October 9th, 2022 
AstroNerdBoy Spy×Family 14
SPOILER Summary/Synopsis
Yor knocks out one terrorists and sends Kieth and his dog fleeing. Anya apologizes to her adoptive mother for leaving her. However, when Anya sees the future though the big white dog who saved her, she realizes her papa, Twilight, is going to die in a bombing unless she does something. As such, she tells Yor that she’s going for toilet paper for Twilight and flees on the dog.
Meanwhile, WISE gets more information to stop Kieth. The dog takes Anya to where the bombing is to take place. Anya laments she can’t tell time. She and the dog find the apartment. Anya discovers a tiny “window” in the wall with a trap door to get in. On the inside, Anya realizes she cannot disarm the bomb on the door. As such, she uses ketchup to leave a cryptic message on the door for Twilight.
Anya and the dog retreat to a safe distance. WISE comes to the apartment, but don’t understand Anya’s message. Nevertheless, Twilight urges caution and peeks through the “window” and sees the bomb. WISE leaves the area for the Secret Police. Twilight takes on the identity of the minister Kieth’s organization wanted to kill to start a war. Kieth takes the bait and pursues the disguised Twilight, sicking his dog on Twilight.
Thoughts/Review
Adapted from manga chapters 20 and 21, Anya gets into more adventures in Spy×Family 14. Now, she’s even deeper in the terrorist muck.
Anya the Hero
I really enjoyed how Anya got to be the hero in Spy×Family 14. But what’s more, I love that Anya isn’t made into more than she is. For a start, she doesn’t know how to tell time. So she doesn’t know how much longer she has before the bomb goes off. That sets up a tense situation for her where she wants to do something, but doesn’t know what to do.
Then there’s the apartment. She almost set off the bomb, had it not been for the dog. Her near mistake felt very natural. Then on the inside of the apartment, she plans on cutting the bomb’s wires, like she’s seen on TV. But as she learns, reality and TV aren’t the same.
Further, she doesn’t know how to disarm a bomb. So she does what she can — leave a message in ketchup. And then she and the dog get out of the potential blast zone.
I don’t think I mentioned this in my review of volume 4 of the manga, but my only problem was the convenient, tiny window with no glass, with only a trap door (or maybe small, wooden shutter) to close it. This window opens to an interior hallway. The manga did show that the next apartment had a full-sized window to that same hallway. However, there’s no mistaking plot convenience at work with the tiny window.
Final Thoughts and Conclusion
I’m super behind, so let me wrap up my review of Spy×Family 14 with some final thoughts.
- The scene with Handler talking with the terrorists had more impact in the anime than the manga. A good anime adaptation should do things like that.
- Twilight does his usual thing here in terms of his role in the story.
- Yor has some lovely moments with Anya, which I liked.
- Yuri had an interesting cameo in the episode that didn’t go anywhere.
- While I had some words for the English adaptation of the previous episode, I didn’t really have any issues with this episode. Yeah, they used “shit” again in the subtitles. “Kuso” in Japanese can be translated as “crap” or “shit”. Considering it was used in the Japanese in a profane way, it made sense considering whom it was coming from.
In the end, Spy×Family 14 is another, lovely episode where Anya gets to be the hero in a realistic way. And she managed to keep her esper powers a secret.
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To be honest, I hadn’t taken much note of Handler until now – other than mild annoyance at the straight-man roles she was playing. But with her monologue to the terrorists, she shot up to my favorite character outside the trio. I half-wonder if the anime writers/director brought it home harder because they wanted to send a razor-sharp message to anyone who mindlessly cheers and hopes for w*r (but has no idea what it truly means, and if faced with even a small fraction of the horrors it creates, would sell their very souls to escape).
To my mind, this episode was more refined than the previous cour. It seems like back then they were a lot more slapstick / flaunting realism when parodying dramatic conventions, but here they mix in a lot of believability – particularly with Anya, as you pointed out. Instead of everything working out because reasons, Bond warns her away from getting distracted and opening the door. Where there’s no way Anya to have the physical strength/stamina to do things, Bond helps out. Her not understanding time is a great accent to this, because it lets us know that although Bond is a really good complement/partner – he won’t be able to fill in all the gaps.
After tweaking a well-worn trope pretty hard with “But all the wires are black!” (insert Anya BSOD face), they have to switch gears and throw in a bunch of ludicrous details to remind us they’re not aspiring to tell a realistic story. Somehow Twilight gets away with stealing the minister’s clothes and car – then a dog can track his scent in a moving car – then Keith openly points out how crazy it would be for a middle-aged government minister to be doing acrobatics, but still keeps chasing him. “Relax, everyone. It’s still a parody, you’re still in on the joke, and we won’t insult your intelligence the way some dramatic conventions do.”
Two thumbs up for this one. Three if I manage to grow an extra after the nukes start dropping. (^_~)bbb
I didn’t talk much about Handler due to time constraints, but I agree with you. The scene is a faithful adaptation from the manga, but it just hit me harder in the anime. And I loved it.
Having read the manga through volume 8 (I need to write the review of it), this tends to be the way it goes. There are some realistic story beats, but then there are some over-the-top moments that rival Lupin III franchise. There’s a lot of fun stuff coming.
Sorry to keep nibbling away with little addenda, no response needed – went back to watch that scene for a fourth time and realized that what I picked up on wrt the animators accentuating the scene (the sudden art-style shift to an apparent flashback in Handler’s memory)… might not have been as important as the very, very subtle background sounds (not quite music) they added.
Just a tip, might be worth a rewatch/listen (if you didn’t already notice it and I’m just late to the party (^_~)°).
Yeah, I should go back and listen again.