The other characters in-story, however, don’t. We know that Rachel deliberately pushed Bam out of the shinsu bubble. This creates a fascinating–if nasty–contrast. “We couldn’t find Bam’s body.”īack in the present, Bam’s companions find themselves successfully having passed the test, but without their group’s guiding light.

Any system that can drive someone to this is a terrifying one indeed. We don’t need to see every gear of a clock to know it ticks, and we do not need to know every aspect of the Tower’s politics to know that there’s sinister machinery at work here. Nonetheless, Tower of God’s finale excels at humanizing a character who by all rights should be outright despicable. It’s still not totally clear by what, as her desire to be a shinsu user lacks wider in-universe context. Rachel here is a character driven to desperation. On the contrary, a lot of it makes her look even worse. Crucially though, none of this actually seems engineered to make Rachel sympathetic. Bam has everything she wants, most of all shinsu manipulation, and she, by sharp contrast, has nothing. Over the course of several more lengthy flashbacks, Rachel’s desperation comes into sharp focus. Then, and only then, can she properly climb the Tower. She prostrates herself at Headon’s feet, and out of, as he puts it “respect for her boundless stupidity”, he makes an exception. Rachel is transparently desperate, something very unlike the calm demeanor we’ve gotten used to over the rest of the show’s run. And, retroactively, in the whole series.Īnother important aspect here is the way this conversation flows. If we take Headon at his word–and we’re given every reason to here–these few sentences are the crux of Rachel’s entire characterization in this episode. Her real desire, he says, is to be special. Headon rebukes her, countering that she wants to become a star. Rachel claims that her reason for climbing the Tower is to see the stars. More important than these literal details though, is a very telling exchange between Rachel and Headon. “You must end Bam’s story with your own hands.” When Rachel was stabbed in the back, he died instead. He was, we are told, a sort of substitute. When even this doesn’t stop her complaints, Headon grants her a ‘weapon’ the oni warrior who abruptly vanished several episodes ago. There she sits, invisible, as Bam completes the test. This amuses Headon much less, and he binds her in a shinsu prison. She refuses to even try, complaining that the test is impossible. A monstrous white eel, a steel ball, the whole nine. He offers her the same test we saw Bam conquer in the very first episode. Bam, not her, is who the Tower intended to summon. Headon flatly explains to Rachel that her presence in the Tower is a mistake. RELATED: TOWER OF GOD English Dub Cast Talk Working From Home and More The first scene that’s new to us is Rachel meeting Headon, the rabbit-like Tower administrator who has been absent for the majority of the season.

Contrasting these scenes, many of which we’ve already seen, with her internal monologue as they happened. Each of these is interlaced with her narration. Instead, we get Rachel’s story up ’til now, as told through flashbacks. We do not open on any direct continuation from last week. We don’t get all of the answers here–and there’s a reason for that–but we get a lot. It’s an astounding peek into the mind of a very broken person. Rachel is here elevated from our hero’s raison d’être-turned-traitor into a stunningly complex “fake hero” motivated, seemingly, by pure jealousy. A good amount of it is dedicated to an exploration of Rachel’s character, and what an exploration it is. Much of the finale is flashback, some of it all the way back to events that occurred in the first episode. But speaking personally, I think it’s cemented Tower of God as the single strongest anime of the Spring 2020 season. It is an unconventional finale, to say the least. But it does prove that Tower of God itself can be a surprisingly thoughtful source of character and societal study. Tower of God did not need to prove that shonen anime can be cerebral. It’s never an easy thing to admit you underestimated a series. This recap contains spoilers for Tower of God episode “Tower of God”.ĭisclaimer: Pre-release screening and screenshot materials for this recap were provided for GGA by Crunchyroll.

Tower of god anime ending