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James Tiberius Kirk, played by William Shatner, is the main character in the original Star Trek television series and the films based on it. In 2007, J. J. Abrams announced that Kirk would be a character in the upcoming Star Trek film, although he did not say who will play the character.[1]
Kirk has commanded two starships named Enterprise: the USS Enterprise (NCC-1701) and the USS Enterprise (NCC-1701-A).

[edit] Overview

The non-canon Star Trek novel "Final Frontier" establishes that Kirk's father is named George Samuel Kirk. Several other novels, published by Pocket Books, list Kirk's mother's name as Winona. George Samuel, Jr. and Aurelan Kirk, Kirk's older brother and sister-in-law, died during the invasion of neural parasites on Deneva in 2267. Kirk's nephew, Peter Kirk, survived. According to dialog in the episode "What Are Little Girls Made Of?", Samuel "Sam" Kirk, Jr. has two other children.
Kirk is known to have fathered at least one child: David Marcus. He also fathered a child by the native woman Miramanee during a mission in which he lost his memory in the episode "The Paradise Syndrome," but Miramanee suffered injuries from her own people, resulting in a miscarriage and her own death.
Virtually nothing regarding Kirk's birth has been established in on-screen canon. Riverside, Iowa is listed on the official Star Trek web site as Kirk's birthplace.[2] His birth date has never been officially established, but both the official web site and fanon speculation suggest March 22, 2233, based upon the real-life birth date and age of actor William Shatner.
Although born on Earth, Kirk apparently lived, at least for a time, on Tarsus IV, where he was one of only nine surviving witnesses to the massacre of 4,000 colonists because of utilitarian extermination by Kodos the Executioner.
Gary Mitchell, in fabricating a gravestone for Kirk in the episode "Where No Man Has Gone Before," prints Kirk's name as "James R. Kirk." However, the middle initial is not again attributed to Kirk.[3]

Career
Kirk had a distinguished career in Starfleet Academy, becoming the first person to defeat the Kobayashi Maru test that stymied cadets for many decades. Whereas any situation would be met by the simulator's overriding dictate that the cadet lose, Kirk won by rewriting the program to allow him to rescue the Kobayashi Maru's crew. For this, he received a commendation for original thinking.
However, Kirk was constantly taunted and tormented by an obnoxious upperclassman named Finnegan, described by Kirk as the kind of person who would put cold soup in a person's bed or a bucket of water over a half-open door. Kirk despised the cackling, maniacal Finnegan, and wanted nothing more than to give his arrogant tormentor a thorough beating. Years later, while on a fantasy planet in the episode "Shore Leave," Kirk gained a certain degree of satisfaction when he was given the chance to beat a replica of Finnegan.
Kirk began his Starfleet career as a cadet in 2250. While still a student at the Academy, he was granted a field commission as an Ensign and posted to advanced training aboard the USS Republic in 2251. While there, young Ensign Kirk accused Ensign Ben Finney of carelessly leaving a switch to the atomic matter piles open which would have blown the ship up in a matter of minutes. This later would come back to haunt Kirk in the episode "Court Martial." Kirk was promoted to Lieutenant junior grade in 2253 and returned to Starfleet Academy as a student instructor.
Upon his graduation from Starfleet Academy in 2254, Kirk was promoted to a full Lieutenant and served aboard the USS Farragut. He gained a tremendous amount of experience aboard the Farragut, commanding his first planet survey and also surviving a deadly attack by a gas cloud alien, in which a large portion of the Farragut's crew, including Captain Garrovick, were killed. According to the episode "Obsession," Kirk later felt that he had been negligent by hesitating when facing the hostile alien life-form, which later killed Garrovick.
According to the official Star Trek website, Kirk was the third captain of the USS Enterprise (NCC-1701), following in the footsteps of Robert April, who predated Christopher Pike as captain of the vessel. Kirk commanded the Enterprise's historic five-year mission from 2265 until 2270. Alongside Kirk was his equally legendary first officer, the Human/Vulcan Spock, who also doubled as the Enterprise's science officer. Filling out the crew were chief medical officer Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy, chief engineer Montgomery Scott, communications officer Uhura, helmsman Hikaru Sulu, and later navigator Pavel Chekov. The crew's dedication to Kirk mirrored his own relentless loyalty to his ship.
Upon completion of the Enterprise's mission, Kirk achieved the rank of Rear Admiral, and was assigned as Chief of Starfleet Operations. In the Star Trek novel Star Trek: The Lost Years by J.M. Dillard, it is stated that during this time period, Kirk was a diplomatic trouble-shooter for Starfleet who was sent on various missions, including a mission to counter-terrorist activity on the planet Djana. However, Kirk was unfulfilled in this administrative role. Spock later told his friend, "Commanding a starship is your first, best destiny...anything else is a waste of material."

Kirk commanding the Enterprise-A in 2293.In 2272, to combat V'Ger, Admiral Kirk took temporary command of the Enterprise over Captain Willard Decker, who oversaw the ship's refit while in drydock. He retired from Starfleet sometime around 2282, but returned to active duty in 2284, where he was in command of Starfleet Academy training.
In 2285, Admiral Kirk briefly took command of the Enterprise in order to pursue his old enemy, Khan Noonien Singh. He was later demoted back to Captain after stealing and scuttling the Enterprise, and sabotaging the USS Excelsior that same year in order to revive Spock, who died in the mission to stop Khan. Kirk was given command of the USS Enterprise-A, and commanded the ship for several years until the vessel was decommissioned in 2293.
With Dr. Carol Marcus, Kirk had a son, David, who was killed by Klingons in 2285. The death of his son enraged Kirk for years to come. While he had always been distrustful and wary of the Klingons, after David's death, he held them collectively responsible for the death of his son. When Spock, on behalf of his father Sarek, opened negotiations with the Klingon Empire after the Praxis incident and 'volunteered' Kirk to lead the mission, Kirk was enraged. When Spock pointed out that they were dying, his sharp response was "Let them die!" It was only when the Klingon Chancellor Gorkon, on his deathbed, pleaded, "Don't let it end this way," that Kirk started to realize not all Klingons were responsible for his son's death, and finally started to let go of his hate of the Klingon people.
Kirk had recorded in his log during the start of this mission that he could never forgive them for the death of his son. It was this recording that was used as evidence against him when a Klingon court convicted him of murdering Gorkon in 2293; he was sentenced to a life term in the prison mines of Rura Penthe, but was subsequently rescued and cleared of guilt.

[edit] Death
In the film Star Trek: Generations, Kirk was lost and presumed dead when the USS Enterprise-B was damaged by The Nexus, which he entered. In this alternate existence, he was persuaded by Jean-Luc Picard from the year 2371 to return to Veridian III and stop Tolian Soran from sacrificing 230 million lives in order for him to re-enter the Nexus. During the climax, Kirk was able to retrieve and activate a cloaking control device from a damaged construction span, enabling Picard to sabotage Soran's plans. However, the span collapsed, causing Kirk to fall. Picard manages to get to Kirk as he lay dying underneath the wreckage, and subsequently buried his predecessor on the plateau.

Kirk dying on Veridian III, in 2371In the original script of Generations, Soran killed Kirk by shooting him in the back. This filmed ending was changed after negative reactions from test audiences. The revised death in the film was still not well received by many fans. Fan edits from fans were later made to prove that the movie could have worked as an independent TNG story and did not need Kirk involved at all.
In books written by William Shatner, beginning with Star Trek: The Return, Kirk is brought back to life by a combined alliance between the Romulans and the Borg, hoping to use him as a weapon with which to assassinate Picard, a nemesis shared by both factions. Kirk eventually sees through the effort, and assists the Federation in shutting down the Borg homeworld, with himself pulling the plug. He survives the ordeal and goes on to have further adventures in the modern Trek universe.
Pocket Books does not acknowledge the events of the "Shatnerverse" storylines in their canon, and thus Kirk has not appeared outside of the books written by Shatner. All of the Trek novels however, have an uncertain canocity.
 
[edit] Mirror Universe
In the Mirror Universe, Kirk was a loyal officer in the Starfleet of the Terran Empire. He commanded the ISS Enterprise after assassinating the ship's previous captain, Christopher Pike. Kirk's first action for the Empire was the execution of 5,000 colonists on Vega IX. His second action was the suppression of an alien uprising by simply destroying the rebels' homeworld. After briefly exchanging places with the regular universe's Kirk ("Mirror, Mirror"), the mirror Kirk was quickly locked up in the brig by Spock. He attempts to bribe Spock with money and his own command, but Spock refuses. Kirk is once again returned to the Mirror Universe at the end of the episode; it is unknown what happens to him afterward.

The regular universe's Kirk would later be revealed as having convinced the mirror Spock to make the Empire more peaceful in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Crossover." Unfortunately, Spock's reforms led to the Empire being attacked and defeated by the Klingons and the Cardassians.


[edit] Other appearances
In the "Shatnerverse" novels written by William Shatner, the mirror Kirk is subsequently supported by mirror Spock in a bid to take control of the Terran Empire. Kirk becomes the most brutal dictator in history as the Emperor Tiberius. His Empire is eventually overthrown by Spock, as Deep Space Nine had confimed with their Mirror Universe episodes, set many years after the events, starting with Crossover. Mirror Kirk found a way to form a joint Klingon/Cardassian alliance to invade and take over of Earth and Vulcan, while he was put into crio-sleep for the next 80 years, bidding his time to return as Emperor in Spectre. In most other print sequels, such as The Sorrows of Empire by David Mack (part of the Glass Empires trade paperback), the mirror Kirk and Spock quickly become bitter enemies; eventually Kirk is assassinated by Spock, who takes sole control of the Empire.
Kirk appears in the archive footage of the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Trials and Tribble-ations," where Benjamin Sisko takes the chance to meet him after saving him from being killed by Arne Darvin. Kirk also meets Miles O'Brien and Julian Bashir after they get involved in the bar fight and Kirk interrogates the crew who took part in it.
Aside from his above appearance in DS9 and his mention in "Crossover", Kirk is mentioned by Worf to Kor in the DS9 fourth season episode "The Sword of Kahless", where Worf asks Kor about the events of "Errand of Mercy."
In the TNG episode "The Naked Now", when the crew are afflicted by a strange sickness which causes them to act drunk, Riker and Data are searching for a similar condition in the Starfleet database when they come across a log entry of the original Enterprise, commanded "by a Captain James T. Kirk." This is a reference to the TOS episode "The Naked Time".
 
I am thinking "interesting" is in the eye of the OP only.

Edit: Or perhaps Flynavy, he's fucked in the head like that :fly:
 
The AH-64 Apache is the United States Army's principal attack helicopter, and is the successor to the AH-1 Cobra. The AH-64 is a twin-engine, tandem-seat aerial weapons platform, powered by two General Electric T700 turboshaft engines. The crew sits in tandem, with the pilot sitting behind and above the copilot-gunner in an armored crew compartment. The AH-64 is armed with a 30mm M230 chain gun and carries a mixture of AGM-114 Hellfire and Hydra 70 rockets on four hard points mounted on its stub-wing pylons.

Designed by Hughes Helicopters in response to the Army's Advanced Attack Helicopter Program, it was built to endure front-line environments and to operate during the day or night and in adverse weather using avionics and electronics, such as the Target Acquisition and Designation System, Pilot Night Vision System (TADS/PNVS), passive infrared countermeasures, Global Positioning System (GPS), and the Integrated Helmet And Display Sight System (IHADSS). McDonnel Douglas purchased Hughes Helicopters and continued the development of the AH-64 resulting in the AH-64D Apache Longbow which is currently produced by Boeing Integrated Defense Systems.

[edit] Development
Following the cancellation of the AH-56 Cheyenne, the United States Army sought an aircraft to fill an anti-armor attack role. The Army wanted an aircraft better than the AH-1 Cobra in firepower, performance and range. It would have the maneuverability to fly nap of the earth (NoE) missions. To this end, the US Army issued a request for proposals (RFP) for an Advanced Attack Helicopter (AAH) in 1972.[2]

Proposals were submitted by 5 manufacturers: Bell, Boeing-Vertol (teamed with Grumman), Hughes, Lockheed, and Sikorsky. In 1973, the US Department of Defense selected finalists Bell and Hughes Aircraft's Toolco Aircraft Division (later Hughes Helicopters).[2]

Each company built prototype helicopters and went through a flight test program. Hughes' Model 77/YAH-64 prototype first flew on September 30, 1975, while Bell's Model 409/YAH-63 prototype first flew the following day.[2] After evaluating test results, the Army selected Hughes' YAH-64 over Bell's YAH-63 in 1976.[3]

Hughes was approved for full scale production in 1982.[2] In 1983, the first production helicopter was rolled out at Hughes Helicopter's facility at Mesa, Arizona. In 1984, Hughes Helicopters was purchased by McDonnell Douglas for $500 million. Hughes later became part of The Boeing Company with the merger of Boeing and McDonnell Douglas in August 1997. The total cost of the AH-64D program is US$ 10.5 billion through April 2007.[4]
 
Operational history

Hydra 70 and AGM-114 Hellfire.
[edit] United States
The Apache was first used in combat during the 1989 invasion of Panama, Operation Just Cause. The AH-64A Apache and the AH-64D Apache Longbow have played important roles in several Middle Eastern wars, including the Gulf War, Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, and Operation Iraqi Freedom in Iraq. The Apaches were proven to be excellent tank hunters and also destroyed hundreds of armored vehicles (mainly of the Iraqi army).

During Operation Desert Storm on January 17, 1991, eight AH-64As guided by four MH-53 Pave Low IIIs, were used to destroy a portion of the Iraqi radar network to allow bomber aircraft into Iraq without detection.[2] This was the first attack of Desert Storm.[2] The Apaches carried an asymmetrical load of Hydra 70 flechette rockets, Hellfires, and one auxiliary fuel tank each.[citation needed] During the 100-hour ground war, a total of 277 AH-64s took part. Apaches destroyed over 500 tanks, numerous armored personnel carriers and many other vehicles during Operation Desert Storm.[2]


AH-64A at Forward Operating Base Speicher, Iraq in 2005.During Operation Iraqi Freedom, some Apaches were damaged in combat, including one captured by Iraqi troops near Karbala on March 24, 2003, and shown on Iraqi television. The captured helicopter was destroyed via airstrike the day after it was captured.[5] The March 24 attack, against an armored brigade of the Iraqi Republican Guard's Medina Division, was largely unsuccessful, apparently because the tank crews had set up a "flak trap" in broken terrain, employing their guns to good effect.[6][7] More recently two Apaches were lost along with their crews between January 28 and February 2, 2007 to Iraqi insurgent ground fire in Taji and Najaf.[8]


An AH-64 provides air support over Tikrit, Iraq on February 24, 2006.The vast majority of Apache helicopters that have taken heavy combat damage have been able to continue their assigned missions and return safely to their bases. For example, of the 33 Apaches employed in the March 24, 2003 attack, 30 were damaged by Iraqi ground fire with several being damaged beyond repair, but only one of these did not make it back to base
 
Israel

IAF AH-64A "Peten" פתן
Apache Longbow at the International Aerospace Exhibition 2006.The Israeli Air Force uses the Apache to strike various targets with guided missiles. The AH-64A attacked and destroyed dozens of Hezbollah outposts in Lebanon during the 1990s, attacking in many weather conditions — day and night. During the al-Aqsa Intifada, the IAF used the Apaches to kill senior Hamas figures, such as Ahmed Yasin and Adnan al-Ghoul, with guided missiles. In the Israel-Lebanon conflict of July – August 2006, two IAF AH-64A helicopters collided, killing 1 pilot and wounding 3, all critically. In another incident in the conflict, an IAF AH-64D Longbow crashed, killing the two pilots, due to a malfunction in the rotor hub.[9]


[edit] United Kingdom
Main article: Westland WAH-64 Apache
The UK operates a version of the Apache called the Westland WAH-64 Apache, and is designated Apache AH Mk1 by the British Army. Westland has built 67 WAH-64 Apaches under licence with Boeing. The Westland Apache replaces the Westland Lynx as the British Army's tactical attack helicopter. They will operate alongside amphibious forces as necessary and have a folding blade assembly for carrier operations. The WAH-64s are currently deployed in Afghanistan.[1]


[edit] Netherlands
Royal Netherlands Air Force ordered 30 AH-64D Apaches in 1996,[10] after leasing 12 AH-64As. The radar domes were not included, hence the Dutch AH-64Ds are not referred to as Longbows. Their first deployment was in Djibouti, Africa. They were also deployed alongside US AH-64s in support of NATO peacekeeping forces in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 2004, Dutch AH-64s were deployed as part of the Netherlands contribution to Multinational force in Iraq.[11] At the same time Dutch Apaches were also deployed to Kabul as part of the Netherlands contribution to ISAF. In February 2006, the Netherlands contribution to NATO forces in Afghanistan was increased from 600 to 1,400 troops and 6 AH-64s were sent in support.[12]
 
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Neon Genesis Evangelion
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Evangelion Portal
Neon Genesis Evangelion (新世紀エヴァンゲリオン, Shin Seiki Evangelion?), commonly referred to as NGE, Eva, or Evangelion, is a commercially[1] and critically[2] successful, influential and popular Japanese anime and manga that began in 1995. The anime was created by Gainax, written and directed by Hideaki Anno and co-produced by TV Tokyo and Nihon Ad Systems (NAS). It is an apocalyptic mecha action series, and refers to Judeo-Christian symbols from the book of Genesis and Biblical apocrypha among others.[3] Later episodes shift focus to psychoanalysis of the main characters, who display various emotional problems and mental illnesses;[4][5] the nature of existence and reality are questioned in a way that lets Evangelion be characterized as "postmodern fantasy"[6] Hideaki Anno, the director of the anime series, had suffered from clinical depression prior to creating the series, and the psychological aspects of the show are based on the director's own experiences with overcoming this illness.[7].

Neon Genesis Evangelion consists of 26 television episodes which were first aired on the terrestrial TV Tokyo network from October 4, 1995 to March 27, 1996.[8] It was later aired across Japan by the anime satellite television network, Animax. The series was followed by three movies: Death and Rebirth and The End of Evangelion in 1997, and Revival of Evangelion in 1998. Death and Rebirth is a highly condensed re-edit of the series (Death) plus the first half of The End of Evangelion (Rebirth). The End of Evangelion is an alternate version of the series ending, which either supplements or replaces episodes 25 and 26, depending on how they are viewed. The two movies were then re-edited and re-released as a single movie, Revival of Evangelion.

In 2003, the US distributor of the series, ADV Films, announced their intention to create a live action Evangelion film which has been partly financed,[9] but a director or production date is yet to be announced.

On September 9, 2006, Gainax confirmed a new animated film series called Rebuild of Evangelion, consisting of four movies to be released in 2007 and 2008. The first three movies will be an alternate retelling of the TV series (including new scenes, settings, backgrounds, characters), and the fourth movie will be a completely new conclusion to the story.[10]

In the original Japanese, the word "Evangelion" is pronounced with a hard g per its Greek roots (see Translation notes on the title below).


[edit] Plot
Main article: List of Neon Genesis Evangelion episodes
Evangelion's plot superficially revolves around the struggles by the paramilitary organization NERV to prevent the city of Tokyo-3 and the Geofront underneath it from being destroyed by monstrous beings called Angels. To this end, NERV enlists three teenagers, Shinji Ikari (the son of NERV's commander Gendo Ikari), Rei Ayanami, and Asuka Langley Soryu, to pilot enormous mecha called Evangelions into battle against the Angels. As the series progresses, it is revealed that NERV, the Evas, and the Angels are pieces in a plot by the organization SEELE to bring about a forced evolution of humanity with potentially cataclysmic repercussions. The struggles of the central characters to overcome their personal issues and personality conflicts factor heavily into the events of the series, and become integral to its conclusion. Towards the end, psychological issues predominate and the apocalyptic events in the real world are only alluded to "over a montage of bleak visuals, that include black and white photos of desolate urban motifs such as a riderless bicycle or vacant park benches interspersed with graphic stills of the devastated NERV headquarters in which Shinji's colleagues are seen as bloodstained bodies."[11]

Evangelion 's story began in 2000 with the "Second Impact", a global cataclysm which kills half the human population of Earth and almost completely destroys Antarctica. The Impact is believed by the public at large to be the result of a meteorite traveling at nearly the speed of light impacting in Antarctica and causing the disaster. However, it is later revealed to be the result of an experiment with the first Angel, Adam.

The series begins in 2015 as Tokyo-3, a militarized civilian city located on one of the last dry sections of Japan, is attacked by the third Angel. Conventional weapons are ineffective, but the paramilitary organization NERV succeeds in developing biomechanical mecha, the Evangelions (Evas), which are capable of intercepting and defeating the Angels. The Evas are piloted by 14-year-old children, who control the Evas through "synchronization" - their souls are meshed with souls contained in the Evas, which allows the pilots to control the Evas through simple thought but also subjects them to pain resulting from damage to their Evas.

Over time, the characters begin to learn of the true plan of NERV and SEELE, the Human Instrumentality Project. Its purpose is to force the completion of human evolution, and thereby save it from destroying itself. To do so, they plan to break down the AT-Fields that separate individual humans, and in doing so, reducing all humans to LCL, which is revealed to be the "primordial soup", the fundamental composite of human beings, and the fluid of the womb. All LCL would then be united into a supreme being, the next stage of humanity, ending all conflict, loneliness and pain brought about by individual existence. At the end of the series, SEELE and NERV come into direct conflict over the implementation of Instrumentality.

In the last two episodes, Gendo and Rei initiate the Human Instrumentality Project, forcing several characters to face their doubts and fears and examine their self-worth. This focuses primarily on Shinji, particularly in episode 26. Initially, Shinji attempts to run away from this internal confrontation, but eventually accepts himself for who he is. This ending, made up of flashbacks, strange, sketchy artwork, and flashing text, left many fans confused and unsatisfied. A year later, a second ending was released theatrically.

The final two episodes were possibly the most controversial segments of a controversial series,[12] although Anno defended the artistic integrity of the finale.[13]


[edit] Characters

The main characters of Neon Genesis EvangelionMain article: List of characters in Neon Genesis Evangelion
“ It's strange that 'Evangelion' has become such a hit - all the characters are so sick![14] ”

The characters of Evangelion are continuously struggling with their interpersonal relationships, their inner demons, and traumatic events in their pasts, creating a complex pattern of relationships.

Anno described the hero, Shinji Ikari, as a boy who "shrinks from human contact", and has "convinced himself that he is a completely unnecessary person, so much so that he cannot even commit suicide." He describes Shinji and Misato Katsuragi as "extremely afraid of being hurt" and "unsuitable — lacking the positive attitude — for what people call heroes of an adventure."[7] When compared to the stereotypical hero, Shinji is characterized more by lack of energy and emotional affection than any sort of heroism or bravery.[15] Rei Ayanami and Asuka Langley Soryu, the other major protagonists, have similar flaws and difficulty relating to other people.

According to Anno, Evangelion was an attempt to make all perspectives into one, creating characters that represent different things to different viewers to make it impossible for everyone to arrive at a single theory. To some viewers, the characters are psychological representations, while to others, they are philosophical, religious, historical, and even themselves.[16] It seems the main goal was to present characters who reflected the deep depression and eventual recovery that Anno experienced before beginning work on Evangelion[7][17][18] Assistant Director Kazuya Tsurumaki said of the series, "If a person who can already live and communicate normally watches it, they won't learn anything."[19]

The character designs by Yoshiyuki Sadamoto have also contributed to the popularity of Evangelion. Sadamoto's attractive designs of the three main female leads, Asuka, Rei and Misato, led to extremely high sales of merchandise[20] (especially of Rei, the "Premium Girl"[21]), and they have been immortalized in the dōjinshi community,[22] garage kit models, and in subsequent anime (such as Burst Angel)


[edit] Origin and production
In March 1992, Gainax had begun planning and production of an anime movie called Aoki Uru, which was to be a sequel to Oritsu Uchugun set 50 years later (so as to be easier to pitch to investors[23]) which, like Oritsu, would follow a group of fighter pilots. Production would eventually cease in July 1993: a full-length anime movie was just beyond Gainax's financial ability - many of its core businesses were shutting down or producing minimal amounts of money:

"General Products had closed shop. We'd pulled out of Wonder Festival [a "flea market for garage kits"] and garage kit making altogether. We weren't taking on any subcontracting work for anime production. We did continue to make PC games - Akai had seen to that - but there wasn't a lot of work tossed our way. With mere pennies coming in, we were having a hard enough time just paying everyone's salaries. Finally the order came down for us to halt production on Aoki Uru. We were simply incapable of taking the project any further."[24]

With the failure of the project, Anno who had been slated from the beginning to direct Aoki Uru was freed up. Legendarily, he would soon agree to a collaboration between King Records and Gainax while drinking with Toshimichi Ōtsuki, a representative at King;[25] with King Records guaranteeing a time slot, Anno set about actually making the anime. Unsurprisingly, elements of Aoki Uru were incorporated into the nascent Evangelion:

"One of the key themes in Aoki Uru had been "not running away." In the story, the main character is faced with the daunting task of saving the heroine...He ran away from something in the past, so he decides that this time he will stand his ground. The same theme was carried over into Evangelion, but I think it was something more than just transposing one show's theme onto another..."[26]

The original early plot line for Evangelion remained relatively stable through development, although later episodes appear to have changed dramatically from the fluid and uncertain[7] early conceptions; for example, originally there were 12 angels and not 17; and the climax would deal with the defeat of the 12th angel and not with the operation of the Human Completion Program; Kaworu Nagisa's appearance was changed from being a school boy -who could switch to an "Angel form"- accompanied by a pet cat, to his eventual actual design, etc.[27]

Production was by no means placid. Sadamoto's authorship of the manga (Neon Genesis Evangelion) caused problems as multiple publishers felt "that he was too passé to be bankable";[28] the stylized mecha design that Evangelion would later be praised for was initially deprecated by some of the possible sponsors of a mecha anime (toy companies) as being too difficult to manufacture (possibly on purpose,[29] and that models of the Evangelions "would never sell."[30] Eventually, Sega agreed to license all toy sales.

Eventually, Evangelion began to be shown: the first episode aired 4 October 1995, long after it was originally planned to air. Coincidentally, that year Yom Kippur fell on the 4th. Initially unpopular, viewing grew slowly, and largely by word of mouth; by the 18th episode, it had become enough of a sensation that Eva-01's violent rampage "is criticized as being unsuitable on an anime show that is viewed by children", and episode 20 would be similarly criticized for the offscreen depiction of Misato and Kaji having sex[31] With this popularity came the first merchandise, "Genesis 0:1" (containing the first two episodes). Beginning a trend, it sells out. As the series concluded on 27 March 1996 with Take care of yourself., the story apparently remained unresolved: Third Impact and the Human Complementation Project are implied to have begun or even finished, but the episodes focus largely on the psychology of the characters, leaving deeply unclear what actually happens. The radically different and experimental style of the final two episodes alienated many fans and led to years of debate and analysis, both scholarly and informal. Anno commented in various interviews after the conclusion of the series that "anime fans need to have more self-respect" and to "come back to reality"; in a Newtype interview 10 May, after the announcement on 26 April of a new movie and re-edited versions of the TV series, he also stated that "computer networking is graffiti on toilet walls."[31] These statements were even more controversial.


[edit] After the series

Graffiti spray painted on Gainax Headquarters front wall: "Tenchuu" (Divine retribution) "Ikari rape-man".
E-mail response to Evangelion: Death and Rebirth: "Anno, I'll kill you!!! Anno, I'll kill you!!! ..."Gainax launched the project to create a movie ending for the series in 1997. They first released Death and Rebirth, consisting of a character-based recap of the entire series (Death) and the first half of the new ending (Rebirth). The project was completed later in the year, and released as The End of Evangelion.

The two endings are similar in plot, but while in the film Shinji rejects Instrumentality, in the television series his decision is left ambiguous. In still frames in episodes 25 and 26, Unit 01 is depicted with wings and the corpses of Misato and Ritsuko are shown, hinting that these events had been planned. In the English-language Director's Cut version of episode 24, the preview of the next episode shows concept frames from the fight between Asuka and the mass-produced Evas, and the title of the next episode is presented as "Air", which is the title of the first chapter from The End of Evangelion, rather than showing scenes from the TV series ending as it does in the original cut. There was a sudden shift in tone around episode 16 of the series. This was partly due to scheduling restraints, which drastically reduced the number of frames that could be drawn for each episode,[19] and partly due to the Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway on March 20, 1995, which occurred while the series was under production; Anno decided to remove elements of the series plot that he felt were too similar to the real-life attack.[22] Anno stated before production that he did not know how the show would end, nor what would become of the characters.[7]

In May 1998, Gainax was first audited by the National Tax Agency: Gainax was suspected of tax evasion on the massive profits from Evangelion. Eventually Takeshi Sawamura was arrested for concealing income of 1.5 billion yen failing to pay corporate taxes of 580 million yen.[32] Yasuhiro Takeda defends Sawamura's actions as being a reaction to Gainax's perpetually precarious finances and the shaky accounting procedures internally:

"Sawamura understood our financial situation better than anyone, so when Evangelion took off and the money really started rolling in, he saw it as possibly our one and only opportunity to set something aside for the future. I guess he was vulnerable to temptation at that point, because no one knew how long the Evangelion goose would keep laying golden eggs. I don't think he purposely set out with the goal of evading taxes. It was more that our level of accounting knowledge wasn't up to the task of dealing with revenues on such a large scale."[33]


[edit] Inspiration and symbolism
This article or section may contain original research or unverified claims.

Please help Wikipedia by adding references. See the talk page for details.

See also: Neon Genesis Evangelion glossary
Evangelion is dense with allusions to biological, military, religious, and psychological concepts, as well as numerous references or homages to older anime series (for example, the basic plot is seen in earlier anime like Space Battleship Yamato[34] - a tendency which inspired the nickname for the series, the "remixed anime"[35] Anno's use of Freudian jargon and psychoanalytical theory as well as his allusions to religion and biology are often idiosyncratically used and redefined to carry his message. This tendency of Anno's has been criticized as "Total plagiarism!" and "just more mindgames from the animation crew".[36] However, Anno has defended himself by denying the possibility of really original work without borrowing in anime:

"There is no longer room for absolute originality in the field of anime, especially given that our generation was brought up on mass-produced anime. All stories and techniques inevitably bring with them a sense of déjà vu. The only avenue of expression left open to us is to produce a collage-like effect based on a sampling of existing works."[37]

"The people who make anime and the people who watch it always want the same things. The creators have been making the same story for about 10 years; the viewers seem to be satisfied and there's no sense of urgency. There's no future in that."[38]

Regardless, Anno seems to have hoped to reinvigorated the genre of anime - seen as lifeless and moribund in the early 1990s - and restore originality: to create a new anime. This desire is also the reason Anno cited for creating the Rebuild of Evangelion movies:

"Many different desires are motivating us to create the new "Evangelion" film....The desire to fight the continuing trend of stagnation in anime.
The desire to support the strength of heart that exists in the world....
Many times we wondered, "It's a title that's more than 10 years old. Why now?"
"Eva is too old", we felt.
However, over the past 12 years, there has been no anime newer than Eva.[39]
 
The interpretation of the symbols and concepts varies from individual to individual,[40] and it is not clear how many are intentional or meaningful, nor which were merely design elements or coincidences. Anno himself said, "It might be fun if someone with free time could research them."[7] A number of these symbols were noted on the English DVD commentary for Death and Rebirth and End of Evangelion.

Many of the characters share their names with Japanese warships from World War II (such as the Sōryū, Akagi, and Katsuragi, though the ship names and character names are written with different kanji, they share the same pronunciations.) Other characters' names refer to other works of fiction, such as the two characters named after the protagonists of Ryu Murakami's Ai to Genso no Fascism ("Fascism in Love and Fantasy"; the two main characters are named Aida Kensuke and Suzuhara Toji).


[edit] Psychology and psychoanalytic theory
For more details on this topic, see Psychoanalysis.
From the start, Evangelion invokes many psychological themes. Phrases used in episodes, their titles, and the names of the background music frequently derive from Sigmund Freud's works[41] in addition to perhaps some Lacanian influences in general[42] Examples include "Thanatos", "Oral stage", "Separation Anxiety", and "Mother Is The First Other" (the mother as the first object of a child's love is the basis of the Oedipus complex). The scenery and buildings in Tokyo-3 often seem laden with psychological import, even in the first episode[43]

The connection between the Evas and their pilots, as well as the ultimate goal of the Human Instrumentality Project, bear a strong resemblance to Freud's theories on internal conflict and interpersonal communication.[44]

The hedgehog's dilemma is a concept described by philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer and later adopted by Freud. It is the subtitle of episode 4 and is mentioned in that episode by Misato Katsuragi as descriptive of her relationship with Shinji.[45]

Many of the characters have deep psychological traumas in relation to their parents. Shinji's introversion and social anxiety stem from the death of his mother at an early age and his abandonment by his father. Asuka was the target of her mother's insanity, and discovered her mother's body after she hanged herself; her tough, bullying personality is a means of distancing herself from her pain, and she has made piloting Unit 02 her only source of pride and satisfaction. Misato's father neglected her when she was a child; after he was killed in the Second Impact, she stopped talking for a couple of years. In episode 25, Misato states that she was both attracted to and afraid of Ryoji Kaji because he reminded her of her father. Ritsuko saw her mother having an affair with Gendo Ikari; after her mother's suicide she felt both attraction and hate towards Gendo. Indeed, the last two episodes are "stripped of the high-tech gadgetry and the colorful visuals that characterize the earlier episodes in the series, these last two episodes take place largely in muted tones… a form of interrogation proceeds to be carried out as he [Shinji] asks himself – or is asked by an unseen voice – probing psychological questions."[46] The questions elicit unexpected answers, particularly the ones dealing with Shinji's motivation for piloting the Eva – he feels worthless and afraid of others (especially his father) if he is not piloting the Eva.[47] Asuka and Rei are also depicted in deep introspection and consideration of their psyches. Asuka comes to the realization that her entire being is caught up in being a competent Eva pilot and that without it, she has no personal identity: "I'm the junk… I'm worthless. Nobody needs a pilot who can't control her own Eva."[48] Rei, who throughout the series has displayed minimal emotion, reveals that she does have one impulse; it is Thanatos, an inclination to death: "I am Happy. Because I want to die, I want to despair, I want to return to nothing."[48] In episode 25 Shinji and Asuka both show that they in fact suffered similar pasts and found different ways of dealing with it. This is further established in Shinji when he claims he has no life without Eva and this is disproven by the world shown in Episode 26 followed by the famous "Congratulations" scene.[10]


[edit] Religion

NERV's logo featuring half a fig leaf; "God's In His Heaven, All's Right With The World" is a quote from a song from Robert Browning's Pippa Passes.
The destruction of an Angel causes an explosion which is cross shaped: one example of Christian icons being used in Evangelion.The most prominent symbolism takes its inspiration from Judeo-Christian sources and frequently uses iconography and themes from Judaism, Christianity, Gnosticism,[49] and Kabbalism, in the series's examination of religious ideas and themes.[50]

Assistant director Kazuya Tsurumaki said that they originally used Christian symbolism only to give the project a unique edge against other giant robot shows, and that it had no particular meaning,[51] and that it was meant to be susceptible to multiple interpretations.[52]

References, with multiple equally plausible interpretations which exist, include:

Adam and Eve (known in other languages as Eva) refer to the first human beings from the book of Genesis. Eve comes from Adam's rib. Similarly, the Eva models come from the Angel first identified as Adam[53]
The Christian cross is often shown, frequently represented by energy beams shooting up skyward.
The second Angel, Lilith is shown crucified. In Jewish folklore, Lilith is the first wife of Adam, and in some works of popular culture, the first vampire. Lilith is impaled with a spear named the "Lance of Longinus", used to pierce the side of Jesus during His crucifixion. Lilith represents the first woman and mother of humanity; traditionally she is identified as being the mother of all demons (who are called in general the "Lilin" or "Lilim"). In Evangelion, she may even be the source humanity itself, as Kaworu says; he identifies Lilith as the source of the Lilim (humanity) in episode 24, "The Final Angel".[54]
The Angels could be a reference to the angels of God from the Old Testament in Japanese, the word used is the same one used for apostle (or messenger), as in the New Testament eyecatches during the series as well as the introduction sequence flashes "Angels" at a point. In addition, their origin is vaguely explained in the series as descending from "Adam" (yet another Judeo-Christian reference) and being "different evolutionary paths humanity could have taken".
The Magi supercomputers are named Melchior, Balthasar and Casper after the names traditionally given for the Magi who were mentioned in the Gospel of Matthew as having visited Jesus in Bethlehem[55] (often called "the three wise men", though the number of visitors is not recorded in the gospel).
The Tree of Sephiroth (Tree of Life) is mentioned, as well as shown in the opening title sequence and on the ceiling of Gendo's office, with Hebrew inscriptions on it (the terms written there are mostly Kabbalic).
The Marduk Institute is a front organization for NERV, tasked with finding the teenagers suitable for piloting Evangelion units. Marduk was the name of the chief Babylonian deity and patron god of the city of Babylon.
In episode 9, Asuka describes the door between her and Shinji as the "Wall of Jericho" which, in the Book of Joshua, was an impenetrable wall, though it eventually fell after being circled 7 times by the army and priests of Israel.
Reference is made to the "Room of Gaff" (spelling taken from the English subtitles; correct spelling/transliteration is "Guf") and its being "empty";[56] in Jewish lore, when the Room of Gaff is emptied of souls waiting to be born, the end of the world, and with it the coming of the Messiah, is nigh. The Room of Gaff is further referenced in Death and Rebirth & End of Evangelion, where it is given greater importance than the one mention in the television series; one analysis of the End of Evangelion has it being "the door to both the beginning and the end of the world, and the hall of souls. When exposed to the power of the Hall of Gaff all living forms lose their ability to maintain themselves as individual lifeforms, reverting to LCL. At the Second Impact the door to the Hall of Gaff is opened by Adam, and everything changes into a sea of LCL. At the Third Impact the portal is opened once again by Rei, who has assimilated with Lilith, and all life-forms revert to LCL."[57] Note that in the movies, human souls come from and return to the Hall of Gaff.[58] There seems to be two separate Rooms of Gaff in the movies: one for the humans, openable through Lilith in the Japanese GeoFront; and a different one, presumably for the Angels in the Antarctic GeoFront, which was opened on the same day the Second Impact occurred (presumably all the Angels produced, except for Kaworu who was born that day, were destroyed as part of the process, explaining why Kaworu is the last Angel to be born while humans continued to be born - the Angel Hall of Gaff was empty after him[59]
The angels themselves are named after angels from angelology, including Sachiel, Shamshel, and Arael.

[edit] Fiction and Philosophy
See also: Human Instrumentality Project
Neon Genesis Evangelion and particularly the Human Instrumentality Project show a strong influence from Arthur C. Clarke's novel Childhood's End, an influence Anno acknowledged.[60] Similarities between the works, such as the larger theme of humanity's evolution to a higher plane of existence, or lesser details such as the declining birth rate after the Second Impact, were gleaned from this work.[citation needed]

Evangelion shows influences from the science fiction author Dr. Paul Linebarger,[60] better known by his pseudonym, Cordwainer Smith. Linebarger was raised in China, became the god-son of the nationalistic leader Sun Yat-sen, and during World War II, worked in psychological warfare on behalf of the U.S. Army, including propaganda efforts by the U.S. against the Japanese. Linebarger's work included strong influences from both East Asian culture and Christianity. His science fiction novels revolve around his own concept of the Instrumentality of Mankind, an all-powerful central government of humanity.[61] Like SEELE, the Instrumentality of Mankind see themselves "to be shapers of the true destiny of mankind."[62] Although Anno insisted that Hokan (補完, Hokan? complementation, completion) be translated as "Instrumentality" in English, perhaps as a way to pay homage to Linebarger, the two authors' conceptions of "instrumentality" are extremely different.[60]

Existential themes are heavily relied upon throughout the entire series, particularly the philosophies of Jean Paul Sartre and Søren Kierkegaard, focusing on individuality and consciousness, and especially, freedom, choice, and responsibility.[citation needed] For Sartre, humans ultimately exist in an abandoned and free state. There is no essential truth about what human beings want to be or ought to be- instead each person must find their own identity and their own purposes.This incredible freedom, in a way, makes us "condemned to be free", because our actions and choices are our own and no one else's, which makes us responsible for them. We are constantly making decisions and choices, whether to continue doing something or to stop and do something else. Being aware of this fact, can bring on despair or anguish; and typically we try to avoid the consciousness of our own freedom.[63]

Sartre's position is in direct contradiction with Freud’s.[citation needed] Freud believed that we are not in control of ourselves, but are rather at the mercy of primordial unconscious mechanisms which drive us.[citation needed] Sartre found such theories dangerous.[citation needed] He felt human passions arise not from the animal element of human nature, but from the fact that human beings are not merely animals or objects, and not merely minds or free subjects either, but always both.[citation needed] In the series, even the mecha Evangelion units turn out not to be machines; Unit 01 moves without a pilot to protect Shinji, and it can fight without the aid of an external power source when it goes berserk. Eventually, it is learned that its external armor is actually to restrain its freedom and to bind it to the control of NERV, and that they are not just machines or animals, but have souls.

To act as if one is only an object or a label, or that if one changes the facts about oneself that they can change who they are, is what Sartre calls bad faith.[citation needed] In the series for instance Ritsuko has dyed her hair blonde as if this fact changes her identity as well; Shinji calls himself a coward as if that is an excuse that makes it impossible for him to act differently. This sort of self deception had been addressed by Kierkegaard in a paradox he called "the sickness unto death," someone who goes on pretending in life as though he has no soul,[citation needed] and as a result, is in danger of losing his "self." Episode 16's title, "The Sickness Unto Death, And…" (死に至る病、そして, Shi ni itaru yamai, soshite?) is a reference to this work.[64]

Sartre in Being and Nothingness calls the conditions that bring about consciousness (ourselves, the world, others) "instrumentalities." Martin Heidegger, another existentialist, wrote an essay describing technology as an instrumentality that reveals "truth." Philosophically, the Human Instrumentality Project is a representation of the idealism developed by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: a unification of all conflicts and tensions between societies, knowledge, and consciousness through a sort of historical evolution. Earlier philosophers such as Fichte had proposed that the human ego had come about through the instrumentality of freedom; it was Hegel's theory that this consciousness was not separated from the world, but was a part of it and would eventually evolve into an Absolute spirit or mind, a sort of God-like being with absolute freedom. In the movie End of Evangelion, Shinji literally becomes such an absolute being, dissolving all other conscious beings and merging with them.[65] Søren Kierkegaard criticized Hegel's theory, not only because it was arrogant for a mere human to claim such a unity, but because such a system negates the importance of the individual in favor of the whole unity. He writes:

So-called systems have often been characterized and challenged in the assertion that they abrogate the distinction between good and evil, and destroy freedom. Perhaps one would express oneself quite as definitely, if one said that every such system fantastically dissipates the concept existence. … Being an individual man is a thing that has been abolished, and every speculative philosopher confuses himself with humanity at large; whereby he becomes something infinitely great, and at the same time nothing at all.

As illustrated in episodes 25 and 26, part of what shapes us as individuals are limitations: gravity, the horizon, a body, and other people. Misato tells Shinji in the first episode, he has to learn how to deal with his anxiety and how to deal with others. Sartre in his earlier works went so far as to say that "hell is other people". Other people limit our freedoms, or may tell us things we do not like to hear, and they may see aspects of our personality we do not. Shinji later reflects upon the fact that everyone he knows has their own impression of him that may be different from his own. But in his later work, Sartre said he felt that both Hegel and Kierkegaard had a point. Individuality is important, but because part of who we are is shaped by the way others see us, we can have an effect on others too, and must work together with others in our collective struggle for existence.

Interestingly, some Eastern philosophies, such as Brahmanism and its derivatives, teach that enlightenment involves liberation from individuality through the re-absorption of the soul into a great All-Soul of creation. It can be argued that SEELE attempts to engineer such enlightenment for the entire human race[attribution needed] – it hopes that by unifying all souls into one all pain and misunderstanding will end. If one wants a separate existence from others, one must be limited and opposed to others, causing pain and suffering (too, the Hedgehog's Dilemma inevitably arises); Buddhism identifies existence as inevitably bringing pain. The way to avoid pain is to extirpate desire and become formless. In the final episode, Shinji realizes how to to attain his individuality, that he can come to have an identity separable from being an Evangelion pilot, a self he can perhaps come to love and not hate. This rejection is interesting, as it seems to be a rejection of the Buddhist solution and almost an existentialist masturbation: the world is painful only inasmuch as you imagine it to be.[citation needed] Arthur Shoepenhauer, whose work is referred to in the title of The Hedgehog's Dilemma, was heavily influenced by Buddhist thought, but Friedrich Nietzsche and Sartre both came to a similar conclusion, rejecting many of his tenets.
 
Million Dollar Murray:

February 13, 2006
Dept. of Social Services

Why problems like homelessness may be easier to solve than to manage.

1.

Murray Barr was a bear of a man, an ex-marine, six feet tall and heavyset, and when he fell down—which he did nearly every day—it could take two or three grown men to pick him up. He had straight black hair and olive skin. On the street, they called him Smokey. He was missing most of his teeth. He had a wonderful smile. People loved Murray.

His chosen drink was vodka. Beer he called "horse piss." On the streets of downtown Reno, where he lived, he could buy a two-hundred-and-fifty-millilitre bottle of cheap vodka for a dollar-fifty. If he was flush, he could go for the seven-hundred-and-fifty-millilitre bottle, and if he was broke he could always do what many of the other homeless people of Reno did, which is to walk through the casinos and finish off the half-empty glasses of liquor left at the gaming tables.

"If he was on a runner, we could pick him up several times a day," Patrick O'Bryan, who is a bicycle cop in downtown Reno, said. "And he's gone on some amazing runners. He would get picked up, get detoxed, then get back out a couple of hours later and start up again. A lot of the guys on the streets who've been drinking, they get so angry. They are so incredibly abrasive, so violent, so abusive. Murray was such a character and had such a great sense of humor that we somehow got past that. Even when he was abusive, we'd say, 'Murray, you know you love us,' and he'd say, 'I know—and go back to swearing at us."

"I've been a police officer for fifteen years," O'Bryan's partner, Steve Johns, said. "I picked up Murray my whole career. Literally."

Johns and O'Bryan pleaded with Murray to quit drinking. A few years ago, he was assigned to a treatment program in which he was under the equivalent of house arrest, and he thrived. He got a job and worked hard. But then the program ended. "Once he graduated out, he had no one to report to, and he needed that," O'Bryan said. "I don't know whether it was his military background. I suspect that it was. He was a good cook. One time, he accumulated savings of over six thousand dollars. Showed up for work religiously. Did everything he was supposed to do. They said, 'Congratulations,' and put him back on the street. He spent that six thousand in a week or so."

Often, he was too intoxicated for the drunk tank at the jail, and he'd get sent to the emergency room at either Saint Mary's or Washoe Medical Center. Marla Johns, who was a social worker in the emergency room at Saint Mary's, saw him several times a week. "The ambulance would bring him in. We would sober him up, so he would be sober enough to go to jail. And we would call the police to pick him up. In fact, that's how I met my husband." Marla Johns is married to Steve Johns.

"He was like the one constant in an environment that was ever changing," she went on. "In he would come. He would grin that half-toothless grin. He called me 'my angel.' I would walk in the room, and he would smile and say, 'Oh, my angel, I'm so happy to see you.' We would joke back and forth, and I would beg him to quit drinking and he would laugh it off. And when time went by and he didn't come in I would get worried and call the coroner's office. When he was sober, we would find out, oh, he's working someplace, and my husband and I would go and have dinner where he was working. When my husband and I were dating, and we were going to get married, he said, 'Can I come to the wedding?' And I almost felt like he should. My joke was 'If you are sober you can come, because I can't afford your bar bill.' When we started a family, he would lay a hand on my pregnant belly and bless the child. He really was this kind of light."

In the fall of 2003, the Reno Police Department started an initiative designed to limit panhandling in the downtown core. There were articles in the newspapers, and the police department came under harsh criticism on local talk radio. The crackdown on panhandling amounted to harassment, the critics said. The homeless weren't an imposition on the city; they were just trying to get by. "One morning, I'm listening to one of the talk shows, and they're just trashing the police department and going on about how unfair it is," O'Bryan said. "And I thought, Wow, I've never seen any of these critics in one of the alleyways in the middle of the winter looking for bodies." O'Bryan was angry. In downtown Reno, food for the homeless was plentiful: there was a Gospel kitchen and Catholic Services, and even the local McDonald's fed the hungry. The panhandling was for liquor, and the liquor was anything but harmless. He and Johns spent at least half their time dealing with people like Murray; they were as much caseworkers as police officers. And they knew they weren't the only ones involved. When someone passed out on the street, there was a "One down" call to the paramedics. There were four people in an ambulance, and the patient sometimes stayed at the hospital for days, because living on the streets in a state of almost constant intoxication was a reliable way of getting sick. None of that, surely, could be cheap.

O'Bryan and Johns called someone they knew at an ambulance service and then contacted the local hospitals. "We came up with three names that were some of our chronic inebriates in the downtown area, that got arrested the most often," O'Bryan said. "We tracked those three individuals through just one of our two hospitals. One of the guys had been in jail previously, so he'd only been on the streets for six months. In those six months, he had accumulated a bill of a hundred thousand dollars—and that's at the smaller of the two hospitals near downtown Reno. It's pretty reasonable to assume that the other hospital had an even larger bill. Another individual came from Portland and had been in Reno for three months. In those three months, he had accumulated a bill for sixty-five thousand dollars. The third individual actually had some periods of being sober, and had accumulated a bill of fifty thousand."

The first of those people was Murray Barr, and Johns and O'Bryan realized that if you totted up all his hospital bills for the ten years that he had been on the streets—as well as substance-abuse-treatment costs, doctors' fees, and other expenses—Murray Barr probably ran up a medical bill as large as anyone in the state of Nevada.

"It cost us one million dollars not to do something about Murray," O'Bryan said.

2.

Fifteen years ago, after the Rodney King beating, the Los Angeles Police Department was in crisis. It was accused of racial insensitivity and ill discipline and violence, and the assumption was that those problems had spread broadly throughout the rank and file. In the language of statisticians, it was thought that L.A.P.D.'s troubles had a "normal" distribution—that if you graphed them the result would look like a bell curve, with a small number of officers at one end of the curve, a small number at the other end, and the bulk of the problem situated in the middle. The bell-curve assumption has become so much a part of our mental architecture that we tend to use it to organize experience automatically.

But when the L.A.P.D. was investigated by a special commission headed by Warren Christopher, a very different picture emerged. Between 1986 and 1990, allegations of excessive force or improper tactics were made against eighteen hundred of the eighty-five hundred officers in the L.A.P.D. The broad middle had scarcely been accused of anything. Furthermore, more than fourteen hundred officers had only one or two allegations made against them—and bear in mind that these were not proven charges, that they happened in a four-year period, and that allegations of excessive force are an inevitable feature of urban police work. (The N.Y.P.D. receives about three thousand such complaints a year.) A hundred and eighty-three officers, however, had four or more complaints against them, forty-four officers had six or more complaints, sixteen had eight or more, and one had sixteen complaints. If you were to graph the troubles of the L.A.P.D., it wouldn't look like a bell curve. It would look more like a hockey stick. It would follow what statisticians call a "power law" distribution—where all the activity is not in the middle but at one extreme.

The Christopher Commission's report repeatedly comes back to what it describes as the extreme concentration of problematic officers. One officer had been the subject of thirteen allegations of excessive use of force, five other complaints, twenty-eight "use of force reports" (that is, documented, internal accounts of inappropriate behavior), and one shooting. Another had six excessive-force complaints, nineteen other complaints, ten use-of-force reports, and three shootings. A third had twenty-seven use-of-force reports, and a fourth had thirty-five. Another had a file full of complaints for doing things like "striking an arrestee on the back of the neck with the butt of a shotgun for no apparent reason while the arrestee was kneeling and handcuffed," beating up a thirteen-year-old juvenile, and throwing an arrestee from his chair and kicking him in the back and side of the head while he was handcuffed and lying on his stomach.

The report gives the strong impression that if you fired those forty-four cops the L.A.P.D. would suddenly become a pretty well-functioning police department. But the report also suggests that the problem is tougher than it seems, because those forty-four bad cops were so bad that the institutional mechanisms in place to get rid of bad apples clearly weren't working. If you made the mistake of assuming that the department's troubles fell into a normal distribution, you'd propose solutions that would raise the performance of the middle—like better training or better hiring—when the middle didn't need help. For those hard-core few who did need help, meanwhile, the medicine that helped the middle wouldn't be nearly strong enough.

In the nineteen-eighties, when homelessness first surfaced as a national issue, the assumption was that the problem fit a normal distribution: that the vast majority of the homeless were in the same state of semi-permanent distress. It was an assumption that bred despair: if there were so many homeless, with so many problems, what could be done to help them? Then, fifteen years ago, a young Boston College graduate student named Dennis Culhane lived in a shelter in Philadelphia for seven weeks as part of the research for his dissertation. A few months later he went back, and was surprised to discover that he couldn't find any of the people he had recently spent so much time with. "It made me realize that most of these people were getting on with their own lives," he said.
 
Continued...

Culhane then put together a database—the first of its kind—to track who was coming in and out of the shelter system. What he discovered profoundly changed the way homelessness is understood. Homelessness doesn't have a normal distribution, it turned out. It has a power-law distribution. "We found that eighty per cent of the homeless were in and out really quickly," he said. "In Philadelphia, the most common length of time that someone is homeless is one day. And the second most common length is two days. And they never come back. Anyone who ever has to stay in a shelter involuntarily knows that all you think about is how to make sure you never come back."

The next ten per cent were what Culhane calls episodic users. They would come for three weeks at a time, and return periodically, particularly in the winter. They were quite young, and they were often heavy drug users. It was the last ten per cent—the group at the farthest edge of the curve—that interested Culhane the most. They were the chronically homeless, who lived in the shelters, sometimes for years at a time. They were older. Many were mentally ill or physically disabled, and when we think about homelessness as a social problem—the people sleeping on the sidewalk, aggressively panhandling, lying drunk in doorways, huddled on subway grates and under bridges—it's this group that we have in mind. In the early nineteen-nineties, Culhane's database suggested that New York City had a quarter of a million people who were homeless at some point in the previous half decade —which was a surprisingly high number. But only about twenty-five hundred were chronically homeless.

It turns out, furthermore, that this group costs the health-care and social-services systems far more than anyone had ever anticipated. Culhane estimates that in New York at least sixty-two million dollars was being spent annually to shelter just those twenty-five hundred hard-core homeless. "It costs twenty-four thousand dollars a year for one of these shelter beds," Culhane said. "We're talking about a cot eighteen inches away from the next cot." Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program, a leading service group for the homeless in Boston, recently tracked the medical expenses of a hundred and nineteen chronically homeless people. In the course of five years, thirty-three people died and seven more were sent to nursing homes, and the group still accounted for 18,834 emergency-room visits—at a minimum cost of a thousand dollars a visit. The University of California, San Diego Medical Center followed fifteen chronically homeless inebriates and found that over eighteen months those fifteen people were treated at the hospital's emergency room four hundred and seventeen times, and ran up bills that averaged a hundred thousand dollars each. One person—San Diego's counterpart to Murray Barr—came to the emergency room eighty-seven times.

"If it's a medical admission, it's likely to be the guys with the really complex pneumonia," James Dunford, the city of San Diego's emergency medical director and the author of the observational study, said. "They are drunk and they aspirate and get vomit in their lungs and develop a lung abscess, and they get hypothermia on top of that, because they're out in the rain. They end up in the intensive-care unit with these very complicated medical infections. These are the guys who typically get hit by cars and buses and trucks. They often have a neurosurgical catastrophe as well. So they are very prone to just falling down and cracking their head and getting a subdural hematoma, which, if not drained, could kill them, and it's the guy who falls down and hits his head who ends up costing you at least fifty thousand dollars. Meanwhile, they are going through alcoholic withdrawal and have devastating liver disease that only adds to their inability to fight infections. There is no end to the issues. We do this huge drill. We run up big lab fees, and the nurses want to quit, because they see the same guys come in over and over, and all we're doing is making them capable of walking down the block."

The homelessness problem is like the L.A.P.D.'s bad-cop problem. It's a matter of a few hard cases, and that's good news, because when a problem is that concentrated you can wrap your arms around it and think about solving it. The bad news is that those few hard cases are hard. They are falling-down drunks with liver disease and complex infections and mental illness. They need time and attention and lots of money. But enormous sums of money are already being spent on the chronically homeless, and Culhane saw that the kind of money it would take to solve the homeless problem could well be less than the kind of money it took to ignore it. Murray Barr used more health-care dollars, after all, than almost anyone in the state of Nevada. It would probably have been cheaper to give him a full-time nurse and his own apartment.

The leading exponent for the power-law theory of homelessness is Philip Mangano, who, since he was appointed by President Bush in 2002, has been the executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, a group that oversees the programs of twenty federal agencies. Mangano is a slender man, with a mane of white hair and a magnetic presence, who got his start as an advocate for the homeless in Massachusetts. In the past two years, he has crisscrossed the United States, educating local mayors and city councils about the real shape of the homelessness curve. Simply running soup kitchens and shelters, he argues, allows the chronically homeless to remain chronically homeless. You build a shelter and a soup kitchen if you think that homelessness is a problem with a broad and unmanageable middle. But if it's a problem at the fringe it can be solved. So far, Mangano has convinced more than two hundred cities to radically reëvaluate their policy for dealing with the homeless.

"I was in St. Louis recently," Mangano said, back in June, when he dropped by New York on his way to Boise, Idaho. "I spoke with people doing services there. They had a very difficult group of people they couldn't reach no matter what they offered. So I said, Take some of your money and rent some apartments and go out to those people, and literally go out there with the key and say to them, 'This is the key to an apartment. If you come with me right now I am going to give it to you, and you are going to have that apartment.' And so they did. And one by one those people were coming in. Our intent is to take homeless policy from the old idea of funding programs that serve homeless people endlessly and invest in results that actually end homelessness."

Mangano is a history buff, a man who sometimes falls asleep listening to old Malcolm X speeches, and who peppers his remarks with references to the civil-rights movement and the Berlin Wall and, most of all, the fight against slavery. "I am an abolitionist," he says. "My office in Boston was opposite the monument to the 54th Regiment on the Boston Common, up the street from the Park Street Church, where William Lloyd Garrison called for immediate abolition, and around the corner from where Frederick Douglass gave that famous speech at the Tremont Temple. It is very much ingrained in me that you do not manage a social wrong. You should be ending it."

3.

The old Y.M.C.A. in downtown Denver is on Sixteenth Street, just east of the central business district. The main building is a handsome six-story stone structure that was erected in 1906, and next door is an annex that was added in the nineteen-fifties. On the ground floor there is a gym and exercise rooms. On the upper floors there are several hundred apartments—brightly painted one-bedrooms, efficiencies, and S.R.O.-style rooms with microwaves and refrigerators and central airconditioning—and for the past several years those apartments have been owned and managed by the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless.

Even by big-city standards, Denver has a serious homelessness problem. The winters are relatively mild, and the summers aren't nearly as hot as those of neighboring New Mexico or Utah, which has made the city a magnet for the indigent. By the city's estimates, it has roughly a thousand chronically homeless people, of whom three hundred spend their time downtown, along the central Sixteenth Street shopping corridor or in nearby Civic Center Park. Many of the merchants downtown worry that the presence of the homeless is scaring away customers. A few blocks north, near the hospital, a modest, low-slung detox center handles twenty-eight thousand admissions a year, many of them homeless people who have passed out on the streets, either from liquor or—as is increasingly the case—from mouthwash. "Dr. ——Dr. Tich, they call it—is the brand of mouthwash they use," says Roxane White, the manager of the city's social services. "You can imagine what that does to your gut."

Eighteen months ago, the city signed up with Mangano. With a mixture of federal and local funds, the C.C.H. inaugurated a new program that has so far enrolled a hundred and six people. It is aimed at the Murray Barrs of Denver, the people costing the system the most. C.C.H. went after the people who had been on the streets the longest, who had a criminal record, who had a problem with substance abuse or mental illness. "We have one individual in her early sixties, but looking at her you'd think she's eighty," Rachel Post, the director of substance treatment at the C.C.H., said. (Post changed some details about her clients in order to protect their identity.) "She's a chronic alcoholic. A typical day for her is she gets up and tries to find whatever 's going to drink that day. She falls down a lot. There's another person who came in during the first week. He was on methadone maintenance. He'd had psychiatric treatment. He was incarcerated for eleven years, and lived on the streets for three years after that, and, if that's not enough, he had a hole in his heart."

The recruitment strategy was as simple as the one that Mangano had laid out in St. Louis: Would you like a free apartment? The enrollees got either an efficiency at the Y.M.C.A. or an apartment rented for them in a building somewhere else in the city, provided they agreed to work within the rules of the program. In the basement of the Y, where the racquetball courts used to be, the coalition built a command center, staffed with ten caseworkers. Five days a week, between eight-thirty and ten in the morning, the caseworkers meet and painstakingly review the status of everyone in the program. On the wall around the conference table are several large white boards, with lists of doctor's appointments and court dates and medication schedules. "We need a staffing ratio of one to ten to make it work," Post said. "You go out there and you find people and assess how 're doing in their residence. Sometimes we're in contact with someone every day. Ideally, we want to be in contact every couple of days. We've got about fifteen people we're really worried about now."

The cost of services comes to about ten thousand dollars per homeless client per year. An efficiency apartment in Denver averages $376 a month, or just over forty-five hundred a year, which means that you can house and care for a chronically homeless person for at most fifteen thousand dollars, or about a third of what he or she would cost on the street. The idea is that once the people in the program get stabilized they will find jobs, and start to pick up more and more of their own rent, which would bring someone's annual cost to the program closer to six thousand dollars. As of today, seventy-five supportive housing slots have already been added, and the city's homeless plan calls for eight hundred more over the next ten years.

The reality, of course, is hardly that neat and tidy. The idea that the very sickest and most troubled of the homeless can be stabilized and eventually employed is only a hope. Some of them plainly won't be able to get there: these are, after all, hard cases. "We've got one man, he's in his twenties," Post said. "Already, he has cirrhosis of the liver. One time he blew a blood alcohol of .49, which is enough to kill most people. The first place we had he brought over all his friends, and they partied and trashed the place and broke a window. Then we gave him another apartment, and he did the same thing."
 
Continued...

Post said that the man had been sober for several months. But he could relapse at some point and perhaps trash another apartment, and they'd have to figure out what to do with him next. Post had just been on a conference call with some people in New York City who run a similar program, and they talked about whether giving clients so many chances simply encourages them to behave irresponsibly. For some people, it probably does. But what was the alternative? If this young man was put back on the streets, he would cost the system even more money. The current philosophy of welfare holds that government assistance should be temporary and conditional, to avoid creating dependency. But someone who blows .49 on a Breathalyzer and has cirrhosis of the liver at the age of twenty-seven doesn't respond to incentives and sanctions in the usual way. "The most complicated people to work with are those who have been homeless for so long that going back to the streets just isn't scary to them," Post said. "The summer comes along and they say, 'I don't need to follow your rules.' " Power-law homelessness policy has to do the opposite of normal-distribution social policy. It should create dependency: you want people who have been outside the system to come inside and rebuild their lives under the supervision of those ten caseworkers in the basement of the Y.M.C.A.

That is what is so perplexing about power-law homeless policy. From an economic perspective the approach makes perfect sense. But from a moral perspective it doesn't seem fair. Thousands of people in the Denver area no doubt live day to day, work two or three jobs, and are eminently deserving of a helping hand—and no one offers them the key to a new apartment. Yet that's just what the guy screaming obscenities and swigging Dr. Tich gets. When the welfare mom's time on public assistance runs out, we cut her off. Yet when the homeless man trashes his apartment we give him another. Social benefits are supposed to have some kind of moral justification. We give them to widows and disabled veterans and poor mothers with small children. Giving the homeless guy passed out on the sidewalk an apartment has a different rationale. It's simply about efficiency.

We also believe that the distribution of social benefits should not be arbitrary. We don't give only to some poor mothers, or to a random handful of disabled veterans. We give to everyone who meets a formal criterion, and the moral credibility of government assistance derives, in part, from this universality. But the Denver homelessness program doesn't help every chronically homeless person in Denver. There is a waiting list of six hundred for the supportive-housing program; it will be years before all those people get apartments, and some may never get one. There isn't enough money to go around, and to try to help everyone a little bit—to observe the principle of universality—isn't as cost-effective as helping a few people a lot. Being fair, in this case, means providing shelters and soup kitchens, and shelters and soup kitchens don't solve the problem of homelessness. Our usual moral intuitions are little use, then, when it comes to a few hard cases. Power-law problems leave us with an unpleasant choice. We can be true to our principles or we can fix the problem. We cannot do both.

4.

A few miles northwest of the old Y.M.C.A. in downtown Denver, on the Speer Boulevard off-ramp from I-25, there is a big electronic sign by the side of the road, connected to a device that remotely measures the emissions of the vehicles driving past. When a car with properly functioning pollution-control equipment passes, the sign flashes "Good." When a car passes that is well over the acceptable limits, the sign flashes "Poor." If you stand at the Speer Boulevard exit and watch the sign for any length of time, you'll find that virtually every car scores "Good." An Audi A4 —"Good." A Buick Century—"Good." A Toyota Corolla—"Good." A Ford Taurus—"Good." A Saab 9-5—"Good," and on and on, until after twenty minutes or so, some beat-up old Ford Escort or tricked-out Porsche drives by and the sign flashes "Poor." The picture of the smog problem you get from watching the Speer Boulevard sign and the picture of the homelessness problem you get from listening in on the morning staff meetings at the Y.M.C.A. are pretty much the same. Auto emissions follow a power-law distribution, and the air-pollution example offers another look at why we struggle so much with problems centered on a few hard cases.

Most cars, especially new ones, are extraordinarily clean. A 2004 Subaru in good working order has an exhaust stream that's just .06 per cent carbon monoxide, which is negligible. But on almost any highway, for whatever reason—age, ill repair, deliberate tampering by the owner—a small number of cars can have carbon-monoxide levels in excess of ten per cent, which is almost two hundred times higher. In Denver, five per cent of the vehicles on the road produce fifty-five per cent of the automobile pollution.

"Let's say a car is fifteen years old," Donald Stedman says. Stedman is a chemist and automobile-emissions specialist at the University of Denver. His laboratory put up the sign on Speer Avenue. "Obviously, the older a car is the more likely it is to become broken. It's the same as human beings. And by broken we mean any number of mechanical malfunctions—the computer's not working anymore, fuel injection is stuck open, the catalyst 's not unusual that these failure modes result in high emissions. We have at least one car in our database which was emitting seventy grams of hydrocarbon per mile, which means that you could almost drive a Honda Civic on the exhaust fumes from that car. It's not just old cars. It's new cars with high mileage, like taxis. One of the most successful and least publicized control measures was done by a district attorney in L.A. back in the nineties. He went to LAX and discovered that all of the Bell Cabs were gross emitters. One of those cabs emitted more than its own weight of pollution every year."

In Stedman's view, the current system of smog checks makes little sense. A million motorists in Denver have to go to an emissions center every year—take time from work, wait in line, pay fifteen or twenty-five dollars—for a test that more than ninety per cent of them don't need. "Not everybody gets tested for breast cancer," Stedman says. "Not everybody takes an AIDS test." On-site smog checks, furthermore, do a pretty bad job of finding and fixing the few outliers. Car enthusiasts—with high-powered, high-polluting sports cars—have been known to drop a clean engine into their car on the day they get it tested. Others register their car in a faraway town without emissions testing or arrive at the test site "hot"—having just come off hard driving on the freeway—which is a good way to make a dirty engine appear to be clean. Still others randomly pass the test when they shouldn't, because dirty engines are highly variable and sometimes burn cleanly for short durations. There is little evidence, Stedman says, that the city's regime of inspections makes any difference in air quality.

He proposes mobile testing instead. Twenty years ago, he invented a device the size of a suitcase that uses infrared light to instantly measure and then analyze the emissions of cars as they drive by on the highway. The Speer Avenue sign is attached to one of Stedman's devices. He says that cities should put half a dozen or so of his devices in vans, park them on freeway off-ramps around the city, and have a police car poised to pull over anyone who fails the test. A half-dozen vans could test thirty thousand cars a day. For the same twenty-five million dollars that Denver's motorists now spend on on-site testing, Stedman estimates, the city could identify and fix twenty-five thousand truly dirty vehicles every year, and within a few years cut automobile emissions in the Denver metropolitan area by somewhere between thirty-five and forty per cent. The city could stop managing its smog problem and start ending it.

Why don't we all adopt the Stedman method? There's no moral impediment here. We're used to the police pulling people over for having a blown headlight or a broken side mirror, and it wouldn't be difficult to have them add pollution-control devices to their list. Yet it does run counter to an instinctive social preference for thinking of pollution as a problem to which we all contribute equally. We have developed institutions that move reassuringly quickly and forcefully on collective problems. Congress passes a law. The Environmental Protection Agency promulgates a regulation. The auto industry makes its cars a little cleaner, and—presto—the air gets better. But Stedman doesn't much care about what happens in Washington and Detroit. The challenge of controlling air pollution isn't so much about the laws as it is about compliance with them. It's a policing problem, rather than a policy problem, and there is something ultimately unsatisfying about his proposed solution. He wants to end air pollution in Denver with a half-dozen vans outfitted with a contraption about the size of a suitcase. Can such a big problem have such a small-bore solution?

That's what made the findings of the Christopher Commission so unsatisfying. We put together blue-ribbon panels when we're faced with problems that seem too large for the normal mechanisms of bureaucratic repair. We want sweeping reforms. But what was the commission's most memorable observation? It was the story of an officer with a known history of doing things like beating up handcuffed suspects who nonetheless received a performance review from his superior stating that he "usually conducts himself in a manner that inspires respect for the law and instills public confidence." This is what you say about an officer when you haven't actually read his file, and the implication of the Christopher Commission's report was that the L.A.P.D. might help solve its problem simply by getting its police captains to read the files of their officers. The L.A.P.D.'s problem was a matter not of policy but of compliance. The department needed to adhere to the rules it already had in place, and that's not what a public hungry for institutional transformation wants to hear. Solving problems that have power-law distributions doesn't just violate our moral intuitions; it violates our political intuitions as well. It's hard not to conclude, in the end, that the reason we treated the homeless as one hopeless undifferentiated group for so long is not simply that we didn't know better. It's that we didn't want to know better. It was easier the old way.

Power-law solutions have little appeal to the right, because they involve special treatment for people who do not deserve special treatment; and they have little appeal to the left, because their emphasis on efficiency over fairness suggests the cold number-crunching of Chicago-school cost-benefit analysis. Even the promise of millions of dollars in savings or cleaner air or better police departments cannot entirely compensate for such discomfort. In Denver, John Hickenlooper, the city's enormously popular mayor, has worked on the homelessness issue tirelessly during the past couple of years. He spent more time on the subject in his annual State of the City address this past summer than on any other topic. He gave the speech, with deliberate symbolism, in the city's downtown Civic Center Park, where homeless people gather every day with their shopping carts and garbage bags. He has gone on local talk radio on many occasions to discuss what the city is doing about the issue. He has commissioned studies to show what a drain on the city's resources the homeless population has become. But, he says, "there are still people who stop me going into the supermarket and say, 'I can't believe you're going to help those homeless people, those bums.'"

5.

Early one morning a year ago, Marla Johns got a call from her husband, Steve. He was at work. "He called and woke me up," Johns remembers. "He was choked up and crying on the phone. And I thought that something had happened with another police officer. I said, 'Oh, my gosh, what happened?' He said, 'Murray died last night.' " He died of intestinal bleeding. At the police department that morning, some of the officers gave Murray a moment of silence.

"There are not many days that go by that I don't have a thought of him," she went on. "Christmas comes— and I used to buy him a Christmas present. Make sure he had warm gloves and a blanket and a coat. There was this mutual respect. There was a time when another intoxicated patient jumped off the gurney and was coming at me, and Murray jumped off his gurney and shook his fist and said, 'Don't you touch my angel.' You know, when he was monitored by the system he did fabulously. He would be on house arrest and he would get a job and he would save money and go to work every day, and he wouldn't drink. He would do all the things he was supposed to do. There are some people who can be very successful members of society if someone monitors them. Murray needed someone to be in charge of him."

But, of course, Reno didn't have a place where Murray could be given the structure he needed. Someone must have decided that it cost too much.

"I told my husband that I would claim his body if no one else did," she said. "I would not have him in an unmarked grave."

FIN
 
Mobile Suit Gundam Wing, known in Japan as New Mobile Report Gundam W (新機動戦記ガンダムW, Shin Kidō Senki Gandamu Uingu?),[1] was aired across Japan on the anime satellite television network, Animax, and the terrestrial TV Asahi network. It ran for forty-nine half-hour episodes, beginning in 1995. Initially directed by Masashi Ikeda and written by Katsuyuki Sumizawa (Yoroiden Samurai Troopers) with music by Ko Otani, the series was loosely based on the original 1979 Gundam series, Mobile Suit Gundam, created by Yoshiyuki Tomino and Hajime Yatate.

Gundam Wing is one of the alternate universe Gundam series, taking place in the After Colony timeline. It is the second alternate universe in the Gundam media franchise, following Mobile Fighter G Gundam. The plot centers around a war between Earth and its colonies in space; however, in contrast to the Universal Century continuity, the Gundams in Wing are more closely allied to each other than they are to any particular side in the conflict unfolding around them. Gundam Wing was the first anime in the Gundam franchise to be dubbed and released in English, airing on Cartoon Network in the United States in 2000.[2] Since then, the series has also been dubbed into Filipino, French, German, Arabic, Spanish, and Portuguese.

Background
Mankind has colonized space (with clusters of colonies at each of the five Earth-Moon Lagrange points), and, down on the Earth, the nations have united as the United Earth Sphere Alliance. Unfortunately, the Alliance rules the colonies with an iron fist. The colonies wanted a peaceful resolution to the situation, with the movement being headed by the pacifist Heero Yuy. Unfortunately, in the year After Colony 175, he is shot dead by an assassin (believed to be Odin Lowe), forcing the colonies to search for other paths to peace. The assassination also prompts five disaffected scientists from the Organization of Zodiac, much more commonly referred to as OZ, to turn rogue after the completion of the mobile suit prototype Tallgeese.


[edit] Plot
Main article: List of Gundam Wing episodes
The story of Gundam Wing begins in the year After Colony 195, with the start of Operation: Meteor; the scientists' revenge against the OZ military organization. It centers around five young boys who have been chosen and trained by the five rogue scientists, then sent to Earth in extremely advanced Mobile Suits, one designed by each of the scientists, known as "Gundams". Their Mobile Suits are called Gundams, because they are constructed from a rare and astonishingly durable material known as Gundanium alloy, which can only be created in outer space.

The five Gundam Pilots, Heero Yuy (his code name, not to be confused with the assassinated leader), Duo Maxwell (not his original name, his current name came from elements in his past), Trowa Barton (also not his original name and was previously known as Nanashi (No-Name)), Quatre Raberba Winner, and Chang Wufei, originally have no knowledge of each others' existence, and on their first meeting, each pilot believes the others to be new OZ mobile suit designs. Once the young pilots realize that they have the same objective of destroying OZ and in some cases, are given the same mission, they band together to help each other complete their ultimate goal