The split cour (which is a relative recent phenomenon in anime) has given rise to an interesting challenge.  How do you end a season that isn’t really ending, especially when it’s an ongoing series?  Cliffhangers are always a good option but it’s rare for a source material to have a conveniently-placed one for the anime to utilize.  Sometimes shows will treat it as just another episode and ignore the three-month break, sometimes they manufacture an original conclusion to give the impression of a stage completed.

As for Spy x Family, it chose door #3 – use an existing manga chapter, but add a bit of extraneous narration to make it a distinctly “season finale” episode.  Which is fine – I can do without all that recap to be honest, but I get the urge to make it clear to newer fans who don’t get how the split cour thing works that this is just a pause.  There was nothing especially distinctive about this chapter itself – it’s a perfectly fine “normal” Spy x Family subplot, with the usual ratios of action and comedy.  Since that’s what most of us are here for, I doubt that will be much a problem.

The focus here, again, is on Loid’s anxiety and exhaustion.  How did the whole spy thing in a place like Vienna or Berlin at the height of the cold war work?  It seems to me that if you had a guy in the midst of a crucial mission like Loid, you wouldn’t continually dump a bunch of extra missions on him that jeopardize the main one.  It’s written off here as “understaffing” and who knows, maybe it really played out that way, but then realism on the spy side isn’t exactly this series’ bread and butter.

Another tidbit here is that we get an acknowledgement that Yor is still engaged in her main gig, the first one in a while.  Yor is kind of a problem for SxF actually, in that for quite a lot of the narrative (basically whenever Yuri isn’t around) she really doesn’t have anything essential to do.  Her job is nowhere near as important to the core premise as Loid’s, and you can’t show her massacring people all the time or her relatability as a character takes a huge hit.  That leaves her as comic relief a lot of the time – which she’s quite good at but honestly, that’s mainly Anya’s job – and eye candy.  All I know is her inability to check her killing impulse is going to lead to a huge problem sooner or later.

The sub-premise here is that Loid’s excess of distraction is causing him to be careless with his main job, projecting the image of a normal family.  In Loid’s position something as seemingly trivial as selling the lie to nosy neighbors is a life-and-death situation.  So, despite his exhaustion, Loid plans an ooting to the aquarium.  Anya (like animanga generally) is nuts for penguins.  In a string of unlikely coinkeydinks the nosy neighbors show up there at the same time, and Loid gets assigned a mission there.  He’s about to turn it down until the old lady contact tells him it involves the recipe for chemical weapons (secreted inside a penguin, natch), and he takes the job out of patriotic duty.

This is standard, mildly entertaining Spy x Family screwball comedy for the most part.  The most interesting element is Anya using her esper powers to help Loid’s mission – which is a big ask for a toddler, given that she can’t reveal her secrets to him.  She can mind-read animals too, including the penguin who’s been used as a mule by the terrorists.  She skillfully directs Loid’s attention to said penguin, and then Yor’s to the escaping terrorist who Loid has foiled.  If Loid occasionally gets hit with a stupid stick for plot reasons (though I was wrong about last week’s case, where Anya only imagined she told him about Ken-kun), Anya sometimes gets hit with a “competent stick” in times like this one.

It all works out of course – this is that sort of series.  And Anya’s spy fantasizing at the end acts as a sort of bookend to the opening narration.  And so ends a very good cour of anime – a first-rate adaptation with only one real stumble (the mostly-filler castle episode).  I still don’t see Spy x Family as the masterpiece some proclaim it to be, but it’s damn good – and it’s not hard to see why it’s as popular as it is.  It’s going to be fascinating to see it go toe-to-toe with Chainsaw Man in the jam-packed fall season – the two obvious candidates for “next big thing” (SxF has pretty much accomplished that already) directly fighting for attention in a way anime blockbusters rarely have.