Under the umbrella of screwball comedy fall many elements.  Not every screwball comedy contains all of them by any means, but among the most common is the farce.  Spy x Family has a pretty broad comic repertoire but farce is among its main weapons, and it was on full display this week.  Farce is typically absurd and ridiculous by definition, but what separates it from true absurdism is that it keeps one toe over the line into reality at all times.  It’s this connection to realism – no matter how tenuous – that defines farce as a genre.

In that context, Spy x Family can’t really work if the bonds between the three main characters don’t ring true – no matter how absurd their situation is.  We have to be able to see ourselves in them, and their emotional reactions need to make sense.  So this is a pretty important phase of the story, as it slowly begins to expand its universe and include more characters.  There are several important players whose introduction hasn’t come yet (we’re probably two weeks away from possibly the most important).  As the world expands the audience connection to the trio at the heart of it has to remain the anchor.

I think we can see from this episode that Spy x Family has the chops to pull that off.  The writing is good enough, and Furuhashi Kazuhiro is proving to be as adept at comedy as he is at period drama.  The first half of this episode was straight-up farce, and often hilarious.  The second got quite emotionally intense and dark, and it made the transition without so much as a single stumble.  Eden Academy is a very important setting for this series – a lot of it takes place there – and it only gets this one chance to make a first impression.

Of course, being a super-elite school in a police state, Eden is going to be an oppressive place with a stifling entrance exam.  The examinees (the whole family is the examinee) are under surveillance – and assessment – from the moment they walk through the gates.  There’s even a staged event where a boy has fallen into the gutter.  Loid of course sees through this (though it’s hardly subtle), but the question is (and I’m still not sure what the right answer is to be honest) what one is supposed to do to pass this test.  Saving the boy and soiling his suit would seem to be wrong, but in a great moment of farce Loid reveals that everyone has packed a change of clothes (is there a phone booth just off camera?).

Headmaster Henry Henderson (Yamaji Kazuhiro) is impressed with the elegant (elegance is everything to Henderson) bit of planning.  Then the farce levels get cranked to eleven, because the only thing sillier than a stampede of escaped farm animals – and various raptors – being another test is a stampede of escaped farm animals actually being a random event.  Yor gives Loid yet more reason to be suspicious by defusing the situation the way she does, and – miraculously (and even more absurdly) the family produces yet another change of clothes.

In point of fact, the Forgers do pretty well in this whole interview process.  Even Anya (who barely passed the written exam) mostly sticks to the script, though she does parrot Loid’s inappropriate thoughts on a couple of occasions and almost calls him a spy.  But one of the examiners, Murdoch Swan (Urayama Jin) is a total asshole determined to trip up everyone, but especially anyone who seems young and happy.  It’s obvious from the moment he starts in on “baggage” that he’s not going to be bound by any sense of decorum or decency.  The trio fends him off quite well, even Anya – but that question on “which mother do you prefer?” is one step too far.

In truth most of those questions were seriously messed up, though I suppose quite possible in this sort of interaction.  But that last one is a real test for the family, especially Loid – he has a mission, and thinking about Anya’s welfare is only theoretically important for how it impacts that mission.  That he snaps the way he does reveals just how far off course he’s drifted – becoming more of a human being at the expense of being less of a spy.  What will Loid do when his mission and the role he’s playing come into direct conflict with each other?  The first returns seem pretty decisive, and this wasn’t even a life-threatening situation…