Hero

The suicide charge of the Scout recruits crashes against Zeke's bombardment. Marlo Freudenberg calls one last volley of smoke flares before a rock takes his life, his final thoughts drifting to Hitch. Zeke wipes out the survivors and mockingly pities them, then discovers the Titans flanking him lying dead. A grappling hook punches into the Beast Titan's shoulder and Levi Ackermann erupts from the smoke screen the charge created. He shreds the Titan's arm with a spiraling cut, blinds it, drops it, and rips Zeke out of the nape, jamming a blade into his mouth. Recalling Erwin, Levi means to keep Zeke alive as fodder for the Titan injection, but Pieck's Cart Titan snatches Zeke away in its jaws, and Zeke sics his remaining Titans on the nearly spent captain. Floch, having survived the charge, wanders the field of corpses calling for anyone alive.

Inside the district, Armin notices the Colossal Titan has visibly thinned since the fight began; its attacks devour its own mass, exactly as Hange once theorized. He sends the rest of the squad against Reiner and climbs to Eren's inert Titan, waking his friend with a blade thrust and a plan. Eren tumbles from the Wall and plays dead while Armin anchors himself to the Colossal Titan's teeth, the one part its steam cannot consume. Bertholdt, baffled that the boy will not let go, keeps venting until Armin's skin, hair, and clothes char away. Entrusting his dream of the sea to Eren, Armin finally falls.

Meanwhile Jean's decoy plan against Reiner falters when Sasha is knocked aside, but Hange reappears with a Thunder Spear, blowing the Armored Titan's jaw open so Mikasa can fire the last spear down its throat, blasting Reiner out of his nape. Bertholdt turns to collect Eren and finds only a hardened shell where the body lay: the fall and Armin's roasting were cover for Eren to seal the breach in the Wall and circle behind on ODM gear. Eren slices him from the nape, and the Colossal Titan crumples. Dragging his captive past the rooftops, Eren remembers how a boy who never ran from bullies refused to call a beating a loss, and tells Armin's blackened body that he was always the real hero.

The recruits' diversionary charge ends in near-total slaughter, killing Marlo among many others, but it masks Levi's approach and lets him single-handedly cripple the Beast Titan and extract Zeke.

Pieck's Cart Titan rescues Zeke before Levi can finish him, and Zeke's leftover Titans converge on Levi, who is down to his final pair of blades.

Hange survives the earlier blast and returns mid-battle, opening the Armored Titan's jaw so Mikasa's Thunder Spear can knock Reiner out of action.

Armin sacrifices himself as living bait, letting the Colossal Titan's steam burn him while it exhausts its mass; Eren secretly plugs the Wall breach with his hardening power and ambushes Bertholdt, pulling him from the nape and ending the battle for Shiganshina.

Adapting the chapters Promise, Hero, and Cleaver from the Return to Shiganshina arc, the episode aired in Japan on May 27, 2019 and in English on June 22, 2019. Direction was shared by Akitoshi Yokoyama, Yôko Kanamori, and Tetsurō Araki, with Hiroshi Seko scripting and Wit Studio and Production I.G producing.

On release it earned a flat 10/10 on IMDb, briefly standing as the site's highest-rated television episode before settling at 9.9, level with Perfect Game, That Day, and Midnight Sun and behind only the Breaking Bad episode "Ozymandias." When the score dipped, fans allegedly retaliated by review-bombing the Bluey episode "Sleepytime" down to 9.8.