Oooh! At last! A place for me to rave about EVA, *and* give nits!

Episode 3:
At the start of the episode, Misato is knackered for coming in from the night shift. Yet Ritsuko is happily at work, apparently at a day shift. Throughout the rest of the series, they're both working at the same time (which seems to be any time of the day or night).
The need to relieve themselves is supposedly a fake excuse to Tôji and Kensuke, but they do it anyway (well, sometimes you talk about it enough, and ya just gotta...er, excuse me...)
This is only the second time an Angel's attacked in the past three week (and before that, there was nothing for fifteen years), yet the evacuations and shelters are treated as if they're used all the time. If it's not for Angels, then what?

Episode 4:
There seems to be limited resources for some things, and methods of transport I imagine are at a premium with people having to rush off and hide or what not. Given the world we're in here, is co-opting a whole train just so Shinji can leave really the best use of resources? (It can't be secrecy - everyone knows what he does anyway, besides, some kid on a train's hardly suspicious.)

And now...

Number 1. The larch. The larch.

And now...

Episode 3:

How come Toji doesn't wear a school uniform? And why does he always wear the exact same outfit? (It's okay for Shinji and Kensuke to always have the same thing on... it's a uniform! But Toji's clothes are not a uniform.)

Convenient that after two weeks of persistently hot rumors, those girls choose the day that Toji returned to finely work up the NERV to ask Shinji if he was the pilot.

The teacher of Shinji's class is a bit of an airhead, isn't he? My proof:
--His class breaks into a noisy uproar and moves about, and he continues on with his lecture as if he didn't notice a thing. Perhaps he should teach with his eyes open? And he can't be deaf, as he did clearly hear the bell.
--His lecture is on the basic history of the Second Impact, something that these kids grew up with as the first post-Impact generation. Wouldn't the class pretty much know this from every day life? Wouldn't this be like some kids fifteen years after W.W.II being taught about the restoration of the country after the war? The kids would all be saying, "Duh! We know that! We were there!" No wonder they fool around so much in class, if their teacher insists on lessons like this! (Of course, in reality the lecture may be more for the benefit of the audience... but as Phil, the Great Bird of Nitpicking, was fond of pointing out in his books, we don't deal in reality here.)

The text message Kensuke reads seems to be over an actual photo of a mountain, rather then over a drawing of a mountain. This isn't necessarily an actual nit... but I did find it slightly jarring.

In the dub Misato refers to the Angels as "aliens." Now, I know alien can mean, "differing in nature or character typically to the point of incompatibility," which would certainly suit the Angels, but the feal I got from the scene was that she meant the more common meaning (these days) of "extraterrestrial." Personally, I never got the impression that the Angels were extraterrestrial in origin.

The photos of Toji and Kensuke that NERV has on file must be old ones, as they're in different school uniforms. (Toji must have not developed that rebellious, anti-uniform habit yet.)

Speaking of uniforms, it's rare to see Misato in hers. She almost always wears civvies under her NERV jacket. Is this the kind of behavior one would expect to be tolerated in an organization such as NERV? Of course, she does get the job done, and that seems to be the most important thing to Ikari Gendo.

How do Toji and Kensuke get inside the Entry Plug? Unit 01 is engaged in combat with the Angel, and can't really move. Shinji must hold the Eva on it's current commands as he ejects the Plug, so he can't first bend into a position to make the Plug's hatch more accessible. Maybe Toji and Kensuke found a really, really big ladder lying about?

"This is only the second time an Angel's attacked in the past three week (and before that, there was nothing for fifteen years), yet the evacuations and shelters are treated as if they're used all the time. If it's not for Angels, then what?"

It is for the Angels. The reason why NERV exists is to combat the Angels. (Ikari himself says this in Episode 1.) If I was building a city that doubled as a fortress, and was expecting that it would someday face attack from great and powerful forces, I know I'd include some rather strong shelters and perform occasional emergency drills.

And now...

Number 1. The larch,

And now...

Number 3. The larch.

And now...

The horse chestnut,

Episode 4:

The close up of Shinji's door shows the "Shinji's Lovely Suite" sign in English, and in a farther shot, it mysteriously changes to Japanese. This happens a few other times to various bits of onscreen text over the course of the first four episodes. (Of course, those watching on VHS wouldn't have that problem.)

Shinji ran away, and took all his stuff with him!? Surely he had more then what would fit into that one bag, yet his room is completely empty,

The dub has Kensuke saying, "I wish I could get inside that lovely cockpit just once!" He did... in just the last episode! Maybe his brain overloaded with joy and he suffered a memory loss. (The subtitled version, just so you know, has him specify that he'd like to be at the controls.)

When Kensuke says he has no mother, he then tells Shinji, "I'm no different then you." How does Kensuke know that Shinji's mother is dead? They only recently met. Shinji's not exactly an outgoing person, and I very much get the impression that this is the first time that they have conversed significantly. And people rarely introduce themselves by saying, "Hi, my name is Ikari Shinji, and my mother is dead. Nice to meet you."

While it is a bit extreme, I have no trouble believing that NERV would set up a special train just for Shinji. He is a former Eva pilot after all, and NERV is sure paranoid when it comes to security.

Well, Lensuke is a pretty inquizitive individual. Maybe once he found out that Shinji was a pilot, she started looking up whatever information he could on him?

Also, am I the only one who found the movie Shinji was watching (well, not really "watching") to be pretty darn funny?

Now... Who the heck is "Lensuke"? Sorry about that

The Angels must not attack too often since
Kendo apparently has made a habit of playing
soldier.

Yeah,I decided to come back and post again after not doing it for awhile.