Attack on Titan The Final Season

Episode 8

“How many more until the fighting ends? Just how many more have to die?”

I teach a novel in my literature class, Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, that is widely regarded as one of the finest pieces of writing about warfare and the life of a soldier ever written, at least in the English language. The novel is a collection of metafictional short stories that blur the line between the author's actual lived experiences as a soldier in Vietnam and the fictions he has invented to try and communicate the painful truths of what it is like to be a young man sent to fight in a war. The first story, also titled “The Things They Carried”, focuses on the soldiers of Alpha Company, and particularly how all of them are shaken by the sudden and random death of their squadmate, Ted Lavender, who is shot in the head while taking a piss outside the small village of Than Ke. One of the soldiers, Kiowa, summarizes the shock that comes from seeing your friend's life extinguished in an instant, along with the eerie, pointless banality that distinguishes so many wartime casualties: “The poor bastard just flat-fuck fell,” he says. “Boom. Down. Nothing else.”

You can maybe understand, now, why this story was on my mind as I watched the events unfold in “Assassin's Bullet”, which is a perfectly haunting and gut-wrenching coda to the terror that Eren and the Scouts have wrought in Marley. After a surprisingly brief and anticlimactic encounter with Reiner, Eren and Mikasa steal away with the rest of their comrades to fly away in their zeppelin, confident that the enemy has no means to pursue them now that the Titans have been brought down. Gabi and Falco witness the Scouts' retreat, though Gabi is unwilling to simply let the villains that killed her friends and ruined her home escape unscathed. Falco tries to stop her; he even attempts to appeal to her sense of empathy by pointing out that the Scouts were victims of the Marleyans' violence, and their retaliation was an act of revenge that is, if not justifiable, then at least understandable. Gabi doesn't care; she can't care. The hatred coursing through her veins is righteous and pure, and she is beyond seeing the enemy as anything other than the rampaging devils she's been taught to see all her life. She asks Falco if he witnessed the attack on Paradise firsthand, and of course he can only respond that he did not. “I didn't see it either,” Gabi says, her eyes sunken in with that hollow expression of grim resolution that Attack on Titan's viewers know so well. It doesn't matter what happened to bring the Eldians to Marley. All that matters now, to Gabi, is that blood be repaid in blood. If only she knew how much Eren Jeager would agree with her completely.

So, Gabi kills the zeppelin's lone rear guard, a poor bastard named Lobov, and she uses his still-attached OEM gear to board the Scouts' ship. For their part, while the main officers were busy dealing with Eren's not-so-welcome return, the Scouts had just been celebrating their ostensible victory; many of the men and women were even shouting praise in the name of “The New Eldian Empire”. The chaos that ensues when Gabi arrives lasts only a second or two at the most, but it is long enough. Gabi spots Sasha, who the audience recognizes as one of AoT's most beloved characters, though Gabi only sees the sniper who murdered the Marleyan guards that had shown such unexpected kindness to her, who had recognized her humanity and fragility in spite of the Eldian armband she's been forced to wear all her life. She takes the shot, and though Sasha is spared the indignity of being caught literally trousers-down that followed Ted Lavender to his grave, the end result of her time in this story is more or less the same: Boom. Down. Nothing else.

The question that moves through all of the anger, heartache, and bewilderment that the Scouts and the children both face this week is one that Jean asks as the others are getting drunk on their “first victory” over the Marleyans. Jean knows all too well that if there is a “first” victory, there will soon come a second, and then a third, and however many must come after that, until… Until what, though? Until when? Jean isn't sure, and while he seems temporarily assuaged when Connie takes the opportunity to remind him and Sasha of how much he loves them both, the fear comes flooding back when Sasha takes that bullet to the heart, and the other Scouts proceed to beat Gabi and Falco senseless before threatening to toss them out of the ship to their deaths. You can tell this moment that Jean, perhaps more so than anyone else on that ship, would like nothing more than to see his friend's murderers take that final plunge. He resists, though, and asks another question, one that looks utterly ridiculous on paper but makes perfect sense right here: “If we toss kids out of an airship, will the killing ever end?”

Meanwhile, Eren is being brought to task by Hange, who confirms what we've already been able to guess about the events that have unfolded in Marley. Eren's essentially infiltrated the enemy homefront in order to hold himself hostage. In his letters, he informed the Scouts about his plans to retake the power of the War Hammer Titan, and simply trusted that they would come to his aid once the fighting started. They did indeed, but as Hange so succinctly puts it, while his trust in the Scouts was vindicated, their trust in Eren has been ruined. There were six deaths accounted for by the time the Scouts made their escape, and that's before Jean brings the kids to helm and announces Lobov's demise, and that Sasha is on death's door herself.

While Mikasa and Armin rush to her aid, the kids are in for an altogether different but equally devastating revelation. It is a truth that, back in Marley, Pieck has begin to suspect herself, on account of the soldier who tried to trap her and Porco before Eren's attack. The man on the inside, who worked with Eren and the architect of this entire scheme, is none other than Zeke. The alliance is clearly a tenuous one, as Levi obviously regrets not being able to kill the man for real when he took down the Beast Titan, but it is still enough to shake Gabi and Falco to their core. The sanctity of their mission, the promise of personhood that Gabi was willing to ruin herself in order to preserve, was founded on the will and rhetoric of loyal Eldian soldiers like Zeke. When Connie comes to barely choke out the news that Sasha is dead now, too, it cuts twice as deep because we know that her murderer came under the pretense that the war that Zeke has helped peddle was a just one. That was a lie, of course; it always was a lie. Now that Sasha is dead, two more children have seen the lie of their lives unravel firsthand.

Sasha's last word, Connie tells Eren, was “Meat.” Utterly lacking in poetry or meaning, it was nonetheless a perfect end of Sasha, who only ever dreamed of finally having a home to go back to, where she could live and eat in peace with the people she loved. Is Gabi, the brainwashed child soldier, the one to blame for this awful, stupid death? Or is Eren the one to shoulder that burden, since he forced his friends' hands and brought them to Marley to be used as instruments of his own personal revenge? When the needle has worn itself so deep into the groove of a spinning record, does one blame the needle or the record for the circle that they make as the gears of the player turn and turn again?

There's another quote from O'Brien's book that I can't quite shake; it's a longer one, but worth considering in full. He writes: “War is hell, but that's not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.” That right there might sum up Attack on Titan better than I ever could, and it might get to the heart of the question that Jean keeps coming back to, about how many people will have to die before the war is done. Sasha's corpse is now just one more body to add to the pile. If the likes of Eren and Gabi have their way, there will be so many more to come, before the end.

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Attack on Titan The Final Season is currently streaming on Crunchyroll and FUNimation.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on Twitter, his blog, and his podcast.