WiC Watches: Neon Genesis Evangelion

Episodes 10: “Magma Diver”

You know, before I started watching Evangelion, I heard a lot about how bleak the show was, about how it was a psychological examination of human frailty first and a show about giant robots second. But the last few episodes have been pretty traditional sci-fi romps, which isn’t a bad thing at all. The climax of “Magma Diver” involves Asuka fighting a newborn Angel inside a volcano, for heaven’s sake. That’s just fun.

The sequence where Asuka is lowered into the volcano (NERV has detected an embryonic Angel in the depths and wants to neutralize it before it can hatch and destroy Tokyo-3) is wonderfully tense; we’d already seen the pressure crush an exploratory probe earlier, so I was worried for Asuka even though I knew she wasn’t going to die here.

The episode also highlights what Asuka brings to the show as a lead character. She volunteers to dive into the magma. That’s in contrast to Shinji, who doesn’t want to but fears he’ll be forced to anyway. Asuka is just far more proactive than either of her coworkers. And today we learn that she’s a college graduate, so she’s also apparently a prodigy.

At the same time, she’s also incredibly 14: while Shinji labors under the burden of piloting an Evangelion (and it’s hard to tell how Rei feels about it), Asuka is eager to show off what she can do in front of Kaji so he’ll be impressed. She pouts about missing her school trip. She’s smart and capable, but still has a lot of maturing to do, which makes sense, because prodigy or not, she’s still very young.

In terms of structure, I liked how the episode tied back Shinji studying thermal expansion to how Asuka defeated the Angel. There’re are some hard sci-fi elements here that contrast nicely with the teen comedy and giant robot-vs-kaiju craziness.