s the controversial Neon Genesis Evangelion series finally shrieks to its conclusion, the child-pilots selected to defend Earth all seem to be disintegrating emotionally. Asuka's confidence degenerates until she can no longer synch mentally with her Eva, rendering her useless as a pilot. Shinji submerges his personality until he seems like a robot, activated only in battle. And Rei, distant and baffling as ever, suffers apparent death in a cataclysmic solo struggle, only to turn up again, confused and unsettled--at least, to the degree she ever experiences any emotion.
Everything else is degenerating, too. The secret masters of the Evangelion project, furious over Gendo Ikari's pursuit of his own agenda, attempt to outmaneuver him by craft and by force. Ritsuko wavers between icy contempt and uncontrollable hysterics while her friend Misato finally stabilizes, too late to save the man she loves. In a series of flashbacks, a great deal of history is revealed: history that finally explains Gendo's iciness, Ritsuko's rigidity, Asuka's arrogant instability, and much more. In the midst of boundless emotional turmoil, past and present, the latest Angel attacks seem almost trivial, even when the final enemy penetrates to the core of NERV's complex.
Somehow it all has to do with Gendo's mad-scientist attempts to create Instrumentality, a state of being where all the characters find themselves inside each others' minds and finally accept the degree to which they're each driven by the same loneliness and fear. But in the end, nothing but the characters' pain and their humanity is ever really made clear.
It's art, but what does it have to do with anything?
Right up to the end, it seems like director Hideaki Anno is finally going to pierce the obfuscation that surrounds the mysterious alien Angels, the biomechanical Evas, the secret cabal that links them and the driven madman who's apparently using them all, either for humanity's benefit or its destruction. Episodes 21 through 24 play out in a powerful welter of Anno's trademark lengthy tableaux and visual mindgames. Anno seems to enjoy throwing out images, words and thoughts at a pace impossible to follow in real time; even on a frame-by-frame basis it can be hard to absorb the full revelations of his bluff and often-masked characters' hidden feelings and memories.
But in the end, it all seems to fall apart, at least for anyone hoping for story resolutions. None of the series' deepest mysteries are ever cleared up--for instance, what the Angels are or why they came; whether they were trying to destroy humanity, communicate with it, or reflect whichever humanity itself preferred as an outcome; how or why Gendo threw the people around him into a shattering psychic link.
Those final two episodes--a lengthy philosophical tennis match in which Shinji finds his purpose in life amid a battering rain of unforgiving questions from the personification of his self-image and his images of others--prove to be a wrenching and powerful experience, brilliantly executed and fascinating. But as a wrapup to a complex, graphic and above all viscerally tangible series, they're a surreal intangiblity--a wonder to watch, but still oddly irrelevant.
