Tag: Loid

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Let’s Watch SPY X FAMILY Episode 25 – “First Contact” (SEASON FINALE)

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

Spy x Family is, first and foremost, a slice of life series. Its focus is on comedy and on character interactions. Anything more serious is a secondary concern, at the end of the day. But! The fact that it does have a plot at all still puts it in a rather different space narratively than, say, something like Do It Yourself!! or BOCCHI THE ROCK!, to provide two examples from this very season. Things eventually circle back around to that narrative core. That’s where episodes like “First Contact” come from; they are quiet, slow, and subtle affairs, but they’re not boring. Indeed, the entire second half of this episode is ridiculously tense. Moreso than any scene since the bit with the bomb dogs back in the earlier parts of this cour. Through it all, Spy x Family makes things look effortless, not unlike Loid himself.

Speaking of Loid, he’s mostly the main character in this episode, which we get a demonstration of right off the bat in a scene where he’s snooping around Eden Academy’s school grounds just prior to a staff-and-parents meetup and creates a mental map of them in his head (complete with a cool wireframe effect.) But the first half actually focuses on Anya, who we should take note of as well.

It feels safe to say that Anya, with her bottomless well of silly reaction faces, general adorability, and strong design, is Spy x Family‘s most popular character by a decent margin. There’s also her charming dynamic with Damian, whose ongoing inner struggles to win the approval of his father have remained one of this cour’s more compelling subplots. It’s brought to the forefront here, and Anya, perhaps surprisingly, helps with that, scheming as she does to help her father by “meeting the evil boss” (recall that this’d be Damian’s father Donovan, Loid’s target). This launches a miniature web of half-misunderstandings and concealments, a spin on the classic “stupid people keeping obvious secrets from each other” school of comedic setups.

To wit; Anya’s great ploy to give Damian the confidence to confront his father directly is to proudly proclaim that she trusts her papa, which she demonstrates by saying she even shows him her “bad tests” and such. Anya’s conversational through-line here is shaky enough that she even confuses herself, ending this little pep talk with a flat “what we were talking about, again?” I have to admit, it got a genuine out-loud laugh out of me.

Loid’s plan, meanwhile, is to engineer a situation where he can talk to Donovan directly, using Anya punching Damian dead in his face way back in episode six as a pretext. It’s just one part of a fairly complicated scheme where Loid plants a fake sheep keychain, banks on Damian’s better nature to pick it up and hang onto it, “happens” to stumble over to Damian and his friends while “looking” for it, takes it back, and then attempts to build a rapport with Donovan by apologizing to him for Anya’s behavior. (Damian is only even meeting up with his father because he called his older brother Demetrius to ask him about it. And Loid only knows that because Anya read Damian’s mind and then happened to blab about it while he overheard. Quite a web being weaved here.) Loid is on the ball throughout, and while it’s no great feat to pull the wool over a group of kids’ eyes, Donovan himself is a very different story.

In general, Donovan Desmond (Takaya Hashi) is a grimly charismatic character, around whom the show actively warps. The background music shifts into an upright, militaristic march (and later, lead-heavy piano work). The man himself has eyes as big as headlights and is surrounded by a clutch of black-suited bodyguards, and the show’s art noticeably sharpens slightly in his presence. Every cue is crystal clear; Donovan Desmond is not a man to be fucked with.

Yet, fuck with him is exactly what Loid Forger does. In particular, I love the visual that pops up when Loid slides into the conversation, knowingly interrupting Damian’s rare meeting with his father. A literal idea web pops up, a giving us a very visual peek into Loid’s mind as he actively calculates the best way to get a foothold—any kind of foothold—with Donovan.

He does succeed, but the entire conversation is tense as hell. Again, probably the tensest moment in the series in nearly an entire cour. It’s cut by only a tiny bit of levity when Damian, in the midst of Loid’s prodding, confesses that he’d like to be friends with Anya. Cute!

Don’t feel bad for Damain about his meeting with his dad being interrupted, either. After Loid departs, both his and Anya’s earlier encouragement actually inspire Damian to tell his dad about what he’s been up to. In response, all he really gets is a “well done,” but for a boy who clearly almost never sees his father, that much is enough, a rare genuine moment of human connection brought out by advice from two people who are part of a family that is, in a lot of ways, much more real and genuine than Damian’s. Maybe he will find his own way to true connection—with his father, or with someone else—in due time. I hope so, the poor kid deserves better.

On that note, Spy x Family‘s wildly successful first season ends. I’d make some kind of grand denouement here, but the year-end list is only a few days away from starting up, so I’m sure you can wait until then. I will just say this much for now; through Spy x Family’s ups and downs, I’ve never stopped caring about the Forger family and their friends, and I am excited to see what else is in store for them in the future.

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All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

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Let’s Watch SPY X FAMILY Episode 24 – “The Role of a Mother & Wife”

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

Today, on Spy x Family, Loid and Yor have what is quite possibly the first honest conversation in their entire relationship. Does it work, as either a story beat or a piece of earned character development? Eh, yes and no.

This is, if you were curious, still about Fiona. Yor’s hung up on the idea that Loid might have someone else in his life, and might be eager to get rid of her, since she is, in her own mind, not a great parent. (Exactly why she thinks this is only explained in broad terms, given that she calls herself a “musclehead” and similar.) Loid knows trouble might be brewing because of some gossiping old women outside his apartment complex (a recurring fixture in this series, really). His solution? A bar date. Which, itself, does not go as planned.

Yor actually tries to talk herself into being okay with the idea of Loid leaving her for Fiona. The fact that this isn’t actually what’s happening is more or less irrelevant. She gets so into her own head that she tries to break up with Loid first. When she can’t actually make herself say it, she drinks enough that she starts sloshing and slurring her words. (Somewhere in here, Loid tries to 10,000 IQ his way out of the situation and gets kicked in the chin for his trouble. Not a good idea, man!) Trying to break up doesn’t work, of course. Because whether she realizes it or not, she’s genuinely in love with the man and loves her current life as his wife.

They eventually patch things up, in a moment that is genuinely pretty sincere. During their conversation, Loid ends up drawing an analogy between how safe he felt as a boy when his mother would sing him to sleep, and how safe Anya feels with Yor. It’s sweet, and it’s a nice reminder that these two idiots do, in fact, love each other, even if they’re still not really cognizant of it yet, necessarily. This is all extremely hetero, mind you, but straight people deserve good romances too. I’d say this episode is one. Its first half is, at any rate.

Yes, this is another episode with two distinct, largely unrelated halves. The B-plot here is about Anya, who, to be fair, hasn’t had a spotlight episode in a few weeks at this point. While I wouldn’t blame anyone for being a touch tired of The Anya Show, this is one of the better such segments. Mostly because rather than revolving around Anya’s ongoing quest to gain eight Stella stars, it instead centers on her relationship with Becky, a hitherto largely undeveloped character who gets a bit more depth and development here than she’s previously had.

The premise is simple, if silly. Becky wants to take Anya shopping, so she—the heir to a fashion fortune, remember—rents out an entire department store. What initially threatens to be a little dry soon turns out to be mostly an excuse to draw both Anya and Becky wearing ridiculous outfits. Those that Becky tries on largely remain within the realm of traditional cuteness. Anya’s, meanwhile, are so goofy that they quickly go from “cute” to “avant garde.” (Her outfits are also soundtracked by a pleasantly breezy pop song. A nice touch.)

More importantly; it’s genuinely sweet to see Anya getting along so well with Becky, given that she’s Anya’s only real friend. Anya eventually buys Becky and herself a pair of matching sheep keychains. A flashback from Becky’s butler provides some important context here—Becky struggled with making friends when she was younger, being prone to haughtiness and with an inability to hold her tongue. Anya, as perhaps the first friend her own age that Becky actually respects as an equal, is a very important person to her, whether or not she’d ever say so.

This week’s Spy x Family is, on the whole, a low-key and relatively character-driven affair. Very different than the tennis-fueled adrenaline rush of the last couple episodes, but solid nonetheless.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

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Let’s Watch SPY X FAMILY – Episode 21 & 22

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

Her code name is “Nightfall.” Alias Fiona Frost. Real name unknown, and unknowable. She is a spy; an international woman of mystery; a phantom in the night. A cloak, a dagger, a whisper on the wind.

She has a huge crush on her coworker, and she’s dealing with it really, really badly.

Fiona Frost (Ayane Sakura), is the first major new character to be introduced to Spy x Family since Bond near the start of this season. On the one hand, she plays into a pretty disappointing pattern of SpyFam not giving its female characters much depth outside of their relationship to Loid. (Other than Anya, who, as a girl rather than an adult woman, occupies a very different place in the narrative just inherently.)

On the other hand; this is still a romcom at the end of the day. While the aforementioned self-imposed narrative constraint remains a handicap, it is at least possible for Spy x Family to pull off some interesting tricks from within that framework. Those tricks are enough for Spy x Family‘s better episodes in this vein; it can leverage them, both for laughs and into actual character development.

We’re introduced to Fiona in a formal context. Her handler informs her that she’ll be working with Twilight for their next mission. Immediately, we get a sense for her character in that her mind begins to race with ways by which she might replace Yor—who she has not even met yet, at this point—as Loid’s “fake” wife. The message is clear from the episode’s opening shots; Fiona is catastrophically down bad, and it’s not going to get better any time soon.

Posing as one of Loid’s hospital colleagues, she shows up unannounced to the Forger household. There, she plans to try to convince Loid to abandon Yor, and take her as a wife instead. The fact that this will be a huge problem toward Operation Strix itself (which she’s fully aware of) does not seem to much bother her. In any case, it’s a doomed cause from the start simply because Loid isn’t actually there when she arrives. Instead, she spends the episode’s first few minutes trying to psyche out Yor, only for her verbal ace in the hole—some unkind comment that starts with “Dr. Forger is always saying his wife is–“—to be interrupted by Loid, Anya, and Bond arriving home from their walk.

Thus, the game changes; she switches to talking with Twilight in code (a very stupid-funny sequence where we learn that WISE agents know how to “make their mouth movements not match what they’re actually saying”, so they can communicate via lip-reading), and directly tries to get him to break it off with Yor.

All the while, Anya uses her mind-reading powers to instantly discern Fiona’s true motive, and is more than a little disturbed by what she sees.

Obviously, Fiona’s attempt to break up the Forger family does not work, and the fact that there’s a fake smile plastered across Loid’s face is cold comfort; she knows Twilight well enough to know that the “subtle body language” she can pick up on as a fellow agent means that he truly is happy with Yor and Anya. Of course, that does not necessarily mean she’s willing to accept it.

Fiona, thus, is something of a minorly tragic figure despite the silly manner in which the episode presents her woes. She’s shackled to the idea of loving a man who, in all senses, “belongs” to someone else. (There are solutions to this problem, but, well, I doubt polygamy is legal is Ostenia.) When she figures out that she has no immediate way to win, she immediately leaves, walking into a rainy afternoon, and into a downpour that looks positively freezing. Loid brings her an umbrella at the end of the episode, and she takes the opportunity to change tactics; she tells Twilight not to hold her down, and says that she thinks “playing house” has made him soft.

Of course, we all know that’s just her changing her angle. Which brings us to episode 22.

Fiona persisting in her pursuit of Twilight is not unexpected. What might be, though, is episode 22’s headlong dive into the world of illegal underground gambling tennis.

Yes, you read that correctly. In its twenty-second episode, Spy x Family effectively embeds an entire other anime inside it; something in the vain of Kaiji or Kakegurui crossed with a sports anime. Loid and Fiona’s mission is to play in an underground tennis tournament in order to gain access to the mansion of the man hosting it, an energy company heir and antiquities collector named Cavi Campbell. There, they’re to retrieve a rare painting. Why? Because the painting is related to a secret document known as the Zacharis Dossier, which contains such high-demand intel as “records of the East’s human experiments” and “the truth behind the West’s massacre of POWs”.

Pretty heavy stuff! Especially considering the remainder of this episode, which, other than a brief flash over to Anya and Yor, is a totally bonkers take on sports anime. If anything else within Spy x Family itself, it resembles that unhinged dodgeball episode from part one. But this is a significantly stronger commitment to the bit; the animation is wilder, the comedy a bit more dialed-in. This may, in fact, be the best episode of the second cour so far. Not in spite of its differences from the rest of the cour, but because of them. Even as details like Fiona’s motivation remain unchanged.

Things begin in relative simplicity, with Loid, who claims to merely “dabble” in tennis, laying a total shotgun smackdown against their first opponents in the tournament, despite those opponents being hardened warriors of the racket.

Things escalate from here; their second opponents are completely roided out on a mix of illegal steroids that makes them look like tennis-playing cousins of the Incredible Hulk.

By the episode’s halfway point, Loid and Fiona are subjected to some sort of weakening gas while locked in a room awaiting their final match. Their opponents, Cavi Campbell’s own kids, wield jet-powered rackets with extending whip handles and play on a court booby trapped in their favor. The entire thing is just wonderfully ridiculous, and the fact that we don’t see the conclusion of this arc here means that we’re probably in for another episode of tennis-themed madness when next episode rolls around.

Most importantly, this episode is fun the entire way through, in a way that it’s really felt like Spy x Family has lacked for a decent chunk of its second cour. If it takes a bizarre turn into sports anime weirdness to get SpyFam back in proper form, I’m all for it.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

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Let’s Watch SPY X FAMILY Episode 20 – “Investigate the General Hospital”

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

This week, Spy x Family wisely returns to what is probably its greatest stylistic asset; the fact that Anya, for the many ways in which she is not like an actual child, is, at her core, written with an authentic kiddishness that lets her carry whole scenes—or in this case, an entire episode—by herself. For being, what, five years old? She’s a hell of an actress.

Our A-plot here is pretty simple. Anya is assigned a job-shadowing project at school; she has to follow one of her parents to work and ask them a few questions as they go about their day. Initially, she asks Yor, but after an admittedly quite amusing sequence of Yor vividly imagining what “taking Anya to her job” would actually entail, she decides to ask her pa instead.

Thus begins a miniature odyssey of Anya going to the hospital that Loid practices as a therapist at. (I think this is the first confirmation we’ve gotten that he actually does go in at least occasionally to keep up appearances for his real work.) In general, this entire plot reminds me of the aquarium episode that closed out the first cour, except here, the monkey wrench is not an enemy spy organization but rather Anya herself. Predictably, she gets into all sorts of trouble at the hospital, from taking notes on what Loid is thinking rather than saying, to sneaking into a secret passage that WISE has installed in the hospital for Loid’s benefit, to stressing her papa out by dumping a bunch of toys into a therapy sandbox in an expression of pure, utter chaos.

The point is this; while Spy x Family still hasn’t really regained any sense of urgency, this plot is proof that it can at least be genuinely fun and charming. This is to say nothing of the report that Anya eventually gives when she’s back in class; a pretty acrid piece of genuine cringe comedy in an anime that doesn’t really go there that often. The mixup is nice, even if it’s not a direction I’d want SpyFam to take for very long.

The B-plot is similarly simple. Anya watches an episode of SpyWars, the in-universe cartoon she’s obsessed with, featuring a cryptogram. She becomes obsessed, and has Yor help her copy the puzzle onto paper several times. Thus begins a dead-simple bit where Anya runs up to various people—her mailman, the women who live down the hall from the Forgers, Becky, Damian, even Frankie—and exclaims “top secret!” before handing them one of the cryptograms and running away. It’s absolutely adorable, and it put a huge smile on my face. (Spare a thought for Frankie, who once again somehow manages to twist this into being convinced that Some Random Woman is in love with him.)

All in all, a resoundingly fun episode for a show that seems to finally be finding its swing again. Let’s hope that continues as we head into the final stretch of the season.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

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Let’s Watch SPY X FAMILY Episode 16 – “Yor’s Kitchen; The Informant’s Great Romance Plan”

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

I don’t like the term “mid.”

Not because things can’t be mediocre—they certainly can—but because I feel like it gets slapped down on the table as an all-purpose “I didn’t really like this and don’t feel like really explaining why” card. When most people say “mid” they can mean anything from “decent but not my thing” to “outright terrible.” Rarely will they bother to explain which they mean or why.

But, you know, I say all this, but sometimes the only adjective you can pull for something truly is “mid.” There were some good parts and some bad parts and the whole thing is kind of just not that great overall. It’s not terrible, certainly, but maybe it’s a sign of bad things to come. Or just an unusually weak spot in an otherwise fine show.

Thus, we have episode sixteen of Spy x Family, the first Yor-centric episode in quite a while and also, unfortunately, easily the least essential since the series came back from hiatus.

The episode’s basic plot is pretty simple, revolving around Yor secretly learning how to cook from her coworker Camille (remember her? She was first relevant way back in episode 2). What the episode wants to be about is the simple joy of home cooking, the knowledge that you’re preparing something for someone close to you and, in a very real way, putting your heart and soul into it.

This is all well and good, and when the episode hits its primary climax at about the 15 minute mark, it does hit well enough to feel roughly worth it. Yor ends up cooking a stew (topped with a fried egg!) of some kind for Anya and Loid, and it’s genuinely pretty cute.

But the problem is getting there. Between the start of the episode and this little story’s conclusion is a parade of iterations on what might be the most overdone joke in the entire shonen format; the classic “oh no, someone is bad at cooking and their food looks like unidentifiable purple gunk” gag.

“Twists” on the trope in this case include Yuri, Yor’s obnoxious younger brother, who of course co-stars in this episode, actually loving Yor’s terrible food because he grew up with it, and….well honestly that’s kind of it. There’s some other stuff where Yor has difficulty properly preparing ingredients because her assassin instincts kick in and she ends up essentially butchering them. It’s marginally more unique, but not really any funnier. A lot of this really just seems far too basic for something like Spy x Family, which has previously demonstrated both much stronger characterization than this and much stronger comedic chops. Why waste time on this?

Yor does, at least, get the jump on Loid in one important way here, in terms of character development. She is the first one to realize that her “fake” family now matters to her more than what it was originally a cover for, and her coming to terms with that is an easygoing kind of heartwarming that perhaps more of this episode should’ve aimed for.

So, we end up with a very weak series of gags leading up to an emotional beat that is nice but doesn’t entirely feel earned. Is that “worth” it? It’s hard to say.

But don’t worry, this is a double episode, because Yor isn’t allowed to be the protagonist of an entire 22-minute stretch of Spy x Family. That would be silly.

No, instead, the latter half of this episode is about Frankie.

Yeah.

Uncle Scruffy here spends his half of the episode trying to enlist Loid’s help in hooking up with a cigar shop employee with the mildly amusing name Monica McBride. Presumably her mother is named Molly McBride and she has two sisters named Matilda McBride and Mary McBride.

Loid’s help mostly consists of telling Frankie to be himself—he tries making a way-too-thorough conversational chart too, but, perhaps wisely, Frankie thinks using that would be weird. There are some decent gags here, like when the two are having a full-on shouting argument and a stage direction pops up onscreen to inform us that they’re actually whispering.

Also, Loid uses his disguise skills to turn into a spitting image of Monica herself. I have to say, holding this against the show is astoundingly unfair of me, but when I’m already a little cold on an episode, hitting me with the dysphoria pangs does not improve my assessment.

On the other hand, it proves that Loid Forger could have tgirl swag if he wanted to.

Naturally, Monica turns Frankie down. (Sidenote here; it would’ve been very funny for the joke instead to be that she likes little awkward fuzzballs, a sort of hairy version of an Android 18 / Krillin situation. But that would’ve put a win in Frankie’s column, which I suppose is unacceptable for some reason.) Loid then closes out the episode by making one of his little speeches about how “people like them” can’t afford to be emotionally attached to others. Sure, dude. Keep telling yourself that.

And that’s where we end for the week! Again, I don’t hate this episode or anything, but a lot of this is just not all that interesting. The more emotional moments are the highlights, but there aren’t really enough of them to bring it above mediocre. Thus, again we must turn to that dreaded descriptor; mid. This is a mid episode. If you put a gun to my head and made me score it out of ten, I’d give it an even 5.

But, hey, next week is an Anya episode, and it’s been a while since we’ve had any episodes taking place entirely at her school. Hopefully that will be fun.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

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Let’s Watch SPY X FAMILY – Episode 15

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

“Boof!”

I feel like I’ve been a bit unduly mean to Spy x Family since it came back. Not in a major or intentional way, but more just out of reflex. I made clear last week that I think Spy x Family’s most recent storyline has been hitting kind of an odd note. I more or less stand by that, but part of me feels that I just haven’t been giving the series the attention it deserves. Which is unfair, because while I’m maybe not as keen on Spy x Family as some are, it is still one of the year’s better action anime and one of its better comedy anime. That’s a solid showing twice over, and it deserves credit for that.

Either way, the whole terrorist bomb dog plot comes to its conclusion here with some amount of fanfare, but much to my own joy, this episode dials back in on the comedy that made Spy x Family so endearing in the first place. In the process, it rediscovers its inner warmth. I don’t think it’d be at all a stretch to say that this episode is the best since the show came back from its hiatus.

Let’s start with the basics. If you were worried about the cliffhanger from last week; don’t be. Loid does not shoot the dog, and in fact, he goes out of his way to make sure the dog who attacked him is fine, even managing to somehow get its bomb harness off and tossed into a nearby river, where it explodes harmlessly.

Yor also gets a brief bit of shine here. It’s perhaps not as much as I’d like, but a scene where she spin-kicks the terrorist Keith through a windshield and sends him careening into a lamppost is a pretty solid showing.

But of course, the main focus is about the dog. Not just any dog, the dog who is basically already Anya’s. With the crisis averted, Sylvia, Loid’s handler, tries to confiscate the psychic woofer while incognito as the state police.

And if you can forgive your blogger here for a moment; she looks damn good while doing it.

Anya, in a shrewd moment of using her psychic powers directly for her own benefit, throws a bit of a temper tantrum and threatens to stop going to school. Which is enough to get both Loid and Sylvia to change their tunes. There’s a touching scene in here where Sylvia remarks that Anya is a good kid, and offhandedly mentions that she had a daughter her age. The past tense isn’t remarked upon directly, but combined with her cold-blooded treatment of the terrorists in last week’s episode, this certainly implies some pretty heavy shit in Sylvia’s past. (Not that this is surprising, given her line of work.)

The rest of the episode, though, is concerned with the far more lighthearted but very important work of naming the dog, who Anya has up until this point just been calling “Mr. Dog.” (Inu-san.) Anya even assumes that the simple act of having a named dog might help her befriend Damien at school. Though, in her defense, Damien’s reaction when he asks for her dog’s name and she can’t give it to him is pretty amusing. This episode is actually a veritable harvest of Anya faces in general, which is great news for anyone who’s been missing those.

We have “Imitation Yor.”

“Thonkeng.”

“The Antihero”

“Edvard Munch’s ‘Scream'”, and many, many more!

She does settle on one eventually; late in the episode the Forgers take Anya and her new pet to a dog park. There, her dog retrieves a pair of gloves surreptitiously swiped from Anya by a different dog. Anya is reminded of an episode of Bondman, and this big pile of fur and love is given the most natural name possible; his name is Bond. Forger Bond.

He likes his martinis shaken, not furred.

And with that, the episode ends later that night, with a shot of the two having fallen asleep together. Yor remarks that Anya looks like a “little angel in [their] midst.” She is absolutely correct.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

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Let’s Watch – SPY X FAMILY Episode 14

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

War, and what people do while waging it, are terrible and depressing. This is known. Armed conflict remains a serious issue throughout the world, perhaps even moreso now than it was just a few months ago back during Spy x Family‘s first cour. Again; terrible, depressing.

The same isn’t true for Spy x Family itself. Even as we get into the meat of a pretty damn serious arc with this second episode of its second cour. Throughout this arc parts, of the story get pretty grim, but Spy x Family still cuts its most serious moments with ones that are more lighthearted. This prevents what is easily the most uncomfortably real arc of the entire anime so far from being outright suffocating, but, nonetheless, it does kind of hit a weird note, doesn’t it?

What actually happens here is pretty simple; the episode is split between a cat and mouse game between Loid’s agency and the terrorists (And eventually, just their leader, the mononymic Keith.) and, separately, Anya and the clairvoyant dog from last week trying to stop a bomb from going off.

That second part is ostensibly the “lighthearted” half of this week’s episode, but even this involves the dog having a grim vision of the near future where Loid dies in an explosion, which, obviously, Anya is desperate to avert. It says quite a bit that this is still the comparatively sillier part of the episode. Mostly due to Anya’s goofy reactions when things don’t go her way.

Loid’s half of the episode is much darker and is almost entirely devoid of humor. Perhaps the most indicative scene being one where his handler, Cynthia, interrogates Keith’s terrorist ring. Things get pretty intense!

And while that conversation is, I’m sure, written from a place of good intention, it does illustrate something of a problem with this episode.

At the end of the day, it’s excellently made, and it certainly deserves to exist in an abstract sense, but cutting so close to the gritty realities of war is dangerous for Spy x Family, which tends to work better when it’s in modes that are a little less reflective of things that actually go on in the world. (Deadly-serious dodgeball games, for example.)

More concretely, it’s a little annoying how yet again Yor is reduced to a bit player in a show she is supposed to be one of the protagonists of. It’s understandable that things here play into Loid’s specialties a little more, given the whole espionage angle of this arc, and I’m not asking Yor to start shanking people in front of her daughter, but surely, she could’ve been given a little more to do? Perhaps next week, it’s hard to say. All in all, this is a well-made but somewhat disappointing episode for me personally. If you feel differently, I’d be happy to hear why in the comments.

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All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

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Let’s Watch SPY X FAMILY Episode 13 – Project Apple

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

If it seems like Spy x Family never really left, that’s because for all intents and purposes, it basically didn’t. In practice, this episode marks the start of a second season, but on paper, what the series is doing here is a once-rare but increasingly-common split cour. Two batches of episodes considered to be part of the same “season” even though they air months apart. Confusing! But if it lets the animators rest their weary bones even a little, we should probably be accommodating.

In any case, from a plot and style point of view it definitely doesn’t feel like things have changed. Spy x Family’s second cour opens with dual plots about adopting a cute dog for Anya and preventing not-Willy Brandt from being assassinated by bomb dogs. Naturally, these two things collide into each other when Anya gets lost at a pet adoption event.

Yes.

It’s easy to forget, since the series leans pretty heavily on the “comedy” end of the “action comedy” spectrum, but there is some genuinely harrowing stuff that happens in Spy x Family. The terrorist plot is played pretty straight throughout this episode. Keith, the terrorists’ leader, is a no-nonsense right-wing extremist, and when Anya stumbles into his group’s hideout, he’s the only one who’s completely unhesitant in trying to kill her.

But Anya is nothing if not lucky (and, you know, telepathic). One of the other assets being kept by the terrorists is a living mountain of fur in dog form.

He doesn’t have a name yet, but he doesn’t need one to make a strong first impression here. He has precognitive abilities, and makes his debut in this episode by yanking a child away from a sign that was about to fall, immediately establishing him as a “good guy” dog. (Although, really, with how Spy x Family generally is, I wouldn’t be surprised if the other dogs introduced in this episode eventually turn face also. We shall see.)

Here, our canine friend heroically slinkies Anya down some stairs.

We also learn of the sinister Project Apple, from whence all these telepathic dogs (and apparently a fair amount of other weird science-enhanced animals) come from. It’s not a stretch to assume that this might have some link to Anya’s own powers.

Regardless, the episode ends mid-showdown, with Yor rescuing her daughter from the terrorists, and things setting up excitingly for next week. It’s good to have the series back, foot foot planted firmly on the gas, dead-set on sparking a sense of adventure in your heart once again. And really, for now, that’s all it needs to do.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch SPY X FAMILY Episode 11 – Stella

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

Last week’s dodgeball plan out the window, Anya Forger needs to find a new way to earn Stella stars if Operation Strix has any chance of succeeding in the long term. In this week’s episode of Spy x Family, she finds a way, although not intentionally, and not without a fair bit of harrowing suspense beforehand.

The episode opens simply, with Loid again struggling with Anya as the latter’s grades continue to sink, although with a more understanding approach than we’ve previously seen. (Also, at one point Loid mentally refers to Anya as his daughter with no further clarifiers, which I think is sweet.) Even from the point of view of a mundane parent, Anya’s scores would be a problem; we see at least three F’s, and there may be several more, so clearly, he’s got to do something. Anya’s academic woes aren’t solved in this episode. Even as she has a fun internal monologue about how she can totally just read other peoples’ minds to cheat, and makes an attempt to sound like Loid while she does so, it’s clear that things need to change for Anya to have any hope of getting a Stella.

All of this vexes Twilight. And indeed, Anya’s ESP means that since she can read his mind, his worries become hers in a very real and immediate sense; a literalization of the idea that children tend to inherit their parents’ anxieties.

He does hit upon one possible solution though, a father-daughter “ooting” to a local hospital. There, he hopes that perhaps Anya acquiring a taste for volunteer work might eventually lead to her getting a Stella for being an exceptional community member. If not any time soon, at least eventually.

Loid gets far more than he bargained for. Initially, this is played for comedy. Anya, being a girl of recall, only five or so, is terrible at helping out around the hospital, first breaking a vase and then shirking her task to reorganize the hospital library by reading their comics section. (Presumably, something they keep around to entertain young patients, which Anya definitely falls in that bracket.)

Just when this gets bad enough that the Forgers are practically kicked out, though, something much more serious occurs. A young boy named Ken, attending a physical therapy session in the hospital’s pool room, idles around near the adults’ pool. Not paying much attention (do kids ever?) he falls in, and almost immediately “Stella” takes a turn for the significantly darker.

Ken cannot swim, and being unable to even thrash or make noise, he simply sinks to the bottom of the pool like a rock. The direction of the episode takes a sharp detour into the visually harrowing here, with the underwater shots especially composed like something out of a tragic drama. The boy is saved only by his own thoughts; mental pleas for help that happen to be picked up by our resident psychic.

In a visible panic of her own, Anya rushes off to the pool with a flimsy excuse to help. Thankfully, Loid gives chase, because even though her bravery is admirable and her desire to help equally so, Anya can’t swim either, and it’s only the fact that Loid hurries after Anya into the pool room that saves both her and Ken. A mission well done, if ever there was one.

Her role in Ken’s rescue is enough to earn Anya the titular Stella, her very first. She gets something vaguely akin to a henshin or other kind of visual power-up sequence as it’s put on her uniform, and it puts a sweet cap on what is otherwise a rather harrowing story. Perhaps more important than the Stella is the other thing Anya has earned: some self-confidence. For the first time, she considers that her powers might be able to actually help people. (And, of course, that this might make people like her. Something she’s also still not entirely accustomed to.)

The remainder of the episode focuses on the aftereffects of all this. Anya briefly gets a bit of a big head, in fact.

But unfortunately her hopes that having earned a Stella in a genuinely heroic fashion might endear her to her classmates are quickly dashed. Some nameless girls in class are straight-up mean about it, and even suggest she might’ve faked it somehow. Only for Damian (!) to, roundaboutly at least, stick up for her by telling the gossips that if they think Eden is such a cut-rate school that they’d hand out a Stella by accident, they should transfer. (He leaves out the part where the main reason he cares about Anya’s Stella being authentic is that it hurts his pride that she got one before him. And it would hurt even more if it weren’t genuinely earned.)

Anya’s little friend Becky also suggests, running on pure spoiled-little-princess logic, that since Anya did something good she should ask for a reward. Eventually, she hits on the idea of a dog (because, you see, Damian has a dog. And if Damian has a dog and Anya also has a dog they’ll have something to talk about. And that will lead to world peace. The mind of a first-grader is incredible. The mind of a telepathic first-grader, all the more so). Anya’s able to talk Loid and Yor into it fairly easily—though not without them respectively wondering about a dog’s utility as a house guard and threat level respectively—and the episode ends there, with the promise of Dog Shenanigans next week for the last episode of the first cour.

Except, there’s a little bit more. Somewhere in a mad laboratory-turned-hellish dog pound, a group of canines who’ve had something done to them—it’s not clear what—waste away in tiny, dirty cages. A pair of villains, obvious by their poor treatment of the animals, talk about their client, who they speculate will use the animals as “bomb dogs.” What the broader implications of any of this may be are presently unclear, but the camera focuses on one dog in particular as the episode fades out, and I do suspect we’ll be seeing him again soon.

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All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch SPY X FAMILY Episode 1 – “Operation Strix”

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

“Papa is a huge liar. But he’s such a cool liar!”

His codename is “Twilight,” alias Loid Forger (Takuya Eguchi). His real name unknown and unknowable. He is a spy; an international man of mystery. A shadow, a whisper. No one knows his name. In what is not said to be but clearly is the cold war, a certain nation stands divided in two. There, Loid is deployed for the commencement of “Operation Strix,” his toughest assignment yet. What could possibly challenge this earl of espionage? This master of manipulation?

Well, domestic life, for one. Loid’s assignment: find a wife and adopt a child, blend in as seamlessly as possible, and send said child to a prestigious private academy to get close to one of the nation’s top political leaders, a man of near-paranoiac caution who rarely makes himself available except at events for that very school. So begins SPY x FAMILY, Wit Studio and CloverWorks‘ adaption of the wildly successful Shonen Jump manga. So also begins our second Let’s Watch column of the season. We’re in for a ride, folks. Strap in.

For Loid, the first order of business is procuring a child. Time is of the essence, so doing so the—ahem—traditional way is out of the question. As such, the first major undertaking our big heroic superspy sets out on in SPY x FAMILY is a trip to a run-down, skeevy orphanage. There, he adopts Anya (Atsumi Tanezaki), a six-year-old girl with a very cute hair style.

Seriously though what ARE those things on her head? Antennae?

She’s also telepathic, which leads to quite a few shenanigans. Namely; it takes Anya only a few moments to learn that Loid is a spy, being able to read his mind and all. This creates a fun dynamic wherein Loid thinks he has to hide his profession from Anya, who knows what he’s thinking at all times anyway, but who in turn also hides the fact that she knows what Loid really is. The implicit comedic observation that SPY x FAMILY makes here is that children, like spies, have thought processes that are pretty incomprehensible to the rest of us.

Anya is also afraid of what might happen if Loid finds out she can read minds. We’re told upfront that she’s been adopted and then returned to the orphanage four times before. This is a cloud that hangs over all of Loid and Anya’s interactions and provides an interesting shade to even Anya’s silliest antics. Her deep and abiding love of peanuts, for example. (Atsumi Tanezaki also deserves some real credit here for lending a believably childish air to her vocal tics.)

SPY x FAMILY is not a drama, really. But you could make the case for “dramedy,” perhaps, if heavier on the “edy” side. It has the good sense to cut its comedic side with more tonally complex moments, creating an actual emotional core as opposed to just a parade of gags. Anya fucking around with Loid’s spy equipment is funny. Her then panicking, wondering if she’ll be sent back to the orphanage if he finds out, and flashing back to her days as “Subject 7” in the facility she was born in? That’s sad. And like any good dramedy, SPY x FAMILY can juxtapose these polar opposites without making either feel out of place. This is, after all, a little girl that we’re talking about. Kids do think like that, and Anya’s been through more than most.

That’s not to say that all of this totally works. Later in the episode, after a great action sequence where Loid rescues Anya from the direct result of said equipment-fuck-arounding, he engages in a bit of self-lionizing, and we get some rather leaden backstory. This comes too early and too unearned to really hit the way the show seems to want it to. (This is to say nothing of it bumping up against the fact that, you know, real spies are generally not great people. SPY x FAMILY generally renders the profession too ridiculous to feel like it’s glorifying it, but it does occasionally come close.) Thankfully, it’s brief, and not enough to seriously ding the episode in any real way.

The episode ends with Anya successfully passing the exam to get into the private school that forms the crux of Loid’s mission. Perhaps more importantly; it ends with Anya snuggling up to her adopted dad on a couch (and him slightly freaking out about it. He fell asleep in front of someone! That’s a huge no-no for a spy). Then things, as they always do, hit a slight snag.

But we’ll discuss the full implications of that next week. See you then, anime fans.

Oh, I think I already have, episode title. I think I already have.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.