Episode 8 – Spy Classroom

After all this time, we finally get to escape the Spy Classroom Purgatory of endless flashbacks and begin the next Impossible Mission! Well…kind of. “MISSION: Daughter Dearest I” is more of a prologue episode that introduces the basic conflict of this upcoming mission—there’s an assassin on the loose and Lamplight has to take him down—though the majority of the story is actually concerned with giving more character development to one of the girls who didn’t get her own spotlight episode during that interminable flashback arc. This time, we get to know the titular “Daughter Dearest”, Grete, and she’s…fine. She’s perfectly fine. If nothing else, her convoluted scheme of using multiple disguise fakeouts to try and poison Klaus is the closest that the team has come to successfully beating him at the game of spycraft, so that’s something? The Lamplight Girls still lose, of course, because we can’t have any meaningful character development or plot digression happening too fast around these parts, but hey, at least it feels like we’re going somewhere again after weeks of wasting time.

The downside of the Grete focus is that she is possibly the least compelling Lamplight agent so far, as the only other discernable personality trait that she has outside of being really, really smart is that she’s down bad for teach. The whole “romantic” angle that Spy Classroom pushed this week really didn’t work for me, if I’m being honest. The lazy fanservice and awkward interactions that came from Klaus walking in on Grete naked in the bathroom was so poorly done that it actually ended up ruining the surprise of Grete’s scheme later in the episode. I kept thinking, “There’s no way that Spy Classroom would waste so much time and energy on such a dumb scene if Grete isn’t going to somehow be the main focus of the episode”, so when she pulled off her mask and revealed her plot to Klaus and Lily later on, I was just grateful that the show was going somewhere with the character, even if that destination was a lame love confession at the end of the episode.

Really, Spy Classroom‘s biggest problem is that not only are its main female protagonists all a bit too stock to muster up any real passion or intrigue on the part of the audience, but Klaus is so bland and annoyingly competent at everything he does that the comedy and spy angles of the show is starting to grow stale, too. There are only so many times I can see one of the girls’ plots get foiled by Klaus, just so he can over-explain all of the tiny elements of failure that he encountered to them. The formula is wearing out its welcome, and Spy Classroom desperately needs to inject something novel in its place if it has any hope of making it across the finish line.

That’s where you’d think that a ruthless assassin named Corpse would at least add some kind of spice to the recipe, but there’s not a whole lot to go on from this episode after that choppily directed opening scene, aside from Klaus and everyone else going on and on about how dangerous he is. We’re talking about an overdramatic murderer who got his name from literally looking like a dead body; this is prime Stupid as Hell Anime Bullshit material, right here! I hope that Spy Classroom can embrace the spy camp of it all and commence with the Impossible Mission shenanigans soon, because I otherwise might end up snoozing my way through the final episodes of the season.

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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.

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