esselfortium wrote:Julia?
Wow. That takes me back to the good old days when my whole family would gather around the television every weekend to watch her cook dishes I couldn't pronounce on PBS.
Now then, getting back to episode thirteen. Well, FWIW I liked it and I feel that it contained some interesting contributions to where the series was heading toward the second half of its run. For example:
Ireul seems to display some traits (infection/infiltration) that would also later be observed in Bardiel. I suppose you could even argue that it was the first of several angels to follow that would attempt some sort of 'contact' as an element of its attack.
By concealing the existence of the eleventh angel, Gendo seems to take his first overt steps (unless I'm not giving enough weight to earlier actions) at trying to feed SEELE misinformation/undermine their scenario/throw off their interpretation of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
It's been a while since I've seen the episode, but as far as the strategy to defeat Ireul was concerned, I recall a discussion took place between NERV's command staff and bridge crew which involved artificially steering the angel's evolution down a path of extinction. Now, depending on how much you want to read into it, I wonder whether some viewers see this as foreshadowing of what is later learned about SEELE, their opinion of the human race, and their version of the Instrumentality Project.
Finally, Ritsuko gets a lot of character development here, which had been somewhat lacking up to this point in the series. We see her deal with some serious deadline-related stress and she basically assumes the role of protagonist for the duration of the episode, since she is the first and only person to successfully defeat an angel without utilizing any of the Evas. While she reveals quite a bit to both Misato and the audience regarding memories of her mother and its accompanying residual emotional baggage, you can't help get the feeling that it was only the tip of the iceberg. I believe that this type of episode was necessary to properly set the stage for what we later find out about Ritsuko's hidden affair with Gendo, her secret agenda, and her eventual nervous breakdown in episode twenty-three.
