em Evangelion /em 's Final Finale Does What Its Other Endings Couldn't

For being one of the most iconic and influential anime series of all time, Neon Genesis Evangelion is also one of the most confusing; as of the franchise's most recent film, released on Amazon Prime earlier this month, the series has officially ended four times. But the new--and truly final--movie, Evangelion: 3.0 1.0 Thrice Upon a Time, delivers a real capstone to the series, as well as a new argument for how to watch the series as a whole. In case you're totally unfamiliar with the series, the gist is as such: Three teenagers, Shinji Ikari (Megumi Ogata), Asuka Langley Shikinami (Yūko Miyamura), and Rei Ayanami (Megumi Hayashibara), serve as the pilots of giant robots known as Evangelions. Though their initial function was to fight against mysterious beings known as Angels, they know serve as pawns between the organization NERV, led by Shinji's father Gendo (Fumihiko Tachiki), who seeks to cause a mass extinction in order to reunite with his late wife, and WILLE, a group of former NERV employees who are now NERV's only opponents. The Rebuild of Evangelion tetralogy, of which Thrice Upon a Time is the last, serves as a sort of re-telling of the events of the original TV series.