Spy X Family – 4/5 [Yor’s Kitchen/Carry Out the Griffin Plan]

Hello everyone, and welcome back to SpyXFamily! Apologies for missing last week, had a bit of a family emergency. Don’t worry though, everything is going much better! Enough with real life problems though, let’s just dive right into our weekly anime.

Right off the bat, this is a bit of an odd (double) week for SpyXFamily. Both episodes have a singular, larger plot to them, like a normal episode should. But neither of these plots are enough to fill an entire episode on their own. So what do you do? Drag it out, or fill the space with something else? In this case, SpyXFamily has chosen the latter. Rather than drag out two perfectly paced stories, it instead added a miniature “filler” story to the end of each episode. As a sort of epilogue to these episodes, mini-sodes meant to show us small parts of these characters daily lives, this is fine. But for me, as someone who isn’t big on Slice of Life, they certainly weren’t my favorite of the things SpyXFamily has done. What I’m saying is, they were cute but lets not do them to often, you know?

With that, let’s dive into episode 4, “Yor’s Kitchen”! You know how I’ve been complaining that Yor has felt like a 3rd wheel for awhile? That she really needed her own episode? Well that’s precisely what she got this week. Something focused almost exclusively on her, complete with it’s own wholesome family moment. Would I have liked something a bit more serious, something that touches upon her job as an assassin? Maybe, yeah. I think there’s a lot of potential content there SpyXFamily has yet to really touch. But how well would something more serious have worked so soon after the terrorist threat arc, and is this really so bad? I would argue its not. In fact, I think this was really good. Despite avoiding Yor’s profession, it still managed to touch on her own home life growing up, and tie it back to the larger Forger family. Good shit!

As for the contents of Yor’s story, her saga of learning to cook was really great. I loved how they brought Camilla back, humanizing her a bit more and giving us a look into her own home life. Or how the first dish Yor was able to cook was was the one she remembers her mother making, with Camilla providing the last ingredient to make it perfect. Bringing it all back to the Forger household, where she gets to give them what her mother gave to her. And we can’t forget the lead in either, how SpyXFamily faked us out with stuff like the “bloody” grocery bag and her serious faces. It’s the exact same kind of stuff I love from Loid’s stories, where we see this “fake” family slowly become more and more real to him. Now we get to see the same thing for Yor!

The only “bad” part of the episode for me was Yor’s brother. He was amusing enough in his first introduction, mostly because of his back and forth with Loid. But as a standalone without Loid to bounce off of, his “I want to marry my sister” gags get old fast. Some of them worked, like his complete 180 on Camilla once she mentioned divorcing Loid. But others got run into the ground via repeated usage, such as enjoying Yor’s terrible cooking. The first time it got a chuckle, I had forgotten about that. But by the 2nd and 3rd I was just thinking “Can we move on”. Luckily he was only around for a small bit, so he doesn’t bring the entire episode down. But I think SpyXFamily is really going to need to do something new with him if he’s going to continue showing up.

Finally, lets take a moment to talk about Franky’s little part of the episode. As much as this was basically filler, it was good filler. SpyXFamily took a gag about Franky being terrible with women and turned it into a look at his friendship with Loid. Not just some spy to spy, peer/employee relationship, an actual friendship where Loid cares for and commiserates with him about how their job prevents them from having a happy family life. After an episode of watching Yor make her own progress with the family, Loid having a small moment to remind us of his own desire for family made for a nice bookend.

Next up we have episode 5, “Carry Out the Griffin Plan”, an Anya episode! This was a really cute episode. Watching kids be kids, have their daydreams and exaggerated moments, etc. Were these adults, or high schoolers, I don’t think it would work near as well. But the fact that Damian, Anya, Becky etc are all 6 year olds, or thereabouts, their antics come off as cute and endearing rather than annoying and stupid. Add to that the backdrop of world peace behind everything Anya does, giving her episodes an odd sense of gravitas to childish pranks, and I think it becomes a fun time. Maybe not everyone’s cup of tea if they don’t enjoy the kids, but I certainly enjoyed it.

That said, the real heart of the episode had to be Damian. As fun as Anya can be, his familial troubles always give her school-day stories that extra oomph. Not only seeing him struggle to get his fathers attention with the art project, but this conversation with the family butler and the knowledge that Jeeves was lying to him just to make him feel better. It was just so… good. I absolutely love these little details SpyXFamily tosses into it’s story. They are what elevate it from a simple weekly gag-comedy show to something that may actually last beyond the seasonal hype. And that’s not to say the gags don’t work on their own, Anya trying to be friends, thinking she failed, only to not realize Damian is slowly falling for her is great. But it’s this family stuff that really pushes it over the edge for me.

The only pseudo-negative of the episode I would say was Becky. And I don’t mean that she was terrible or anything, more that I see the potential for issues down the line. In case it wasn’t obvious, I’m talking about her infatuation with Loid. On it’s surface, this is funny. It’s a childish crush and Becky really needed something to do, to tie her into the larger Forger family/story. This not only gets her to interact with Anya outside of school, but should also lead to some amusingly one-sided interactions with Yor. My only concern is whether or not SpyXFamily will keep it to just a childish crush. I’d really rather it avoid any of the possibly creepy routes it could go with a 6 year old crush, the same way it failed to do that with Yor’s brother.

Aside from that though, it was a good episode and a good week of catchup for me! Sylvia also had a small filler bit at the end of episode 5, which I won’t complain to much about since she’s just that hot, but certainly didn’t fit the rest of the episode. All in all I enjoyed this catchup though and I think SpyXFamily is on a good track. I’m curious what kind of finale arc it will have, and if we will have a full arc before then or if it will just be episodic stuff for awhile. So long as that episodic stuff is in the same vein as what we got this week though I imagine it will be fine.