Adams State College Disaster Recovery Plan: Fill & Download for Free

The plot is a bit complicated, but most of it is revealed along the series. It’s somewhat hard to follow, given that little focus is given to key background plot points. But it goes basically like this:WARNING: SPOILERS ABOUND.Long before the series’ timeline startsThe AngelsIn the early days of prehistory, there were two ‘Moons’ (or something similar to moons—apparently more like huge asteroids, but this is never clarified in the series) that hit Earth, each containing an ‘Angel’ (mysterious creatures we learn gradually about in the course of the series):a ‘White Moon’, containing an Angel named ‘Adam’, a.k.a. ‘the First Angel’, anda ‘Black Moon’, containing another, named ‘Lilith’, the ‘Second Angel’.This event is known as the First Impact. Adam later became the progenitor of 14 other Angels (Angel no. 17 is implied to have been created from Adam’s mind at a much later incident—see below), and Lilith created the 18th—us humans.We learn very little about what the other Angels (hereafter just ‘the Angels’) are like, except that:they have DNA extremely similar to our own, except made of different material;they are powered by a mysterious dark red spherical core known as an ‘S² engine’; and thatthey can emit a sort of energetic barrier known as the ‘Absolute Terror Field’ (or just ‘AT Field’) that conventional weapons can’t break through.¹Like other Angels, humans also have AT Fields, but they’re apparently much weaker and just keeps their phyical forms discrete instead.The Dead Sea ScrollsNow, there is a certain text referred to in the series known as the ‘Dead Sea Scrolls’ (those exist in real life but are obviously very different). The contents of the Scrolls are never revealed directly, but from discussions between characters (namely Gendou, Fuyutsuki, and Seele—see below), they discuss the ‘17 Angels’, i.e. Angels 1–17. They also contain such as a prophecy saying that once certain conditioned are met, including the destruction of Angels 3–17, an epic, almost surreal event, known as the Third Impact (we’ll get to the Second Impact in a bit), will unfold. It is said to involve the opening of the ‘Doors of Guf’,² ‘Guf’ being a plane of existence or semi-metaphysical space where souls can apparently be stored en masse.³ This event can go several ways; more on this below.Before the series main timeline startsThe Second ImpactSome time before the year 2000, a man named Gendou Rokubungi starts dating a woman named Yui Ikari, a promising young biology student of a scientist named Prof. Kouzou Fuyutsuki. He’s somewhat of a disreputable character—Fuyutsuki first meets him when he has to bail him out of custody after he got in a bar brawl. Rumour has it that he started dating her in order to gain access to her talents and to a group of people she is associated with, which is rumoured to be a mysterious group nicknamed ‘Seele’—a handful of men who have ridiculous amounts of power and control behind the scenes (e.g. they are said to secretly control the UN).Despite his reputation, Gendou is in fact quite a bright individual himself. He is invited to take part in a field research led by one Dr. Katsuragi, a famous scientist who, because of his work taking up all of his time, drove his wife to leave him with their daughter Misato, who resents him deeply. Said field research takes place in 2000 in Antarctica, with the aim of researching Adam, who is apparently frozen there, as they believe that his core will shed light on Katsuragi’s ‘super solenoid theory’ (hence ‘S²’).In 2000, Dr. Katsuragi’s team attempts to investigate Adam’s S² core in an experiment, which apparently involved inserting DNA into Adam’s body through the use of the Spear of Longinus, a spear-like object that is capable of breaking through AT Fields. However, as seen in the beginning of ep. 12 and briefly in the Director’s Cut version of ep. 21, on Sept. 13 that year, the experiment goes awry: Adam wakes up, unleashing colossal amounts of energy in the form of a flash of light so huge it’s visible from outer space, temporarily opening the Doors of Guf, followed by a huge storm. (It’s implied that Gendou and Keel Lorenz, the head of Seele, intended for it to happen; that is why Gendou went back home the day before.)It is implied that the energy released by Adam is so strong that Antarctica is melted away, the Earth is tilted so that it’s always summer (at least in Japan), and, as a by-product, the ecosystem is damaged and left in shambles, leading to half of the world population dying either in the disasters or the conflicts that ensue. In addition, it is heavily implied that this event—known as the Second Impact—also somehow created the aforementioned 17th Angel, who has Adam’s consciousness in a humanoid body (bearing the DNA Dr. Katsuragi’s team gave him), while Adam’s body reverts into that of an embryo, frozen inside a block of bakelite.⁴ The whole event, however, is covered up as Seele manipulates the investigation committee, and the official story released to the public is that it all happened because of a meteor strike.In the wake of the disaster, the badly injured Dr. Katsuragi puts teenaged Misato, who was there with him, in an escape pod, which is then blasted out to sea. She is soon found and brougt to safety, but is so badly traumatized she suffers for years from what seems to be shock-induced selective mutism.Gehirn foundedSome time later, a team of investigators found an organisation named Gehirn, whose aim is to research the Angels and build what they refer to as ‘Evangelions’ (or ‘Evas’): cloned engineered Angels (which can therefore create AT Fields) with roughly humanoid body plan, reined in by technology created by Gehirn and powered by a human soul (although the scientists running it are secretly working on a system that would replace it, a ‘dummy plug’ based on human brainwaves). Their purpose is to fight Angels via pilots (nicknamed ‘Children’, in English⁵) who sync up with them through a special breathable liquid filling their cockpit (or ‘entry plug’, as it resembles an enlarged metal test tube plugged into the Eva’s nape) known as LCL; this liquid will have a more serious role later on. Gehirn is headed by Gendou Ikari (né Rokubungi; he took his wife’s prestigious last name); its other high-ranking members include Yui, Fuyutsuki, two scientists named Kyoko Zeppelin Sohryu and Dr. Naoko Akagi, and Naoko’s daughter Ritsuko.Naoko is Nerv’s chief scientist. She shows Ritsuko that she has established Nerv’s computer system based on three interconnected ‘bio-supercomputers’, collectively known as ‘Magi’ (pronounced ‘MAH-gee’), each representing one aspect of her personality:‘Melchior’as a scientist‘Balthasar’ as a woman‘Casper’ as a motherGendou and Yui have a child together, whom they name Shinji. When he’s three or four, an experiment goes awry, causing Yui’s soul to get sucked into an Evangelion unit, Eva-01, providing the soul powering it—an event that Shinji sees witnesses. (It is implied that this was intentional on Yui’s part, as a flashback of her talking to Fuyutsuki is shown near the end of EoE; in it, Yui, who is tending to baby Shinji, tells him she intends to become an eternal living relic for humanity.) Gendou is accused of sabotaging the experiment to murder his wife, but is ultimately cleared of these charges.Still, Gendou sends Shinji, who grows up believing his mother is dead, to live a dull life with his teacher away from himself. Next to nothing of his life back then is revealed, but one anecdote of him as a toddler is shown: an old memory of him playing with two of his peers in a sandbox, building a pyramid in the sand, until the two of them are picked up by their parents. Shinji, who is left alone at dusk, almost starts to cry, but holds back and stomps on the pyramid in anger—signalling the first time we see of him desperately repressing his emotions and refusing to cry without reservation.From Gehirn to NervIn the meantime, he creates the first Rei, a rough clone (one of many) of Yui containing Lilith’s soul, and starts an affair with Naoko. However, when Rei is a toddler, she tells Naoko that Gendou actually has very little respect for her as a person (and has merely been using her); in response, Naoko strangles Rei to death. She is immediately so horrified by her actions that she shoots herself dead. This event leads to two important actions:the creation of a second, more docile Rei, the ‘First Child’, who is used for certain shady experiments; andthe immediate dissolution of Gehirn… followed by its recreation under a new name, Nerv.Gendou and Dr. Fuyutsuki lead the new organisation, in coordination with Seele. It is revealed that Seele aims to follow the prophecy in the Dead Sea Scrolls and merge all of mankind’s consciousnesses to end the suffering caused by interpersonal interaction, a plan they refer to as the ‘Human Instrumentality Project’. Gendou, on the other hand, plans to make the Third Impact go another way, essentially keeping it to himself so that he can reunite with Yui, destroying the possibility to fuse all human consciousness again. (And, as stated above, Yui has plans of her own for the Third Impact.)In 2005, Misato Katsuragi, who had been under Gehirn’s/Nerv’s care for years, eventually overcomes her mutism in her early adulthood or so, becoming surprisingly outgoing and charismatic. She befriends Ritsuko, joins Nerv, and dates a man named Ryouji Kaji (the three go to college together), but eventually breaks up with him because he reminds her too much of her father.We later discover that Nerv has Lilith and the Longinus Spear, lodged into Lilith’s body and restraining her, in its possession. However, this is kept secret from most of the rest of Nerv, and certainly from the government of Japan.Asuka and her motherDuring that period, Kyoko Zeppelin, who now works for Nerv, runs an experiment similar to the one that cost Yui her body. She survives it with her body intact, but it costs her her sanity: she starts mistaking some doll for her child, Asuka, calling the actual daughter ‘that girl’ (and giving her a profound hatred for dolls); eventually, she unsuccessfully tries to strangle Asuka to death in a murder-suicide at some point. At some later point, Asuka, who is still a child, is chosen to be an Eva pilot (supposedly by an organization named ‘Marduk’, which is meant to scout the children who can), making her the ‘Second Child’, and rushes home to share the good news with her mother and finally earn her attention—only to find her mother’s dead body swinging from a noose. Asuka’s father re-marries, and Asuka resolves to stay strong and never cry again, leading to profound emotional scarring. She soon begins her pilot training, during which develops an unrequited crush on her guardian, Kaji.Rei and GendouIn 2015, Shortly before the main timeline, Rei is badly injured during an experiment: her Eva, Unit-00, goes berserk in the lab and almost kills Gendou. The Eva is powered down in time to avoid any serious physical damage to anyone, and Gendou immediately rushes in to open the ejected entry plug, dropping his glasses into the scorching liquid on the floor, which breaks them; its emergency handles are still scorching hot, but he opens them with his bare hands anyway, leaving him with pronounced scars on his palms. Although Rei is left badly injured by this incident, these actions instill a deep sense of debt to him in Rei’s mind, and she gets to keep the glasses as a memento.Series main timelineShinji’s first fightIn the year 2015, the Third Angel is trashing Tokyo 3.⁶ The UN and the JSSDF can’t stop it, despite their best efforts, leaving Nerv to take it on. Gendou, having predicted this, has already called his son, who was deemed the ‘Third Child’ by ‘Marduk’, back to Tokyo 3 and demands that he pilot Unit-01, as Unit-00 is still damaged. Shinji refuses, as he has no knowledge of what an Eva even is and believes he couldn’t possibly do it, and in general he resents his father deeply for having called him after 11 years of not seeing him just because he needed something out of him.Gendou in turn tries to send in another teenage pilot, the still badly injured Rei. Shinji, is shocked to see the condition his replacement is in. When Rei tries to get up and enter the plug, the Angel attacks close enough to Nerv to make it shake bad enough for several heavy ceiling lamps to detach and almost fall on Shinji, who is miraculously saved by the unmanned Eva moving its arm to shield him, to everyone’s utter bewilderment. Shinji rushes over to the injured Rei, tells himself he cannot run away, and finally decides to pilot it anyway.While at first he’s very awkward about it, uttering kimochi warui⁷ at the LCL filling the entry plug, he still goes through with; although at first he does horribly, being sorely beaten by the Angel (and feeling the pain from it because of his synchronization with it), his mother soon takes charge of the Eva and easily destroys the Angel in berserker rage.Shinji himself has no idea that his mother was behind this, having apparently blacked out in pain. When he comes to, he sees that the Eva looks oddly organic without its helmet on, and when a strange slit spontaneously opens in the Eva’s head, making room for an eye to form in it and look directly at him, he screams in horror. (This is the first indication that the Evas are not, in fact, just giant robots, as he, the employees of Nerv, and the viewer are initially led to believe.)Shinji almost leaves Nerv, makes friendsShinji officially moves in with Misato and becomes a full-time Eva pilot along with Rei to fight against the next Angels. He enrolls into a local school, where a boy named Touji Suzuhara punches him in the face for botching his fight with the Angel, causing his sister to get injured and hospitalized. However, soon after this incident, another Angel comes along; while everyone else in town has evacuated into shelters, Touji and Kensuke let their curiosity get the better of them, and they sneak out to get a closer look. Shinji is forced to let them into the entry plug for their safety, and they see firsthand how he stabs the Angel while screaming in amok, despite Misato ordering him to retreat, and how he holds back his angry crying afterwards.While this event leads to Touji and Kensuke changing their mind and ultimately befriending him, Misato is not happy. Shinji defending his actions with, ‘Well, we won, didn’t we,’ uttered in a typical disaffected teen fashion, wins him no favours. He says that he pilots the Eva because, well, he has to,⁸ Misato assures him Rei could take over and he shouldn’t pilot the Eva if he didn’t want to. Being a teenager, Shinji simply runs away from home without warning;⁹ when he is found again, he says he no longer wishes to be a pilot, but when he is about to be sent back he decides at the last minute to stay anyway.Shinji and Rei disagree over Gendou, but ultimately bondSome time after these events, Shinji is sent to Rei’s apartment to deliver her new Nerv ID card. When he arrives, she is in the shower and cannot hear him knocking, so he enters anyway. He finds his father’s old glasses. He tries them on, only to turn around and find Rei, looking at him, still naked. She angrily takes off his glasses, and he trips and falls with his hand on her breast. She seems entirely unfazed by this fact. However, later on they chat on the way to their training; she expresses her undying devotion to Gendou, but Shinji expresses his deep-seated contempt, and this causes him to slap him angrily. (As we see later, Shinji’s relationship with his father is more complicated than that.)Still, when the next Angel arrives, it turns out to pose a serious challenge to the both of them. The battle is frought, and when it is finally won, Shinji has to rush to Rei to save her from her scorching hot entry plug—just as his father did, but with the slight protection of his onesie-like pilot uniform. He tears up in joy when he finds that she is safe and sound. Rei, having been raised in isolation, apologizes in turn for not knowing how to respond; Shinji tells her she should probably smile, and she does.The Angels continue to arrive, one at a time, with the intention of finding Adam and triggering their own version of the Third Impact: an eradication of humanity, which would let them get their planet back. However, they are unaware that Gendou has essentially tricked them, and they’re heading in the wrong direction: they keep coming to Nerv, which stores Lilith, while Adam’s body is kept at a separate location.Asuka joins the effortSome time after that, Asuka, who has completed her training and even her college education abroad, comes back to Japan at the age of 15. She immediately shows herself to be a strong-minded and generally very abrasive, boasting the abilities of her Eva, Unit-02 (which is, unbeknownst to her, powered by her mother’s soul). She is accompanied by Kaji, whose motivations are somewhat less clear at this point; he secretly brings Adam’s body, still frozen in bakelite, to Gendou. From now on, the Angels are heading in the right direction.Asuka, who has joined Shinji and Rei in their battle against the Angels, also joins Shinji’s classroom (despite her education level), befriending the class rep Hikari Horaki, who has a love-hate relationship with the gruff Touji. She also moves into his and Misato’s apartment; however, she is not pleased with the latter, only barely putting up with Shinji’s and Rei’s passive, ‘doll-like’ nature. Still, they do still manage to get along, as Asuka is still feeling very confident in her abilities—enough for them to spend a week preparing to fight in a perfectly synchronized manner against an Angel with the ability to split itself in two, by perfectly synchronizing their actions in general, from eating to dancing to everything else. (It takes quite a lot of effort for them, and Asuka is fairly miffed that it goes much more smoothly when Rei, who has already bonded with Shinji, tries to take her place.) As a matter of fact, at one point it even seems that there is a bit of sexual tension between the two of them.Shinji and his fatherIronically enough, the person Shinji gets along with least seems to be his own father: when Shinji calls him to ask him to come to his school for a career discussion interview, Gendou curtly tells him that these responsibilities have been delegated to Misato and he should stop bothering him; however, by the end of the day, Shinji regains some of his appreciation for his father, when he sees him chipping in with the rest of the Nerv employees to try and get the Eva working manually when the power is out throughout the city.At one point, a challenging Angel appears. Misato promises Shinji, Rei, and Asuka to buy them a steak dinner once they’ve defeated it, but Rei protests, explaining that she dislikes meat.¹⁰ It is a rare occasion of her expressing her personal likes and dislikes, but Kensuke still notes shortly afterwards that ultimately, Rei’s apparent dedication for the cause is actually motivated by seeing no inherent worth in herself. Once the Angel is defeated, Gendou congratulates them on their effort, but singles Shinji out to praise him specifically, giving him a much needed sense of validation. Misato intends to deliver on her promise, but Asuka tells her they’re aware of her financial situation and would be fine going somewhere else, so they all have ramen instead.Some time after that, the two of them go to visit Yui’s grave. The meeting is tense, but Shinji is still ultimately glad that they did.Misato and Kaji reuniteMisato is generally very displeased to see Kaji again. He, on the other hand, seems to revel in teasing her. It takes the two of them a considerable amount of time to patch things up, and for her to reveal the true reason why she left him to begin with on an outing together. While they are away, Asuka asks Shinji if he wanted to kiss out of boredom, and although Shinji is clearly attracted to her to some degree, he is uncomfortable with this and she has to manipulate him into agreeing. She holds his nose to keep him from breathing on her while they kiss, effectively choking him for the duration of their prolonged kiss—which ends with her rushing to the bathroom to loudly brush her teeth and express her disgust. Any attraction she’s had is now gone.However, soon after their reunion, Misato discovers that Kaji is a spy for Seele, catching him in the act as he attempts to enter Nerv’s lowermost underground floor, its best kept secret: the Terminal Dogma. He is unfazed by the gun she holds to his head and opens the doors to it with a magnetic key, revealing that Lilith is stored therein (although he claims it is Adam), and that Gendou and Ritsuko are aware of this. This shakes her faith in her organization. Soon after that, he also reveals another secret to her: ‘Marduk’ does not actually exist, and Nerv has been choosing the Children themselves and deliberately putting them in the same homeroom.Shinji and Asuka deteriorateSoon after this revelation, Shinji manages to exceed Asuka’s sync rate with the Eva in their training; Asuka, who feels a strong need to excel at everything she does to feel validated, is distraught by this, barely managing to contain her contempt; signaling the start of an emotional downward spiral for her. It certainly doesn’t help things when she sees just how well Shinji and Rei get along, while she can’t relate to either.Shortly after this, a battle with a strange Angel ensues. It has the ability to absorb things into itself, into a ‘pocket dimension’ of sorts referred to as the ‘Sea of Dirac’. Shinji’s increased synch rate alone turns out to be insufficient: he and his Eva fall inside, where he interacts with the Angel directly. The Angel talks about its own shallow existence and forces Shinji to confront his unhappiness with his reality. Shinji recalls the accusations of his father having murdered his mother, but vehemently rejects them, claiming she was happy at the time. While Shinji is inside, Ritsuko and Gendou are planning to destroy the Angel with Shinji inside, to which Misato, appalled by their callousness, responds by slapping Ritsuko, yelling at her to take responsibility for the situation. Ultimately, Shinji manages to fight his way back out of the Angel, but is still left with a deep emotional trauma.Asuka feeling bested and Shinji being traumatized leads to a toxic feedback loop between them. She repeatedly lashes out at him, and he in turn tries to avoid conflict by apologizing reflexively, but her distaste towards his passive nature means that this simply aggravates her more. This causes Shinji to regress and undo his previous progress with Touji and Kensuke, and Asuka in turn experiences a consistent drop in her synch rates.Touji becomes the Fourth Child, with dramatic consequencesFurther complicating things, at one point Touji is recruited as a pilot, with the promise of funding his sister’s recovery, officially making him the Fourth Child. Everyone soon comes to know of this, but Shinji does not. He only finds out when his Eva, Unit-03, is taken out for a test run, but is soon revealed to have been hijacked by an Angel, causing it to go berserk. In the brief amount of time when Rei is able to execute her order to attack it, she hesitates (or maybe outright refuses), as she is aware of who the pilot is; the Angel incapacitates her Eva, charging at Shinji, but he would rather die than kill someone else, even if he doesn’t know who that person is. Gendou orders them to switch control over to the Eva’s dummy plug, which is based on Rei’s brainwaves; this change causes the Eva to go berserk, bashing the opposing Eva at ease, but ultimately going as far as to break the ejected entry plug in its hand.When the battle is finished and the pilot is evacuated, Shinji sees it was Touji all along. He screams in shock at this revelation and threatens to destroy Nerv’s pyramid-shaped HQ with his Eva in his fury. When he starts to angrily stomp on it, Gendou orders the bridge to increase the density of the LCL in his entry plug, making Shinji pass out.Touji is still alive, but has lost his right leg below the knee. Shinji is brought to trial before his father. When his father reads out the charges and asks him what he has to say for himself, Shinji angrily informs them of his resignation as a pilot in protest, and leaves soon after.Shinji is trapped in his entry plugShortly after leaving, Shinji comes across Kaji. The two bond a little, and eventually Kaji explains to him what would happen if the Angels managed to reach Adam. This convinces him to go back to Nerv to fight against the Angel that has appeared in the meantime. Once again, Shinji fails to defeat the Angel on his own, and his mother forces the Eva to go berserk and destroy the Angel. This time it goes so berserk that it begins to eat the defeated Angel, finally revealing to Misato and all others present that the Evas are not robots, and they’re not wearing armours but restraints.Once the battle is finished, it is discovered that Shinji has reached a 400% sync rate with his Eva—in other words, he dissolved into the LCL. He is still alive, seeing visions enticing him to give up having a physical form and making him confront his repressed memory of seeing his mother ‘dying’. Eventually, his mother’s soul manages to speak to him and guide him into regaining his physical form, after an entire month has passed with him dissolved inside the entry plug.Kaji’s final missionShortly after that Kaji and Misato reunite and sleep together. Kaji refuses to give her too many details, but leaves a secret capsule, apparently containing a computer chip of some sort, telling her it’s his final gift to her. The next day Seele kidnap Fuyutsuki and bring him to Seele, who demand answers for how the latest fight against the Angel went so poorly. Fuyutsuki reminisces about his past in a long flashback revealing the founding of Nerv. He is ultimately rescued by Kaji, who is in turn killed by an unseen character.¹¹ Misato is utterly distraught at the news.Asuka is mentally destroyedSome time after this, Asuka and Rei share an elevator in a very uncomfortable ride. Rei tells Asuka that her Eva won’t respond unless she ‘opens her heart’ to it; this leads to a very uncomfortable exchange, ending with Rei telling Asuka that she would die if ordered to by Gendou; Asuka is mortified, and she slaps Rei in response, accusing her of being his ‘doll’.Shortly after this, another Angel appears. It attacks from outer space, and one of its abilities is to synch with human brains, allowing it to peer into their deepest, innermost thoughts. It catches Asuka, who is forced to confront all of her traumatic memories and her deep-seated fears of being ignored. She stands there, paralysed, feeling that she has been ‘defiled’. As a final Hail Mary, Rei is ordered to toss the Spear of Longinus at the Angel. It is defeated, but the Spear lands on the moon.Asuka, who has already been deteriorating emotionally, is reduced to a furious, self-loathing husk. By the time the next Angel appears, her synch rate is so low she can’t even move her Eva.Rei-IIIAsuka’s inability to fight the Angel proves to be a huge setback. Shinji and Rei struggle to defeat the Angel on their own: it appears as a long, worm-like being emitting a white light with the ability to fuse into Evas’ bodies. When it fuses into Rei, and then into Shinji, Rei notices she is crying, for the first time ever; she realizes her desire to protect Shinji and self-destructs, killing the Angel with her.Shinji is horrified but is somehow unable to cry. Misato tries to comfort him with some physical closeness,¹² but he curtly rebuffs her. Meanwhile, Seele let on to Ritsuko, who has been having an affair with Gendou, that he has actually been making cynical use of her, preferring Rei over her. As payback she shows Shinji and Misato the Eva graveyard, where failed attempts to create Evas using Angel clones are buried, and a tank full of Rei clones to be used whenever a Rei dies. She destroys all clones and asks Misato to kill her, but she refuses. Ritsuko is then arrested for her actions.Fortunately enough, a third Rei was created beforhand, with no memory of the final battle.In the meantime, Asuka has come to stay at Hikari’s place, playing video games non-stop before she finally acknowledges that she has overstayed her welcome and leaves.KaworuAsuka is entirely broken. Aside from her synch rate having reached 0%, in the Director’s Cut she is also told that Kaji is dead. Now a sickly husk of her old self, goes to some abandoned, ruined house. She folds her clothes neatly on a nearby chair and sits inside a bathtub, telling herself that now that she can no longer be an Eva pilot, she has no more purpose in life. The bathtub is full of what seems to be red water, either because of rust or because of her attempting to slash her own wrists. However, she is found in time by Nerv troops and is taken to their hospital.Touji, Kensuke, and Hikari’s families have all left Tokyo-3 by now. Rei is a stranger. Asuka is comatose. Shinji is very lonely, and when he goes to the beach to ponder his own loneliness and helplessness, he is encountered by a handsome boy his age, who introduces himself as Kaworu Nagisa, the Fifth Child. Shinji is instantly infatuated,¹³ and the feeling seems mutual—at one point Kaworu sleeps over at Shinji’s place and tells him outright, ‘Maybe I was born to meet you.’However, not all is as it seems. The files concerning this boy have all been erased, and the only available detail about him is his date of birth: 13th of September, 2000. He also has the uncanny ability of controlling his synch rate with his new Eva, Unit-02. At one point (in the Director’s Cut), Misato catches him chatting with Seele representatives (who appear as holographic monoliths surrounding him) while standing on top of a semi-sunken statue out in the sea, in a way that seems very awkward for ordinary humans. She can’t hear the conversation, but Seele reveal to him that Adam is already ‘inside of Ikari’, as Gendou has already grafted the body of Adam into the palm of his hand in preparation for the Third Impact.Sure enough, he turns out to be the 17th Angel, emitting an AT Field stronger than that of any of his predecessors, as he controls Unit-02 remotely, floating with it down to the Terminal Dogma. Shinji is obviously deeply hurt at this betrayal. He follows Kaworu to the Terminal Dogma, fighting Unit-02 all the way down, finally defeating it when they reach it. Kaworu enters, planning to start the Third Impact and destroy humanity (as apparently ordered by Seele), only to discover that it is actually Lilith. (This is considered a plot hole—Seele told him where Adam was, but Kaworu still went in the opposite direction for some reason, causing much speculation.)Shinji defeats Unit-02, grabbing Kaworu in his Eva’s hand. Kaworu tells Shinji that for him life and death are equal, and humanity should live instead. He looks up to see Rei looking at him, and encourages Shinji to kill him.After a tense wait, he does. He is later seen mourning his death by the sea, almost crying, telling Misato they loved each other and that he should have been the one to live. Misato disagrees, telling him that Kaworu had no will to live and thus shouldn’t have. Shinji calls her ‘cold’ for saying so.End of EvangelionShinji, who is now even lonelier than before, feeling that Misato has become too distant to approach, tries to reach out to Asuka for help, but she’s still comatose and won’t respond. He tries to shake her awake, urging her to call him a ‘dumbass’ like before, but ultimately all he manages to do is shake her hard enough for her shirt to open by accident. At this point the combination of his attraction on one hand and deep contempt on the other drive him to masturbate to the sight of her exposed breasts. Once he finishes, he feels so horrible about it he becomes semi-catatonic.Attack on NervAround the same time, Misato finds out the truth about humanity and its origins through Kaji’s work, which he confided in her. However, once she does, the entire data suddenly disappears inexplicably—something is deeply wrong here.As it turns out, Seele have caught wind of Gendou’s different plan for the Third Impact. In their effort to stop him from sabotaging their plan, they launch their attack against Nerv: first, they unleash a computer virus, is why the files disappeared from the server Misato was reading from. Nerv manages to fend it off with the help of now-released Ritsuko.Second, they get the Prime Minister, who has been informed of Nerv’s plans, to send the JSSDF to their headquarters, with the order to kill everyone there. During this attack, Nerv manage to seal off most of the complex (at Misato’s order) and sneak Asuka into Unit-02. Three soldiers manage to find Shinji; one of them aims a gun to his head, apologizing and saying it’s not personal, but Shinji doesn’t respond either way.Fortunately, Misato comes in at the last second, guns ablazing, and manages to kill them all. Once they are all dead she tries to talk Shinji back into piloting the Eva. When he continuously refuses, seeing himself as worthless after killing Kaworu and doing what he did to Asuka, Misato kisses him on the mouth and tells him they’ll ‘do the rest’ when he comes back, pushing him into the elevator leading to Unit-01. This is soon revealed to be a lie: Misato collapses on the floor, bleeding from her stomach, addressing her final words at Kaji. Shinji notices the blood on his shirt, realizes what Misato has done, and starts crying without reservation for the first time in ages.Asuka is still catatonic, but eventually her mother’s spirit gets her to snap out of her stupour and fight. Asuka, realizing her mother has always been there for her, is encouraged to fight back, destroying the JSSDF’s planes, fully fending off their attack along with Nerv.In the meantime, Gendou has taken Rei to the Terminal Dogma. Rei is naked and her body has started disintegrating, as her AT Field can no longer contain her physical form. They intend to start the Third Impact, but instead they find Ritsuko waiting there. She aims a gun at them, telling them that Nerv would soon collapse and stop them… only to discover that Balthasar, which still holds her mother’s affection for Gendou, stops it from happening. Gendou tells Ritsuko something, but the audio shuts off when he does; we only see his mouth moving, but Ritsuko responds, ‘…Liar.’ Gendou shoots her dead, intending to continue with his plan.The Mass-Produced EvasNow Seele are ready to unleash their final strike: a series of eight mass-produced Evas, Units 05–12, running on dummy plugs based on Kaworu. Asuka manages to fend them off in part, but it’s an uphill battle. Though she does seem to have the upper hand for some time, she is defeated when one of them lunges the retrieved Spear of Longinus at her, breaking her AT Field and pinning her down to the ground. Shinji has reached his Eva, but it is frozen in bakelite and cannot be moved. Once again, he feels completely useless. Fortunately, shortly after Asuka is impaled, it moves on its own, breaking free from the substance, unleashing its full power and blowing up the top of the Nerv pyramid; Shinji enters the entry plug and sets off, but it is too late: Asuka and her Eva have been mangled entirely, and Shinji can do nothing but scream in utter horror.InstrumentalityRei somehow hears Shinji’s scream, recognizing his distress. Gendou attempts to begin the process of the Third Impact, inserting his hand, with Adam’s body grafted into it, into her breast; however, Rei, in a culmination of her self-assertion, tells Gendou she’s not his ‘doll’, severing his hand inside of her. She then floats away to Lilith, fusing with it, and beginning the cataclysmic event that is Instrumentality.The world descends into trippy chaos. Without going over the staggering amount of trippy Freudian symbolism, this is basically what happens:Shinji sees Rei, now fused with Lilith and huge, staring at him, and he is somehow even more horrified; he only manages to calm down when a huge Kaworu emerges from inside her, comforting him. The Doors of Guf open and all humans, who have been kept as discreet beings thanks to their AT Field, are dissolved into a uniform Sea of LCL, merging their consciousness together—while it did not go exactly as Seele had planned, they are very happy with the result as they melt away into it. Unit-01 takes Gendou, who is lying wounded on the floor of the Terminal Dogma, mentally apologizing to Shinji for what he’s put him through, and bites his head off.This prompts Shinji to takes a long, hard look at his own psyche, looking into his shortcomings, hatred of others, low self-worth, tendency towards escapism… He also interacts with Asuka, who mocks him for having done what he did to her earlier, shoving her cleavage in his face and urging him to do it again.At one point, an apparent flashback shows Shinji trying to comfort a clearly upset Asuka, who is sitting on a chair in the kitchen, but when she tells him to go away he quickly drops the façade and asks her to pay him some attention and help him out of his emotional pit. Instead, she stands up and starts lashing out at Shinji, at one point shoving him on the kitchen table, where a still steaming pot of coffee is placed. Shinji breaks entirely and angrily begs her not to ignore him, throwing chairs around in anger; when she coldly says, ‘No,’ he snaps and chokes her, triggering her trauma.The endingFinally, Rei and Yui manage to talk to Shinji, encouraging him to stay alive. He is asked if he wants to stay merged, but he decides, for the third time now, to free himself and regain his physical form.Instrumentality stops. Everyone is still merged, but the giant Rei has started disintegrating. The world is still in chaos, and the Sea of LCL is still there, but Shinji is told that humans can choose to return to their physical forms—it just seems like most people haven’t chosen to do so yet.Then, Shinji notices Asuka beside him. Having seen Asuka’s psyche from the inside, he is angered, feebly trying to strangle her on the verge of tears; she, in turn, having seen his, gently strokes his cheek in empathy, prompting him to start crying. And yet, as she’s also aware of what Shinji had done to her earlier that day, the film ends with her uttering the same phrase Shinji uttered when he first got into the Eva:Kimochi warui.Original airing endingThe original finale is what happens when the Instrumentality works, but it is portrayed very differently: rather than portraying the cataclysmic event ending the world as we know it, we see characters being interrogated inside their own consciousness by the rest of the cast—or, rather, how they perceive them. This process delves into each character’s psyche. Most characters make little progress if at all, and so the process finally focuses on Shinji’s. He is forced to confront his own consciousness and come to difficult realizations, such as admitting that although he has made it a mantra for himself not to run away, the real reason he never actually runs away for long is that, well, he feels like he has nowhere to run anyway.Ultimately, the process yields some good. Shinji realizes that his view of the world is inherently very limited—just like that of everyone else. Therefore, he should take everyone’s perspective with a grain of salt, and realize his own value… and eventually, he realizes that he has his own inherent worth and is worthy of life. For this, he is congratulated by the recurring cast, whom he thanks warmly.In my humble opinion, however, the symbolism the series uses implies that humanity will return to its original form, with a much better understanding of each other.¹ In Japanese folk religion, souls are said to be spherical and exist on a sliding scale of size—small ones in inanimate objects, larger ones in animals, larger than those in humans, and the largest in kami. More on this here.² Should be pronounced ‘goof’ but is pronounced ‘guff’ in the series³ In Kabbalah, it’s said to be where unborn souls are stored; it is said that Doomsday, or the Jewish equivalent thereof, will happen once all souls therein have descended to our realm.⁴ Supplementary material indicate that using the Spear of Longinus was somehow used to fight Adam, and the white giant form he is shown to have in DC21 is because of his instability.⁵ The Children are referred to using the English ‘children’ even in the singular: ‘First Children’, ‘Second Children’, etc.⁶ The reasons why there’s a third Tokyo now are mostly irrelevant to the plot.⁷ Lit. ‘nasty feeling/sensation’; this can mean anything from ‘ew’ to ‘disgusting’ to ‘I’m nauseated’.⁸ This is an example of the kind of quintessentially Japanese mentality known as shou ga nai.⁹ This incident, as well as his next attempt to leave Nerv behind, and his complicated love-hate relationship with his father, seem to be the main reason why Westerners seem to (mistakenly) think of Shinji as a ‘wimp’ who constantly tries to dodge his responsibilities. (Well, that and Spike Spencer playing him less as more whiny in the dub, as opposed to Megumi Ogata’s original interpretation of him as frustrated teenager who bottles things up until he violently lashes out.)¹⁰ Much like Hideaki Anno, the creator of the series.¹¹ Following years and years of speculation, Gainax finally revealed that it was an unnamed Nerv employee who killed him.¹² Fans debate whether she was just going to hug him or offer him sex—while she is in her late 20s and he’s 14, she generally has a lot of trouble relating to men in general.¹³ Yes, really. I won’t budge on this, Netflix.

I didn't vote for him. I was also surprised when he won the nomination and shocked when he won the election..Let’s stipulate right away that President Donald Trump is losing this race. Set aside the particulars—how suburban voters are migrating toward Joe Biden, and how seniors are rethinking their support too. Consider the basics.Presidents are supposed to keep Americans employed. The jobless rate now stands at 11 percent—more than 3 points higher than when Jimmy Carter lost reelection in 1980 and when George H. W. Bush was defeated in 1992.Presidents are supposed to keep Americans safe. About 140,000 have died from COVID-19, more than twice the number that perished in the Vietnam War, which doomed Lyndon B. Johnson’s reelection chances in 1968.Presidents are supposed to attract voters outside their loyal base. Trump’s approval rating stands at 38 percent, according to Gallup; no president since Harry Truman in 1948 has won reelection with a number less than 40 percent.So what—it’s over, then? Maybe not. Facing the combined calamities of a pandemic and an economic meltdown, Trump hasn’t collapsed. His base never really grows, but neither does it crumple, keeping him competitive. “If Trump could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose supporters, he could also raise the dead on Fifth Avenue and not gain any supporters,” Charles Franklin, the director of the Marquette Law School poll, told me.The pointless feuds and rage tweets, the conspiracism and obsessions all seem baked in—none of that seems to surprise the electorate anymore. He could win. He might win. Here are six reasons why.1. The economy could come back just enough.Reckless though it was to reopen businesses while the virus raged, states that lifted stay-at-home restrictions gave the economy an unmistakable jolt. A record-setting total of 7.5 million jobs were added in May and June. The numbers might well cool off in the coming months, but Trump can spin what might turn out to be fleeting gains as a full-fledged recovery.“This looks like a very rapid rebound,” Gregory Daco, the chief economist at the consulting firm Oxford Economics, told me, referring to recent job numbers. “But we have to keep in mind that we’re still deep in the hole. We’ve only recouped about one-third of the jobs lost, and the second portion of the recovery phase is likely to be much slower.” To illustrate the point, Daco cited clothing sales, which dropped 90 percent from February to April. Since then, sales have nearly doubled, which may sound like a reason to celebrate. But they’re still 70 percent below the peak, Daco told me.For Trump’s purposes, the broader context wouldn’t matter. He’d point to the progress and ignore the rest. And some may be inclined to believe him. Even as voters sour on Trump for other reasons, 50 percent still like the way he handles the economy, a new ABC News-Washington Post survey shows.“The president needs a glimmer of hope in the fall, and that will be enough on the economy,” a former senior White House official told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity in order to talk candidly about Trump’s reelection.2. Polling could be wrong (again).Four years ago, the race between Trump and Hillary Clinton came down to Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Trump narrowly won all three. This time around, Biden is leading in each of the same three states by anywhere from 6 to 8 points, the RealClearPolitics average of polls shows.If that sounds familiar, it may be because state surveys also showed Clinton topping Trump in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania ahead of the election. In Pennsylvania alone, seven different state polls taken in the first two weeks of October 2016 showed Clinton beating Trump by no fewer than 4 percentage points and by as many as 9. She wound up losing the state by about a point.Postmortem analyses of state polling turned up serious flaws. In some instances, surveys failed to correct for the overrepresentation of college-educated voters who participate more in polls and tended to favor Clinton. Or they didn’t capture a trend in which most voters who made up their minds late voted for Trump.It’s not clear that state polling this time around is any better. “You certainly see state polls appearing today that clearly are not reflecting the educational distribution in the states they’re polling,” said Franklin, who took part in a postelection polling study conducted by the American Association for Public Opinion Research. “That’s a bit of a puzzlement.”3. Trump can campaign all day long.If they choose, presidents can exploit the office for reelection purposes with brutal efficiency. They can push policies that matter most to prized constituencies, and fly to swing states for campaign stops masquerading as official visits. Trump can no longer hold rallies whenever and wherever he wants, but even during a pandemic, he can capitalize on his surroundings in ways that a challenger can’t.“Most presidents want to be reelected, and so they take full advantage of all those benefits of incumbency,” Barbara Perry, the presidential-studies director at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, told me.A president’s sheer ubiquity is enough to reinforce his grip on the office. “For all of his foolishness and craziness, Trump is there. He’s there 24/7. That’s a huge advantage,” Aaron David Miller, the author of a book on the presidency called The End of Greatness, told me.Amid signs that he’s losing ground with seniors, Trump appeared in the Rose Garden in the spring to announce a plan that caps the amount of money they pay for insulin. Two minutes into his speech, he began belittling his opponent: “Sleepy Joe can’t do this, that I can tell you.” Toward the end, the White House aired a video showing a 68-year-old man with diabetes thanking Trump for cutting his expenses.Last week, Trump showed up in the Rose Garden again, ostensibly to talk about Hong Kong, but instead spent most of a free-associative hour lampooning Biden. A “Rose Garden” strategy used to mean that a sitting president would plant himself in the White House and devote himself to governing. Trump is more literal: He’s turned this historic outdoor space into a campaign stage.This week, Trump resurrected the daily coronavirus task-force briefings that he’d dropped a couple of months ago. They give him a captive national TV audience at a moment when he can’t easily hold his beloved rallies.4. Biden’s got his own problems.Biden has suffered a personal loss, which has made him a comforting figure to grieving Americans who have lost jobs and loved ones in the pandemic. Yet he still symbolizes a brand of establishment centrism that leaves some younger voters and some in the party’s activist wing uninspired.“We have to be true to ourselves and acknowledge that Biden is a mediocre, milquetoast, neoliberal centrist that we’ve been fighting against in the Democratic establishment,” Cornel West, the Harvard University professor and a Bernie Sanders supporter, told me.If Sanders’s primary voters stay home on Election Day out of pique, that could damage Biden’s chances, especially in must-win swing states.Nina Turner, a co-chair of the Sanders campaign, told me she has no appetite for the choice she faces: “It’s like saying to somebody, ‘You have a bowl of shit in front of you, and all you’ve got to do is eat half of it instead of the whole thing.’ It’s still shit.”Expect Trump to aggravate a dispute that advances his own interests. As I’ve written, he spent months wooing Sanders voters during the primary, trying to convince them that the senator was the victim of a Democratic conspiracy to prevent him from getting the party’s nomination.5. Biden voters might not get to vote.If the state elections held in recent months are any sort of dry run, November could be a disaster. The number of polling places was slashed in the face of COVID-19, forcing voters to wait hours in line. More than 80 voting locations were shut down or consolidated in the Atlanta metro area last month, while places in Milwaukee were cut from 180 to 5.That amounts to voter suppression. A replay in November might dampen the Biden vote in the Democrats’ urban strongholds within the red, blue, and purple states alike. Millions of potential Biden voters would face a bleak choice: Stay home, or go to the polls and risk catching a potentially fatal disease.An obvious workaround is mail-in voting. But Trump has used his megaphone to make the spurious claim that expanded mail-in voting is a plot to defeat Republicans, which sends a clear message to state GOP leaders and elected officials that he’s not in favor of greater access. And the mail-in process is already difficult for voters in some states, as my colleague Adam Harris recently wrote.6. What if there’s an October surprise?Ever the showman, Trump could try to shake up the race with a late announcement of dramatic progress in fighting COVID-19. News of a “breakthrough” would get ample attention, and whether he’s right or wrong might not get sorted out until long after the votes are counted. By that time, it wouldn’t matter; Trump could lock in a chunk of voters grateful for any news of an antidote.“He’ll probably announce a vaccine in October,” Charlie Black, the longtime Republican strategist, told me with a laugh.

Don’t Count Trump OutPolling could be wrong. The economy could recover just enough. He could announce his own October surprise.Let’s stipulate right away that President Donald Trump is losing this race. Set aside the particulars—how suburban voters are migrating toward Joe Biden, and how seniors are rethinking their support too. Consider the basics.Presidents are supposed to keep Americans employed. The jobless rate now stands at 11 percent—more than 3 points higher than when Jimmy Carter lost reelection in 1980 and when George H. W. Bush was defeated in 1992.Presidents are supposed to keep Americans safe. About 140,000 have died from COVID-19, more than twice the number that perished in the Vietnam War, which doomed Lyndon B. Johnson’s reelection chances in 1968.Presidents are supposed to attract voters outside their loyal base. Trump’s approval rating stands at 38 percent, according to Gallup; no president since Harry Truman in 1948 has won reelection with a number less than 40 percent.So what—it’s over, then? Maybe not. Facing the combined calamities of a pandemic and an economic meltdown, Trump hasn’t collapsed. His base never really grows, but neither does it crumple, keeping him competitive. “If Trump could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose supporters, he could also raise the dead on Fifth Avenue and not gain any supporters,” Charles Franklin, the director of the Marquette Law School poll, told me.The pointless feuds and rage tweets, the conspiracism and obsessions all seem baked in—none of that seems to surprise the electorate anymore. He could win. He might win. Here are six reasons why.1. The economy could come back just enough.Reckless though it was to reopen businesses while the virus raged, states that lifted stay-at-home restrictions gave the economy an unmistakable jolt. A record-setting total of 7.5 million jobs were added in May and June. The numbers might well cool off in the coming months, but Trump can spin what might turn out to be fleeting gains as a full-fledged recovery.“This looks like a very rapid rebound,” Gregory Daco, the chief economist at the consulting firm Oxford Economics, told me, referring to recent job numbers. “But we have to keep in mind that we’re still deep in the hole. We’ve only recouped about one-third of the jobs lost, and the second portion of the recovery phase is likely to be much slower.” To illustrate the point, Daco cited clothing sales, which dropped 90 percent from February to April. Since then, sales have nearly doubled, which may sound like reason to celebrate. But they’re still 70 percent below the peak, Daco told me.For Trump’s purposes, the broader context wouldn’t matter. He’d point to the progress and ignore the rest. And some may be inclined to believe him. Even as voters sour on Trump for other reasons, 50 percent still like the way he handles the economy, a new ABC News-Washington Post survey shows.“The president needs a glimmer of hope in the fall, and that will be enough on the economy,” a former senior White House official told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity in order to talk candidly about Trump’s reelection.2. Polling could be wrong (again).Four years ago, the race between Trump and Hillary Clinton came down to Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Trump narrowly won all three. This time around, Biden is leading in each of the same three states by anywhere from 6 to 8 points, the RealClearPolitics average of polls shows.If that sounds familiar, it may be because state surveys also showed Clinton topping Trump in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania ahead of the election. In Pennsylvania alone, seven different state polls taken in the first two weeks of October 2016 showed Clinton beating Trump by no fewer than 4 percentage points and by as many as 9. She wound up losing the state by about a point.Postmortem analyses of state polling turned up serious flaws. In some instances, surveys failed to correct for the overrepresentation of college-educated voters who participate more in polls and tended to favor Clinton. Or they didn’t capture a trend in which most voters who made up their minds late voted for Trump.Franklin, the Marquette Law School poll director, told me that his survey now shows Biden leading the president by 8 points in Wisconsin. But how much weight do such polls deserve, given the debacle in 2016? At the end of that race, Clinton led Trump by an average of more than 6 points in Wisconsin and then lost by nearly a point.“So, that’s a large error,” Franklin said. “Was that a humbling experience?” I asked. “Yes! Absolutely. How could it not be?”It’s not clear that state polling this time around is any better. “You certainly see state polls appearing today that clearly are not reflecting the educational distribution in the states they’re polling,” said Franklin, who took part in a postelection polling study conducted by the American Association for Public Opinion Research. “That’s a bit of a puzzlement.”Kellyanne Conway, a former pollster and a current counselor to the president who served as Trump’s campaign manager in the 2016 race, argues that nothing has been fixed. “The same problems surround the polls this time because many of the people running the polls then are running the polls now. There’s been no course correction whatsoever,” Conway told me. “If polling were run like a business, the C-suite would have been cleaned out, the shareholders would have revolted, the customers would have walked away.”3. Trump can campaign all day long.If they choose, presidents can exploit the office for reelection purposes with brutal efficiency. They can push policies that matter most to prized constituencies, and fly to swing states for campaign stops masquerading as official visits. Trump can no longer hold rallies whenever and wherever he wants, but even during a pandemic, he can capitalize on his surroundings in ways that a challenger can’t.“Most presidents want to be reelected, and so they take full advantage of all those benefits of incumbency,” Barbara Perry, the presidential-studies director at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, told me.A president’s sheer ubiquity is enough to reinforce his grip on the office. “For all of his foolishness and craziness, Trump is there. He’s there 24/7. That’s a huge advantage,” Aaron David Miller, the author of a book on the presidency called The End of Greatness, told me.Amid signs that he’s losing ground with seniors, Trump appeared in the Rose Garden in the spring to announce a plan that caps the amount of money they pay for insulin. Two minutes into his speech, he began belittling his opponent: “Sleepy Joe can’t do this, that I can tell you.” Toward the end, the White House aired a video showing a 68-year-old man with diabetes thanking Trump for cutting his expenses.Last week, Trump showed up in the Rose Garden again, ostensibly to talk about Hong Kong, but instead spent most of a free-associative hour lampooning Biden. A “Rose Garden” strategy used to mean that a sitting president would plant himself in the White House and devote himself to governing. Trump is more literal: He’s turned this historic outdoor space into a campaign stage.This week, Trump resurrected the daily coronavirus task-force briefings that he’d dropped a couple of months ago. They give him a captive national TV audience at a moment when he can’t easily hold his beloved rallies.A former White House official told me that some aides were “dead set against” the briefings in the spring. “We were stunned that he was out there doing it,” this person told me. “We lost that battle. There were a group of us in the West Wing who said, ‘He needs to be the commander in chief. He doesn’t need to be the head of the coronavirus task force.’” But to Trump, the briefings are irresistible. “Suggesting the president go on TV is like pushing against an open door,” the former official said.4. Biden’s got his own problems.Biden has suffered personal loss, which has made him a comforting figure to grieving Americans who have lost jobs and loved ones in the pandemic. Yet he still symbolizes a brand of establishment centrism that leaves some younger voters and some in the party’s activist wing uninspired.“We have to be true to ourselves and acknowledge that Biden is a mediocre, milquetoast, neoliberal centrist that we’ve been fighting against in the Democratic establishment,” Cornel West, the Harvard University professor and a Bernie Sanders supporter, told me.If Sanders’s primary voters stay home on Election Day out of pique, that could damage Biden’s chances, especially in must-win swing states.Nina Turner, a co-chair of the Sanders campaign, told me she has no appetite for the choice she faces: “It’s like saying to somebody, ‘You have a bowl of shit in front of you, and all you’ve got to do is eat half of it instead of the whole thing.’ It’s still shit.”Expect Trump to aggravate a dispute that advances his own interests. As I’ve written, he spent months wooing Sanders voters during the primary, trying to convince them that the senator was the victim of a Democratic conspiracy to prevent him from getting the party’s nomination.5. Biden voters might not get to vote.If the state elections held in recent months are any sort of dry run, November could be a disaster. The number of polling places was slashed in the face of COVID-19, forcing voters to wait hours in line. More than 80 voting locations were shut down or consolidated in the Atlanta metro area last month, while places in Milwaukee were cut from 180 to 5.That amounts to voter suppression. A replay in November might dampen the Biden vote in the Democrats’ urban strongholds within red, blue, and purple states alike. Millions of potential Biden voters would face a bleak choice: Stay home, or go to the polls and risk catching a potentially fatal disease.An obvious work-around is mail-in voting. But Trump has used his megaphone to make the spurious claim that expanded mail-in voting is a plot to defeat Republicans, which sends a clear message to state GOP leaders and election officials that he’s not in favor of greater access. And the mail-in process is already difficult for voters in some states, as my colleague Adam Harris recently wrote.6. What if there’s an October surprise?Ever the showman, Trump could try to shake up the race with a late announcement of dramatic progress in fighting COVID-19. News of a “breakthrough” would get ample attention, and whether he’s right or wrong might not get sorted out until long after the votes are counted. By that time, it wouldn’t matter; Trump could lock in a chunk of voters grateful for any news of an antidote.“He’ll probably announce a vaccine in October,” Charlie Black, the longtime Republican strategist, told me with a laugh.