You’d probably never guess it from the first two episodes, but this week’s offering was probably closer to the default mode for Spy X Family.  Based on my limited reading of the manga, anyway.  There’s plenty of spy action, but in a very real sense this is more of a slice of life comedy than a thriller (even a satirical one).  In that mode it works for me at this point, but the risk is that this particular setup seems to have the potential to get repetitive.  I haven’t read enough to know whether the manga avoids that trap, but its sterling reputation suggests it does so to most readers’ satisfaction, anyway.

After a new narrator introduction (which I kind of hope doesn’t consume 4% of the runtime every week), we launch right into the themes for the week – settling in as a “family”, and preparing for the Eden Academy interview.  You’d have to be pretty detached not to notice how we never saw the picture of Yor’s little brother – indeed, that we’ve never seen his face.  Yor even tells Loid that she’s only spoken to him by phone for a long time.  But having at the very least helped in raising him seems to have prepared Yor well for the Anya experience.  She’s more natural around Anya than Loid is, although her thoughts are even more terrifying.

The irony in this arrangement is that both Loid and Yor have given the other plenty of reasons to suspect something is up.  Loid at the very least should have some alarm bells ringing, with his “trust no one” training.  Yor is clearly no normal civil servant, that’s for sure.  But for the moment Loid is consumed with passing the Eden interview.  And that looks mighty hopeless at this point.  Anya is a wild child and Yor clearly has no sense of how the gentry conduct themselves.  Loid’s first mock interview is an abject disaster (Yor’s interpretation of “pass” being the highlight), so he changes gears and takes the family on a cultural field trip for the day.

It’s funny that Anya, who’s a modestly clever but otherwise seemingly normal toddler, is the only one who knows that this whole arrangement is a house of lies (because she’s anything but normal in one very important sense).  She certainly betrays her ability with her reaction to some of her “parents” thoughts, especially Yor (“two broken ribs”), and she panics after revealing too much in her relatively indecipherable museum drawing.  But her secret is totally safe, because if Yor and Loid can’t figure out that the other isn’t what they seem, they certainly aren’t going to guess Anya is an esper.

The main event here is the purse snatcher incident, and what’s most striking about it is that both Yor and Loid wind up taking an enormous risk in getting involved.  For her it’s more understandable and less potentially dangerous, but him?  Hard to imagine a guy in Loid’s position drawing attention to himself in such a fashion.  I get the whole “it’s nice to get recognized once in a while” idea but, I mean…  If you’re an undercover agent that has to be as big a cardinal sin as you can commit.  If getting credit is important to you, you picked the wrong job.

As a narrative establishing shot, though, I suppose this is important.  Both Loid and Yor have jobs where they kill people, but we’re supposed to identify with them as the heroes of the story.  There has to be some idealism in their makeup for that to work, so doing the right thing should be something they care about. Both believe they’re working for a just cause – though of course, those causes just happen to be opposing.  That’s the ultimate secret they’re keeping from each other, really – and not even Anya knows the truth of it.