly cut off. On the elevator, Misato and Kaji realize that there has been a power failure and speculate that Ritsuko might have caused it during the Unit-00 test. In the lab, Ritsuko denies responsibility. Fuyutsuki orders all the emergency power channeled to the Magi and Central Dogma.

Shinji, Asuka and Rei arrive at Nerv and find that their cards won't work to open the gate. Inside, Gendo and Fuyutsuki realize that the power must have been sabotaged. At the same time, the Ninth Angel, Matariel, emerges from the ocean and heads for Tokyo-3. The JSSDF commanders tracking the Angel get no response from Nerv HQ, prompting them to send a direct evacuation warning to the city's populace.

The pilots try to make their way into HQ but are unsuccessful. Misato can't get out of the elevator as well. Ritsuko and Maya must climb a maintenance ladder to get to the control room. Rei finally thinks to consult her emergency manual; the other pilots follow suit and they realize that they need to get to headquarters. Asuka declares herself leader and chooses Shinji to crank open the doors manually.

Hyuga, who had been picking up Misato's laundry, hears the evacuation order and confiscates a politician's loudspeaker van and heads to Nerv HQ. On the elevator, Kaji tries unsuccessfully to flirt with Misato. In the control room, Gendo, Fuyutsuki, and Ritsuko decide that the purpose behind the sabotage must have been to learn how they would react to it. Meanwhile, under Asuka's leadership, they pilots have got themselves lost. Hyuga passes above them in the van, informing everyone within earshot of the attack, but they are unable to get his attention. Rei points out a short cut and they begin crawling through an air vent. Shinji tries to speculate on the nature of the Angels, but Asuka thinks that the question is pointless; if they're attacking, they must be enemies. Asuka then leads them up the wrong path again, opens a door and encounters Matariel face to face before panicking and slamming the door shut. Hyuga reaches the control room and informs them of the Angel's attack. Confident that the pilots will arrive on time, Gendo orders the Evas prepared for a manual launch.

Thanks to Rei, the pilots are on the right path once again. Asuka accuses Rei of being the favored pilot, which Rei denies. They begin crawling through a duct once again. Asuka orders Shinji not to look forward and gives him a flurry of kicks to the face when he disobeys. They come crashing out of the vents into the Eva launch area, with Shinji and Asuka landing in a heap, Rei nimbly landing on her feet. They find the Evas nearly ready for launch. Shinji looks on in awe as he sees a side of his father he has never seen before. Gendo is diligently working beside everyone else to insert the Entry Plugs by hand with a pulley.

The three pilots launch and craw into a large horizontal shaft to try to come underneath the Angel. But when they climb into the vertical shaft they realize that Matarael is trying to burn its way into Nerv with highly corrosive acid. They scramble into a side shaft, losing their guns in the process. Asuka comes up with a daring plan: One Eva will be on defense and will block the acid and neutralize the Angel's A.T. Field. The backup Eva will drop to the bottom of the shaft and toss one of the guns to the offense Eva who will open fire as the defense Eva dodges back into the horizontal shaft.

Rei volunteers for defense, but Asuka has reserved that role for herself and gives Rei the backup role. Shinji will be offense. The plan works perfectly and Matarael is destroyed. The power is restored, and Kaji and Misato, who had been trying to climb out of the elevator, fall into a heap, similar to Shinji and Asuka falling out of the shaft, and the doors open to reveal Ritsuko, Hyuga and Maya, who all react with disgust. As the episode ends, Shinji once again speculates about the Angels' motives; Asuka thinks that such speculation is meaningless, because there's no way to know why.

Notes

• This episode marks the first time that all 3 Evas (Eva-00, Eva-01, and Eva-02) are deployed at the same time.
• Evangelion Unit-00 reappears in this episode for the first time since it was severely damaged in Episode 06, and it has now been repaired and partially rebuilt, with shoulder armor plates like the other Evas, and it has been repainted blue (with white highlights) from its original orange color.
• Eva-00 has retro rockets in its shoulder armor plates, which it uses to slow its descent after a particularly long jump down an access shaft. It is unknown if the other Eva Units also have these, because this ability is never used again in the series.
• It is possible to connect external batteries to all 3 Evas to extend their operational time limit when they are not connected to an Umbilical Cable. They connect to an Eva's shoulder armor fins, and are so long that they extend below the hips. Presumably these are not normally attached to an Eva because they restrict its mobility.
• Asuka jumps in and assumes leadership of the group, both when the Eva pilots are trying to get back into Nerv HQ, and during the fight against the Angel. She also puts herself at risk by going on "defense" and getting Eva-02 sprayed with acid. Besides being emblematic of her extroverted and domineering personality, as Asuka herself says out of pride she wants to make up for the perceived debt she has to Shinji for his using Eva 01 to save her while submerged in the volcano last episode.
• We see more of what off-duty everyday civilian life is like for Nerv personnel, when we see them all stopping at a laundromat. As Ritsuko, Maya and Shigeru do their laundry at the same laundromat, it would seem that they live near each other. Misato forces Makoto to bring her laundry to the laundromat for her.
  • This is the only time in the series that we see the trio of Nerv technicians in their civilian clothes. Shigeru was previously seen to be a guitar fan last episode, when he was reading guitar magazines and strumming an air guitar while in Nerv HQ. Here, he is seen carrying a guitar case on his back.
• The plane sent by the JSSDF to contact Tokyo-3 says it is part of the "Japanese Air Self-Defense Force", abbreviated JASDF. This would appear to be the air force subsection of the JSSDF.
• After two episodes of the red tinted closing credits, the blue credits screen is back.
• Tokyo-3 is controlled by the Magi, a trio of supercomputers. The civilian "town council" in Tokyo-3 is just a puppet with no decision making power whatsoever.
• Matarael is said to make landfall in the "former Atami area".
• A Termination Signal Plug, shaped like a crucifix, can very briefly be observed being removed from Eva Unit 01 when it is being manually prepared to launch, and so the Entry Plug can be loaded. It is difficult to see because the shot is so dark. A Termination Signal Plug was last seen in Episode 02.
• When Ritsuko is picking up her laundry in the opening scene, it can be observed that the laundry she's picking up is just extra copies of her blue shirt and white lab coat outfit (possibly logically answering the question of why "cartoon characters always wear the same clothes"; even Misato wears different outfits during the series).
• The English title selected for this episode by Gainax, "The Day Tokyo-3 Stood Still", is a reference to the classic 1951 scifi movie, The Day the Earth Stood Still.
• Animation goof: in the shot when the JSSDF general puts out his cigarette in an ashtray, the cigarette simply disappears after he puts it down.

Analysis

• It is never explained who exactly sabotaged the power supply in Tokyo-3, and this remains an unanswered mystery of the series. It could have been Seele, or the Japanese government, or an independent act of terrorism. However, Ritsuko noted that because the loss of power didn't result in Tokyo-3's destruction, it was highly probable that the power sabotage was meant to probe Tokyo-3: by examining the order in which power was restored in Tokyo-3, whoever turned it off would gain a detailed blueprint of how Tokyo-3 and Nerv HQ operate. Having surmised this, Ritsuko created several dummy programs, restoring power to the base out of order, etc. trying to confuse whoever might be trying to gain reconnaissance data on the base. Given that Seele orders the JSSDF to attack Nerv HQ in The End of Evangelion, and at that time Aoba noted to Hyuga that it seemed that Seele had been planning this attack far in advance by cutting Nerv's defense budget, it seems likely that the real culprits behind the power sabotage were Seele.
• Matarael is probably the weakest Angel in the entire series: it is literally the only one to ever be killed using an Eva's standard-issue pallet rifle, and a single burst at that. It is probable that had there been no power outage and the Evas had been sortied against it normally, it would not have posed a significant challenge.
• The JSSDF generals refer to Matarael as the "Eighth Angel", even though it is really the Ninth Angel, meanwhile the Nerv team inside Central Dogma refer to it correctly as the Ninth Angel. This may not be just a dialogue mistake: it seems that while the top JSSDF commanders know that the first Angel, Adam, is what caused Second Impact 15 years ago, they know absolutely nothing about the secret existence of the second Angel, Lilith, in Terminal Dogma.
• Curiously, when Fuyutsuki mentions the Magi, Maya replies, "You mean the three supercomputers?," as if they are something she's only heard of. Actually, she works with them every day. Indeed, she's the technician who most often assists Ritsuko in work on the Magi.
  • The English dub tries to smooth this over a little by having Maya say "you mean the same three supercomputers we use?", but its still odd that Maya wouldn't know all of the tasks the Magi perform.
• Gendo Ikari, commander of the entire Nerv organization, can be reached from a pay phone? What type of security system do they have? Or did Shinji say who he was, and because he's a pilot the call got through? In which case, why would Gendo answer a phone call said to be from his son, if he was so annoyed to get it?
  • Shinji could conceivably have just told the Nerv HQ phone operator his Nerv personnel ID number, thus getting clearance, perhaps anticipating that his father wouldn't have even picked up the phone if told in advance it was from Shinji.
• Shinji openly asks Asuka what the Angels are and why they are fighting them, and she retorts that they don't know, but they still have to defend themselves against the Angels by fighting them. It is not that the series does not clearly explain why the Angels are attacking or what their motivations are, it is an intentional secret. Although some information about why Nerv is fighting the Angels and where they ultimately come from is given later in the series, more specific information about the Angels is often lacking; they remain fairly enigmatic throughout the series.
• Does Rei just remember the layout of Nerv HQ very well, or is there something instinctual or super-sensory in how she is always able to correctly pick which maintenance tunnel the pilots should go through in order to get back to Central Dogma?
  • Rei hears Hyuga long before Shinji and Asuka do, and lands perfectly on her feet after a big drop. Previously, in Episode 9, she had synchronized her movements with Shinji perfectly on the first try. Even her normal senses and balance are unusually acute.
• In Episode 05, it seemed that Gendo doted on Rei, and that Gendo was the only person who actually made Rei happy and responsive. However, in this episode when Asuka accuses Rei of being Gendo's "favorite", Rei says that she knows "all too well" that she isn't favored by anybody. Even in episodes after this one, Rei always seems to brighten up when Gendo is around and is utterly loyal to him. Why the apparent disconnect between that behavior and her comments here?
  • Deep down, Rei may realize that Gendo's "favorite" is ultimately "Yui Ikari", not "Rei Ayanami", and that Gendo only really cares about Rei because she's a living shadow of his wife. Rei may or may not know that she is a clone of Yui Ikari, but she could detect that Gendo's real favorite is "someone else". Aside from this, Gendo does not truly connect with Rei on a personal level, as will be expanded upon in Episode 15.

Quotes

• Ritsuko Akagi: (After the power goes out while she's conducting a test) "...It wasn't me."
• (The three Children arrive at a closed door inside HQ)
  Asuka: "Okay, Shinji, you're up." (Shinji, struggling to manually open the door)
  Shinji: "Sheesh! You only rely on people at times like this!"
• (An Officer in the very next scene) "Damn those Joint Staff bastards! They only rely on us at times like this."
• Fuyutsuki: "The first havoc wreaked upon our headquarters wasn't caused by an Angel, but by another member of our species. Just goes to show."
  Ikari: "Ultimately, the enemy of mankind is mankind."
• Shinji: "Angels, messengers of God, enemies named after servants of Heaven. Why are we fighting them?"
  Asuka: "What are you, stupid? Strange beings are attacking us. If you're going through a fire, you've got to brush away the embers, of course!"
• Rei Ayanami: "Man fears the darkness, and so he scrapes away at the edges of it with fire."

Episodes & Films
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