nothing good ever comes from piloting
evangelion 3.33: you can (not) redo (hideaki anno, 2012)
Fourteen years after Shinji almost ends the world, Asuka retrieves Unit 01 from space. Shinji has been asleep or in a coma or something up there the whole time, and when he awakens he is understandably confused and not even aware of the passage of time. Misato is there but she won’t explain anything to him. A battle starts but they don’t want him to pilot. “Don’t get in the robot, Shinji”—is this reverse psychology? No, they actually mean it. But why?
It takes a while for anybody even to mention to Shinji that it’s been fourteen years, a statement he finds confusing given that Asuka is right there and she’s clearly not older. Asuka says that’s because of “the curse of the Evas,” something neither she nor anybody else wants to explain. In any case, Shinji is a prisoner now, not a friend, and Misato’s attached a bomb to his neck that she’ll detonate if he ever tries to pilot an Eva again or if Unit 01 activates again.