Camera pans down from the Milky Way in the night sky to the front of Mount Futago, showing all of Neo Tokyo 3 in the process.
It’s a beautiful night sky, like a falling star. Only the Angel and Mount Futago are lit up
thewayneiac: The whole "lights out" sequence from 192-201 is beautifully drawn.
Fireand'chutes77: From everlasting to everlasting, the stars return to view, having shied behind the veil of civilization's blazing light for some seventy years. The stars are patient, and the passage of a human lifetime - an entire century - is nothing at all to them. This is the return of the primal state; this is the wild darkness the stars broke a million years ago, and will break a million years hence, when the frail lights of man go dark once more. No matter what happens at Mt. Futago tonight or a year from now, the starlight is cooly unblinking. It is separate and aloof from humanity's life-and-death struggle, and will outlast it.
thewayneiac: Very nice. Is that a quote, or is it original?
Additional Commentary
Fireand'chutes77: Original. It came out a little more gloomy/fatalistic than it first sounded in my head, though... The scene was awe-inspiring (in the classical sense of the word), and beautiful at the same time... The aerospace engineer and backpacker in me both found something to enjoy. (On a side note: I wish my campus would turn the lights off at night, because the stars would be *amazing* out here if they did.)
In a similar vein, I was quite impressed by the very distant views of catastrophic explosions (2I, Nevada) in later parts of the series. On the ground, the scene is overwhelming, but pull back far enough and it becomes a tiny pinprick of light on a very large planet, backdropped by the even larger matte black of space. Carl Sagan's commentary on the Pale Blue Dot came to mind several times during this series. And despite the global effects of 2I and 3I and titanic machinations of NERV, SEELE, and Gendo, the sum of it all barely reaches lunar orbit* - a distance just two or three doors down the hall in cosmic terms.
*With perhaps the exception of Yui. But that's for later...
