So ends another season of Spy X Family. On balance I’d probably rank it ahead of Season 2, largely because of the plot choices (and those are pretty much the whole ballgame with this series). To be honest I was pretty close to dropping SxF by the end of the second season, which was quite a bore for most of its run. This was better – not so much for its highs (though it did have one of the best episodes so far) but for avoiding too many lows. It did miss Furuhashi Kazuhiro in the director’s chair – he was slumming with this franchise, but did bring a bit of boldness and flair. Even so, I still found myself more engaged more of the time than I have since the first half of S1.
As for this final arc, it wasn’t a high point for me. A lot of Nightfall and Yuri and no Eden is not a good recipe for my SpyFam enjoyment. I go back and forth on which of them is worse – Nightfall definitely was in these episodes but on the whole I think I’d still give it to Yuri. I found the whole denouement of the Wheeler incident pretty uninspiring. There was some potential here, too – like, I would have loved to have seen Loid and Wheeler have a real conversation about their respective choices and their reasons for them. But that wouldn’t have been Spy X Family I suppose.
I’m also finding it harder and harder to suspend disbelief on Loid and Yor being ignorant of each other’s true vocation – it gets more ludicrous every week. She has the excuse of not being the sharpest tooth on the saw, I suppose, but what about him? This master spy is fooled by the bad actress that is Yor Forger? I was actually hoping Yuri was going to put the pieces together and maybe push the plot off the status quo, even though in my heart I knew that was an extreme longshot.
The little aside with Bond at the end was amusing, especially the beautifully drawn post-ED sequence. I know what I’ll be hoping for in Season 4, and that’s movement on the Operation Strix front and more on Anya and Damian’s relationship, and the school generally. When push comes to shove that’s the only part of the series that genuinely interests me. And that’s not really enough if I’m brutally honest, but for now I’m still on-board. I mean, sooner or later that has to take center stage for real, right? It’s kind of the point. In the meantime we wait, the duration of which is indeterminate as we – somewhat surprisingly – didn’t get an announcement beyond “See you next mission!”. But there can’t be the slightest doubt it’ll come soon enough – as current kaijuu go, Spy X Family is one of the biggest.
