>particularly in light of... uh... whatever it is that Gendō
>actually wants in the original, I've never been entirely clear on that
>but it seems to me that it ends with human extinction, which is a
>pretty committed endgame.

I'm even more in the dark on that score, never having seen more than tiny fragments of the original. I mean, I'm not even clear on why Gendō was put in command of NERV in the first place. I guess he did design the EVAs, but shouldn't that just put him in the Dr. Shen role?

(The road not taken, at least by anything I've read: it's all on the adults -- Misato, Maya, and maybe also Ritsuko and Kaji -- to figure out that Gendō/SEELE's plan is all kinds of bad for humanity and put a stop to it. Yeah, the Children are the main characters in the original, but they're fourteen-year-old kids and they've got enough on their plates.)

>>... So then that got me rereading NXE, and I noticed that the first
>>season's pacing is quite similar to the pacing of the Serial
>>Experiments.
>
>Hmm, yeah, you're right. I had forgotten that we attempted to hold
>NXE to a schedule in the early days, probably because that was
>pre-website and so seems a little bit like it was part of another
>geological epoch. :)

I was mostly thinking about the pacing of the writing there, not the release schedule, but I guess the two are pretty closely tied.

>(On one level, I regret the Forum not being here when all but the last
>couple of episodes originally dropped. On the other hand, ye gods.)

Mm. I owe you an apology for a cranky email sent at some point in season 3, come to think of it. It's been so long that I can't remember what I said or why, but it was uncalled for.