Spy x Family – 26 (S2 01) – Burdens of the Butthurt

After a mostly serious encounter between Loid and his target Donovan Desmond closed out its first two-cour season, Spy X Family returns to its spy sitcom roots and shows that Wit Studio x Cloverworks haven’t skipped a beat. The show looks and sounds just as good, and comes with fresh, inventive OP and ED with two suitably bangin’ songs.

It also eases us in with the simplest of premises this week: Yor got shot in the butt on her latest assassin job, and while she (presumably) got the bullet out, it still hurts like hell. When she comes home, Loid mistakenly believes she’s in a bad mood because he made her run an errand, but the next morning her face is even more sour (Yor’s face game is in rare form this week).

As Yor can’t very well tell Loid why she’s making such faces—nor can Anya, who knows because she’s a telepath—Loid believes he needs to improve Yor’s mood in order to shore up their marriage of convenience, and that means a carefully curated date.

He leaves Anya with Franky, but when Anya says she wants to tail her parents, Franky is all for it, as he has nothing better to do. Loid discovers the tail instantly, but pretends not to notice. What he can’t help but notice, however, is that throughout their date, Yor simply won’t sit down. She can’t, because she fears her butt will hurt more than it already does.

At the fancy restaurant where Loid got a reservation for dinner, Yor has to at least pretend to sit at the table while keeping her tookus an inch from the seat. By dumb luck, a new waiter at this restaurant just happens to be the only survivor of Yor’s mission. Anya can sense his intent to kill her from outside, which could lead to her revealing her assassin skills.

The waiter’s first attempt is to use a whole blowfish worth of poison on Yor, but as an assassin she’s built an immunity to most poisons, including this one. But while the poison doesn’t kill her, it does offer extraordinary pain relief. Finally able to sit, focus, and relax, Yor starts to enjoy herself.

His first avenging plot foiled, the waiter is prepared to build a makeshift bomb and blow both Yor and himself to smithereens. Anya, having heard his plans in her mind, dons a new black spy suit, infiltrates the restaurant via the ventilation system, and sets up a Home Alone-style gauntlet of booby traps that defeat him.

Where she got the spy suit so quickly, and how she’s able to follow the bomb making directions so perfectly, hardly matters; we’re dealing with heightened reality here! What matters is that Anya is a complete badass when she warns the waiter to give up trying to kill Yor and get back to his ordinary job and girlfriend.

Of course, if the waiter hadn’t been there, Yor would have never been able to enjoy her dinner, or the walk afterwards which affords a beautiful view of the city and traveling amusement park. The whole reason she sucked it up to go with Loid is that she didn’t want to blow their cover by never going on dates, which would have made her co-workers suspicious.

But now that she’s gone on a date, she had a lot of fun, and wants to do it again if it isn’t too much trouble…when her butt doesn’t hurt. Loid says he’d love to take her on another date soon. Alas, the next morning the blowfish poison has worn off, Yor is back in agony, and Loid once again mistakes her demeanor as being in a bad mood.

Honestly, this episode had me at “shot in the butt”, which is not only an inherently funny situation, but also just funny to say. Hayami Saori’s “butt-hurt voice” is also funny, as are all the date scenes of her standing when she should be sitting. I’m sure things will get more serious again at some point this season, but for now I’m enjoying the silliness.

I’ll close by adding: is Yor’s domestic life starting to adversely affect her assassining? Not only did she get shot in the butt, but the waiter wasn’t the shooter. That means she allowed two people to survive when she thought she was done, both of whom overheard her phone conversation. Seems kinda sloppy for the Thorn Princess!