I wouldn’t objectively say this arc is great or anything, in a vacuum. It’s good, solid Spy x Family though nothing spectacular. It is, however, very welcome in terms of premise. I really think it’s long past time that Yor showed some introspection about her life choices (and that she get a storyline that properly uses her, for that matter). At some point somebody has to say “hey, that’s an elephant!” or else your suspension of disbelief starts to crumble.
Mind you, I’m not totally in-synch with where that introspection seems to be heading. Spy x Family continues to try and have it both ways, taking great pains not to paint the Stasi (let’s be honest, that’s what they are) or the mafia as straight-up bad guys. Well, they were (and are). The Briar siblings are on the side of evil, and I’d respect Endou-sensei a little more if he came right out and said it. Come on man, trust your audience a little more – we can handle it.
Yor, at least, is realistically hesitant about putting her life on the line now that she has something besides her freak of a brother to live for. She manages to put Barnaby down without the jig being up – ironically, because he hesitates over all the attention their fight is drawing. Anya does her part to keep a lid on things, leading the crowd to think this is all street theatre. Olka and the others retreat to a second-class cabin, where Zeb (Terashima Junta) reflects on how scary assassins are. Zeb spins a tale of how Olka’s family and the black market they ran after the war kept him from starving (in all fairness, that actually was the case for a lot of people in postwar Germany), but it’s pretty obvious the reason he agreed to pose as her husband is because he’d like to be her real one.
Meanwhile, Anya and Loid continue to provide the comic relief to Yor’s heavy plotline. And very effectively too – this is about as well as I’ve seen the two faces of Spy x Family balanced against each other. Loid is in way over his head trying to do this whole father thing, and Anya finally realizes that she’s torturing the hell out of him with her apparent mood swings. Then, all her plans to help Mama Yor the next day are foiled by everything on the ship being so damn fun. Anya may be an esper but she’s also five(ish), and one of the appealing things about her character is that most of the time she doesn’t act unrealistically precocious. She’s a total dingbat in the way five year-olds usually are.
It seems likely to me that Olka, Gram, and Zeb (the first two at least) are going to successfully defect, as there’s not much of a future for them otherwise. But I’m more interested in where Yor goes from there, frankly. Does she put all this in the rear-view and go back to killing people without a second thought? Does she realize her priorities have changed, and start looking for a way out – and how does Garden react if she does? If there aren’t at least some repercussions from this arc, I’d consider that a definite missed opportunity for character growth.
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