And we’re back with another double helping of episodes from Attack on Titan: The Final Season Part 2. We are well and truly marching towards the end game now, so let’s see what happened.
Episode 25, Night of the End, was designed to illustrate the difficulty in the two sides working together against Eren. In particular, General Magath and Jean Kirstein had a terrible time trying to coexist early on. This mostly boiled down to the fact that Magath still views the island dwellers as devils, and Jean views Marley’s atrocities on equal footing.
The interesting thing here is that both sides had some legitimate points to make. At this point, it’s clear that neither side is truly what you would call the ‘good guys.’ As Yelena would point out towards the end of the campfire debate, there were many among the group that had killed countless people. Worst yet, try as she might, Hange was having a tough time getting them all on the same page.
Two really nice points came out of this though. On the smaller side of things, we did learn that Yelena wasn’t who she said she was. She was, in fact, from Marley and had made up her own backstory to fit better with the narrative she was trying to follow with Zeke. That was actually far more interesting to me than the idea that she was from somewhere annexed by Marley.
The bigger point was raised by Annie though. She outright asked if the former Scouts would kill Eren, and was completely unsurprised when Mikasa said there were other ways to stop him. This raises the point that we all knew would come up eventually: if it comes down to it, can Mikasa take Eren’s life? It should be clear that she would be the one to finally face him, and this places her in a rough spot because, as Annie said, Mikasa can’t think of anything more important to her than him. Also, it was really quite tragic seeing Annie stating that she was fighting for her father without realising he was already dead.
The final chunk of the episode saw Jean laying into Reiner and accidentally kicking Gabi. The end result was that the team seem to at least be working together. As we saw though, their initial plan of heading to Eren with the help of the Azumabito family is not looking promising, as Floch already has the port locked down.
Overall, I enjoyed this conversational episode, and thought it really flew by. I was happy to see that they weren’t all going to just suddenly be friends thanks to a joint cause, and the internal conflict combined with the external battle the episode set up made for good viewing.
Which brings us to episode 26, Traitor. Now, in what seems to be a trend with the season, the animation took a dive for me for most of the episode again. It only really picked up towards the end when the Titans appeared. Story-wise though, there was plenty to enjoy.
This basically came down to the realities of the route the heroes are taking coming to the forefront for them. Magath admitted he was wrong to deal with things the way he had the previous night, for one. Meanwhile, Armin, Mikasa, Jean, and Conny were faced with the real possibility that they would need to kill their friends.
Of course, Armin attempted to find a peaceful solution, albeit one wrapped in subterfuge. The problem was, Floch was far too jumpy to fall for it. Which led to the Armour and Female Titans having to step in. It was nice to see the Female Titan back in action, and the two of them did start to tear through the Eren cult.
The biggest shock came for Conny though, who had to execute two friends who were trying to kill him and Armin. That was a tough moment for him, and it all led to Yelena acknowledging that people will always try to kill each other. Oddly enough, Kiyomi Azumabito said much the same thing during her conversation with Floch earlier in the episode.
Once again though, I’m not sure I spotted Mikasa actually killing anyone. I think that moment will come with Eren. But we shall see. This episode had less to discuss than the previous one, but it was still enjoyable, even with the animation issues.
But what about yourselves? What did you make of the episodes? Let me know in the comments below.
Matt Doyle Media 