Recap: The Colossal Titan returns and opens a hole in the gates of Wall Maria. With Titans quickly pouring in and devouring the population, the recruits find themselves on the front lines of the defense of Trost.

Gee’s Thoughts:

I had a feeling this would happen, especially considering the anime is going in chronological order. To give you all an idea of how the manga presents things, the events of this episode occur at the end of the first volume. While I generally prefer how the anime is giving us more time with the side characters before they go crunch, episodes like these prove that it’s not always a good thing. We get a good 5 minutes tops of action inserted in between another 15 minutes of talking that doesn’t really do much except establish the direness of the situation.

While short and a little disappointing, I think the recruit squad’s first foray against the Titans is an effective message: Titans are goddamn monsters, and anyone thinking taking them on was going to be easy is naive. With Thomas dying within seconds, Mina’s subsequently fatal fall, and the rest of the squad’s ignoble deaths, Attack on Titan does a great job of reminding us that no matter what kind of Shonen antics and fart jokes it might try and introduce, this is a bleak story and only the strong and lucky are going to survive.

That said, the twist of this episode is a strong one, and it definitely throws things into flux. Even in an anime like Titan where anyone can die, I’m sure nobody expected Eren to be one of the first major characters to bite it (I’m so sorry I’ll never make a pun that bad again…in this post). It certainly adds a degree of uncertainty to the series and makes one wonder where the plot will go now, whether it shifts the focus to Mikasa, Armin, or another unnamed character.

Or who knows, maybe deus ex machina will swoop in and Eren will be revealed to be alive and well in the next episode. If nothing else, while this episode was short on the promised action, it continues to do a great job of upping the ante and keeping up the tension.

Marlin’s Thoughts:

Well… fuck… didn’t see that coming.

Gee: In addition, for everyone watching this, I’ve created a character guide for those having trouble remembering the loads and loads of characters this anime is going to introduce. While the anime doesn’t suffer from the sameface and rather poor early artwork that the manga did, I have a feeling it’ll still come in handy. I’ll continue to update it every week as new characters are introduced.