Episode 4

The Forgers arrive at Eden Academy for their entrance interview, and Loid and Yor immediately sense hidden eyes on them. Realizing that instructors are secretly grading every applicant from the moment they set foot on campus, Loid warns his wife and daughter to stay on their best behavior. Housemaster Henry Henderson, unimpressed by the year's crop of candidates, takes notice when the family pauses to honor the founder's statue, though Anya's borderline written score of 31 points and questions about the hastily formed household leave him wary.

Along the route to the interview hall, a heavyset boy flails in a gutter, an obviously staged trial. Loid wades into the muck to haul him out, ruining his own clothes and Anya's, then stuns the watching examiners by producing spare outfits the family packed in advance. Moments later, escaped farm animals stampede through the grounds. Loid rescues a child left behind in the panic while Yor drops the lead cow with a strike to its pressure points, and Anya quietly calms the frightened herd. An awed Henderson personally thanks the family for averting a crisis and delays their interview so they can tidy up, only to learn they brought a second change of clothes as well.

The interview itself goes smoothly until Housemaster Murdoch Swan, a bitter and recently divorced examiner, begins needling the family. When he demands that a tearful Anya weigh Yor against her deceased first mother and then mocks the crying child, Loid nearly punches him, smashing the table instead. Declaring that a school that belittles a child's feelings is the wrong place for Anya, Loid walks his family out. Henderson, asked by Swan who truly disgraced Eden, answers by knocking his colleague out cold. At home, the deflated Forgers brace for rejection, but Anya voices her wish to attend school anyway, and the three toast to their future just before the family photo tumbles from its shelf, an unwelcome omen.

Henry Henderson, Murdoch Swan, and Walter Evans all make their first appearances. Henderson's fixation on elegance becomes a running motif as the Forgers repeatedly exceed his expectations across the staged gutter rescue and the animal stampede.

Yor immobilizes a charging cow with a single pressure-point strike, giving Loid his first real glimpse of her physical capabilities. Anya leans on her telepathy throughout, soothing the panicked cow and surviving the interview questions by pulling answers from Loid's mind.

Loid loses his composure for the first time in the series, choosing Anya's dignity over the smooth progress of Operation Strix. The falling family portrait closes the episode on a note of dread about the school's verdict.

The episode adapts Chapters 4 and 5 of the manga. A family that briefly offers help to the boy trapped in the gutter appears only in the manga and was cut from the adaptation.

Loid's line about his nerves before the interview is softened for broadcast: the manga compares them to defusing a nuclear bomb with a single second remaining, while the Japanese anime refers only to halting a missile launch. The English dub restores the nuclear wording.

The portrait that falls at the end is the photograph the family posed for an episode earlier, whereas the manga showed only an indistinct framed picture.