Attack on Titan

Episode 34

This is an episode I've been looking forward to a great deal, while also dreading it just a little bit at the same time. I've been anticipating it because it's so important to this season's arc, this moment where Reiner, Bertholdt, and Eren all have the chance to sit down and palaver (while Ymir gets to handle all the resultant screaming with saintly patience). More than anything, this is a long overdue opportunity for Eren to figure out just what the hell is going on. Given AoT's weird time compression, it can be easy to forget that between the last arc of season one and the entirety of season two, only a few days have passed. Over the span of almost half a decade, Eren Yeager has had just the worst week, and it's about damn time he can start making sense of it.

Still, I was just a bit worried about this entry, precisely because this entire episode is devoted to that conversation between our hero and his friends-turned-Titans-turned-captors (outside of a few minutes setting up the Scouts' rescue mission). Attack on Titan does a lot of things really well, but extended conversations have never really been its strongest suit. This series is so much about mood, tone, and the visceral bombast of combat – it communicates its themes through bloodshed and the traumatized stoicism that overcomes a soldier in the face of unknowable terror. This season especially has been filled with some of the most impactful, terrifying, and memorable sequences I've seen in years from anime, but I don't think many of them required words.

Dialogue in AoT has always been tackled with a “function-over-form” mentality, which isn't necessarily a criticism. When characters have information to share, they share it bluntly. When they're angry, they scream and shout and spit violently into the uncaring void of the world. Heck, when they express love or support for one another, they also scream and shout and spit violently into the uncaring void of the world. Sorrow, grief, fear, and confusion equally evoke their fair share of histrionics. In Sasha's case, anything involving food is equally likely to involve some guttural yawp. Attack on Titan is melodrama writ large enough to suit a world inhabited by gargantuan man-eating monsters with psychotic grins plastered on their faces. So it's not a show that's ever really needed nuance or graceful dialogue, content to get by on its more bombastic merits.

This episode was a little different, though. It doesn't have the benefit of shocking imagery to bolster its storytelling, and there isn't a gorgeously animated battle to fill the runtime. Most of the direction this week is pretty tame, consisting almost entirely of shots cutting back and forth between the Titans (Reiner and Bertholdt) and their captives (Ymir and Eren). The closest thing we got to interesting visuals this week were the many different shots of Eren looking completely fed up with his life. Maybe it's the fact that his face and stumpy arms still bear the scars of his recent battles, but I don't know if I've ever seen a character look so utterly baffled by his own circumstances. Eren does a lot of yelling and raging this week, but none of those exchanges work as well as the handful of shots that show just how broken our hero is becoming.

Though Eren is a littler under-served this week, Reiner, Bertholdt, and Ymir are able to keep the conversation going more effectively than I anticipated. This mostly comes from their distinctive character dynamics, which even Eren's limited emotional reactions can contribute to. Contrasting our hero's single-minded pursuit of vengeance and justice is Bertholdt's surprisingly reserved presence, and what little he does reveal shows a man who might feel remorse for his actions, but he's equally determined to finish what he started. Meanwhile, Ymir knows little about the affairs of these men, or at least seems to know little, and whatever her differing origins are, it's obvious that she cares about reuniting with Christa and little else. The opposing goals of these three give us a conflict we haven't seen much of yet in this show, a battle of wits and wills that cannot be solved with immediate action or violence. Eren and Ymir are too weak yet to transform, and the swiftly setting sun presents a ticking clock for the rest of the Scouts as well. While I have no doubt that the omni-directional gear will get busted out sooner rather than later, I will admit that this digression into a more verbal kind of warfare was much less clunky than I feared it would be.

It also helps that Reiner's story got complicated in a delightfully weird way, providing easily the most interesting part of the episode. I will admit that the moment was slightly spoiled for me by Twitter, where I had seen conversations regarding there being “two Reiners”, but I took that much more literally than what actually occurred here. Instead of the Titan Reiner being some kind of imposter that replaced another human Reiner in the cadet corps, what we got instead was one man whose dedication to two competing causes forced his personality to split. Though it has been hinted at a little over the past few weeks, we get to bear full witness to Reiner oscillating between the dedicated defender of humanity that he was pretending to be and the deeply conflicted and guilt-ridden traitor that he truly is. Eren's incredulity at the whole situation further sells the ridiculousness of this twist, but given the heightened level of reality AoT operates at, I actually bought it. Is it kind of silly? Sure, but that doesn't prevent us from feeling the gravity it has on Reiner's character, which is all that really matters. In a way, this is what Attack on Titan has always done best. It takes a deeply bizarre and fundamentally silly premise and, through sheer force of spectacle and will, manages to warp it into something more affecting and human.

Like last week, this episode was mostly setup for the showdown that will come when the Scouts and the traitorous Titans finally clash. Outside of clarifying these four soldier's mental states, we don't really learn much that we didn't already know. Still, when it's operating at Peak Insanity, Attack on Titan has a way of making the most out of even the slightest bit of development. Even a B-level episode like this shows just how great this second season has been. If nothing else, I'm very excited to see what new levels of madness and excitement the last few episodes of the season are prepared to deliver.

Rating: B

Attack on Titan is currently streaming on Crunchyroll and Funimation.

James is an English teacher who has loved anime his entire life, and he spends way too much time on Twitter and his blog.