Spy×Family Season 3

Episode 45

People sometimes underestimate how much pain hurts. That goes for both physical and emotional pain – both get downplayed by others, who don't understand, or don't want to understand, the effect it can have on someone. Both can be debilitating, but the fallout from emotional pain, which is often dismissed as “all in your head,” can cause people to do anything to stop it. We don't live in the world of Lock & Key, after all, where a magical key can open your skull so that you can pull the bad feelings out.

Emotional pain is, in some ways, the theme of this season of Spy×Family, and it isn't holding back on how that pain is, in this case, rooted in war. Loid dealt with it as a frontline fighter. Billy and his daughter Biddy (an old-fashioned nickname for Bridget) acquired their pain through the protest movement. His situation is a reversal of the lyric from Florence Reece's 1931 protest song Which Side Are You On: "My daddy was a freedom fighter/And I'm my daddy's son/And I will fight for freedom/Until everybody's won" - his daughter Biddy was the original protester, and he has taken up her mantle after she was killed by the government for her beliefs. Billy believes that in hijacking the Eden College buses, he's both getting revenge for Biddy and standing up for what she believed in…until Anya, all unaware, tells him that all he's doing is the same thing that was done to him: killing someone else's child.

As Loid's past has shown us, and I hope we all know anyway, there's no excuse for that. If Billy kills that busload of kids, or even one of them, he's no better than the cops (or SSS) who murdered his daughter. Children should not be casualties of war or used for war in any way. In his pain, Billy forgot that, even as he believed he was acting in the best interests of his child's memory. But would the girl who held back larger cats so kittens could eat really have wanted him to use two busloads of six-year-olds to further an agenda? In the words of Buffy Sainte-Marie, “brothers, can't you see/this is not the way to put an end to war.”

While this episode would have been strong with just Billy figuring things out (with Anya's help), it's made even better by the actions of the other adults. Henderson, temporarily freed from the constraints of elegance, selflessly offers himself up for his students, negotiating his way onto the bus and the poor teacher's way off. Martha not only saves Anya from being shot by the purported good guys, but she also shows a coolheadedness that undoubtedly stops the situation from getting worse. She keeps Becky's dad in check, and she waits for her opportunity to act. There's clearly more going on with her, but in the moment, it's not hard to see why she's Becky's bodyguard. Meanwhile, Yuri finds the second bus and takes a bullet to free the kids. He may be grumbling all the while about doing it for “leash girl,” but he still does it. That stands in sharp contrast to the other SSS agents, who have zero qualms about letting six-year-olds get caught in the crossfire. They view the children as disposable – the very attitude that created Billy in the first place. Oh, when will they ever learn?

Nothing is going to bring Biddy back, any more than Loid's childhood friends can be brought back. But people can choose to stop killing children or putting children into a position to be killed. That's why Loid's a spy. That's probably why Sylvia's a spy. And now I'm thinking that even Yuri gets it, and maybe that's why he joined the SSS. But until the people in power understand, it will keep happening.

We'll have to put our faith in Anya and hope that her generation can take another step towards breaking the cycle – maybe just by saying they're hungry.

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Spy×Family Season 3 is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.