Welcome everyone, to another episode of Spy x Family! This week is another example of the perfect Spy x Family episode experience. We got great action, incredible wholesomeness, poignant spy moments and fantastic animation. Despite my criticisms of some of the recent episodes, this is the stuff I watch this show for. So without further ado, lets dive into it.
Right off the bat, it’s obvious that this episode looked fantastic. Not just in it’s wild full-body movements during the tennis match, though those were great as well, but also the interesting camera angles used to frame them as well as the great effects work during Yor’s scene at the end. Touches like angling the shot through the sniper scope, closeups of the racket as we follow the balls path, etc etc. Simply put, this was one of, if not the most, visually engaging episodes Spy x Family has had across it’s 24 episode run up to this point. I know it’s not good to hope for this on every episode, it’s just an unreasonable demand. But god damn when Spy x Family wants to it becomes just as much a visual treat as Chainsaw Man and Mob Psycho this season.
Getting into the actual episode, lets pick back up with the tennis match and it’s conclusion: It was great. All the little tricks the siblings kept pulling out, Loid and Fiona’s responses to them, it was all simply pure chad energy. It was one of the few times we are reminded that these two are not just professional spies, but two of the best. Always prepared, jumping in front of bullets for each other even when not knowing they were rubber, selling it all as just being “hungover”. I get that it’s just action, but it’s fun action. It’s not just mindless beat’em up that we get in a lot of lesser series. They aren’t doing these moves to look cool, but are actively dodging like… 8 hazards at once. It’s stuff like this that makes it easy to understand what Fiona sees in Loid, because I’m seeing it to.
Speaking of Fiona, I know I’m beating a dead horse here but she continues to be so much better than Yuri. I keep saying it, but here we have even more proof that her love seems based on an actual respect for what Loid does and not just because she’s related to him. His dedication to the job, how their game inspired the siblings to reform, him taking a bullet for her, etc. While her reactions are over the top, I feel like her affection comes from an actually real place. And that makes it so much easier to get on her side and kind of even root for her. Not a lot, she’d be a terrible mother and Yor is the OTP. But I at least enjoy having her on screen and watching her dynamic with Loid and Yor.
Going back to the mission, between all of the jokes Spy x Family still managed to deliver on poignant spy moments. Stuff like almost missing out on the painting only to figure out another way to steal it out from under their nose, or the secret dossier being a silly Idol obsession and Loid/Handler being relieved that war won’t break out after all. These don’t progress the plot in any way, true. But they do remind us of the larger conflict going on in the world and what exactly it is Loid is doing all of this for. Allowing that backdrop of war to make the wholesome family moments, such as how the Dossier was hidden away to not cause conflict in the family, to shine that much brighter. And it did the same to Yor and Loid’s relationship to!
This brings me to the finale, Yor vs Fiona. The gag of Yor being so ridiculously strong, but no one having any time to really process it, continues to be great. I don’t know what I was expecting to happen when she hit the ball, but cutting it into fine cubes was not it. That, as well as Fiona seeing her life flash before her eyes and admitting defeat without questioning it at all, got some hearty laughs out of me. Most of all though, I liked that Yor accepted the challenge knowing full well what it was about. Not because Fiona told her or anything, but because she could feel the competition. She arrived to the same answer as Fiona but with all the wrong information, turning this into a battle for a place in the household. And in her victory, Yor wanted Loid to know it. Good stuff!
So yeah, all in all I really enjoyed this episode. It’s the quintessential Spy x Family experience. I’ve been rather negative about the series lately, talking about how its starting to ramble and wander, not moving any character or plot line forward. And I stand by that! But I also want to acknowledge when the show does something truly great, like it did this week. Spy x Family is not an incredibly consistent show, in any way whatsoever. The production, the narrative, it all differs on a weekly basis. But when it hits, it hits hard. And that’s what happened this week. Will it be able to keep this up for the last 2 episodes going into our finale? Probably not. But I can dream damnit.
Mindless beat em ups? Care to provide examples of these mindless beat em ups?
A lot of the lower tier shounen, like Tower of God, Food Wars (by the end), Black Clover (has some good stuff in there but largely isn’t great), Fire Force (This is my dark horse, this is what people will hate me for), etc. Even really “good” shounen can have off arcs, like Bleach filler, One Piece’s worse filler, Yaiba suffers from this a bit, early Jojos, MHA, etc. Hell Spy x Family does it a bit to, though those are usually not fights and more just random bits of spontaneous animation that serve no purpose besides wowing the audience (Take Yor’s pot antics a few episodes back).
Basically I think a lot of series out there create conflict without considering whether or not that conflict makes actual sense.
To be faithful that’s mostly filler. At least the main manga tries to justify big fights. Nothing filler about Dabi vs Hawks.