Jet Alone

Abbreviated JA, this towering bipedal machine debuts in Episode 07, where Japan Heavy Chemical Industries presents it as a replacement for the Evangelion program. Though it shares the Evas' humanoid frame and roughly matches them in height and mass, the resemblance stops there. Its arms stretch unnaturally long and end in slender pointed fingers, and instead of a proper head, a face of glowing rectangular panels sits sunken deep into the upper torso, giving the machine a hunched silhouette. A fan of rigid spines sweeps up from its back and over the top of the body, adding considerable height, while its paint scheme sticks to muted neutrals rather than the loud contrasting colors the Evangelions wear.

Jet Alone's selling points attack the Evangelion program's weaknesses directly. Where an Eva drains external power cables and carries only minutes of internal charge, JA runs on a built-in nuclear reactor good for at least 150 days of continuous operation. It also needs no pilot; an onboard computer drives it, with radio instructions relayed from a ground station. The tradeoff is that a machine cannot project an A.T. Field, an objection its developer Shiro Tokita waves off by claiming an artificial field is simply a matter of time. Since the robot carried no armament during its only outing, its true combat potential goes untested.

During the demonstration the unit slips out of control and marches toward a reactor meltdown. Misato Katsuragi, ferried aboard by Unit-01, tries to wipe its programming with the password "Hope" supplied by Tokita, and fails; disaster is averted only when the sabotaging computer virus finishes running and the safety systems come back online. Gendo Ikari's closing remark that events unfolded according to plan points to NERV as the saboteur, whether to protect its funding, to prevent a rival machine from someday being turned against NERV, or simply to keep the Evangelions irreplaceable.

Japan Heavy Chemical Industries owns and operates the unmanned prototype. The concept outlives the failed demo in several spinoffs: the Neon Genesis Evangelions game introduces an improved successor, Jet Alone Kai, drawn by mecha designer Ikuto Yamashita, and the ANIMA novels feature a distant descendant in the JSSDF's Type-4 "Akashima". For Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon A Time, Yamashita revisited the design once more as the JA-02, whose components are cannibalized to assemble the Production Model-New 02α.

The robot's name honors Jet Jaguar, Godzilla's android ally from Godzilla vs. Megalon, splicing together that character's contest-winning draft name "Red Alone" with his final one. Hideaki Anno personally completed the final design sheet on 22 June 1995, and a 2023 Battle Spirits card from the GODZILLA vs EVANGELION collaboration later depicted Jet Jaguar suited up in JA-02 armor.