The Summer 2023 Anime Preview Guide

Spy Classroom Season 2

In a world still recovering from the devastation of its “Great War,” nations have increasingly turned to teams of expertly trained spies to enact their plans for subterfuge and counterplotting. While the girls of Lamplight may have started as a bunch of rookies with no ties to one another, they have grown into an effective unit of spies thanks to the training of their masterful—and very eccentric—teacher, Klaus. As they continue to fend off threats both from the outside and possibly from within, the Lamplight girls will have to hone their spycraft to perfection if they have any hopes of completing the Impossible Missions that lay before them.

Spy Classroom Season 2 is based on Takemachi's Spy Classroom (Spy Kyōshitsu or Spy Room) light novel series. It streams on HIDIVE on Thursdays.

Another season of Spy Classroom has arrived, and the show is hellbent on continuing with the downright bizarre pacing of its storytelling from its first season. Thankfully, now that we've at least become acclimatized to the madness, nothing will end up being as disorienting as the grueling slog of flashbacks that preceded that first Impossible Mission. Still, this is the same Spy Classroom that we have come to know and…tolerate, I guess? For better and for worse.

For instance: We ended last season with a pretty major cliffhanger, with a bunch of the girls gone missing after the mansion mission and the possibility of betrayal hanging over the head of Thea, in particular. Naturally, that means that this episode flashes back from that cliffhanger to show us the anticlimactic capture of Corpse at the hands of Klaus, Thea, Monika, Erna, and Annette; then, it flashes forward to the very end of Season 1, when the team has learned that those same girls have not reported back in to Klaus, only for the show to flash slightly further back to the days before the mansion mission so that we can spend the whole premiere on a slice-of-life episode focusing on those same soon-to-maybe-be-in-danger girls. Finally, the show flashes forward again to four days before the other members of the gang get the call-in, which takes place before the flashforward cliffhanger from the end of Season 1, and, yep, my eyes are starting to roll back into my skull again.

Of course, none of this incredibly random pacing would be as big of a deal if Spy Classroom had all its other narrative ducks in a row. However, it speaks to the quality of that first season's endless parade of time-wasting flashbacks that I still have to resort to a wiki to remember who half of these characters are. The stories Spy Classroom has told so far are certainly not terrible by any means, but even at their absolute best, they struggle to clear the shallow bar of “perfectly and forgettably average.” That doesn't seem to have changed for this second season, which makes Spy Classroom impossible for me to recommend to anyone but the diehard fans that have already drunk the Flavor-Aid. Despite all of the time I spent with the show, I don't count myself among that group, so I'll happily give this season a pass unless circumstances (such as masochistic voters in the Streaming Reviews poll) dictate otherwise.