Rather than pick up where the last episode left off, this one decides to open on a completely different squad of soldiers. Rather than cadets, these are the elite scouts, who venture out to engage and investigate the titans.
Despite the title, I was almost convinced that the whole episode was going to follow them. On the one hand, I get it, you want to hold the tension on the big reveal from last episode, but at the same time, this show doesn't really need more characters that I know little about.
While it was certainly nice to see a group of humans winning in a battle against the titans, I'm not sure what it brought to the table. The death of one of the soldiers was poignant enough, I guess. Though the fact that we know next to nothing about him at this point undercuts that significantly.
Speaking of, that image of him getting chewed on was less scary and more hilarious. Once he was actually bitten in half, it got more serious, but early on, it almost looked comical.
This stands in stark contrast to what Eren sees after he gets swallowed. Sure, he's alive, but he's waist deep in a pool of blood, surrounded by floating corpses. It's just as jacked up as it sounds and the scene is accompanied by an appropriately haunting chanting musical leitmotif. The fact that he's able to keep it together as well as he did was commendable. He does start to break down, but oddly, it's less due to what's around him and more due to how he fought so hard and got so far; but in the end it didn't even matter. I know that angsting about that sort of thing in anime is fairly common, but priorities, man.
Eventually, we do cut to the present where, sure enough, Eren has no idea what happened. It was a predictable turn, sure, but it poses a problem as the whole squad is now standing against him, ready to blow him to smithereens with a cannon if need be.
Armin and Mikasa are alongside him, the latter even standing in a badass defensive battle pose between Eren and the army, but it seems like everyone is intent on seeing Eren dead after seeing what happened.
I said before that the characters were oddly unwilling to let the rogue titan kill the titans for them. I still say that this is something they should be cheering for. I want to cite this as another instance of the humans being dumb, but it doesn't seem like these soldiers know the specifics. Eren's unconscious muttering about "wanting to kill them all" (ie the titans) didn't help things either, as they think he's talking about killing and eating all of them.
It leads to a rather tense stand off that takes the focus of the last ten minutes of the episode. This scene is so good that I wonder why it bothered wasting my time with the other stuff.
The back and forth had me hooked and on the edge of my seat. If the whole episode had just been this inquisition, it probably would have gone down as one of the all time best episodes of the show.
You can understand the view of the other troops, but you also feel for Eren, who has no idea what's happening. I also liked how, while the main officer was clearly manic and on edge, others were quite calm and analytical about why Eren couldn't be left alone. It showed that there was more than just human paranoia and panic at play (though Armin tries to argue that this is the case) and it gave the other side a stronger footing.
The episode ends on yet another wham note. We get some hints as to Eren's origin, as he flashes back to his father injecting him with something and making vague statements about a key and a basement, but Eren also decides to intentionally trigger another transformation to save both himself and his friends from the resistance.
I'm not sure how his transformation made for an effective shield, considering we see that he's just the upper half of a skeleton at this point. On top of that, this seems to be a completely different titan form than what we saw last time. Is it in transition, or does he change into a different titan each time? I guess these are things we'll learn later.
I wasn't a fan of the first half of this episode. It didn't really seem like anything of note was happening. Once the ball got rolling and the episode found its focus, though, it became one of the more intense and gripping ones in the series overall.
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