Welcome back! Are you prepared?! Assuredly, you are not. Hunker behind what remains of the walls. It’s time for another episode of Attack on Titan. This is the part where I let you know that I am very much not a regular anime watcher but that this strange and at times horrifying show continues to captivate me. We are continuing on through the third season, as part of our 2020 Summer TV Binge and beyond. Let’s get into it! Buckle up your Omni-Directional Movement gear. Lets swoop into Attack on Titan season 3, episode 19. This is really it, we have come far and this has been our destination since basically the beginning of the show. Today we enter… the basement!
1. A decision with no regrets
It’s four hours later… and Armin is totally ripped! That titan juice grew him abs for days. What it failed to do is turn off his conscience. His memory is hazy, but he knows he ate Bertholdt and that is um, hard to swallow. Part of me is eager to see what the spritely, ruthless genius does with intense power. But I guess he’s earned a break.
Levi claims he stands by his decision to save Armin, even if he doesn’t work that hard to justify it. He keeps up his cool guy posturing, waves it off as not a big deal, and blames Eren and Mikasa. He tells Armin that he’s happy he decided the way he did, but that Eren and Mikasa might not be if he messes up his second chance at life. I don’t know if I say this often enough, but Levi is weird.
2. A gathering of ghosts
They’re really building up this basement reveal. It better be worth it. Truly, this entire show has been a build up to the basement reveal. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned from watching TV, this sorts of landings are impossible to stick. I mean, don’t let anyone tell you this show doesn’t know how to dramatically frame a scene. The music gets quiet, and for what feels like most of the episode’s runtime, Eren, Mikasa, Levi, and Hange Zoe are just walking through the ruins of Shingashima. Which serves to make the buildup even more extreme. It just doesn’t relent!
Eren and Mikasa stay silent, seeing the ghosts of their hometown, including their own. They (and by extension the show) seem to think that it was a more innocent time, and I guess that’s relative. They still were budding little serial killers. They had just experienced less death. And then, they see the ghost of Hannes! OK, I knew that was coming but that dude is always going to make me feel things. Drunken uncle who dies in a redemption arc is this show’s bread and butter, right?
3. When you start feeling it
Since so little actually happens in this episode, you have a lot of time to reflect. You can ask yourself questions like: Oh my god, can you imagine returning to your hometown after a battle, long abandoned? Being the first person to see your house in years? As they get nearer, the obvious flashbacks stop, and we just start seeing objects and are left to wonder what it means. There’s a shoe in the Yaeger yard. Is it their mom’s? One of theirs? It doesn’t matter, it’s been left there undisturbed for literal years. That’s crazy.
At the midpoint of the episode, we get one of those signature interstitial. “The basement will likely reveal the secrets of the world” it says. This really really really needs to ace the landing.
4. And… and… and… and… and…
And then suddenly, stuff is happening. They get to the bottom of the stairs, try the key in the door and… the key doesn’t fit!! Oh my god! But before they can even regroup to reassess, Levi just kicks the door down! I can’t believe that worked. They poke around and find Grisha Yaeger’s desk. The key is for a drawer in the desk! And the drawer has a false bottom! There’s a book in there! This is it, the secrets of the world, right? Right? Right? That’s when things take a weird turn.
Continued below5. Too exact to be a painting
Instead of allowing us any sort of catharsis, the final moments of the episode screw with time in an infuriating way. We jump back to what seems to be a young Grisha talking with Erwin. “How do we know there are no people outside the walls?” Erwin asks, and apparently this isn’t the first or last time he’s posed that question. Of course we know he’s right, but the question feels really heavy here. Is there an advanced society out there? Or barbarians? Do they still have baseball? One thing is for sure. They have photography. Hange Zoe and the rest of the crew are totally baffled by a photo in Grisha’s book.
And just like that… we’ve jumped ahead to the triumphant return of the surviving Scouts. There’s a parade for Levi and Eren and Mikasa and the rest of them. Eren has his dad’s books but… the episode is over. The build continues and we are going to have to wait another week to discover if any of it means a damn thing!
