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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Spy x Family returns to form this week after a rather poor showing last week. It helps that the show is here operating in one of its simplest and most effective modes; “Anya tries to galaxy brain a way into Damian’s good graces and fails spectacularly.”

The only real unfortunate thing is that this means that there isn’t terribly much to actually say about this episode. It’s funny, certainly, but there are only so many ways I can commend deft execution of simple jokes like “Anya makes a miscalculation in one of her little schemes and then makes a shocked face and says ‘Gong!’ out loud.” They are legitimately amusing, but at this point they’re fairly expected.

The more interesting material here comes from two specific characters; Damian himself, and Becky, Anya’s little friend whose parents are, if I remember properly, arms dealers? Something like that. In any case, Anya tries to pull this “oops, I dropped a cool picture” trick for the second time in as many cours, and instead what happens is that Becky sees the photo, and instead of being enamored with Bond, Anya’s big cool dog, she promptly falls head over tiny heels for Loid.

^{Becky reveals herself to have the same taste in men as about half of my Twitter mutuals.}

The actual plot, about Anya trying to help Damian make a paper-mache griffin in an arts and crafts class so he can impress his dad, is basically just a vehicle for more gags and funny faces. It’s a decent vehicle, though, and on Damian’s part we get some further insight into just how detached his father actually is from his life. At one point, he fantasizes about his dad admiring the griffin and praising him for “honoring the family name.” Later, after school, he stands visibly apart from his classmates, talking to his butler Jeeves (really) on the phone. He asks his butler what his father thought of what went down during the initiation—you probably remember that episode—and Jeeves audibly struggles to come up with something. It doesn’t really work, because Damian knows full well that his father doesn’t think of him at all. It’s honestly pretty sad! It’s strange that Spy x Family handles this sort of “serious material” so much better than it does any other kind, but the series is pretty good at it, and I hope going back to this well several times means that some resolution is on the horizon somewhere.

After this plot runs its course, the episode again features a shorter B-segment. This is mostly about Sylvia Sherwood, Loid’s handler, and is mostly an exercise in some incredibly stone-faced humor. It’s a pretty fun one, so I’m glad it made it into the episode. The real punchline comes when Sylvia asks Loid for a report on his mission, and….she gets a different answer than what she probably expected.

There’s also an even shorter C-segment after the end credits, but it’s basically just a retread of last week’s Yor Food gags, and is thus not really worth discussing at any length. There’s a Yuri episode on the docket up next; we’ll see what the future holds then, anime fans.

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