Spy Classroom

Episode 12

It is only fitting that this season of Spy Classroom would end with its favorite kind of episode. It means that we're seeing a mostly tangential flashback to a one-off story that happened before the big mission, which is what the last month's worth of episodes have been all about. Let me summarize the story for you in a single sentence: The Lamplight Girls discovered a bakery they like is harassed by an evil fried chicken company, so they use their finely honed spycraft (and, presumably, thousands of dollars of government equipment) to commit transactional fraud and make it so that everyone can enjoy meat pies in perpetuity. It is truly the Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo of Spy Classroom episodes.

Now, before anyone gets on my case for “not understanding” what the lighthearted little spy sitcom is trying to do, let me just say that I didn't mind this premise, for the most part. We're long past the point of me being caught off guard or disappointed by these slice-of-life episodes, and I appreciated that the story leaned more heavily into the “professional spies have to use their spy skills to solve problems” angle in a way that didn't revolve around them failing yet again to get the upper hand on Klaus. Grete and Monika get some decent material to work with (at least, I think it was Monika? I honestly still get her and Sybilla confused with each other whenever they share too much screen time), and the other girls are…well, they're all there! I appreciated the return of the “Klaus is preternaturally inept at explaining even the most basic of concepts in a way that any reasonable person could ever hope to understand” joke, as it is the single funniest running bit that Spy Classroom has to work with.

My biggest complaint, though, is that for all of the decent setup that goes into the meat pie recipe switcheroo that the girls spent the episode trying to pull, the show bungles the execution. After spending so much time establishing Grete's obsessive love for Klaus as the only hope that the team has for translating his gibberish meat pie recipe, we don't even see the girls figure out the puzzle and make the pie! The whole ordeal is taken care of with such little fanfare that I honestly thought that the final scene was one of those hypothetical demonstrations that you see when characters are running through a scheme in heist movies and such. But the episode just kept going. I realized, "No, that was all there was to it."

Plus, that final tease of betrayal and confrontation between Monika and Thea was more irritating than it was interesting. We barely know these characters, yet we also know the show well enough to guess that nobody is really going to betray the team; even if they did, who cares? Meaningful consequences are not something that Spy Classroom has ever been particularly interested in, so I don't know why the show would suddenly start trying to turn up the stakes halfway through its run. Ah, well. If we're going to get another cour of this one eventually, maybe a sudden increase in plot and tension would be a good thing, after all. Only time will tell. But until then, we'll always have the meat pies, I guess.

Rating:

Spy Classroom is currently streaming on HIDIVE. James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on Twitter, his blog, and his podcast.

---

Disclosure: Kadokawa World Entertainment (KWE), a wholly owned subsidiary of Kadokawa Corporation, is the majority owner of Anime News Network, LLC. One or more of the companies mentioned in this article are part of the Kadokawa Group of Companies.