i think i'm probably the third one

neon genesis evangelion (episode twenty-three, "rei iii")

all images are from fancaps dot net

Misato is in a drunken grief haze where she listens to Kaji’s message over and over. Asuka is staying at Hikari’s house, playing video games until she has to go to sleep. Rei is Rei. Shinji and Pen-Pen are on their own, at least until this episode’s Angel shows up. And it is… a circle of light? A double helix of light? Rei goes out and the Angel attacks and then infects her.

As with Asuka, this is a clearly painful experience that has sexual overtones, but the Angels seem to have learned from what happened in the last episode and this encounter does not instantly start shredding Rei’s mind. Rei has a conversation with the other consciousness that has arrived in Unit 00. The Angel asks Rei if she’d like to become one; Rei says no; the Angel says, well, tough luck there it’s already happening.

Back at NERV HQ send Asuka out to rescue Rei but she’s so traumatized and depressed she can’t even get Unit 02 to move. They send Shinji out but the Angel instantly attacks and begins to infect Unit 01; when he stabs it, it lets out a human scream and a bunch of tiny Rei faces start appearing on his plugsuit demanding to know why he hurt her. The Angel even manifests a Rei face and torso and reaches out to embrace him.

Rei realizes the Angel is doing this because she wants to “become one” with Shinji and that she can’t let this happen. She pulls the Angel back in and blows herself up. Rei is dead. There is no chance that she is alive. But then Shinji and Misato get a call: Rei is alive. She doesn’t remember saving Shinji, though. She says to him that she thinks she’s the third one. He has no idea what that means, but he’s about to find out.

I said that this episode was bad times for Rei, but looking back on it really it’s worse for Ritsuko. Her cat dies. She’s brought before SEELE to testify and she is completely naked; they tell her that Gendo sent her to them in Rei’s place. She decides to show Shinji everything going on at NERV, only to get held up at gun point by Misato on the way. She takes them down to a place we’ve seen many times before—a lab with a large glass vat connected to something that looks like a giant mechanical brain. This time, however, Ritsuko switches on the lights, at which point we realize that surrounding the room is a kind of aquarium of Rei clones. These soulless bodies are what actually exist inside the dummy plugs. And they are also “spare parts” for Rei.

Ritsuko breaks down and kills all of them while giving an incoherent speech—she was willing to do anything for Gendo but he chose Rei over her, because, like her mother before her, he actually just doesn’t care about her. She was in love with him but it didn’t matter.¹ And… that’s where we end it, for now.

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Where to start with this episode? This episode’s creepiest image for me is not, somehow, the tank of smiling soulless Rei bodies—they’re pretty creepy, don’t get me wrong—or even the Rei faces popping up on Shinji’s hand—though that’s also pretty creepy—but rather when Unit 00 begins to reach up toward something the sky and briefly transforms into a giant Rei with a halo. What’s happening here? And I don’t really mean “what’s happening with the plot,” but you know. What are we being told here about what’s happening to Rei?

Rei’s dying and while she expects she’s going to be back in some sense, she can’t really know what that means. What kind of continuity exists between Rei I, Rei II, Rei III? I don’t think even she knows. Rei destroys herself because the angel seems to act on her desire to “be one” with Shinji, but her last thought is of Gendo.² Who is Rei III? She is and is not another person, as is clear when she picks up Gendo’s glasses in her apartment and tries to destroy them, then begins to cry.

The Angel tells Rei that the loneliness she can identify in a sort of abstract way (“there are many of us. But you’re alone and you hate it”) is the feeling she has in her own heart. Rei seems to be shocked by this discovery, even though she knew she was describing herself. She wants to be herself and not this other, but what does it mean for Rei to get to be “herself”? What self is Rei permitted to have?

Shinji and Asuka have both struggled with the way Rei seems to be special and singled out, feeling disposable in comparison. Rei however lives with the knowledge that she literally is disposable—that she is infinitely copy-able, that she can’t even really die, and that while the function “Rei,” as a general concept, represents in Gendo’s plan is necessary, the individual Rei is not. Rei III’s anger and subsequent tears suggest she retains the emotional legacy of Rei II’s experiences, even if she cannot remember the details.

Over the past series of episodes, every Eva pilot has died and been reborn. Shinji dissolved and reformed himself; Asuka was razed to the ground; and Rei killed herself knowing she would not be allowed to die. Shinji’s plea for somebody to be nice to him, Asuka’s plea for somebody to touch her, Rei’s stoic admission of her own loneliness and her shock at her own tears… there’s a relation among these three deaths and rebirths that I’m trying to tease out.

When I watch the giant Rei thing reach crying up toward the sky, it feels more than anything like Rei just doesn’t want to die alone. Or maybe she wants to hear that she’s special and won’t be replaced. Whatever it is she wants, she doesn’t get it.

Next episode: Shinji falls in love.

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• Scheduling: I’m going to switch to every other week for the last three episodes. I know this is kind of annoying, but… these are honestly challenging episodes to write about! However, after the next episode, I will release “Tayvangelion” aka “A Cruel Angel’s Argumentative Antithetical Playlist (She Can Still Melt Your World) (Into LCL)” in its own post, since at that point there will be no characters left we haven’t met.

• This was a difficult episode to do—definitely weigh in in the comments…

• Annals of inappropriate laughter—the light clicking on to reveal Shinji’s horrified face as Misato points a gun at Ritsuko.

• The gentleness in Misato’s voice when she tells Ritsuko it’s her despair that makes her a fool is very touching to me—as much damage as it’s received, there’s a friendship between them nothing can really destroy.

• Misato reaches out to touch Shinji’s hand while he’s in shock over Rei’s death, only to be rejected. The next person who tries will have better luck, as I remember it…

• I don’t view that hand touch as sexual, incidentally, and genuinely find it kind of weird that people do. I don’t think this show is very subtle about those things and if it wanted to show Misato coming onto Shinji it would be blunt.³ Poor Misato. One fan theory has her as a murderer and another puts her down as a pedophile.…

• Ritsuko’s mental collapse seems very parallel to Unit 00’s “core” collapse (and perhaps also to Asuka’s).

• Dept. of things I have no reading of: the blood coming out of the Angel “Rei.” Rei has been previously established as a woman who does not bleed and also as somebody who dislikes the smell of blood. But I have no thought that connects these items.

• When it comes to the question of “who is in Unit 00,” I think there are a couple possible answers. One is that Rei I is in Unit 00. This makes sense insofar as her creepy little face shows up when Shinji’s in there… but it also doesn’t really make sense to me. Souls can “rip” (as in the case of Asuka’s mother) but Rei doesn’t exhibit the kind of total break from reality that seems to follow there.
  
  I entertained the thought that Ritsuko’s mom could be in Unit 00, since, after all, we do not actually see her body, and it would explain the Eva’s paroxysms of violence and its determination to kill Gendo. But that doesn’t really make that much sense either, does it? Would Rei be able to pilot an Eva with somebody who hated her so much?
  
  After thinking about it while writing this, I wonder if the answer really is just that Unit 00 is a body without a soul, which is what makes it so unpredictable and violent. The dummy plugs are also bodies without souls, and they are extremely cruel and violent, as we’ve seen; and the mass-produced series is the same way. It seems like soulless bodies, in Evangelion, have appetites and locomotion but not much else. But then Rei says the Eva has a heart…

• This episode seems like another example of the show priming you for a reveal—in this case, what an A.T. Field is, which we find out next episode.

1. A touch I like here is that they cut to Shinji at one point and it’s clear he’s emotionally grasped what’s going on with her. Like yeah join the club of people Gendo has rejected in favor of Rei, Ritsuko.

2. Another thing that stands out in this episode is Gendo’s silence as Rei suffers and eventually dies. There’s no “REI!” coming out of him here, as there has been in the past. Once it is inevitable, he is completely unmoved by her loss.

3. To the extent that I read about… half… of End of Evangelion as Hideaki Anno saying “I hate you all you sick little creeps you weirdos die die die die” to his fans, the relevant scene with Misato kind of fits here.