The Idiot Ball in Q - Lazy Writing or Thematically Poignant?

[Azathoth]

I think you're very right that Shinji does not much affect the character arcs of really any other characters besides Kaworu in the movie. The most notable interaction he has with any other character is his complete failure to affect Rei in anyway by trying to pretend that she is Rei II (Rei's character begins to develop out of his rejection of her). That said, as I've pointed out, he serves as a focus, target, and punching bag for Asuka's outpourings of emotion. This is because Shinji deliberately secludes himself from unpleasant (non-Kaworu) people (such as Rei, herself) behind images (such as his memories of Rei II), and as such the only way he actually can affect other people is if other people refuse to allow him his solitude. The movie ends with Shinji fetal, catatonic, and in darkness until Asuka blasts the door open, chastises him for his behavior, physically drags him out into the light and sets out to make contact with the rest of the human race, pulling him behind her. Shinji's inconsequentiality to others is Shinji's problem, but Asuka finds him of consequence.

I think you're right that in that scene, she is angry at Misato as well as at Shinji. If she actually is throwing Misato's words back at her, then Misato must look pretty hypocritical now, standing here with this kid after she told Asuka they weren't going to bother retrieving him from Unit 01. In other words, she resents Shinji already, and resents Misato both for shooting her down when she asked about him and for then retrieving him anyway - essentially, she belittles Asuka for caring about Shinji still, and then brings forth Shinji. Too bad none of this is actually in the movie, huh? What we do see of their relationship is professional but terse. Hence I don't buy your little sister interpretation, or the "family" reading more generally. Asuka and Misato are extremely cold around each other, which should not be a surprise to anyone - Asuka, this mentally adult woman, is forced to feel like Misato's junior and inferior by the curse of Eva - and the fact that she actually is Misato's junior and inferior probably rankled with her too (note that Asuka, not Misato, directs the field operations of Wille's Evas - one can not imagine Q's Shikinami suffering gladly the kind of micromanagement Misato regularly subjected her kids to back when they were kids). Their relationship is not non-existent, but neither is it familial even by a usage of the term as broad as Misato's. The notion that she regards Shinji like a brother doesn't seem substantive to me, the last movie wasted unfuckinggodly amounts of time on a retarded subplot about how much she wanted his meat in her miso and it honestly makes the most sense to assume that her character in Ha is just written as a bad-tempered dumbass trying to form a meaningful adult relationship (she may not have Soryu's lust for old people, but remember that her character is all about how she's trying to be an adult (military rank, outrageous and laboured competence) while still clinging to the things of the past, her doll in Ha and her Eva in Q before her character arc pays off and she blows the bitch up) and probably also have sex with the first available candidate because, as I said, Asuka. I don't think she views Misato as a mother. Misato is not very maternal in this movie. Asuka is well past the age where she needs a mother looking over her shoulder. Shinji spends the movie with his real family and that of his husbando.

[Monk Ed]

Complicated thread surgery complete. The stuff discussing Gendo and his possible ultimate plan and whether or not it might coincide with Yui's went here. Let's hope the resulting bold green stitches where I sewed parts of posts together onto other posts are not too much of an eyesore on either patient.

Lawl, in retrospect I think I made the split too early in the thread, I could have left in everything before ElMariachi's first big post about Gendo's plan. Oh well, too late now.

[FreakyFilmFan4ever]

Well, not quite. The problem is that none of the snippets of conversation you offer here conclusively say the things you seem to think they do. For example, take the first one: you take it to mean they didn't think Rei would come out of Unit 01, while I take it to mean that they looked for her, didn't find her, and just don't care.

Hm. I don't know about that either. See, I think Shinji was "tanged" to some degree at the end of Ha. Ritsuko clearly pointed out at the end of Ha that Shinji "wouldn't be able to return to humanity" if he continued the path he was on, and given Yui's backstory in NME, forsaking a human form and having one's "soul" or "conciseness" or whatever being melded to the Eva would describe exactly what Ritsuko was concerned about at the end of Ha. If this is the case, then they wouldn't be searching for Shinji using traditional methods. (Peeking in there and seeing what's up.) They would have to search for Shinji's intangible soul.

Now, if they searched inside the Entry Plug looking for something that resembled the tanged soul of Shinji, they would have found evidence of Rei and maybe even Yui in there. Basically, whatever method they used to find existence of Shinji's intangible soul inside Unit 01 in order to extract him would have also unveiled the existence of the intangible soul of Rei and possible even the soul of Yui. Sure, Rei or Yui might not have come out no matter how hard they tried, but telling Shinji that they found "nothing" and that they "didn't exist" wouldn't be an honest answer either.

The fact that they didn't find the intangible, inhuman souls of Rei and Yui when looking for Shinji's soul leads me to believe that they still didn't have the ability to look for such things, and were rather only looking for tangible objects, like maybe a body, some clothes, whatever that thing is they wear on their head, ect. And if you're looking for a body that hasn't eaten for the past 14 years, you're pretty darned sure it wouldn't be a living body. And they unquestionable succeeded in extracting (which basically means to remove) Shinji's physical body and his physical tangible SDAT Player, and, surprisingly Shinji's still alive. Their following actions that are presented in the movie see, to align with this theory.

Much of this theory I have rests on Ritsuko's line at the end of Ha. I know there's a whole thread asking why 2.22 is so important of it happened 14 years before 3.33, and the answer as to why it's important should be apparent to anyone who watched these movie: Each film is building up to the events in the next film. (You know, basic story-telling stuff.)

Anyway, Ritsuko's line that my whole theory hinges on is that Shinji would not be able to return to humanity of he continues doing what he was doing inside the Eva. (Or, if he continued being inside the Eva as it did things around him. I guess someone could debate that as well.) The important part of Ritsuko's line and deciphering its meaning is "humanity," and what it would mean to abandon it. And yes, being "tanged" or whatever inside the Eva Unit would definitely be one way to leave humanity. That still is a viable way to interpret what she said given the still limited information we currently know about the series.

But what if it didn't mean that at all? What if it meant something completely different? What if Ritsuko was alluding to the Curse of Eva when she warned Shinji about leaving humanity?

This would mean that the Curse of Eva isn't something that's inflicted on anyone who simply enters the Unit and has their lungs filled with LCL. In that case Toji and Kensuke would have also been "infected" with the "Curse of Eva," which makes me wonder if there wouldn't be more objection to Misato simply letting them inside the Entry Plug.

No! This would mean that the Curse of Eva comes to a pilot when they do something very specific with their Evangelion Unit.

Let's look at this for a moment. Rituko states at the end of Ha that Unit 02 abandoned humanity with the pilot still inside of it when it went into Beast Mode. (Though the plug depth was going down, not up. So it was abandoning humanity in the opposite direction that Shinji would later on in Unit 01 when it transcends Humanity.)

Ritsuko also says that Shinji will also be abandoning Humanity, stating that he'll "won't be able to return to humanity."

It's assumed Asuka does a similar "Beast Mode" trick at some point during the 14 year time gap, as she seems quite apt at doing it by the time she needed it most. (I'm gonna speculate and say it was while they were taking down the 11th Angel, maybe even before she left Nerv if it's to be believed that the AAA Wunder is the 11th Angel. Either way, the 12th Angels seems to be all about Kaworu and his Mark.06, so I doubt it would have happened effectively then, if it happened at all.) If this is the case then she would also be abandoning humanity, presumably in the same general direction Mari did. (Descending as opposed to transcending.)

Then in Q Asuka calls everyone who hasn't done something weird with an Eva the "Lilin," categorizing herself and those immediately around her as separate from the rest of humanity.

It's a thought, anyway. And seeing as how Shinji was transcending humanity rather than descending from it, I guess being "tanged" or whatever could still be involved, making him invisible to the naked eye until Yui pushes him back out.

[Charsi]

That's.. not really an alternate theory, and it has already been discussed, FFF4e. For what it's worth I think it's spot on: the curse is inflicted upon those who are infected by the Eva/Angel (really, they're more or less synonymous). For Asuka this is the Eva-03 activation. For Mari it's pushing the negative range during Beast mode. For Shinji it's obvious.

So yeah.

Returning to the original topic of idiot ball, I really do think several of the characters had to make deliberately shortsighted decisions in order to move the plot along in the direction it was intended to go. Really, some of these things do not sound like the kind of decision somebody's had 14 years - or even 14 hours - to think about what they're going to say.

Take for example Shinji. At some point, WILLE decided to recover Eva-01 from space. This must have taken preparation, and the operation itself took some time. During that entire time did nobody consider how best to broach the topic of 14 years passing, regardless of who might be recovered from the Eva? You write scenarios and talking points that work no matter who you get back. You think about the state of whoever you might recover (whatever they might be). You get specialists (sorry, Sakura doesn't count) to calm the survivors, etc. Instead, the captain and XO winged it. It's the most critical thing you're going to do in a decade, probably, and when it comes time to debrief the recovered survivor, you're just going to wing it? Sure.

I think in a sense a post way back on page one or two summed it up: in the new world, Misato and WILLE have become a lot like NERV used to be. Very ruthless (which I think is the true intent of Asuka's bitter remark), seemingly heartless... and utterly predictable. They - Misato mainly - has largely lost the emotional element and tried to go cold - and they're going up the master of ruthless methodical machinations. Gendo will checkmate with ease unless they think outside the box, because he knows the cold act is bullshit and when, where - and why - Misato will crack. Plus, other than infodumping, I think another layer to Fuyutsuki's shogi game with Shinji is insight into just how many moves ahead he is capable of thinking, as well.

It may be a common theme, in that everyone's stepped up to the next tier. Asuka (probably in 4.0) is positioning herself as Shinji's minder, like Misato was, and Misato had both kind and angry moments. Misato has stepped into the Gendo role. Gendo has - rather officially - stepped into the Seele role.

But to do it all they had to make some dumbass choices that make 3.33 feel like it took place maybe six months to a year after 2.22, not 14. Imagine for a sec if the word they'd used was "months" instead of "years". What about the story - not the visuals - would you have to change to make the shift from "14 years" to "14 months" work? To my mind, there would be no need to change anything, and that's why the story falls over and needs an idiot ball... because if 13 additional years passing don't make the characters any smarter, they're being written to facilitate the desired plotline.

[Azathoth]

The fact that it's fourteen years is pretty important in that it shows Shinji has spent at least as much time jacking it inside Unit 01 as he has actually living. The film is very convinced that the magnitude of Shinji's fucked-upness is not widely appreciated, which is why it so belabors the point that he's willfully stupid asshole. It's also pretty important in that it gives Asuka a rationale for behavior that does not remotely resemble that of her terribly written character in Ha (the attempt to attain freedom from how characters are "expected" to behave was, I'm pretty sure, a major motivating factor for the timeskip in general - after Anno realized that the movie he made as a "Break" was retreading the first half of EoE) and builds time for Shinji to be replaced by Sakura (incidentally, Bag, I think there is a far more convincing case to be made for sisterly feeling between Sakura and Shinji than between Asuka and Shinji - he winds up literally wearing her dead brother's clothes even). In other words, mostly it serves as an excuse for Anno to throw out everything the last two (shitty) movies said and make a movie about whatever he wants. The fact that it's fourteen years long could be seen as a gag about how long it's been since EoE came out (the last time Shinji had any new character development. although i guess it was actually 15 years between EoE and Q so maybe not), but also plays into the movie's character assassination of Shinji by making him innately, massively incapable of relating to the world just by clinging to who he thinks he is. If all you watch is old anime, of course you won't like new anime, Shinji...

I agree about every other character "leveling up" while Shinji is asleep, and this is another reason for the fourteen-year skip (Asuka becoming exactly the same age as Misato was), but I'd like to note something else about Asuka: Anno makes much of the horror of her condition, what with her constantly being haggard, rude, and predisposed to hellacious outburts of berserk violence. Her character is all about the tension between childhood and adulthood; the movie portrays her as someone who should be able to be an adult but isn't. She tries to step into the Misato role, but that's only half her character. In much the same way, Misato tries to step into the Gendou role but is not cold enough to kill even one child in service of her goals, let alone the entire world that Gendou is willing to sacrifice. Gendou has virtually become Keel, but ultimately he rejects and destroys SEELE. The movie is adamant that it's bad to play a role to the exclusion of who you really are, because everyone in it has a double role with which they are uncomfortable. Does that necessitate that it be fourteen years? Yeah, kind of, because it lends weight to Asuka taking the mentor role - this would be ineffectual if not for the fact that Asuka is more experienced and adult than Shinji or Rei.

[Charsi]

(the attempt to attain freedom from how characters are "expected" to behave was, I'm pretty sure, a major motivating factor for the timeskip in general - after Anno realized that the movie he made as a "Break" was retreading the first half of EoE)

You know, I actually think this is implied in one of the 2.22 interviews by Anno. There's a section on how they couldn't fit Mari anywhere, and it is mentioned how the original story just doesn't leave any wiggle room for any improvisation or change... the further along you follow the original narrative, the more you are tied in both to the story and the inevitable conclusion.

So yes, a big break was needed or they'd just be retelling the same story - which they clearly don't want to do. So they dropped Touji, put Asuka in the plug of Eva-03 to get sidelined which put Mari in Eva-02 for the big dustup.

Full disclosure: I dislike the timeskip and that it's gutted what I thought was a nicely developing and different retelling of Evangelion. But ultimately, it's not my story, i'm not entitled to $#%, so I either deal with it or move on. I think i'll at least stick it out to see how this gets wrapped up, if it even does.

I agree about every other character "leveling up" while Shinji is asleep, and this is another reason for the fourteen-year skip (Asuka becoming exactly the same age as Misato was), but I'd like to note something else about Asuka: Anno makes much of the horror of her condition, what with her constantly being haggard, rude, and predisposed to hellacious outburts of berserk violence. Her character is all about the tension between childhood and adulthood; the movie portrays her as someone who should be able to be an adult but isn't. She tries to step into the Misato role, but that's only half her character. In much the same way, Misato tries to step into the Gendou role but is not cold enough to kill even one child in service of her goals, let alone the entire world that Gendou is willing to sacrifice. Gendou has virtually become Keel, but ultimately he rejects and destroys SEELE. The movie is adamant that it's bad to play a role to the exclusion of who you really are, because everyone in it has a double role with which they are uncomfortable. Does that necessitate that it be fourteen years? Yeah, kind of, because it lends weight to Asuka taking the mentor role - this would be ineffectual if not for the fact that Asuka is more experienced and adult than Shinji or Rei.

What a great way to sum it up; you hit the nail on the head better than I did. They've stepped into the roles, but at the same time are all fakes/frauds in that role, trying to be something they're not and cracks are showing (Asuka's most notably). I wonder how Gendo's cracks will show. Fuyutuski's prodding dialogue around the time Kaworu shows the world to Shinji seems to suggest Gendo does have some.

[Azathoth]

Full disclosure: I dislike the timeskip and that it's gutted what I thought was a nicely developing and different retelling of Evangelion. But ultimately, it's not my story, i'm not entitled to $#%, so I either deal with it or move on. I think i'll at least stick it out to see how this gets wrapped up, if it even does.

I'll readily acknowledge that the timeskip is a super clumsy device to accomplish an end that was supposed to have been accomplished in the previous movie and wasn't, and I can see in an instant why people find it so jarring, unpleasant, and awkward. But I think that, since it's in the movie, the movie makes the right choice by engaging with its unpleasantness: it pulls the movie's failings as drama back behind the fourth wall, it mythologizes the reality of Eva's production as entertainment and places it squarely within the world of Eva itself. I find this much more fun to watch than Anno retreading the already overtrod ground he did in Ha, following a status quo that only existed to satisfy the structural requirements of a TV series that came out in 1996. Honestly, the opening scene makes me wish Anno had gone farther with his desire to change everything, and just turned the whole Rebuild series into a big-budget love letter to old-school sci-fi anime and gone the whole nine yards with the ridiculous robot antics and pretty girls in space...but, since he seems intent on making more Eva, I'm about as content to stick it out as you are.

e: Yeah, Gendou remains the one of the biggest black-boxes of these movies and while there aren't people making ridiculous theories about him like there used to be ("he's time-traveling Shinji from EoE! and Shinji is actually the real Gendou!!") his character is seriously weird in this movie and goes well beyond even the preternatural stoicism and coldness common to his previous portrayals. That together with Kaworu declaring him King of the Lilin (every time i hear this line i think "Ikuree gedno, saver of humens") and Fuyutsuki's bizarre and confusing attempts to clarify his goals for Shinji...man, I wouldn't be surprised if cracks in Gendou's facade start appearing, but it's a hell of a facade.

[FreakyFilmFan4ever]

Take for example Shinji. At some point, WILLE decided to recover Eva-01 from space. This must have taken preparation, and the operation itself took some time. During that entire time did nobody consider how best to broach the topic of 14 years passing, regardless of who might be recovered from the Eva?

This is why I really don't think they had the ability to regenerate Shinji from whatever state he was in when it can to using Unit 01. If they had that process all figured out, then they would have thought enough to be prepared to debrief whoever they found with whatever they know.

But if they didn't expect to recover anyone, and Yui just pushed out Shinji, then every action they take makes sense.

They found Shinji's body, and it still looks the same as it did 14 years ago. Might be an Angel or something else that's animating Shinji's body. It makes sense since in any other scenario we find a body after it hadn't eaten in 14 year it would be dead. Ship it to Misato heavily guarded just in case it gets any weird ideas. Quiz it on who it thinks it is and if remembers anything that happened with the real Shinji Ikari.

Also, note the lack of information told to Shinji about how they found him. They calmly debriefed him on everything else concerning him and his Eva Unit that you'd think that if they found him in some state of primordial soup of life and had to reconstruct his human form that they would have told him that too.

But they tell him they did that. (Probably because they didn't do that.) In fact, the way they found him seems to insignificant that they don't even think to tell him.

What's the most insignificant way you can find someone?

How about just laying there unconscious?

Unless you can prove that they did somehow find Shinji in any other way than a tangible human being that they randomly found intact when searching the Entry Plug, then it should follow that they simply found him in the physical state the movie first introduces him in. Anything else would contradict what Ritsuko stated in the last movie and what Misato keeps stating in this movie, that things "don't exist anymore" once they "leave humanity."

I really can't see any evidence to the contrary. And the evidence of people's behaviors and reactions both before and after the 14 year gap seems to support the idea that they honestly thought they were never gonna see Shinji again.

[Giji Shinka]

Yeah, now Wille has more reasons to why they couldn't treat him in some other/better way:
-They though he was dead. Now that he's alive they don't know what to feel about the apocalypse boy. (Mixed emotions.)
-They think that he's possibly an angel. (Even more mixed emotions.)
-They have mixed emotions about the fact that's he's a 14-15 year old kid. (Ya know, morals about not killing a child and stuff...I dunno) They don't know full 100% if they should treat him as an adult or child.

Besides, they already have so much pressure/responsibility on their shoulders, so yeah.......

[Charsi]

Yeah, now Wille has more reasons to why they couldn't treat him in some other/better way:
-They though he was dead. Now that he's alive they don't know what to feel about the apocalypse boy. (Mixed emotions.)
-They think that he's possibly an angel. (Even more mixed emotions.)
-They have mixed emotions about the fact that's he's a 14-15 year old kid. (Ya know, morals about not killing a child and stuff...I dunno) They don't know full 100% if they should treat him as an adult or child.

Besides, they already have so much pressure/responsibility on their shoulders, so yeah.......

Absolutely none of these are excuses not to plan. Being caught blindsided that there's a pilot inside when you retrieve an Eva from orbit requires a pretty large idiot ball. And that's just one of my issues. Even if it IS an Angel you should have a story ready.

This is an organization that has been running from the Nemesis series for a while. They've got a huge fleet and are being shipped a massive amount of supplies which takes considerable manpower (and helicopter force) as we've seen. They can rig massive cables to power up numerous S2 engines which they've presumably stolen or otherwise acquired and presumably move that entire infrastructure with them each time they disperse and flee to a new hiding spot.

But they don't plan on finding anyone in the Eva they retrieve from orbit. They had a DSS choker and control unit available (even though they left Kaworu, the guy it was made for, behind at NERV) but were totally blindsided by this.

This is also an organization with anti-AT ammunition (that requires authorization to fire). I imagine if they were genuinely afraid that BM-03 was an Angel that just looked like Shinji, those guns the four guys had would have had anti-AT bullets in them. Nobody mentioned it though, so that's just a guess.

They seemed to be fairly prepared, except where it comes to that guy they fished out of the Eva they just recovered. In fact, the things they've done seem pretty split between cruelty and kindness. They treat him like he's a criminal until they are reasonably satisfied he's who he thinks he is, and then show a flicker of kindness in explaining things to him, but do it in the most cruel way possible. The very first thing you tell him is he's going to be killed if he pilots Eva again. Nice. Then Asuka walks in and punches him in the face - or would have, had that wall not been there.

As was pointed out on page.. oh, I don't know, three or so? the far easier thing to do is lie to him. Tell him the choker's to monitor his health, that they're still working on Unit-01 and haven't found Rei YET (ie they're "still looking"), and that Gendo's a bad guy. And keep Asuka away 'till much later. Funny. For a Captain who apparently doesn't have time to worry over a single person, the door is strangely unlocked during the debriefing, letting just about any interested party wander in to say hi. Isn't that strange.

[Giji Shinka]

Uhhhh....It's quite different to..... I wasn't....

Well, interpret it the way you want....
I was just trying to make a point about what blocked them to handle Shinji in some other way....

[ElMariachi]

@ Charsi : I think you're overestaming them, NERV already proved to have been taken by surprise numerous time by the normaly impossible crazy stuf that the Angels nonetheless pulls off, and most of the surviving NERV personal is now in WILLE.
It's perfectly possible that they didn't planned something in case Shinji came back because they genuinely thought that Shinji wouldn't come back as a human being, at best as the Eva's new control system, and what happened when Auka called for help in space seemingly confirmed that.
But turns out that again the impossible happened and Shinji did came back in human fom, taking them completely by surprisee and without a clear plan on how to deal with him.

WILLE is a para-military organization tasked with protecting what remains of mankind in a post-apocalyptic wasteland and who, unlike NERV, don't employ any children(at least not anymore since Asuka and Mari turned mentally 18 or 20), how to deal with out of time children shouldn't be really high on their list of reauiered competences.

It's also possible that they didn't tok any gloves with Shinji because that's just not their style : this new world is shitty and harsh, they lived in it for the past 14 years and that made them blunt and franks, so they won't be gentle with Shinji not by malice or to bring the point that now you have to be strong and shit... but only because that's how everyone acts now.

And even then they have been diplomatic enough to prepare a whole special debriefing for him(there was "BM-03 comprehension report" written at the side of the screen) in order to teach him everything that happened, even informations that they weren't obligated to tell him, like what they are doing with EVA-01.

Besides, and that's I think the most important point, they thought that they had all the time in the world to deal with him since he can't pilot EVA-01 anymore and neo-NERV will obviously don't have any interested in him, especially since a ready-to-Awake-and-Impact Eva is just next to him... hence their complete when it tured out that neo-NERV's objective with Mark.09's raid and probably the NS chasing the fleet down turned out to be Shinji all along!

[Charsi]

I was just trying to make a point about what blocked them to handle Shinji in some other way....

Sorry, didn't mean to rip your head off. But the thread is kind of about idiot moves (so to speak) and to my mind it's a fairly big problem with the story as written. But I have a lot of problems with it, obviously.

[Giji Shinka]

But the thread is kind of about idiot moves (so to speak) and to my mind it's a fairly big problem with the story as written. But I have a lot of problems with it, obviously.

Tbh, the story of Evangelion has always been all over the place.

[ElMariachi]

About WILLE's part on the Idiot Ball holding, the problem is that we don't know anything about what were their intentions with Shinji, or what they tought they know : we could endlesslyspeculate about if theyacted the wayhey did because they never thought Shinji would come back in human form, ot if he was an Angel, or if they all hate him because they think he's the one who destroyed the world...

The only source of information we got about what Shinji is accused doing is Kaworu when he showed him the outside world, and he seems to be an unreliable narrator at best, since most of what he said about what happened 14 years ago contradicts what we saw in 2.0 and even some of his own comments...

So until Final comes and clear what WILLE have planned for Shinji and what they are eccusing him of doing, and said by a member of WILLE, it's kinda hard to determine if what they did at the beginning of 3.0 was really an Idiot Ball moment.

[Monk Ed]

I was rather caught by surprise that anyone thought Wille were being "stupid" in how they treated Shinji, at least as far as the "they should have lied" sentiment goes. As far as the situation at the time looked, Shinji looked pretty damn secure; it's hardly inconceivable that whatever plans Wille had for Shinji, they made them assuming a very low probability that a giant hand would bust through the wall exactly at his location to take him directly to Nerv precisely after they've expressed their long-held emotions to him. And hilariously enough, they actually did have a plan for something like that anyway -- the DSS Choker itself. Why are people discounting that as the very contingency plan that allowed Wille to be as honest with Shinji as they were?

Let's not forget: Their contingency plan worked in the end. The choker blew up (not the person they were expecting, but still), Fourth Impact was stopped short (with a little extra effort, which they also planned for), and they did it all without stooping to their enemy's level by either lying to Shinji or, worse, killing him.

They achieved their goal and did it while staying the good guys. Is that really so idiotic?

[ElMariachi]

Their contingency plan worked in the end by pure luck that Kaworu had enough sense to realize that his plan could go wrong and took the DSS Choker as an extra guarantee, or that he has a dead wish or a messiah complex or all of the above.
If not then everyone would have felt very dumb at the moment to stop EVA-13.

But anyway WILLE weren't holding an Idiot Ball at the beginning of the movie, like you said what happened was so crazy and in exactly the worst possible moment(just after Misato said that Rei is no more) that there wasn't any way to stop him short of blowing off his head or having Sakura somehow restraining him.

My only complain would be that they told him about the DSS Choker true function too soon, they should have told him about it after telling him what he did to deserve that Choker... but even then that would have been moot since Mark.09 would have come before the end anyway.


Makes me wonder if Gendo didn't had a way to monitor the Wunder to make Rei Q attack at the precise moment that would maximize his chances to have Shinji following her : just after Misato told him that is "no more" but before she had the time to explain what she meant by that(that Rei was a clone and that there is probably others around here)
Could be that Yui is on his side since the beginning and that the Wunder's power source and control system is actually against them!

[Chuckman]

The fact that it's fourteen years is pretty important in that it shows Shinji has spent at least as much time jacking it inside Unit 01 as he has actually living. The film is very convinced that the magnitude of Shinji's fucked-upness is not widely appreciated, which is why it so belabors the point that he's willfully stupid asshole.

This is an important comment. 3.0 can be read as a reaction to the audience' reaction to Shinji's actions at the end of the preceding film. I think that when the preview made, the plan was for a much shorter gap and a film where Shinji was mostly absent while the rest of the cast dealt with the consequences of his actions, but somewhere along the line it was decided that the audience was too supportive of Shinji and needed a harsh lesson in the form of an entire movie hamfistedly belaboring how much of a self absorbed asshole he is.

[Conspicuous]

Their contingency plan worked in the end by pure luck that Kaworu had enough sense to realize that his plan could go wrong and took the DSS Choker as an extra guarantee, or that he has a dead wish or a messiah complex or all of the above.
If not then everyone would have felt very dumb at the moment to stop EVA-13.

Makes me wonder if Gendo didn't had a way to monitor the Wunder to make Rei Q attack at the precise moment that would maximize his chances to have Shinji following her : just after Misato told him that is "no more" but before she had the time to explain what she meant by that(that Rei was a clone and that there is probably others around here)
Could be that Yui is on his side since the beginning and that the Wunder's power source and control system is actually against them!

To be fair, I sincerely doubt that WILLE had any idea about the fact that NERV had a Magic Space
Jesus who could remove the collar in the first place. If they did, they wouldn't ever had bothered creating such a device against him in the first place.
It's safe to assume that they had very good reason to believe that the only people who could remove the collar would be Misato.

Also, we already know that Yui's allegiance to Gendo specifically is pretty questionable, after she rejected him and his Dummy Plug. Whatever her goals may be, they are not the exact same as Gendo's. So while she may end up aiding Gendo's plans and going against WILLE, it's only because of her personal wishes, not because she's actually following Gendo for his sake.

[Chuckman]

We have no idea how conscious Yui is in the Eva. For all we know she rejected the dummy plug because it made Shinji sad, not for any complex secret plot reason.