‘Attack on Titan’ Season 3 Shares New Erwin Image

Attack on Titan fans are fixated on a new preview image of Commander Erwin Smith, taken from the upcoming season 3, episode 3.

Just two weeks in, Attack on Titan season 3 is already a minefield of drama and intrigue. As the days trickle by between episodes, fans are clinging to any teaser they can get, including this new screen shot of a scowling, determined Commander Erwin.

The image shows Erwin’s face mostly masked in shadow. His brows are creased in an expression somewhere between concentration and anger, and his eyes are shimmering a bright blue. The commander appears to be in the middle of a speech, and at least three men behind him stand watching and listening.

Erwin had very little to do in last week’s episode, though a few events set him up to take a more active role this week. The commander is still under the watchful eye of the Military Police, but he has given instructions to Levi, Hange and the others from afar. He has tried to help them to protect Eren and Historia, and now that they’ve been kidnapped, to rescue them.

This effort may get him more than he bargained for in episode 3. According to the preview at the end of the last episode, Erwin will face some repressed memories when he learns the truth about Historia.

“It’s a secret big enough to change the kingdom,” said the preview narrator. “Once the secret is known to Erwin, he remembers a past of his own.”

The upcoming episode is titled “Old Story,” suggesting that we may got a glimpse at the commander’s origin. However, we still do not know how that will effect the larger conspiracy story that is unfolding.

Recently, it has been revealed that the small, soft-spoken cadet known as Krista is actually Historia Reiss, the illegitimate daughter of a noble lord from the interior. On top of that, Sannes finally admitted in the midst of torture that the Reiss family is the true royal line, with the right to rule over everything within the walls.

Erwin’s history could be somehow intertwined with this cover-up, though there is no telling how. Last month, the series creator, Hajime Isayama, wrote a blog post about season 3, explaining that it will have an overall faster pace than the same the story arc did in the original manga. He felt that the chapters of that time period were a storytelling low point, and the anime affords him a chance to restructure the story more to his liking.

“Honestly, it’s like I was out of gas,” he wrote, according to a translation by Anime News Network. Isayama felt that the part of the story the anime is now tackling was too slow in its original form, so he worked with scriptwriter Hiroshi Seko and director Tetsuro Araki to speed it up.

“I requested that we reform it into a suitable scale for the role of the story,” he explained. He called this a more “idealized” version of the same epic tale.

Attack on Titan is available on Hulu, Crunchyroll and Funimation, and new episodes go up every Monday at 2 p.m. ET in the U.S.