Doggy Crisis Arc

The Doggy Crisis Arc is the sixth story arc of SPY x FAMILY, spanning chapters 18 through 23 (volume 4) and episodes 13 through 15 of the anime's first season. It sits between the Stella Star Arc and the Midterm Exams Arc.

Its central threat comes from a band of Berlint University students plotting to assassinate Westalis's Foreign Minister Brantz with explosive-rigged dogs, hoping the killing will ignite a war between the two nations.

The Forgers' weekend trip to buy Anya a dog is cut short when Loid is pulled onto an urgent mission: stop an isolationist student cell from killing Minister Brantz. Disguised as their leader, Keith Kepler, he tricks the member Kris into revealing the scheme, while his Handler explains that the group's dogs came out of Project Apple, a scrapped government program that left them with unusual abilities.

At an adoption fair with Yor, Anya locks eyes with an enormous white dog and, through their telepathic link, glimpses the whole Forger family in his mind. Trailing him leads her straight into the terrorists' hideout, where she is caught eavesdropping. The dog helps her escape, sharing a glimpse of things to come as they run, and Anya realizes he is clairvoyant, a hidden talent to match her own. Yor arrives just in time to flatten the pursuing Kurt, and Keith abandons the dog and runs. A second vision shows Loid dying in a clock tower explosion alongside the minister's assassination, so Anya bolts off on the dog's back to change that future.

WISE sweeps up every cell member except Keith and extracts four possible bomb sites. Anya reaches the right one first and, unable to disarm anything, scrawls a cryptic warning that stops Loid from triggering the door-rigged charge. He then impersonates Brantz to bait Keith into the open, all while dodging Yuri, who is meant to be escorting the real minister. Keith sends his bomb dog after the decoy, but Loid strips the explosive off the animal and hurls it into the river, and when Keith tries to flee, Yor's kick sends his car into a pole.

With the plot broken, the Handler poses as an SSS agent to confiscate the white dog as a Project Apple subject. Anya digs in, threatening to quit school unless she can keep him, and the mission wins out: the dog joins the household under Loid's supervision. After struggling for a name, Anya notices how much he resembles Bondman from her beloved cartoon and christens him Bond.

Bond becomes the fourth Forger, a precognitive pet whose visions quietly bail the family out for the rest of the series. The arc also deepens Sylvia Sherwood: Brantz addresses her by her alias, and her furious lecture to the captured students reveals both her firsthand experience of the last war and the daughter she lost to it.

Project Apple, the program that created Bond, lingers as an unresolved thread that later arcs return to.