English Dub Review: Spy X Family “■■■■’s Memories II”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Loid completes his flashback to how he got his start as a spy.

OUR TAKE

We come to the conclusion of the flashback story about Loid’s past, carrying on from the shocking end of last episode where the supposed attack from the Ostanian Army began, apparently only escalating from there as Loid’s parents and remaining family were eventually killed. From then on, things only seem to get worse for Loid, as he joins the Westalis Army and hones his abilities as a soldier, even meeting his eventual ally Franky and reuniting with his old childhood friends, though those friends soon die in a poorly planned campaign. From there, he is recruited by WISE, the spy agency he is a part of at the start of the series, and the rest, as they say, is history. And by that, I mean the flashback sort of just stops the moment we meet Loid’s spy boss from the present day. We return to the present with Loid waking up from fainting from Anya’s Tontris Bolts that she got in last week’s episode, which I predicted would be the case BEFORE looking up the synopsis of this week’s episode, and finds out she actually got that bolt from protecting Damian, so he praises her for that, end of episode.

And yeah, I would say this was a decent peek into Loid’s backstory, to a greater extent than we have before in the series, but the main thing that bugs me is that, well, it kinda feels superfluous by the end. Again, glad we learned more about Loid, but to what end? We have a solid framing device, though it’s not like Anya’s demerits really triggered anything in Loid about his past, and said past sort of just stops playing once it hits something close to the present, like a tape stopped playing. I guess the final scene is meant to be about how stepping up for friends is important, but that wasn’t really a prevalent thing in Loid’s past. Heck, all his friends died and he didn’t even get a chance to stand up for them or save them. It just all feels very disjointed and unpolished, especially since I’m not sure if any of this is going to really matter in later parts of the season due to this series tending to be pretty episodic and self-contained. But I guess we will just have to keep watching to find out, and we’ve got at least nine more episodes, so who the heck knows.