©Tatsuya Endo/Shueisha/SPY×FAMILY Production Committee
We rarely hear Handler’s story. It does make sense – even in terms of supporting roles, she’s in the background, as a spymaster, and that’s exactly where she should be if she’s going to do her job. Luide remembers her as eerily low-key, but mostly seen behind her desk or behind the scenes. That’s why it always feels like a treat when we get an episode focused on her, and this week, we were just so lucky.
I don’t know the word “lucky” she But it will work. Training a baby spy isn’t an easy task, and while we know she’s very, very good at it (see: The Twilight Saga ), it’s also like pulling teeth. A typical example is her current protégé, a young man who has been working at WISE for two years and is probably about the same age as Loid was when he first started working – in his late teens or early twenties. Being a smart guy, he was also incredibly gullible, and I would have been even more scornful if I hadn’t seen my dad, a very smart guy who started out in advertising, fall for advertising more often than it was strictly to his advantage. Just because you work in a certain field doesn’t mean you can avoid all pitfalls…
The name of this trap was “propaganda,” and like most wartime material, its purpose was to foment dissent and make peace an elusive goal. In the case of this episode, it was a targeted smear campaign against an opera singer who was trying to blend East and West…or a whitewash campaign that he was a good guy, designed to make him look like better Complete his stated mission? Don’t ask the new guy, because he’s interested in every line the news media prints… even the gimmicks Handler uses to try to do damage control. Watching her grow increasingly exhausted while this guy bounces around the office like a teenager who’s had too much coffee really drives home the point that even when she’s not working out in the field, she’s working hard. Her makeshift whip is also deadly.
Her earnest and exhausting attempts to train the next batch of spies are a great foil to the second half of the episode, which pairs Anya and Henderson. Like Handler, he works very hard to teach his students, but unlike her, he doesn’t really know how to do it. This goes double for Anya, who is different from most of the other children in Eden – if only because she is at least a year younger than them. (And, you know, the telepathic thing.) Anya and Henderson both try to say what they think the other wants or needs to hear, but they both never get the point. Henderson’s well-intentioned lecture on how to be a good student disappeared from Anya’s mind as soon as the mention of “tea snacks” was mentioned, while her attempt to sound mature did the opposite. While Anya has some great faces, it’s not as interesting as the series, although it still keeps things moving toward Henderson’s past, which we’ll get to in a moment. (I can’t decide if that will be the end of the season; I hope so, because that would be some great bookending.)
What’s more, Anya grew up in a completely different world than any of the adults around her. Handler calls the assassin in the first half a “ghost of war,” meaning he’s still stuck in his days on the battlefield. That’s a fair assessment, but I think all The adults in this series are ghosts of war. We don’t know what prompted Handler’s espionage or Henderson’s education, but they are both aware of what happened in the past – and Handler is working to prevent it from happening again in the future. Luid is also still bound by his memories, and while Yuri isn’t quite as entangled in them, she’s still actively involved in the killing business – and Yuri is definitely involved in what could be considered part of the war machine. Anya Know about all this, but like her conversation with Henderson, she doesn’t understand it. That’s fine; she shouldn’t do that. But this makes her a direct foil to all the adults around her, even children like Damian who had an unhappy childhood.
Do Spy×Family Sometimes it feels like it focuses on the “family” part to the exclusion of the “spy” element? certainly. But as the last three episodes have shown, that might be the point.
grade:
Spy×Family The third season is currently airing
Crunchy roll.
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