- Evangelion’s Apocalypse Explained
- Differences between the ending of Evangelion TV series and the End of Evangelion movie
- The Real-World Reasons Behind Evangelion’s Ending
- Alternate Universes and the New Evangelion Films
Evangelion’s Apocalypse Explained
Let’s start with the anime series’ ending first. At the end of episode 24, Shinji is forced to kill Kaworu, who was revealed to be the final Angel. Despite being made to reunite with Lilith, thus wiping out humanity and making Angels the new dominant lifeform, Kaworu is moved to give his own life so that humanity—or rather, Shinji—can go on. With all the Angels gone, SEELE and Shinji’s father Gendo Ikari both set the project known as “Human Instrumentality” into motion: a process that will meld all human beings into a single shared consciousness.While both forces want Instrumentality to happen, what they want from it is wildly different. SEELE’s goal is to make the meld a permanent state, with everyone blending together and losing any sense of humanity. They’re a kind of death cult, believing that humanity isn’t fit to live as it is and must undergo a unification in order to become a new being. Essentially, life is too hard, it’s beyond fixing, so let’s hit the reset button and start over.
Gendo, however, is carrying out his late wife Yui’s plan, at least coincidentally. He wanted to use EVA Unit 01 as a sort of “arc” where everyone would experience the benefits of understanding one another and healing their own traumas, but also be able to resume individual shape afterward. To that end, Yui sacrificed her life so that her soul would inhabit Shinji’s EVA. Unlike SEELE’s plan, Yui’s would allow people to understand one another and then build a better future while retaining individuality. This is all kind of incidental to Gendo, whose driving desire is to see Yui again.
Gendo, implicitly in the series and explicitly in End of Evangelion, is the person Shinji is in danger of becoming if he can’t find a way to change. That is to say, the actual worst human being and father. All of this is set up before the finale begins, though often in cryptic dialogue masked by references to Christian iconography.
Very little of what we’re about to describe happens explicitly in the TV series, and visually the show begins to look dramatically different than the first 24 episodes. Instead, episode 25 begins with Shinji already undergoing the process of Instrumentality. However, because of the select images that are shown, like Misato’s body suffering the same gunshot wound and Asuka having been moved from the hospital to her EVA, it’s safe to assume that what happens explicitly on screen in the movie is also likely happening offscreen between the end of episode 24 and the beginning of episode 25. The TV series is far less interested overall in the “hows” of the apocalypse than the emotional stakes that event represents for the cast. Still, let’s break it down what End of Evangelion depicts.
In order to gain access to Unit 01, SEELE sends a military strike force into NERV headquarters and kills most of its personnel. Misato, before she’s fatally wounded, tells Shinji that Angels and the human race are all descendants of Lilith: each Angel is a different version of what humanity could have evolved into. This means that just like the Angels, humanity is also trying to reunite with the scary-mask-Lilith in the basement and ascend into a new form—that’s Instrumentality. Misato begs Shinji to stop this from happening, but EVA 01 is unable to move. Asuka is gruesomely taken out by a series of artificial EVAs powered using Kaworu’s DNA (the same as Rei’s “dummy plug”).
Meanwhile, down in the basement, Rei absorbs the embryo of Adam—the creature created by the First Ancestral Race that SEELE dug out of Antarctica—but rejects Gendo as the leader of the apocalypse. Instead, because she is a clone made of Yui’s DNA and Lilith’s, she’s able to meld with the scary-mask-Lilith and turn into a giant Rei. Having done this, she seeks out Shinji, who has managed to get into the awakened EVA 01.
Terrified by the sight of Asuka’s mangled EVA, his breakdown intensifies, and he is powerless to stop the unification of the EVA (a symbol of humanity’s knowledge) and Lilith (Giant Scary Rei). Lilith-Rei appears to everyone in the form of their most beloved person--for Shinji it’s Kaworu, for Hyuga it’s Misato, for Maya it’s Ritsuko, and so on. The only exception is Gendo. While he sees a vision of Yui, she (alongside Kaworu and Rei) berate him for his abandonment and abuse of Shinji before Yui, whose soul still inhabits EVA Unit 01, bites off his head. Around the world, humanity melts together into a sea of LCL (that’s the stuff pilots float in when they’re piloting the EVAs). That takes us roughly halfway through the movie and, theoretically, to the point where episode 25 of the TV series begins.
Confusing, right? All of that tells us the “how” and “what” of Evangelion’s apocalyptic conclusion, but the mechanics are secondary to the metaphor: this is about the world “ending” in emotional terms, as a result of debilitating mental illness (particularly anxiety and depression). To that end, many fans prefer to think of the different endings of the TV series and End of Evangelion as two divergent universes when it comes to the results of Instrumentality, each potential paths that Shinji could have taken. Though never confirmed as canon, the multiverse theory is a popular one because it offers a possible explanation as to how these two starkly different conclusions can co-exist within the same continuity.
Interested to see the biggest changes Netflix made to their re-release of Evangelion? Watch the video below:
Differences between the ending of Evangelion TV series and the End of Evangelion movie
In the TV ending, Shinji is able to confront his self-loathing successfully—as are Asuka, Misato, and presumably the rest of humanity. However, you may have been caught off guard by how Shinji’s journey is rendered in abstract, with line animation and sometimes plain colored marker drawings. There are conflicting reports as to why this happened: anonymous sources have alleged that the show had difficulties finding (or rather, keeping) sponsors, leading to a need to outsource production work and the budget running thin in the show’s final third; director Hideaki Anno allegedly puts it down to scheduling issues caused by the television networks, which would have left the team insufficient time to finish the episode; the fact that the sexual content and violence late in Evangelion’s run would lead to stricter broadcast censorship standards, and founding studio president Toshio Okada claimed Anno just couldn’t make up his mind in a timely fashion.Whatever the case, the starkly different animation style can be seen as a pragmatic storytelling device. As Shinji travels further and further into himself, stripping away his defenses, so too do the visuals strip down through the steps of making an anime. Shinji peers into the hearts of those around him and realizes that they are also suffering, just as he is, and that it isn’t right for him to rely on them to fix his issues. In a half-dialogue, half-lecture mimicking a therapy session, Shinji realizes that his own self-hatred has warped his relationships with others.
Part of this journey involves traveling to a literal blank page, symbolizing complete and utter freedom of self-definition. But that’s far too much for a human mind, particularly a teenager, to grasp. And so, slowly, it becomes a brief glimpse into an alternate reality where Shinji and his friends are happy as ordinary high school students. Think of it as a sort of “Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come” sequence, except more hopeful; rather than showing Shinji the catastrophic outcome if he continues on his current path (that’s End of Evangelion, more on that in a minute), it presents a version of him that’s succeeded in being happy. This single scene is significant for the franchise at large because it implied a canonical multiverse that would later allow artists to put the characters into a variety of genres and settings, but its purpose in the moment is to snap Shinji out of a sense of being trapped.
While perhaps a slight exaggeration—learning to love yourself won’t bring your parents back from the dead, for instance—it illustrates for him that he can change his own perceptions and thus himself. Having had this moment of breakthrough, the world metaphorically opens up to reveal all the potential healthy connections now open to him. Here the show uses its last gasp to scale things back up to full animation, bringing color and movement into Shinji’s world to accompany his newfound resolve.
In End of Evangelion, however, Shinji rejects the concept of growth and this ending is the dark yin to the anime series’ more positive yang. As Instrumentality begins, he sees warped versions of scenes with Misato and Asuka that, in the TV ending, helped him to understand his pain. Here, it only intensifies his misogynistic disgust, as he is closed off from understanding their actions and sees their words only as attacks. The camera light that acted as a metaphor for illumination in the TV ending appears again, but it’s dark and unused. We even see Gendo parroting the same words about fear of others in his dying moments, creating an ugly glimpse of the man this Shinji will likely become—bitter, abusive, and obsessed.
He conjures a mental image of Asuka who tells him harsh truths: that his attachment to her is impersonal, uninterested in her problems, and only a means to prop him up. Unable or unwilling to accept this, he strangles her; and because his mindset is the catalyst for Instrumentality, it becomes one framed by human sorrow and fear rather than understanding and growth. When Shinji asks whether his existence is worthwhile, which was explored and affirmed in the TV series finale, he now receives no answer.
Shinji is visited by the spirits of Rei and Kaworu, who represent hope and love within his heart respectively. They attempt to deliver the message of the TV ending, and Shinji grasps the idea that he wants to reach out to others—but because he couldn’t face himself, it’s doomed to end in failure. He reflects that he’ll likely realize the same thing “over and over” as he separates from the sea of humanity and wakes up on a beach with Asuka. After much emphasis on the fact that humans have hands to reach out and understand one another, the camera pointedly lingers on the pair’s hands, close enough to touch and yet worlds apart.
In contrast to the ambiguous but hopeful ending of the TV series, which in the new English dub goes so far as to layer Misato and Asuka’s voices onto the line “I can change and like myself” to imply that the entire cast is reaching a point of closure and healing, the movie contradicts Shinji’s supposed desire to start over. Despite saying that he wanted to try once again to connect with others, Shinji’s first act on seeing Asuka is to try and strangle her. This is an exact repetition of his decision earlier in the movie, which kicked off the montage of worldwide despair and anguish. That he returns to it apparently on instinct suggests that he has learned nothing and changed nothing, and at best will walk the same road to another breakdown and have another opportunity to choose change instead.
The ending does have a glimmer of hope in that Shinji stops when Asuka reaches out to touch him. This could be seen as Shinji ultimately choosing to stop harming Asuka and feel emotions (as evidenced by his tears) rather than continuing to shut everything out, but this profound change comes at the great cost of all the destruction that just transpired. It’s an incredibly bittersweet ending compared to the TV series, only offering the slightest morsel of optimism after the end of the world.
But others read the moment as a completely bleak outcome where Shinji only stopped because he returned to a state of paralysis, his depression and self-loathing consuming him. The common thinking behind this interpretation of the ending is that it was Anno giving fans unhappy with the TV ending “what they wanted” in a monkey’s paw scenario: here it is, the literal opposite of how things ended before. Enjoy.
The Real-World Reasons Behind Evangelion’s Ending
A lot of the confusing elements, differing endings and wildly diverging visual styles (like the inclusion of hand drawn sketches and live-action elements) tie back to the reportedly troubled production of the original anime series.Director Hideaki Anno reportedly faced a serious battle with depression while creating the Neon Genesis Evangelion series. The crew was having a hard time of it too due to an overall stressful production and issues with sponsors that would eventually contribute to the famously limited animation of the last few episodes. Sometime before the finale was made, Anno was given a book on psychology and mental illness by a friend, and it became the closest thing he’d had to a breakthrough regarding his own issues.
That experience formed part of the basis for the television ending, and it carries a sense of hopefulness in the possibility of recovery. "I wrote about myself,” Anno said to Newtype in a translated interview by CJAS. “My friend lent me a book on psychological illness and this gave me a shock, as if I finally found what I needed to say.”
Despite the ending coming from a positive experience had by the show’s creator, a segment of the fandom felt unsatisfied by the conclusion. To some, the series felt insultingly incomplete because of its limited animation and focus on Shinji’s internal journey rather than the concrete details of the apocalypse, while others debated over whether the TV ending was a testament to Anno’s vision or a disservice to dedicated fans that betrayed their expectations and loyalty.This legendary vehemence has passed into a lore almost as robust as the series itself, flamed by Anno’s penchant over the years of saying vague or even outright contradictory things in interviews. But we are able to piece together a rough timeline of the drama that ensued based on various reports from over the years. The final episode of the TV series finished airing in March of 1996, and in July of 1997 End of Evangelion was released. Some claim that Anno made End of Evangelion specifically in reaction to the poor reception of the TV ending, while others say that artists within the studio were eager to work on more Evangelion and pushed for it. But either way, the backlash to what was happening with Evangelion was in full effect and saw production studio Gainax receive death threats from viewers.
Anno’s response was to present a distinctly different ending in response to the fan backlash about how retreating into fantasy causes the end of the world, prevents human understanding, and dooms Shinji to make the same mistakes over and over again rather than successfully grow. This explains the live-action section of a movie theater during the film’s Instrumentality montage toward the final act of the movie, and why there are letters on screen. Those are actually a selection of the death threats the studio received. The resulting film is a bitter but earnest one, contrasting Rei and Kaworu’s speech with the poisonous effects of denying personal honesty: it caused the shift from a set of episodes named “Do You Love Me/Take Care of Yourself” to “Love is Destructive/I Need You.”
To drive the point home, the transition into the film’s live-action sections include a litany of disgusted dialogue from the film’s female characters -- End of Evangelion’s Shinji objectifies and rejects understanding of the women in his life, as illustrated by the way the camera focuses on their breasts or fantasies of them naked while they’re trying to take Shinji to task for not listening to them during the scene on the train. This ending is a direct reaction and response to the anime fans who turned on Anno.
As Deputy Director Kazuya Tsurumaki put it in The End of Evangelion Theatrical Program Book, “For example, Hideaki Anno says that, ‘Anime fans are too introverted, and need to get out more.’ Further, he should be happy that non-anime fans are watching his work, right? But when all is said and done, Hideaki Anno's comments on [Evangelion’s two endings] are that it is a message aimed at anime fans, including himself, and of course, me too. In other words, it's useless for non-anime fans to watch it. If a person who can already live and communicate normally watches it, they won't learn anything.”
Alternate Universes and the New Evangelion Films
Maybe because of the boiling audience contention and production-side constraints, Evangelion has never been allowed to rest as a completed work. Thanks to the alternate universe slice-of-life anime sequence in episode 26, countless manga and video game spinoffs have explored putting the EVA kids into other settings.Most significantly, there’s an official manga adaptation by Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, which began alongside the TV series in 1995 and ran until 2013. The written version of the story is different from the TV series in both tone, ending, and additional content woven in throughout. The other spinoffs are basically high-budget fanfiction that let fans revisit characters in new contexts. Want to see a more active Shinji? Have opinions on which love interest he should have ended up with? Looking for some comedy shenanigans after the emotional wringer of the TV series? There is probably a spinoff for that.
The biggest addition to be aware of in terms of recontextualizing the TV series and End of Evangelion’s endings is Rebuild of Evangelion, a series of three films--with a fourth coming any day now, they swear--that originally was assumed to be a seemingly straightforward remake. Press around the first movie referred to it as being like a “recap” of the series, with little information given regarding what would happen during the rest of the announced quadrilogy. The first film, Evangelion 1.11: You Are (Not) Alone is nearly a beat-for-beat remake of the first six episodes of the TV series with a higher budget. It did, however, update a few minor things that seemed like retroactively tightening the script at the time but would later feed into the popular “time loop” theory: Shinji is told the stakes of what exactly will happen if he doesn’t stop the Angels much sooner, and Kaworu is introduced long before he’s destined to meet Shinji.The second film, Evangelion 2.22: You Can (Not) Advance, diverged into its own alternate universe with a new pilot named Mari, a much more action-oriented ending, and a boatload more fanservice. By all accounts, it was giving fans what they’d said they wanted with a badass, masculine Shinji, a lot of panty shots, and a cool robot fighting finale where the hero saves the girl. It ends on that supposedly triumphant note, with dark undertones that Shinji’s actions have triggered Third Impact (aka the apocalypse) much, much sooner than it occured in the original series.
Along the way, fans took note of the fact that there’s an unexplained red mark across the moon in Rebuild, which looks a lot like the blood spray left behind after Lilith-Rei’s collapse, and that the oceans in Rebuild are red rather than blue, a lot like the sea of LCL. There’s also the fact that while he’s hanging out up on the moon, Kaworu makes a lot of statements about making Shinji happy “this time”--all elements that evoked imagery from the End of Evangelion or referenced a cycle of events.
After a four year gap in production, Evangelion 3.33: You Can (Not) Redo, seemed to execute the same rug-pulling trick on viewers that End of Evangelion had almost 20 years before: it skips the story forward by 20 years and reveals that Shinji’s selfish action-hero posturing at the end of the previous film had actually put the world in a much worse state and killed off much of what remained of humanity, and much of the film focuses on alienation and the struggle to atone. It seemed to bring home the idea that this was not a remake but a new branch of the timeline, possibly one born of Shinji’s rejection of Instrumentality last time around.
It’s impossible to say what all of this is leading to, as the final film of the quartet has been in production since 2014 and isn’t due to come out until next year. Its buried connections to End of Evangelion and possible ongoing interrogation of that film’s themes might make it of interest to those who were left wanting more closure.
Closing Thoughts
In the end, we encourage you to think of Evangelion as a series that doesn’t have a “right” interpretation. Because of its troubled production, many plot elements and themes changed course over time, which makes explaining what the ending actually means a mess from a structural viewpoint. This is a series that had two do-over endings, a full reboot that might be a plot continuation, and more than two dozen other iterations of the characters, so trying to find one perfect way to digest the story is a fool’s errand in light of that much convoluted canon.But that’s what makes the series so freeing, and why it’s drawn in so many people over the years: different parts of the story resonate for different people, and your emotional journey will vary based on how you personally perceive the events of the show. The technical details of the plot will always be secondary to the power of that emotional experience.
At least until we figure out where the heck Anno is going with Rebuild.
