It’s interesting to me that I found the second half of this episode so much more engaging than the first – quite excellent, in fact.  The obvious suspect is that’s when the narrative shifted away from the main cast and onto Gabi, Falco and his brother.  To be honest I find everything surrounding Reiner especially but also Armin (who were probably my two favorite characters at one time) so ridiculous at this point that I just want their scenes to be over.  And Mikasa and Eren were ridiculous from the get-go.

When the scope is wider I really struggle with Shingeki at this point.  Simply because I don’t want to root for either of these main sides, and there’s only so much interest I can hold in a fight where I want both sides to lose.  The series does better when it zooms in individuals being ground in the gears of stupidity, especially the ones who haven’t been tainted by being immersed in the narrative since the beginning.  This is where Attack on Titan comes closest to an essential truth, I think – it does seem to recognize that the real victims of war are those who never wanted any part of it in the first place.  What’s missing in my view is an adequate sense of blame, and a sense of where to point it.

I did hate Gabi to bits when she was first introduced, as long-time readers may remember.  Her voice is still like squeaky styrofoam to me but she’s been appropriately beaten down to size by the narrative.  At least Gabi has the sense to realize that she’s been dedicating her life to a lie told by agents of abject evil, and the decency to be mortified over her role in the atrocities those agents have committed.  Falco is something close to a blameless character, a true rarity in SnK.  He never really set his sights on anything high-minded – he just wanted to stay alive and keep his crush from getting herself killed, and he paid the price for it.

A small moment of decency like Nile-san turning Falco over to his brother is spit in this ocean of depravity, but it has an outsized impact on the mood because of that.  Truthfully Nile has to realize Falco doesn’t have much more chance of surviving this than he does, and all he’s likely doing is giving him the chance to say goodbye to his brother.  But most people are so powerless in these situations that a nearly-meaningless act of kindness is probably the most impact they’ll ever have the chance to have.  Kudos to him for choosing to commit that act.

Virtually everyone in the main cast has been dead/not dead so many times that I’m not making any assumptions about any of them, including Zeke.  I may not want either side to win but I still have a morbid curiosity to see how all this is going to turn out, and whether indeed Eren’s cooperation with the Jaegerists is going to turn out to be an asspull.  I suppose I should be rooting for that just because it would mean Armin hasn’t turned into a complete idiot, which isn’t much to hang your hat on.  For a series that’s built its legend on delivering shock and awe, it’s sort of ironic that in the end the smaller it goes the better it gets.