It’s sort of cruel for a season to end with an episode that good, especially when the run of play has tended towards the mediocre.  But that’s Spy x Family – it’s just what this series is.  Those ups and downs have always been part of the experience and likely always will, as long as it’s being written.  Maybe it stems from the material being by the mangaka’s own admission outside his comfort zone, maybe not – in the end it doesn’t really matter.  And with another season and a movie to follow (and there’ll be more where that came from) it’s certainly nice to have your interest spiked before the break.

SpyFam can’t follow this plot thread all the time, for obvious reasons.  But when it does, it really hammers home just how wispy a lot of the rest of the series is by comparison.  For starters, this is the main event of the whole story and as such, it’s where the stakes are highest.  Add to that Damian, whose personal story is as grounded and relatable as pretty much every other character’s is fantastical and usually silly.  The school stuff being generally the strongest venue doesn’t hurt either, and finally there are some very interesting ways this storyline reflects on Loid’s character.  It’s a win on every level (except that it’s only an occasional event).

As it happens, Loid’s interests overlap with Damian’s here, though that’s really just the tip of the iceberg.  They both want to see Donovan Desmond (Hashi Takaya) albeit for totally different reasons.  The social gathering (where older brother Demetrius will be participating, as an Imperial Scholar) is nearly impossible to infiltrate even for Twilight.  The original plan was to get Anya to that level of course, though Loid has pretty clearly seen the futility of that venture.  As such his best chance is to use Damian’s planned meetup with his father as a pretext.  The problem?  Who knows (certainly not Damian) if that meeting will even take place.

Anya for her part understands at least this much – she has to try and ingratiate herself with Damian (if only she understood what she was reading in his mind).  Maybe she even feels a little bit of empathy for Damian’s fear about whether his father loves him – certainly her goading helps push Damian into actually showing up (and a good thing he did, too).  She pretty much taps out after that, her planned infiltration losing out to having the attention span of a gnat.  Becky gets her home safely, and the stage is cleared for the main actors to take the stage together for the first time in the series.

First, Loid has to have a pretext to talk to Damian – for which he uses a replica of Anya’s sheep keychain.  He then apologizes profusely for Anya’s violence towards him and starts stalling for time, hoping Donovan is going to show up.  Getting on Damian’s good side can’t hurt either of course – there’s always Plan B to consider, and Loid has no idea Damian has fallen for Anya.  If Loid feels any remorse about using an innocent child in this way there’s no sign of it yet – I don’t take his unspoken apology for hijacking Damian’s family reunion as anything genuine.  At most, Loid is getting a sense of the relationship between Donovan and his son – and how messed up it is.

This meeting is tense and kind of difficult to watch, for many reasons.  Loid is walking a tightrope here – any chance to speak with Donovan (and size him up) is a unicorn and beyond priceless, but he can’t do anything to raise the incredibly cautious target’s suspicions.  And Damian is not a passive bystander here – this is his opportunity that Loid is frittering away, and he’s increasingly agitated that his moment with his father is slipping away from him.  The coldness between the two of them – notwithstanding that it’s one way – is unmistakable.  Damian sees his father’s seeming unconcern over the Anya incident as evidence that he doesn’t really care.  And honestly, who could blame him?

It may not be that simple, though.  First of all, Donovan showed up – showed up and acted like a tool towards Damian (a “whim” indeed), but he did show up.  He even praised Damian after a fashion, when the boy told him about his griffin prize and his Stella.  Loid is working Donovan on Damian’s behalf here, but again – it’s about overlapping interests, not empathy.  The better the relationship between father and son, the better the chance of a future meeting involving Anya’s classmate.  The question is, does Donovan – who it’s pretty clear is absolutely no dummy – understand that he’s being worked here?

For me, the most interesting moment of the episode – and maybe the season – was the look on Loid’s face as he watched Damian and his buddies celebrating the “success” of the meeting.  Was that a tinge of involuntary self-reproach in his eyes – displeasure at the idea of using Damian’s feelings as a weapon in his plan?  For me this angle has a lot of potential to be a crucible for Loid’s character, and whether or not his family charade has really started to change him.  The extent to which he sees Damian as a human being, a vulnerable child whose family situation  causes him pain, as opposed to simply a resource will say a lot about the sort of man he is (and could make pursuing his assignment considerably more uncomfortable for him).

I’ve always felt that thread was a big part of where Spy x Family is eventually headed, but it’s going to take quite a long time before we get any real answers.  It’s worth slogging through a lot of lesser material in-between the really good stuff, because with SxF the good stuff actually is really good.  It’s quite a frustrating series in that way, but I can honestly say that nothing I’ve seen from its (very few) rivals for commercial supremacy engages me as much as this series when it’s on top of its game.  And this week it was definitely on top of its game.  Better late than never.