Spy Classroom

Episode 7

I'm sorry, but I refuse to get over this: There is no way on this Earth that I can accept Lamplight's ridiculous plan to somehow prevent the Bad Guys from figuring out about Erna's existence despite every inch of the manor being tapped. Maybe I could have bought it before we spent an entire freaking month doubling back to these pre-Impossible-Mission filler stories, since those kinds of plot holes and inconsistencies are often very easy to paper over when you don't ask your audience to think about things too hard. After four straight weeks of all this faffing about, though, I've had nothing to do except for overthink the logic of this goofy show, and the math doesn't add up, y'all.

For one, the whole “It's pretty hard to tell the voices of all the girls apart when they aren't using their names!” thing is baloney because half the point of the entire damn show is that every one of the Lamplight girls is voiced by a veteran actress that is doing their take on whichever anime girl archetype they've been assigned. Besides, I'm pretty sure that even the most incompetent spy imaginable couldn't avoid listening to however many dozens of hours of audio they have to sift through without saying to themselves, “Who the hell is this girl that keeps on talking to herself about how unlucky she is? She is very clearly a distinct individual from all the other girls who absolutely do not do that constantly. We should probably make a note of that just in case this is all some bizarre attempt at subterfuge…”

And yes, I know, this is a slice-of-life sitcom about a bunch of goofy teenage girls that just so happen to engage in acts of spycraft from time to time, so you might say I'm getting bent out of shape for no good reason. If you did say that, though, I'd tell you that you're completely wrong right to your face because this is also the show that has bent over backward for nearly two months to tell a completely out-of-order story for the sole reason of preserving the big-brained spy twist that doesn't even make a lick of sense when you're forced to spend a whole month considering the mechanics of it. All of this could have been avoided! It didn't have to be this way!

…er, right then. Anyway, now that I've gotten that off of my chest, it is my legal obligation to report to you that “File: Meadow Sara” is absolutely an episode of Spy Classroom. You might even say that it is one of several episodes of Spy Classroom, and that it does, indeed, feature spies who all live and work together in a setting that you could generously describe as a “classroom,” I guess, so long as you'd had enough to drink beforehand. Sara is the main focus of this week's story; if you forgot who she is, as I most certainly did, it's pretty easy to remember: She's the one who wears a hat.

Truth be told, I might have just lied to you because Sara is as much the “focus” of the episode as the whole premise of the girls' spy work, which is to say she barely matters. Sure, her scenes with Erna and Klaus and that cute little puppy bookend the episode, but the story isn't really “about” her unless that one dinner discussion where she meekly insists that doing random housework and home repairs counts as meaningful spy training is supposed to be the point of the entire episode. Instead, the episode is mostly about random housework and home repairs. Seriously: Klaus has a delicious tenderloin that he wants to keep to himself, and the girls all scream “MEAT!” at him like a pack of Neanderthals until he decides to wager the meal over a contest to see who can fix up all the damage that the girls' shenanigans have done to the mansion. There, I just described the entire episode to you in, like, one sentence.

I am officially tired of Spy Classroom's one joke being that Klaus is just good at everything, so the bit where he fixed a door with improbable speed was a true waste of time. The episode made me kind of smile once, though, when Sara's little animal squad helped the girls out with their window-washing challenge. It was just…so, so stupid, you know? I couldn't help but be a little impressed.

Other than that, the single redeeming factor of this otherwise useless, pointless detour was the post-credits scene, which seems to imply that we are finally leaving this Endless Eight purgatory of pointless pandering and starting a new storyline. Will that new storyline even be any good? I honestly don't care too much at this point! So long as it involves the girls and Klaus doing something - anything - related to their jobs, something that requires just the barest minimum of thought and effort to put together, I'll consider it a victory for this show. Sure, that's kind of like giving the blue ribbon to the one toddler at the tee-ball game that manages to technically bonk the whiffle ball off of its stick and then run around aimlessly in a circle for a bit, but I'm a desperate man, and I'll take what I can get.

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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.