 What's up everybody, I'm Gil with One Take and today we're talking about Attack on Titan Season 3 Episode 20 also known as Episode 57 titled That Day. This is going to be a spoiler filled review and recap of the episode so if you haven't seen it yet go check it out and then come back and watch this video. I should also say I don't read the manga so there won't be any spoilers from that or future episodes. With that let's jump into tonight's episode. The episode begins right where the last one left off. If you watched through the end credits of last week's episode then you would have seen Eren's dad Grisha with his younger sister Faye in an interminant zone. They run outside the walls of that zone you can tell they're not supposed to do that. They run out to go see where the airships land. This episode we see them arrive in the city, where those airships land and take off from. They reach the airship and on the way there we learn a few things about this world and this time period. We see people refer to Grisha and Faye as devil bloods and more importantly we see them referred to as Eldians which will become important as the episode goes on. We also see that they have to wear armbands and overall they're treated as an oppressed group of citizens. When they reach the airships they are spotted by two people. One of them is a guy with a mustache, the other is a sort of chiseled well-built young lad and the two of them will play important roles in this episode. It's clear that Grisha and Faye are not supposed to be here. The two men pull them aside and ask Grisha labor or beating. He chooses beating as his punishment and also begs them not to beat his sister and asks them to give him the beatings for both himself and for his sister. They agree. The man with the mustache takes Grisha's sister Faye away, claims he's taking her home but we learn that she is found dead the next day in the river. When Grisha goes home he sees his parents being chided by the two men that caught him and his sister. Those two men tell his parents about the death of their daughter, they claim it was an accident and they tell them basically to be better parents you need your son to behave better. You've got to tell him about the sins of your ancestors. And this is where we start to learn a lot of history that explains much of what we've seen in this show. So Grisha's parents are of course distraught. His mom is extremely upset clearly mourning their daughter. Grisha's father is holding it together a little bit better. You can tell he's the kind of guy that really tries to toe the party line. They tell him tell your son about your past and he says okay I'm going to do exactly that. And then he goes on to explain a lot of history. I had to rewatch it a couple of times so I'm going to try and break it down for you here just stick with me. So basically 1,820 years ago somebody named Yamir Fritz. This is an ancestor of Grisha. This is one of Aaron's ancestors from nearly 2,000 years ago. She made a contract with the devil of all earth. In the image they showed he looked sort of like the traditional devil. He had the little spinny horns like you see. And she made a contract with this devil to obtain the power of the Titans. Eventually Yamir died and her spirit split into nine Titans. Those nine Titans formed the Eldian Empire and defeated the nation of Marley to do so. This led to the Dark Ages where the subjects of Yamir also known as the Eldians oppressed all of the races. They steal from them. They force them to bear their children and they use the term ethnic cleansing. They said the ethnic cleansing went on for 1,700 years. So the Eldians that's Aaron's ancestors were oppressing people for almost 2,000 years. Eventually the Marleyans were able to rise up, took over seven of the nine Titans through the Great Titan War for 80 years. And it's important to note here. They took over seven of the nine Titans. That leaves two Titans unaccounted for I'm assuming that's the armored Titan and the colossal Titan but it's not confirmed in the episode. After the Great Titan War the Eldian King leaves. He goes to the Island of Paradise and when they mention the Island of Paradise we see an image of a map. And on that map we see the circular walls we're familiar with. So my interpretation of that is that the Island of Paradise is where Aaron and all the characters we've been watching that's where they reside. The Eldian King went there and put up some walls. We see a picture of a bunch of Titans standing and creating the walls we're familiar with. So we finally learn the origins of the walls. We learn why when you break open those walls you see the faces of Titans. Then the Eldian King left the Eldian Empire which has now been restored as Marley. When the Eldian King left he left behind some Eldians including Grisha, Grisha's family, Aaron's parents. So they've been left behind and now they're oppressed because the nation of Marley they're kind of pissed off over the last two, the last two thousand years of being treated very poorly to put it lightly. So one thing I want to say here before we move on from all this. All this backstory is fascinating and when this episode started and we see Grisha, Aaron's father as a child and we see the horrible circumstances he's living under all of that is super interesting and it feels like they hit the fast forward button. Which A is a shame because we don't get to see it all play out to its most dramatic impact and B it was just difficult to follow like I said I had to rewatch it a couple of times and because there's so much information being given to us a lot of very emotional things are happening here and they didn't fully impact me as much as they could have because while I'm absorbing it all I'm sitting there working trying to piece it all together trying to understand what it all means so I definitely didn't hate it but I sort of wish they would have taken their time a little bit maybe this could have been three or four episodes instead of half an episode where they fit in all that history I just described but having said all that it's still a very interesting story and once you process it all it makes a lot of what you've seen make a lot of sense. At age 18 so we've now fast forwarded nearly a decade Grisha is a doctor and he meets someone in his office this person moves his shirt open and exposes an ex scarred into his shoulder which he explains is a sign that he's a patriot he's one of the Eldians who wants to fight back against the nation of Marley. He explains that they have an informant in the government of Marley and from that informant they were able to get confirmation that Grisha's suspicion that his sister was murdered and not killed by some accident that suspicion is confirmed the guy with the mustache sicked his son's dogs onto Grisha's eight-year-old sister and had them essentially eat her and leave her for dead in the river so this fires up Grisha to join the cause become a patriot himself and he says I'd show them who the real devil was and he joined the restorationists so here we see the show touch on a theme it's touched on a few times before which is we see these never-ending conflicts good guys become bad guys all in the name of things that their ancestors did because when you see this you totally understand why Grisha wants to fight back why he wants to restore Eldia to its original state he was oppressed horribly his sister was murdered in cold blood eaten by dogs but is he going too far the whole reason the nation of Marley rose up is because they were being oppressed by Eldia to begin with so that's just something that's very potent in this episode the idea of good guys becoming bad evil be getting more evil oppressors becoming oppressed so we see that more in this episode than we've seen in other ones Grisha has a meeting with other restorationists and he tells them that apparently the history they've all learned from the nation of Marley is false he claims that Ymir Fritz the one who originally gained the power of the Titans from the devil use that power for good she cultivated the lands bridged mountains made the nation great and we have reason to doubt this is true because the person that Grisha met in his doctor's office he's surprised that Grisha knows all this he asks him you know you're able to read this ancient language so easily and Grisha says no I still haven't deciphered most of it and then they ask well how do you know the truth is well because I believe in our founder Ymir I believe we are the chosen children of God so he may be lying here and that's sort of ironic because earlier in the episode when he witnessed the mustached man tell his parents that Grisha's sister was killed in an accident he tells his parents the man was lying he was lying because it was convenient for him and you can tell Grisha was very angered by that fact but we can see over the years he started to become corrupt and now he's using lies to rally this group to fight for him then Dana Fritz shows up she was sent by the informant that's working with the Marlians and she is the last or the the last descendant of royal blood the last descendant of Ymir Fritz that's still left in the Marli nation she explains that the King of Eldian when he left to the island of paradise he brought with him the founding titan and they decide they need to go to the island of paradise to get that founding titan back and they realize that the nation of Marli is going to be trying to do the same thing so they need it to get there first we also learn that underneath the island of paradise there are fossil fuels so the nation of Marli has even more motivation to get there to power all their new technology we see images of airplanes and other tools of war so the restorationists now led by Aaron's father Grisha come up with a plan at this point Grisha and Dina have wed and they have a son named Zeke right off the bat you recognize that name as the beast Titan so you figure this is not going to go very well for them so Grisha and Dina have this child Zeke and they decide that they're going to train Zeke to become essentially a spy they decide he's going to join Marli and fight from within now one a couple of interesting things to note here one we see a photograph taken of Grisha Dina and Zeke so we find out that the portrait we saw in the last episode was Grisha Aaron's father and the beast Titan as a child who would have guessed that seeing that picture last episode we also see Zeke playing with a monkey doll so you wonder if maybe he had an affinity for for a simians and he had some say in what form his Titan ultimately took hopefully we'll find out more on that in future episodes they explained to Zeke what they need him to do we need you to be a spy we need to train you and he says okay I understand but you can see his eyes are wide he doesn't look good so when he says that you have a feeling this may not go the way we want it to very shortly after that that Zeke turns on his parents it's explained that he does this to save himself and his grandparents so he turns his parents in now why did he do this they don't give us a lot of motivation at least not explicitly in the episode itself and I am partly critical of the episode for that this goes back to what I said earlier where I really wish they took their time with this this could have been a very tense thing to watch where you wonder if Zeke will turn or if he'll support his parents but it's within five to ten seconds he turns on them my thought is that it's been established already that the nation of Marley basically brainwashes you so you get the feeling that he's been it's been hammered into his head since childhood this story that the Eldians are evil the nation of Marley rose up you even see Grisha and Dina explain to him everything you've been told is a lie I think it's hard for a kid to accept that so it was a little foolish for them to think one conversation is going to flip this kid from being loyal to Marley to suddenly being loyal to Eldia so I think that explains why he turned on them from there Grisha wakes up at the island of Paradise he's on the wall about to be tossed over the wall and we learn what happens when you're captured and sent to Paradise we see that Grisha's hands are bandaged up and bloodied quick flashback tells us that he was tortured and it's implied his fingers were cut off as they questioned him so it's a little bit gruesome kind of glad we only heard that and didn't actually see any finger removal so they put him on top of the wall and what they do to you here is they inject you with some of that Titan serum kick you over the wall and then you turn into a Titan so we actually learn where all the Titans are coming from on this island and it we should also note here that just about every Titan that shows up so when they inject people throw them over the wall they turn into Titans I recognized most of them I can't place all of them exactly but one of them the old man Titan seasons ago is the one who ate Eren before we found out that he is a Titan another of these Titans also looked very familiar which we'll get to in a minute while we're on top of the wall here a couple of familiar characters show up the two men that caught Grisha and Fey at the beginning of the episode are there the guy with the mustache the one who murdered Grisha's sister is there with his buddy we learn a little bit about this moustached man apparently he's kind of a psycho to put it lightly he clearly takes pleasure in turning these people into Titans at one point one man is begging crying begging for his life this is the man that Grisha met at the hospital the man who introduced him to the restorationists so the man with the mustache kicks that guy over the wall doesn't turn him into a Titan but lets him run and lets all the other Titans chase after him to likely eat him when Grisha recognizes the moustached man as the one who murdered his daughter he asks him why he does this and the man actually answers him and in summary he says because it's interesting he says people actually want to see cruelty we should live thinking this might be the last day we've got which that's actually good advice of everything he said that was kind of the one good thing he says you know carpe diem live every day like it could be your last but then he goes on to say it was educational having my son's dogs eat your sister so I wouldn't take too many life lessons from this guy that's some some life advice brought to you by one take then Dina is brought there Grisha's wife we see is also a prisoner and just before she's injected with Titan serum and pushed over the wall she looks to Grisha and says no matter what form I take I will come and find you and then when she's pushed over that wall and turns into a Titan we recognize that Titan as the one from way back when from episode one Dina Fritz Grisha's wife is the one who ate Aaron's mom which is just one of many insane revelations in this episode she says that she's going to find Grisha she does which implies that the Titans maybe have some subconscious drive she wanted to find him even in Titan form she eventually did in a very tragic way so clearly a lot to unpack and this is only about halfway through the episode but just one thing I'll react to is we've known for a long time now or at least it's been very heavily implied for a while now that Titans are human or used to be human and when we first learned that I assumed it's similar to a zombie movie right you get bit or something happens to you which turns you into a mindless Titan and what we learn in this episode is far more interesting than that we see all this backstory there's so much more to the origins of these Titans and I found it to be a little bit rushed in the explanation but overall a satisfying explanation especially when you add on the ironic tragic twist behind Dina's character right after that transformation we see Aaron wake up in a cell we find out that him and Mikasa have been imprisoned because of the way they went against Levi when he was trying to resurrect Erwin and we find out that everything we've been watching this episode was dreams that Eren was having and my interpretation of this we learned a little while ago that while in Titan form Eren ate Grisha his own father and we also learned that when you do that you can absorb memories from the person that you consumed so I'm assuming here that Eren is reliving some of his father's memories because of that and maybe it's been sort of unlocked by finding that diary one random thought it took me a second to recognize Mikasa she didn't have the scarf on and she had just woken up so her hair was kind of messy so interesting new look I know it wasn't intentional but maybe something she should try out so we go back into flashback mode Grisha is on top of the wall he just watched Dina turn into a Titan and the mustached man is about to push Grisha off the wall and I should say the last couple of episodes we've had some very satisfying moments of triumph we saw them take down the armored Titan we saw them take down the colossal Titan we saw Levi slice up the beast Titan and do a lot of damage there I thought this episode you know what they've given us enough triumphs we're not going to get one this episode the mustached man and his friend are about to push Grisha off the wall he's screaming he's crying and then the mustached man's friend it turns on him pushes him off the wall and we see him about to get eaten by a Titan and we hear it off screen and usually the sound is disgusting but in this case it was beautiful because the man deserved it and it turns out his friend is the informant working for the restorationist the informant known as the owl he helps Grisha up and tells him remember Grisha this is how we turn into Titans and he slices his hand open in emotion we've seen many times before turns into a very badass looking Titan kills a bunch of the marley police people breaks a boat in half and saves Grisha so I mentioned earlier that one of the themes that come back to in this episode is the oppressed becoming the oppressors good people becoming evil they touch on that very explicitly here again Grisha asks the mustached man if he has any remorse and just so I stopped calling him the mustached man I'll say his name is gross so he asks gross if he feels any remorse and gross goes into his whole spiel about how it's interesting to watch dogs eat people and how cruelty is great and all that and then he turns to Grisha and asks what were you as the Eldians planning to do to marley don't you feel any remorse so he basically says to him you were going to do to us what we're doing to you and then he gets eaten so overall thoughts on the episode I keep saying this but I've been absolutely loving this season I'll say this episode of the last three or four is probably my least favorite even though I liked it quite a lot it gave a lot of very satisfying answers to questions we've been asking for years the problem is that it gave us so much information in such a short span of time that I felt it took away some of the emotional impact of what we saw here some of it really landed I would say the last few minutes of the episode Grisha on the wall his friend showing up and getting pushed off the edge dina showing up and turning out to be the Titan which will ultimately eat Grisha's future wife Erin's mother that stuff worked really well but everything in the first 10 to 15 minutes that should have had an impact was sort of overshadowed by me just trying to process everything that was going on so I love the answers they gave but I wish they gave them over the course of two three maybe four episodes so I'm hoping that they've given us this info dump and now I'm hoping they'll take their time a little bit I don't know if we'll be seeing more flashback or if now we'll be going back to Erin and the rest of the gang but I can't wait to find out looking forward to the next episode and thank you for watching if you enjoyed this recap make sure to subscribe to our channel and hit the little bell icon to make sure you get notifications whenever we release more videos like this one thanks for watching