Hoo boy, this was a ride and a half. I’m always a little overwhelmed trying to review a movie-length episode, and that did not change with this nearly 90-minute finale of finales of one of the biggest animes in history. There’s also the reality that the drip-drip-drip of final episodes and specials sapped a little of my enthusiasm, much as it did for iconic shows like The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, and to a lesser extent, GoT.
But for now I’ll break down the desperate final mission of the now-united faction of Titan and non-Titan Scouts to save and/or stop Eren from, well ending the world. He doesn’t make it easy, nor does Founder Ymir, who is able to conjure a seemingly unlimited number of iterations of the original nine Titans to defend Eren from their aerial attack.
Reiner and Pieck are the only Titans in their first wave, with Armin holding his Colossal powder as a last resort. But as the non-Titans start running out of ammo and stamina, it’s starting to look like they have to shift to a Kill-Eren strategy, something Mikasa never wants to hear. The group gets a big boost from the surprise arrival of Annie, who decides to join the fight after all, along with Gabi, who are riding Falco—now a very handy winged Jaw Titan.
Before they arrive, however, Armin is scooped up by an okapi Titan, and after yelling at himself to wake up, ends up in the Paths with Zeke. The older Yeager believes the meaning of life is to simply multiply, and that they developed fear in order to do so with more urgency.
Armin takes a more personal tack: there are times he believes he was only put on this earth to run around with Eren and Mikasa back home, behind Wall Maria. He even accepted that there was a specific order to that: Eren leading, Mikasa pretending to trail, and him bringing up the rear.
Both men manage to escape the purgatory of the Paths when Armin finds a leaf from that tree he and Eren and Mikasa always used to run to; to Zeke, it appears as the baseball that gave him so much joy to throw back and forth. Amrin ends up being freed from the okapi Titan and caught by Annie in her Titan form. I’m glad they got to reunite, even here at what may well still be the end of all things.
Armin and Zeke aren’t alone: they called upon those former Titans who died, in order to fight the multiplying Titans Ymir was sending at the others. Zeke offers his neck to Levi, who beheads him, and the Rumbling stops just a few yards short of thousands of men, women, and children trapped upon a sheer cliff.
Armin orders the other scouts to retreat aboard Falco so he can blow up the gigantic Attack/Founding Titan with his Colossal Titan’s explosion. But while the Rumbling has ceased, a weird translucent caterpillar thing still works to get back to Eren’s Titan, which would start it back up again. It even turns everyone back at the military camp, including Gabi, into a gaggle of Titans to defend it.
Only those who are already Titan wielders and the Ackermanns are immune, so Levi and Mikasa head back to where Armin’s Titan continues to do battle with Eren’s Titan.
Then, suddenly, Mikasa wakes up, as if from a long dream. She’s with Eren at a bucolic cabin up in the gorgeous mountains. This is the life they’d have led if Eren had gone with her and left their life of fighting and killing behind.
In reality, it’s just an illusion within the Paths, but it does enable Mikasa and Eren to talk again, since the last time they were in person he said some horrible things.
With Levi’s help, Mikasa manages to break through Eren’s Titan’s teeth to where his body is located, where she beheads and kisses him while Founder Ymir watches.
Armin has his own time with Eren within the Paths, first as little kids but gradually growing older as they traverse landscapes both familiar and trippy. Eren admits to Armin that as the Founding Titan, there’s no true past or future; he sees it all at the same time.
His plan was to have him, Mikasa, and the Scouts defeat him so they could be lauded by society as the heroes who saved the earth, in hopes the conflict between Marley and Eldia could end. By attempting this plan, Eren’s Rumbling killed 80% of humanity, and left Marley in a diminished state that they couldn’t fight Paradis if they wanted to, at least not for some time.
Armin doesn’t let Eren carry the entire burden; after all, it was he who showed Eren a book about the world beyond the walls and the sea. The two embrace as brothers, with Eren telling Armin that when everything is over he’ll remember everything he told him, while Armin tells Eren they’ll suffer the consequences of what they’ve done together.
Back in the present, Armin comes to, and learns that not only him, but everyone who knew Eren had some time in the Paths with him, and only now when he’s dead do they remember those times. Mikasa heads off with Eren’s head, intending to bury it beside the tree they used to run to.
Three years pass, and we see that Historia and her child continue to live in peace, which is what Eren wanted. Marley is still picking up the pieces of their civilization, while Eldia has grown more extreme and militaristic. Armin, Annie, Connie, Reiner, Pieck and Jean have ditched their Scout uniforms for business suits, and tasked with using their status as saviors of humanity to attempt to forge a peace.
Mikasa is also at peace, having left her life of fighting and killing far behind. She visits and tends to Eren’s grave, still wearing the scarf he wrapped around her, and which he asked her to get rid of. Instead, she keeps wearing it, and keeps visiting, until she passes away.
Time goes on, both the tree and the city below the hill grow larger and taller. Over a period of untold centuries the city evolves into a futuristic metropolis, and is then leveled into ruins by weapons of mass destruction.
Who knows how many hundreds or thousands of years pass when a young boy and his dog discover a cave in the ancient tree that survived all of that history. Somewhere within its massive roots, a small stone tablet, Eren’s grave, still dwells, and his remains below it.
This final scene has an almost Made in Abyss like vibe; taking place as it does so long after everything and everyone we knew in this world had long since passed on. More than anything, it most definitely feels like a finale. This is the end; there is no more Attack on Titan.
I’ve described, with variable levels of accuracy, all the crazy stuff that happened in this movie-length episode, but it remains hard to actually put my thoughts about it into words. It was at times a hard watch, and at times an immensely joyful watch.
I guess my main takeaway is that we are all pretty much children, and our time on this earth is short, and perhaps the best way to live our lives is with as much love and as little fear as we can manage. Love can obviously instill fear—fear of loss or change—but loss and change are inevitable qualities of mortal life.
Attack on Titan never pretended to know how to answer all of the hard questions it asked about the cyclical nature of war, death, hate, extremism, and suffering that are the products of our inability as a species to achieve universal love for each other and the failure to keep fear at bay.
But simply by addressing them, sometimes awkwardly or controversially, within the limited the scope of this band of flawed, scarred, intensely human members of the Scout Regiment, and watching them grow up, drift apart, then come back together, was a monumental achievement to watch.
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