Spy Classroom

Episode 9

I was ready to check out of “Daughter Dearest II" when the first third of the episode was spent on yet another failed attempt to one-up Klaus, because at this point, the joke has gotten so old that it has not only ceased being funny, but it has become actively irritating. We get it. Klaus is the God King Anointed of Spy Guys, and the girls are all still pretty terrible at their jobs. Even the other Lamplight Girls treat Lily, Sibylla, Sara's weak-ass attempt to poison their Teach as an opportunity to dunk on such a lame plan, so it isn't like Spy Classroom is unaware of what it's doing. It's just…not funny, or interesting, or even particularly cute. We've seen a variation on the same thing for weeks now. Even cheesy sitcoms know that you've got to switch up the material on a regular basis if you want to keep the audience coming back each week.

(Okay, I will give the show credit in that it did successfully get me to laugh once during this segment when Lily absolutely murdered Sibylla with her test-taking analogy, but given how rarely that has happened after literal months of this slice-of-life stuff, Spy Classroom has still got a pretty woeful batting average.)

Thankfully, once the heavy-handed cooking preamble is out of the way, we actually do get a change of pace, with the girls getting assigned an actual mission for the first time in God-knows-how-long. The task isn't an especially thrilling one—the aforementioned trio, plus Grete, have to pose undercover as maids for one Mr. Uwe to protect him from Corpse—but it's something. We even get a glimpse at Sibylla's backstory as a wayward orphan that both ties into her last spotlight episode and Mr. Uwe's whole “curmudgeonly aristocrat who secretly has a heart of gold" deal. The way that Sibylla deduced Uwe's vitamin deficiency was a bit melodramatic for my tastes (heh), but points for effort, I guess. Spy Classroom actually managed to tell a story this week; it's a low bar to clear, but it was cleared, nonetheless.

Do any of these meager victories change the fact that Spy Classroom remains fatally clumsy and shallow in the ways that it depicts the “Spy" half of its premise? Probably not. The “suspenseful" assassination attempt that ends the episode is just as intriguing and exciting as any of the other spy-thriller moments that the show has tried to execute this season, which is to say that it isn't very exciting or intriguing at all. With only a few episodes left to go in the season, I'm going to temper my expectations and hope that we can simply arrive at a point where Spy Classroom can become a marginally more effective sitcom than it has been for the last seven weeks, with the occasional action scene thrown in to keep from falling out of Spy Anime 101. That can't be too much to ask for, right?

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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.