WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Chapter #128 of Attack on Titan, by Hajime Isayama, Dezi Sienty and Alex Ko Ransom, available in English from Kodansha now.
Attack on Titan is no stranger to Easter eggs. Just recently, Chapter #124 featured a Titan that could only have been based on Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul's slick lawyer, Saul Goodman, played by Bob Odenkirk. Now, in the manga's latest, it seems like mangaka Hajime Isayama may have had a certain time-traveling cyborg on the brain while writing/drawing Chapter #128.
Currently, an Eldian/Marleyan alliance made up of Mikasa, Armin, Hange, Levi, Jean, Connie, Reiner, a resurrected Annie, and others, is gearing up to take down Eren, who has harnessed the power of the Founder, Ymir, to go on a genocidal warpath. By now, Eren and his legion of Wall Titans have already marched across the sea and onto Marleyan soil, meaning that those who oppose him -- humanity's last hope -- need to commandeer flying ships to catch up to him. The problem is, the Jeagerist cult that has sprung up around Eren and his half-brother Zeke have the harbor under their control. They also have representatives from Eldia's ally nation, the Azumbito, held captive.
It's during this rescue mission to extract the Azumbito that Isayama invokes James Cameron's iconic sci-fi film series. When Hange, Mikasa, Jean and the Marleyan military leader-turned-Eldian-ally, Theo Magath, arrive to bring the Azumbito to safety, Magath tells them to head down to the basement, adding to their formidable and distrusting leader, Kiyoto: "Come with me if you want to live!!"
That endlessly quotable line was used first by John Connor in The Terminator when rescuing Sarah Connor from Arnold Schwarzenegger's titular, robo killer, and then again -- more famously -- in Terminator 2: Judgement Day, the second entry in the Terminator franchise. Though Attack on Titan and Terminator have very little in common other than slotting nicely into the bleak, dystopian subgenre, it's interesting that the line is used in both Isayama's manga and Cameron's T2 by characters who go from bad to good, and spoken to women who have a key role to play in reshaping their respective, endangered world's future.