What Tuesday Nights Did to Me
Every Tuesday night around ten years ago, VOX ran a Japanese animated series with the original audio and German subtitles. I was taking a language class nearby, which meant I couldn’t watch it live, so I’d set the VCR before leaving and sprint home afterward—television on, still soaking from the run, rewinding to the beginning. And there it was: Neon Genesis Evangelion.
Giant robots piloted by teenagers, fighting alien beings called Angels in a post-apocalyptic Tokyo that barely survived the near-destruction of everything. An underground organization called NERV runs the operation, cities detonate on a regular basis, and God apparently has a personal grudge against all living things. It sounds like a fever dream assembled by a thirteen-year-old at maximum enthusiasm. It is exactly that, and I was completely helpless against it.
The characters are what really got me. Shinji, the reluctant lead, so thoroughly defined by his need for approval that watching him felt uncomfortably familiar. Rei, cloned and re-cloned, carrying secrets about her own existence that surface slowly like oil through water. Misato, their commanding officer—beer before noon, apartment like a crime scene, emotional damage she spends twenty-six episodes almost confronting. And Pen-Pen, the warm-water penguin who lives in her fridge. I would take a bullet for Pen-Pen.
Then there’s Asuka. Asuka Langley Soryu, German-American, red-haired, ferociously competent and ferociously fragile in exactly equal measure. The show builds her up as its most capable character and then systematically takes her apart until there’s nothing left, and somehow this made me more gone on her than anything. If I could reach into a screen and drag one fictional person into actual reality, I would take Asuka to Las Vegas and make a run of increasingly catastrophic decisions. Someone should probably commit me. I’ve made peace with this.
The first two-thirds work beautifully as intelligent mecha—each Angel escalates the stakes, each episode excavates another layer of the show’s theological conspiracy, and the robots are enormous and genuinely, deeply cool. Then, famously, the money ran out or director Hideaki Anno collapsed or both, and the final two episodes abandon the action entirely. No climactic battle. Instead: fragmented animation, typed text, static images, each main character forced into their own psychological void to confront whatever they’ve been running from. Parents, children, love, the point of being alive—all of it face down in a ditch. The fans who’d been expecting a resolution reportedly sent Anno death threats.
His response was The End of Evangelion, a theatrical film that replaces those episodes with something more extreme and more honest: an apocalyptic set piece of extraordinary violence followed by the most nakedly raw piece of filmmaker self-examination I’ve ever encountered in any animated work. He essentially killed everyone. The fans kept threatening him anyway. I understand both impulses.
No anime has taken me the way Neon Genesis Evangelion did. Not before, not since. That convoluted story with its borrowed imagery from the Book of Revelation. Those characters, each one a different variety of damage. The robots. Asuka. I watched it on taped VHS as a teenager who had school the next morning, sprinting home through the dark after class, and I never quite returned from it.