English Dub Review: Attack on Titan “Whereabouts of Left Arm: The Struggle for Trost, Part 5”

Tonight, we get introduced the bad-ass of the series. I don’t think you can handle it.

Spoilers Below

Boy, I cannot begin to tell you how generic the animation is  for this intro. Why people like it is beyond me. The song is alright. There is nothing really of note here. Anyway, the military force wasn’t up to full power, because the scout team was beyond the wall on a recon mission. They are the tasked with finding exploratory expansion, but still die at an alarming rate.  But rest assured, they’re getting better! It’s at 30%. To be honest, I’m not sure how that’s really good, because 30% is still pretty freaking high. Cut to a Titan chomping on a soldier, and a hook shoots behind the Titan’s head, and it’s Levi. He flies by, cutting the Titan’s weak spot, causing the Titan to call to the ground. His team shows up, and sends two after one Titan, Petra to tend to the munched on soldier, and Levi takes two Titans for himself. Meanwhile, Hange is in a giddy mood, slaying Titans with glee.

Levi, however, takes out one Titan and blinds another. He stands on it’s head, taunting him, then kills him. Levi comes across the soldier who was getting eaten, and there was nothing Petra could do. Levi keeps the soldier’s morale up, saying he will carry the torch for him. Commander Erwin notifies Levi that they’re moving out to engage the Titans north of the wall.

We cut to Eren, who is inside the Titan that ate him. Inside the stomach, there are still some who are barely clinging to being alive. Just then, a Titan arm juts out from the mouth, and another Titan rips out of its stomach. It’s the Titan that was fighting the other Titans. The captions confirm it. Titan Eren goes to kill them all. He snaps out of it, just as he says “You’re all going to die.” The other soldiers hear this, are terrified of Eren turning into a Titan again.

Conny is telling the story to Ymir and the others, but no one knows where Mikasa is. They turn to Jean, who is under a gag order for all things regarding Eren. While Hannes is reminiscing on Eren, Mikasa and Armin, they are facing an execution due to Eren becoming a Titan by Woerman. They are trying to determine if Eren is friend or foe. Woerman doesn’t buy that Eren has no idea what is going on, but Mikasa is ready to go ham on them all to defend Eren. Eren is having problems remembering what is going on, and answers that he is human. Woerman doesn’t believe it, and gives the order to fire. We get a flashback to Grisha and Eren, where Eren gets injected with something to make him forget. He remembers, bites his thumb, and protects Armin and Mikasa by doing a half transformation into a Titan.

It’s amazing how fast a person, or a group of people in this case, turn on someone when that someone does something no one understands. Granted, in the real world, no one turns into a 15 foot tall monster than can annihilate anything and everything in its path. Unfortunately, human nature is to fear what isn’t understood. This premise is taken to an extreme with this episode. Everything fit rather well, especially holding off Eren’s story to the latter part of the episode. Oh, and Woerman can eat a dick. The dude is your stereotypical cowardly official, this time with cannons.

Levi is every form of badass motherfucker that a character could be, right down to the nonchalant attitude for killing Titans. The fact that he was just chilling on top of that bald Titan’s head was glorious. Also, I really liked Hange. she seemed like she was one bad turn away from completely losing it, or is just really that happy. Again, I’m following Adult Swim’s airing, so I don’t know what’s going on farther down the line.

I have to say, that this was a really well put together episode. The upswing is still going, which I didn’t see happening. Hopefully next week we can get a look into what is in the basement of the Yaeger household. That seems to be a recurring plot point now, so it should come up sooner or later. The final verdict on this: go watch it because there’s a lot of plot that is actually pertinent. Not to mention there’s none of that lazy, freeze framing with a character doing a monologue over it.