Judgment Day

MSTed by Keith Palmer

Story by Artemis


Read this MSTing: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.


Fanfic: It's just another typical day for everyone's favourite fourteen-year-old angst-ridden teenager burdened with saving the world, Shinji Ikari, what with his cryptic dream and his fellow Evangelion pilot Rei Ayanami's medical emergency. Before he can really ask her about her own cryptic dream, though, their secret organisation NERV is attacked by armour-piercing meteors. The fact that NERV has run out of impressive Angel code names and has to call the meteors Feathers is mildly troubling, but everyone concentrates on the solvable problems to think about the silver Angel the size of Germany bearing down on the Earth.

Any crisis that gives you a trip to Florida has to be a good one, even with a Feather attack tossed in along the way, but the Evangelion cast is a little too busy to really enjoy it, what with the new pilot showing up. Adam Traeger just happens to look like a character from Gundam Wing and his father just happens to be the President of the United States, but he's really a nice guy. That, of course, pits him against his fellow pilot Asuka Soryu-Langley until an Angel disguised as a mime attacks. The Gundam Wing accessory kit attached to Adam's Evangelion doesn't help him that much, but at least Asuka gets upset about him being beaten up before the story comes to an abrupt stop, cryptic dreams and Germany-sized silver Angels left up in the air.


Host Segments: Prologue: Mike grimly prepares for a new ice age as the bots argue first about what era of science fiction is most appropriate to respond to the crisis with and then about how to respond to Gypsy's saving the day.
Segment One: Dr. Forrester had planned to make the final experiment before going into the deep freeze memorable, but the video store was out of copies of "Armageddon." He compensates by going on the Internet and finding a crossover between Armageddon and Neon Genesis Evangelion.
Segment Two: Mike and the bots discuss what the fanfic would have been like had it had just a little more Armageddon in it.
Segment Three: The bots, taking their cue from the fanfic, attempt to jolt Mike loose from his "darkly complex personality" by engineering a loss of atmosphere.
Segment Four: Mike and the bots contemplate just why the fourteen-year-old son of the President drives a motorcycle, and move on from to there to why there are so many motorcycles in anime (Crow blames Fonzie) and to what other form of transportation would be more appropriate.
Segment Five: Dr. Forrester gloats over how our heroes are anticipating a chapter of the fanfic that won't arrive before the silver Angel the size of Germany finally shows up. Thankfully, Bruce Willis saves the day, and we close with something resembling an Evangelion reference.
Stinger: Asuka's excellent command of English.


Reflections: There was something about a crossover between Evangelion and Armageddon that took and held my attention the first time I noticed it on a small fanfic archive, and by the time I got to the refugee from Gundam Wing who was both the inevitable new pilot and the son of the President, I was convinced the story could make for a MSTing. A while later, after I actually started writing MSTings, I joined a small group of rookies planning to work together and proposed the work. Everyone else dropped out along the way, but I managed to complete it, moving the setting for my host segments back in time from Undocumented Features to the sixth season of MST3K.

However, I'm not quite as satisfied with it as I am with my other work. The riffing seems to assume familiarity with Evangelion. Other MSTings of Evangelion fanfics often may do the same, but they do it more entertainingly as well. My riffing also frequently depends on noting the story's weak grammar, although some riffs contributed by Matt Blackwell help with that a bit. Still, any MSTing in which I manage to reference Scott of the Antarctic and make the quip that "money can't buy you love, but infallibility is available on the instalment plan" doesn't seem all that bad.


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