Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!

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Ask any parent, even completely mundane admissions interviews are stressful. School admissions interviews are nowadays mostly the domain of college applicants and the ultrawealthy, but they used to be more common. And as with anything involving both parents and teachers, they are nerve-wracking for all involved. The Forgers, though, aren’t just any parents. We don’t actually explicitly learn if they pass the interview for Anya to get in to the prestigious Eden Academy or not in this episode, but let’s say the forecast is positive. With one…minor exception.

Before the interview itself, the Forgers—along with dozens of other hopeful families—must make a first impression on their way through the academy’s courtyard and to the halls where the interviews are being held. Even this early on, the academy has eyes on them. Recurring character Henry Hendersson (Kazuhiro Yamaji) makes his debut here as one of the school’s housemasters. Hendersson observes the Forgers, along with the other families, from a tower overlooking the courtyard, and we instantly get a pretty good idea of his character. He’s an odd man, obsessed with his personal ideal of “elegance”, but despite what may be easy to assume, he is not the antagonist of this episode. It only gains one of those in its second half.

First, though? Cattle stampede.

Yes, in what I am convinced simply must be a Revolutionary Girl Utena reference, a stampede of random livestock breaks out in the courtyard. Why does Eden Academy have a farmhouse? How did the animals break out of it? Who knows! Stop asking such silly questions. What’s really important that Yor takes out the leader of the herd with, ahem, “yoga techniques.”

^{Golfing! Wait, wrong series.}

Also, the Forger family changes outfits twice over the course of this first half of the episode, once when helping a little boy who’s fallen into an open storm runoff(!) and then again after the cattle attack. Mr. Hendersson is first impressed, and then slightly terrified by all this.

The interview itself is of course the episode’s real focal point. For the most part, it goes well. Hendersson is joined by two other interviewers; the mild-mannered Walter Evans, and this episode’s true antagonist, a vindictive, recently divorced, woman-hating jackass named Murdoch Swan.

The interview mostly goes according to plan. Anya professes to hobbies such as “going to moozeums” and “eating the opera,” and calls her father “a spy-cialist in mental health.” Loid and Yor convincingly recite their canned backstories about meeting at a tailor shop (which is, to both’s benefit, mostly true). Anya even adorably says that she’d give both of her parents “a perfect 100 points,” and that she wants to be with them forever. All seems to be going very well.

And then Swan asks this.

And Anya starts crying. Which makes perfect sense when you remember that she’s a small child being bullied by bitter, snide snake in the grass who takes out his frustrations with his own personal failings on other people. The situation, shall we say, escalates. Loid barely restrains himself from clocking Swan directly in the face—and smashes a nearby mosquito hard enough to crack a hardwood table in two in the process—to say nothing of Yor, who genuinely looks ready to kill the man.

^{Yor Forger in the process of figuring out, in real time, how to murder a man with a vase and flowers.}

About the only thing that stays her hand is Loid taking his “fake” family and simply leaving. His parting remark, something to the effect of not being interested in a school that bullies children as part of its educational system, would be cutting if Swan was the sort to be hurt by such things. But perhaps predictably, he doesn’t really care. (Original mangaka Tatsuya Endou deserves a lot of credit here, Swan is exquisitely hateable.) But this stain on the academy’s honor is enough to piss off Hendersson, who, after the Forgers depart, finally gives Swan what’s coming to him.

^{Elegantly done.}

The episode basically ends here, with a tearful Anya apologizing that she couldn’t do better at the interview. All three Forgers are now worried about the future of their family, and it’s only the knowledge that Hendersson was on their side during this whole mess that prevents this from being an out and out downer of an ending. I called the forecast positive in the opening paragraph because I am quite sure that the Forgers will be fine, but they don’t know that yet. Their concern for each other is sweet. (Frankly, it trumps what I’ve seen from many “real” families in my day, but that’s another conversation altogether.)

We will find out next week, of course, if Anya’s chances of getting into Eden Academy are really as dashed as they all think. Until then, anime fans.

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