Technically speaking, I guess I should have titled this an “End” post rather than a season finale. This is not officially a split cour, and there’s been no official announcement of a sequel (and timetable). But we didn’t need that *see you next x mission” end card to know it’s only a matter of time. Spy x Family is huge, very huge. It’s one of the biggest hits of the decade, it has a theatrical film coming soon, and it’s a virtual certainty that it will receive a complete adaptation (though it may get the Haikyuu!! treatment, as it’s even more popular). I’ll be very surprised if we don’t see a continuation (whether they call it Season 3 or Season 2 Part 2) before the end of 2024.
Which is, you know, fine. Some of the bloom is off the rose for me – this season was a definite step down from the first. SxF is another kaijuu I just can’t fully embrace. At its best it can be very good indeed – the comedy is sometimes really sharp and when it shifts into true screwball comedy (as in old Hollywood) mode, it’s got a lot of charm. But the bad moments can be pretty grisly, and a lot of this season was frankly kind of boring.
I mean, you’re going to finish with an entire episode focused on Bond? That’s somehow fitting, seems to me. Borf is fine, but he’s not a character to carry a series for 22 minutes. He’s got one gag, basically, and if he’s in the spotlight for too long Endou basically has to put that gag on a loop. The training thing and the ice cream and the bird poop misunderstandings would have worked fine as a six or seven-minute B part. But a whole episode they’re not, even with the fire subplot thrown in.
This season seemed to have less of what really makes Spy x Family look the best – the Eden stuff generally and Damian specifically. There was no real development in Damian’s subplot, but in fact the whole thing with Loid’s mission (which is the catalyst for the entire premise) went absolutely nowhere. And this is a larger problem, in that SxF just doesn’t have much development, period. Yor stays dumb, Yuri remains insufferable, Anya is Anya, Nothing much ever seems to change, really. And that limits a series’ upside in a profound way.
All that makes me feel pretty ambivalent about the idea of covering a third (or whatever it’s eventually called) season. I imagine I probably will, at least at the start, because I still feel like this show’s best is the strongest of any of the current megaseries crop’s best. I just wish we saw a lot more of it, and that I had some real idea where Endou was trying to go with this series – whether there’s some sort of larger point to any of it. There are times I wonder if he know himself, to be honest – and that too is part of the problem.
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