(Maybe spoilers, but no details, because frankly the details are above the Board's rating!)

I finished the show and the rewrite of the end of the show.

Yay?

I don't really have that much to say, though, for the simple reason that I feel unqualified. The show turned into a psychology thesis, and I'm not familiar enough with Jungian or any other branch of psychology to comment in depth. To really do it justice, I think you'd have to be a serious student of psychology, religion, and philosophy, or at least get one of each to discuss it together.

I can say I wasn't impressed with the original ending, and I can see why the creator wanted to redo it. The themes are there, but they're told, not shown, with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Worse, the last episode rehashes stuff the second-to-last already covered, so it was like a second hammer-blow of unsubtle delivery. It wasn't just odd, it was boring. Up to that point, the show is really good at conveying what's happening in the characters' heads without an actual play in a play, with a stage and everything. They seriously dropped the ball there.

On that score, The End of Evangelion is way better. It shows. Boy, does it ever show. To the point that it's equally unsubtle and maybe not better at telling the story.

Okay. So. There's a sub-theme about sex and sexuality throughout the anime. It hides in the usual sort of anime fanservice at first, so I didn't catch on right away. It gets more overt in later episodes, but still, when anything "adult" happens, it's off-camera (if not off-mic). There's some pretty strong imagery of penetration and pregnancy at one point, but it happens to one of the Evas, not a human character, so while it's weird as hell... no, I can't finish that sentence, it's just plain weird as hell. But I guess what I'm trying to say is that I think there's a point to it, and it's conveyed cleverly.

Well, take all those ideas and remove the requirement to be safe to air on TV. I still think there's probably a point to the sexual imagery, but it's so extraordinarily blatant that it was distracting. I can't even begin to figure out what the point might be. I'm still just reeling from it, and it's been like a week.

But, the big question is, is Neon Genesis Evangelion worth watching?

Yes. Absolutely yes. For the most part, it's smart, it's well done, and it made me care. I'm glad to have seen it, and I want to watch it again sooner than later to see if I can piece some things together now that I know more about what's going on.

Do be aware that it turns on a dime from what seems like a pretty straightforward story of post-apocalyptic coming of age with giant biomechs into a serious psych thesis with dreamlike, trippy, possibly disturbing, sometimes adult imagery. That's a thing, and I think most people probably need a bit more of a heads-up than "it gets totally weird." Knowing a bit about the specific direction it takes, I hope people who are interested in psychological stories will give it a shot.

~Neshomeh

Uuuuhhhhh didn’t I just finish writing my Endgame review? They really do churn these movies out quickly. Good thing my brother pays attention to release dates, since I don’t pay for cable to be able to see commercials.

Spoiler warnings for Captain Marvel, Captain America: Civil War, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Avengers: Infinity War, Avengers: Endgame and Spider-Man: Far From Home.

Stan Lee always prided himself in making Marvel’s characters feel human to the audience, and out of the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe, I think the two Spider-Man films do the best job of getting that across. The mundanity of the high school scenes that open this movie are such a big tonal departure from the rest of the MCU, but they do so much to make Peter Parker feel like a teenager first and a superhero second.

Boy, it sure is awkwardly coincidental that all the main characters from Homecoming (aside from the written-out Toomes family) happened to also get dusted so they could all stay the same age and grade as Peter. I thought for sure Aunt May would turn out to have survived Thanos, for the sake of emotional scenes where she would talk about the time she spent worried about Peter. But I guess not. And I guess the world has moved on pretty dang easily from the five years of psychological turmoil and economic collapse, because New York, Austria, the Netherlands, and Italy all seem to be completely back to business as usual. Repercussions? What are those? But man, I feel like I could watch the marching band snap/basketball game blip scene over and over and over without getting bored. I think I’ve developed a weird fascination with that dusting animation . . .

Looks like we’re just completely forgetting about Liz Toomes and moving straight forward with the Peter/Michelle romance now. I don’t really mind; we all knew it was coming. She is, after all, the “MJ.”

So I was a pretty avid fanboy of the 1990s Spider-Man cartoon, so there was no hoodwinking me into thinking that Mysterio was really a good guy. I mean, I was open to the idea of it; we just had the Skrulls turn out to be good guys in Captain Marvel, and I like them quite a bit. But I really just never accepted anything about Mysterio at face value. My brother and I both separately noticed some tells that hinted at his story being a lie. Firstly, my brother says that when Peter started rambling about quantum mechanics, Mysterio had a wide-eyed look on his face, apparently realizing that he wouldn’t be able to discuss the topic with Peter, which could potentially reveal his AU backstory as a fake. On my end, I noticed that Mysterio named the Elementals as the “primary elements,” but earth, air, water and fire haven’t been viewed as elements in the Periodic sense for centuries now. Also—but I should double-check this—yes, Mysterio labeled the MCU’s Earth as Earth-616, but the MCU Earth is actually Earth-199999. I think 616 is the Earth in the main comics. So yeah, I very much knew there was a twist coming, though I wasn’t certain what shape it would take. Until Peter started talking about handing over the glasses. Once that scene started rolling, I knew the shoe was about to drop.

And wow, do I completely hate the reveal? We only just lost Tony Stark one movie ago, and in the last minutes of the movie. And here, the very next film, we have an entire team of villains motivated by how mean and unappreciative Tony was to them, and using Stark technology to threaten innocent lives. We even get “treated” to a hologram of a zombie Iron Man armor clambering out of his grave to attack the camera. It just leaves a bad feeling for me, that this is (at least potentially) going to be the last major involvement of Tony in the story. It feels like a weird, weird choice.

The holograms themselves are cool enough, at least. The idea that the holograms can be so flawlessly convincing, and get picked up by various cameras just as effectively as by the human eye, plus stay so perfectly synched with the destruction caused by the drones, is bit of a stretch. But it’s a comics universe, and Pym Particles exist here, so whatever, I don’t care. I didn’t find the Elementals themselves too exciting, after so many movies go for some giant CGI monster, but what were really cool were the illusions Mysterio used to attack Peter directly. I also like that the hologram issue gave the writers an excuse to work with the fact that the spider sense really didn’t come into play yet at this point, and forced Peter to develop it more thoroughly on the fly.

Oh man, Mysterio’s final trap really changes the status quo for Peter. I know most of his closest friends will trust him, but I worry that some of the other Avengers who haven’t gotten to know him as well at this point may try to come after him. And, of course, all his loved ones are in potential danger now; the one prisoner in the after credits scene of Homecoming was already looking to learn his secret identity out of revenge. I am glad they found a way to get Jay Jonah Jameson into the MCU, since Peter seems pretty far from becoming a journalism photographer, if ever.

Maria Hill is one of my favorite characters in this universe, so I was going to say how happy I was that she got a bigger role right after she returned from being dusted . . . except, of course, that she wasn’t actually in this movie. The reveal of the after credits scene is honestly just weird, and raises so many questions that just don’t seem like they lead anywhere. What are Fury’s plans that require him to be in space? I mean, Talos is literally filling Fury’s role, and Fury is with the Skrull fleet. Why have they swapped jobs, when each is probably more suited to their regular job? Why is Talos trying to . . . I’m not sure I even caught the explanation. He’s restarting the Avengers in Germany, I think? Is the fact that it’s happening in Berlin mean that it’s somehow related to the fight at the airport from Civil War? And weirdest of all, where are the other Earth-based Avengers? If Fury wanted hero representation in Berlin, why did he only seek out Mysterio and Spider-Man to be present there? Or, more heroes to fight the Elementals, for that matter? Peter conveniently only asks after two heroes who are normally space-based, Captain Marvel and Thor. Mysterio, of course, only wanted Peter there to get to the glasses, but it seems weird that Talos/Fury didn’t seek out anyone else. Wanda alone could probably have destroyed an “actual” Elemental; she was strong enough to break an Inifinity Stone, for crying out loud! Hulk and big-sized Ant-Man could have helped with the non-fire ones, as well. So I currently feel like I just have no idea what’s happening with Phase Four.

—doctorlit wonders if the inevitable “Spider-Man graduates and goes to college” movie will be titled Spider-Man: Dormcoming

“Within the black holes, spoilers formed from the primary elements.” “Within the black holes, spoilers formed from the primary elements.” “Within the black holes, spoilers formed from the primary elements.”

We of the internet generation(s) like to think we invented fanfiction, but of course there’s really nothing new under the sun. John Milton knew how to look at an existing text and expand on the characters and events with new insights and developments, way back in 1667.

Spoilers for . . . Well. For the Bible and Paradise Lost. Yep.

So.

Man, this is so different from anything I’ve written about before. It doesn’t help that I actually finished it a couple of weeks ago, but I’ve been too busy covering a coworker’s vacation to be able to sit down and write this. It was actually quite a slog to read through, despite technically being a poem, and therefore having a decent amount of blank space on each page. Me being me, however, I of course had to read every footnote and endnote, which meant a lot of breaking up my train of thought and flipping back and forth through pages. Also, lots of old-timey words and phrases.

I found Satan to be a let-down, honestly. (Is that weird to say? I feel like that’s weird to say.) Everything I heard about PL before I sat down and read it made Stan out to be this massive figurehead of rebellion and resistance. And boy, did he turn out be . . . a pathetic, ineffectual loser. The boy may be able to talk himself up to his fallen angel pals, and I won’t deny the fight scene between Satan and Death was pretty dang cool. But the further he gets from Hell, the lamer and more boring he gets. Get him up against God or His angels, and it’s curb stomp city. He couldn’t even infiltrate Eden without the scouting angels getting suspicious. Once his plans to directly mess with God and Heaven are thwarted, he goes full-blown schoolyard bully, and starts focusing his evil on the much weaker beings of creation, Adam and Eve and that poor Serpent. Again, before reading, I had heard the argument that Satan is really the protagonist and God the villain, but I just didn’t see it. Satan barely appears in the last third of the text.

Yeah, I like snakes, I like the capital-s Serpent. PL gets kind of ambiguous between when it’s referring to Satan or the Serpent around that famous scene. I like to think Milton wasn’t hating on snakes for what one snake did while possessed, but snakes have been maligned in human history for so long, it’s hard to say. Folks, it’s okay be afraid of snek, but no blame snek for Original Sin.

Even with the gulf of language evolution between us, I feel like Milton did a really excellent job of contrasting the pre-fall and post-fall states of Adam and Eve, as well as the change to the “garden” of Eden itself. Before the fall, Adam and Eve are simplistic and peaceful, without coming off as dull or, dare I say, “Purity Sues.” It’s only after the fall when they start exhibiting more selfish traits and feeling conflict between each other, but after seeing them so sweet and perfect for each other, it did make me feel rather sad, even though on paper it seems like they should have gotten more interesting after such a change. I also like Milton framed Eden itself not as a literal garden located somewhere on Earth, but the state of evil-lessness Earth was in before Adam and Eve fell; it’s their perception of the world that changed, not the world itself.

“So spake the seraph Abdiel, faithful found
Among the spoilers, faithful only he
Among innumerable false, unmov’d”

—doctorlit is definitely going to binge-read the entire Bible someday, just you wait