The Cutprice Guignol

So, week three, and it’s time we really blew our minds with a good twist. Nothing beats a twist when it’s pulled off with real panache: I wrote about this in a previous post regarding How to Get Away with Murder last year, but great twists are hard to come by, difficult to pull off, and yet every show you watch is likely frantically trying to conjure up something from that elusive alchemy that’s going to get everyone talking. Sometimes, as The Walking Dead proved last year, commitment to a bad twist can all but derail your entire show and leave your viewer base feeling cheated and disillusioned. But a good twist, done right, can change the course of a show for the better – and I think there’s no better example of that than Attack on Titan – season one, episode five, First Battle: The Struggle for Trost, Part One. I feel like it goes without saying, but there are obviously spoilers ahead for the first season of AoT, a show which is worth going into spoiler-free if you haven’t seen it already.

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