Spy X Family – 13 [First Contact]

Welcome everyone, to the grand finale of SpyXFamily! This week was a massive surprise for me. The jokes were minimal, the pacing slow, the subject matter serious. This episode is perhaps the most serious across its 26 episode run. And for me, that’s a good thing. Now lets jump into it!

So in case it wasn’t obvious, this was a serious episode and I loved it. I’ve long wanted SpyXFamily to treat it’s premise with the severity it deserves. Even just a one-off side episode would have been enough! Just anything to remind us, and to make use take seriously the fact, that the backdrop of this cutesy family friendly Slice of Life is the freaking Cold War. And what I got wasn’t just some random side episode with wacky tennis spectacle. Instead it was 20 minutes of Loid finally meeting the central villainous figure of the series: Donovan Desmond. And you know what? I loved it. This was easily my favorite episode of the season, which is funny considering how little actually happens in it. It’s just a meeting, a first contact if you will. Nothing more. But I loved it anyways. Lets talk about why.

First up, let’s talk about the elephant in the room, Loid and Donovan’s conversation. For some reason, I really enjoyed this. I think it has to do with how Donovan was presented. All this time he’s built up as this big, menacing villain to peace, this warmonger. Yet when we meet him he seems almost… pleasant? Congenial? Chill? Basically he doesn’t seem like a bad guy, on the surface. A bit serious, probably inattentive towards his kids. But he’s very accepting of Loid’s apology, doesn’t hold it over his head, and is generally pretty amicable. I think this is a great decision, as most people are cartoonish evil. Nothing like you would expect from a Nationalist party. They have to have some kind of charisma to get where they are. It’s only when Damian starts getting involved that we see why however.

Donovan isn’t chill because he’s a pleasant dude. It’s more that he simply doesn’t care about Damian. He doesn’t care that he got hit, about his grades, about the apology. This isn’t the chillness of a dude who’s accepting that kids will be kids and more the chillness of someone who honestly expects nothing, and so couldn’t care less. And personally? I think this is far worse than the cartoonish evil I was expecting. Because this is a much more real evil. A kind of neglectful parent that is all to real. One that pushes their children to beg and scrape for every crumb of affection, turning them into terrible people when they grow up just like their parents. Hopefully Damian will be able to escape that, considering Loid, Anya and his friends. But that’s a bit out of scope for this series probably. At least so far.

Meanwhile on the Loid side of things, it was interesting watching his tactics evolve over the course of the conversation. From buttering him up as a sycophant with how he apologized to Damian to trying to connect with him on an ideological level with his party until eventually he challenged him with his own interpretation of connections. The last bit especially was good because Loid let some of his own heart, his own opinions, leak out. He does think that humans can’t truly understand each other. But that doesn’t mean you can’t walk together anyways. Anyways, in general I thought this play by play with the callback to his conversation web from the Franky date episode was cool.

Finally we need to talk about Damian, who’s sort of the victim this episode. Loid butted into a private conversation with his father and kind of hijacked it. Despite that though, Loid managed to talk up not only Damian but Anya as well, inadvertently pushing their little romance subplot. To be honest, Damian’s whole thing with his father is really sad. This kid just wants his approval, wants him to look at and care about him, and is clearly trying his hardest to achieve it. But nothing he does is good enough. He’s so afraid of talking to him that he needed both Loid and Anya to encourage him to speak up, even about his failures. While I don’t expect it to happen, it would be cute if part of Loid’s grand plan was to repair their relationship. We see a bit of that, but hopefully that evolves.

So yeah, all in all I thought this was a great final episode to end the series on. Definitely one of my favorites across the 2 cours. Does it fix my issues with the rest of the season? Not really. But I’ve long been an ending kind of guy, I think that the final taste a series leaves you with is important. So it definitely helped my overall impression of the series and gave me some hope for future seasons that we will get a bit more serious content. Now apologies for cutting this short, but I have christmas and like 3 freaking reviews to write.