During "Evangelion"s production and first broadcast, Anno encountered difficulties writing the character, not feeling "particularly interested" or relating to her, but he thought of her as a representation of his unconscious mind. In the fifth episode, explicitly dedicated to her character, Rei speaks seven lines and fifty-two words, while in the sixth she has twenty-five lines. For a long time he forgot to explore Rei's personality, ignoring it or giving it marginal space. In episode eight, for example, she does not appear in any scene, while in episode seven he remembered her giving Rei a brief appearance in one shot. During the production of the fourteenth episode, he decided to focus on her and "explore her emotion", adding Rei's monologue. When he was working on the monologue, he wanted to develop her in a "schizophrenic" direction and wondered how to portray a kind of madness. He was loaned a magazine-like book entitled on mental illness that contained a poem by someone who suffered from a mental disorder, and that triggered his imagination. In the twenty-first episode, the first Rei clone, killed by Naoko Akagi in the final version of the script, would eventually survive after being strangled and having lost consciousness momentarily, awakening in an empty command room without Dr. Akagi. Anno described "Eva" as a "live show" in which he didn't followed a plan for the development of the characters, but from the beginning, he had the idea of Rei's death, then presented in the twenty-third episode. During the production, Ikuhara, annoyed by the idealized image and the fetishism that some fans built around the character, proposed to Anno that they "betray" fans and show her as a real girl who gets married and "gets pregnant in the last episode", but Anno rejected the suggestion. Anno himself declared he considered her character "already finished" in the episode six smile scene: "In short, if she and Shinji completely 'communicated' there, then isn't she over with? At that moment, Rei, for me, was finished".