‘Attack On Titan’ Episode 11 Review: Protect Falco At All Costs

After a blockbuster start to the season, we are slowing down in subsequent episodes of Attack on Titan, which are not featuring any epic Titan battles, but setting the stage for the final showdown of the series.

This week’s episode focused mostly on Gabi and Falco, the two Marley children who stowed away/were captured during the Marley Titan assault, where Gabi killed Sasha in a blind rage and this, week she also brutally kills a prison guard so they can escape.

Gabi and Falco are polar opposites, which has never been more fully on display than it was this week. They run across a group of orphaned children who lost their parents to Titans, and Falco has to constantly keep Gabi in line, preventing her from going off the rails as she still refuses to meaningfully interact with the Eldian “devils,” fully corrupted by her years of brainwashing, learning to hate her own people for their generations of misdeeds.

Gabi is truly nuts, nearly goring a young girl with a pitchfork when she reveals she’s known the two were from Marley the whole time. Falco is her only saving grace, a pure character who is very much open to understanding that no, the people of the island are clearly not the devils Marley has proclaimed them to be.

By the end, however, Gabi is confronted with just how stupid and pointless her beliefs are, as the girl explains how she watched her mother eaten by a Titan four years ago. Gabi rants about centuries of Eldian misdeeds, but Falco and the girl try to make her understand that all of that stuff happened generations ago, and have nothing to do with the current Eldian people, nor does Marley’s own sins reflect on them. I’m still not sure if Gabi fully “gets it” but it’s possible she may have had some kind of breakthrough by the end.  

To top it all off, the girl reveals that she was previously saved by Sasha, and now wants to grow up to be like her. Though no one but the audience is meant to make the connection that she’s referring to the person that Gabi just assassinated a short while ago.

The episode ends with the Titans back in Marley figuring out that Zeke has betrayed them, and while they’re supposed to wait for a global alliance to invade the island once and for all, Reiner correctly believes that this is what Zeke is banking on, and if they launch a surprise attack now, the island will not be ready for them. My guess is that this is the final conflict we’ll see by season’s end, and I do have to think that Marley is out-gunned here. They’ve lost the Warhammer Titan and only have the Armored Titan, the Cart Titan and Galliard. Meanwhile, the island has the Colossal Titan, the Warrior Titan and the Beast Titan, with the Female Titan under guard (and when Annie does re-emerge, I’m not sure what side she’ll even be on anymore).

I don’t know what longer term plans the show has for Gabi and Falco, these two kids they only introduce this season. As the top Warrior candidates, it seems likely that at least one of them will become a Titan at some point, and if it’s Gabi, I sort of weep for the future of humanity, as someone that unstable shouldn’t be given a Titan to control. But we’ll see. More to come next week.

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