Evangelion 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time, the final film in Hideaki Anno’s Rebuild series, closes not just the story of Shinji Ikari but the larger Evangelion project spanning decades.
The film blends action-packed sequences with heavy psychological imagery, and its finale provides resolution to long-running emotional and thematic questions.
At the start of the movie, Shinji is broken. He is traumatized by the events of 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo, where his decisions triggered catastrophic effects.
His guilt makes him nearly catatonic as he joins a village of survivors rebuilding their lives. This quiet chapter matters because it represents Shinji finally observing ordinary human existence and realizing that, despite suffering, people continue forward.
Recharged by this exposure to humanity and through bonds with others, Shinji regains enough strength to face his father, Gendo Ikari.
Gendo’s plan involves merging with Unit-13 to bring about the “Additional Impact,” reshaping all existence according to his will. The final confrontation is not just robot versus robot but father versus son, ideology against ideology.
As the project continues, Shinji, with Rei’s and Kaworu’s past guidance, steps into the Anti-Universe. This surreal space becomes the stage for the true ending: Shinji’s final acceptance of himself and his role in breaking Evangelion’s cycle of despair.
Shinji Versus Gendo: Confronting the Past
The emotional core of the ending rests on the confrontation between Shinji and his father. Gendo, as revealed, is not motivated purely by power. His coldness comes from profound grief, particularly the loss of Yui Ikari, Shinji’s mother. He seeks to erase individuality and remake reality so he can be reunited with her.
Shinji, once paralyzed by rejection and fear, rises in contrast. Instead of choosing escape, Shinji takes responsibility. As they battle within the Anti-Universe, the fight visually shifts from colossal Evas to personal confrontations, showing that it is not a war of machines but of perspectives.
In the Anti-Universe, Shinji is guided through a series of encounters with important figures from his life: Kaworu, Rei, Asuka, and finally his parents. Each encounter reenacts painful memories but also provides him with clarity.
Unlike his younger self in The End of Evangelion, Shinji does not collapse in despair. He learns to accept both joy and pain as inseparable parts of being alive.
Shinji’s acceptance dismantles Gendo’s plan. Importantly, Shinji also understands his father, acknowledging the depth of his grief but rejecting his method of erasing individuality.
In one of the most human moments of the series, Gendo recognizes his mistake after Shinji offers empathy rather than hatred. The loop of dysfunction between father and son finally breaks.
The Anti-Universe: Breaking the Cycle of Evangelion
The Anti-Universe serves as the metaphysical climax of the story. Here, everything becomes symbolic. Evangelions collapse into sets, battlefields turn into stage backdrops, and the story fractures into theatrical representation.
This imagery highlights that Evangelion has always been a constructed narrative about trauma, identity, and closure.
Shinji’s role here is to confront the cycles of destruction, death, and rebirth that Evangelion as a series has repeated across its versions.
The Anti-Universe effectively becomes a meta-commentary, with Shinji walking through old scenarios, witnessing variations of battles and choices. Through this progression, he acknowledges that these cycles of repetition must end.
Evangelion 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time (Credit: Prime Video)
At last, Shinji chooses to rewrite the structure entirely. He asks about the “power of wills” shaping reality to create a world without Evangelions, a world where humanity can live without being bound to destructive cycles of fighting, trauma, and apocalyptic fear.
His decision echoes the thematic core: growth requires letting go. Evangelions, once symbols of pain and survival, are finally unnecessary.
The Instrumentality-like Sequence and Rei’s Guidance
Much like The End of Evangelion, Thrice Upon a Time features a large-scale human merging moment. The boundary between individuals blurs as Shinji interfaces with the Anti-Universe.
However, this time, Shinji chooses not to use Instrumentality to erase human suffering. Instead, he uses the opportunity to cleanse the world of Evangelions.
Rei appears as a guiding figure, supporting Shinji in this decision. Her presence symbolizes compassion and possibility, showing that even constructs of control can choose humanity over endless repetition. Together, they help usher in a new world, not through escapism but through acceptance.
The important contrast here is agency. In prior versions, Instrumentality overwhelmed Shinji until he collapsed into an ambiguous choice. In this film, he clearly acts: deciding to erase Evangelions and to release humanity from their shadow.
The Ending at the Train Station Platform
After choosing to remove Evangelions, Shinji appears in a scene resembling reality: a modern train station. This moment transitions from animation to live-action imagery of Ube-Shinkawa Station in Yamaguchi Prefecture, Hideaki Anno’s own hometown.
Shinji is shown as an adult, no longer the lost child caught in cycles of trauma. Asuka, Rei, and Kaworu appear standing beside tracks, symbolizing farewells or alternate paths. In the end, Shinji is met by Mari, who runs to him warmly. Together, they leave the station toward the city, suggesting a hopeful beginning.
Unlike the ambiguity of The End of Evangelion, this conclusion is clear in tone: Evangelion as a story, and Shinji as a character, has resolved. The series that for decades repeated cycles of pain has finally released both its protagonist and its audience.
Key Themes of the Conclusion
Responsibility and Growth: Shinji finally embraces accountability for his choices, ending his arc of avoidance.
Empathy and Reconciliation: By understanding his father instead of rejecting him in hate, Shinji breaks the generational trauma.
Cycle Breaking: Evangelions, once central to humanity’s survival, are removed, symbolizing freedom from endless repetition.
Acceptance of Life’s Duality: Shinji embraces that pain and joy coexist, making existence meaningful.
Hope Beyond Evangelion: The finale steps into a world without Evas, suggesting new life unshaped by apocalypse.
Why the Ending Resonates
The ending of Thrice Upon a Time has massive emotional weight, not only within the film but across Evangelion’s history. Hideaki Anno’s personal connection to the story gives the finale a sense of closure for both creator and audience.
Shinji finally achieves what he never could before: he accepts himself, forgives others, and chooses a future not defined by despair.
The sequence at the train station symbolizes Evangelion’s farewell to its fans as much as it does Shinji’s farewell to his old self. By literally stepping into the real world, the film breaks its own frame, declaring that Evangelion as a cycle of trauma and rebirth is finished.
The ending of Evangelion 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time resolves not just Shinji’s story but the Evangelion saga itself.
Through his acceptance, he puts an end to Evangelions, reconciles with his father, and chooses a life rooted in freedom rather than fear. The live-action coda emphasizes closure, bringing the narrative to a definitive conclusion.
Where past endings of Evangelion left ambiguity or despair, this film offers hope. Its final message is that even after repeated cycles of suffering, it is possible to change, to grow, and to choose life. By breaking the cycle, Shinji not only saves humanity but finally becomes free himself.
The final act of Predestination delivers one of the most shocking revelations in science fiction cinema. The story follows the unnamed time agent, portrayed by Ethan Hawke, who is locked in a mission to stop the terrorist known as the Fizzle Bomber.
Through the film, he interacts with John, a man with a mysterious and painful past, who recounts a story that seems almost unbelievable. As the timeline folds back on itself, the truth of their connection becomes clear, bringing the narrative to a startling conclusion.
The final sequences reveal that John, Jane, and the time agent are not separate individuals but the same person at different stages of life. Jane, born intersex, is abandoned at an orphanage and raised as a girl. Later, after meeting a mysterious man and falling in love, Jane becomes pregnant.
The pregnancy is complicated, resulting in a forced gender reassignment surgery, which transforms Jane into John. The baby from this pregnancy is secretly taken away and placed in the same orphanage, completing the cycle. This means that Jane is both the mother and father of her child, and John is both the lover and the product of that union. The cycle of self-creation is absolute.
When John realizes the truth, it shatters his identity. He learns that the man who seduced Jane and caused her heartbreak was his future self. What appeared to be a tragic romance is in fact part of an endless time loop. The paradox is complete: Jane, John, and the agent are all versions of the same person, tied together in a cycle of birth, love, and betrayal that no one else shares.
The Final Revelation: The Fizzle Bomber
The final twist takes the film beyond questions of identity and into the territory of destiny. After retiring from service, the time agent prepares for a new life.
However, his time device fails to fully decommission, leaving him connected to his past missions. He continues searching for the Fizzle Bomber, convinced that eliminating this terrorist will give him closure.
The climax occurs when the agent finally finds the bomber, only to discover that the bomber is none other than his own future self. This revelation forces the character to confront the idea that he is destined to become the very monster he has been hunting all along.
The older bomber insists that his bombings were not random acts of cruelty but attempts to prevent even worse tragedies in the timeline. He argues that the loss of a few lives is justified if it prevents greater suffering, presenting himself as a twisted kind of savior.
The time agent refuses to accept this reasoning. Horrified by the possibility of becoming this version of himself, he makes a choice. Despite the bomber’s pleas, he kills him, believing that by doing so he can end the cycle and prevent his descent into madness.
Yet the lingering detail of the still-functioning time device suggests that the loop may not be broken after all. The possibility remains that killing the bomber only delays, rather than prevents, his own transformation into that figure.
What the Ending Really Means
The ending of Predestination is not just a shocking twist but a meditation on identity, free will, and destiny. The film suggests that time is not a straight line but a closed loop, where cause and effect fold back on one another. Jane gives birth to herself, John fathers himself, and the agent hunts himself across decades.
The paradox is airtight: every stage of this character’s life is both a cause and an effect of another stage. There is no origin point, no external actor who begins the cycle. It is a story of pure self-creation, a person existing entirely because the loop sustains itself.
This idea challenges traditional concepts of identity. If Jane, John, the agent, and the bomber are all the same person, then the distinctions between them are illusions. Each version carries the scars, choices, and traumas of the others. The heartbreak Jane experiences becomes the motivation for John.
The struggles of John become the foundation for the agent. The disillusionment of the agent becomes the rationale for the bomber. Instead of being separate lives, they are stages in one continuous existence, each feeding the next.
Predestination (Credit: Pinnacle Films)
The question of free will is at the core of the ending. Is the agent choosing to kill the bomber, or is that choice already predetermined as part of the loop? The movie leaves this ambiguous.
The fact that the time device malfunctions and remains active suggests that history cannot be rewritten, only fulfilled. The agent’s attempt to stop himself may be just another step toward becoming the bomber, meaning his fate is sealed from the start.
Thematically, the ending forces viewers to grapple with the balance between destiny and choice. The bomber argues that his violent actions prevent worse outcomes, suggesting a utilitarian logic that justifies evil in the service of the greater good. The agent rejects this, insisting on personal accountability.
Yet the haunting possibility remains that his rejection itself will push him closer to becoming the bomber. In this way, the ending reflects on how people wrestle with their own darker impulses and whether true change is possible.
Why the Ending Resonates
What makes the ending of Predestination memorable is its combination of personal tragedy and cosmic paradox. On a personal level, the story is about loneliness and identity.
Jane and John are trapped in a cycle where their only true connection is with themselves. Every relationship they form is essentially a mirror of their own existence. The isolation of this paradox becomes the central tragedy of the character’s life.
On a broader level, the story asks whether human beings are prisoners of fate. The paradox is perfect, but it is also suffocating. The character cannot step outside the loop to create a new path.
The choices they believe they are making freely are, in fact, predetermined by the closed structure of time. This creates a chilling message: perhaps destiny is not something that can be escaped, only lived through endlessly.
The closing message of the bomber, claiming his actions were necessary, lingers long after the credits roll. Was he a monster, or was he right about preventing greater disasters?
The ambiguity forces viewers to confront uncomfortable questions about morality, sacrifice, and the thin line between heroism and villainy. By leaving the cycle unresolved, the film ensures its ending resonates not just as a puzzle but as a philosophical challenge.
