Pokemon S01E64-65 Review: Return to Pallet

Pokemon, Season 1, Episode 64: It's Mime Time; Episode 65: Showdown at the Poke Corrall

We've got eight badges, but apparently Ash himself is clueless about what to do before the huge championship fight, and so are the producers. Which is why we're going to have a relatively long stretch of standalone filler episodes. And back when I was a kid, I had a stack of VCD's of Pokemon that I watched and rewatched a fair amount of times... but I was missing everything from after the Giovanni fight to around a couple of episodes before the start of the Indigo League tournament. While I did eventually read up synopses in episode guides or watch the odd episode or two to find out what happened in the huge chunk of time that I missed out on, this is essentially the first time that I've really watched some of these episodes in its entirety.

Anyway, this episode is... it's relatively decent. It's technically the addition of one of the anime's longest-running recurring characters in Mimey, which is going to be Ash's mom's partner Pokemon for quite literally the rest of the show's run, but you wouldn't have guessed it by watching the episode. It feels like yet another "Pokemon-of-the-week" episode, and we certainly have settled into the "meet a bunch of characters-of-the-week and help out their problems thing. In this episode, as Team Ash return to Pallet Town, they end up encountering Stella, a circus ringmaster who's trying to catch a Mr. Mime in order to basically be a competition to get her own slacking Mr. Mime to get motivated to work for a living. Brock basically gets the idea to have Ash himself dress up as a Mr. Mime, which leads to some hijinks when Team Rocket shows up to steal Mr. Mime, only to find Ash instead. Even more hijinks ensue when Delia ends up thinking that the wild Mr. Mime is actually Ash... although this whole misunderstood-identity bit honestly is a joke that got dragged on for way too long.

(The anime, by the way, does a pretty good job at making Mr. Mime actually look cute and adorable instead of creepy and unsettlingly human).

When we reach the climax of the episode, Team Rocket shows up with a rubberized tank and starts shooting net missiles at the rest of the circus's Pokemon, and in a display of selflessness and unconditional love (tm) Stella gives her lazy-ass Mr. Mime a piggy-back ride and shows how much she loves it. The Mr. Mime that Delia has taken a shine to, Mimey, ends up being a lot more proactive in creating barriers, which is pretty cool, and together with Mr. Lazy Mime they trap Team Rocket's tank in a massive tower of invisible walls. That's actually kind of a neat usage of the Pokemon's specific special skill. That's neat. This invigorates Mr. Lazy Mime to be a proper performer, while Delia formally adopts Mr. Mime as her Pokemon.

I also do like the little nuggets of continuity in episode 64, in addition to the Mr. Mime stuff actually being aW relatively solid Pokemon spotlight. We get to see Charizard still be a lazy bum and refusing to obey Ash (eight badges or not, Charizard don't give no shits). We also get a brief little follow up to the Giovanni stuff last episode, which I certainly didn't expect. The one we got in 64 is pretty tame, just Team Rocket apologizing to Giovanni (who's dismissive of their flaws and just tells them to 'do better'), and Giovanni beholding Mewtwo and talking up how rare and special it is. It's not much, but I'll take what I can get.

Anyway, a pretty solid episode with a solid, simple plot, and a bunch of neat little extra stuff going in the background. What about 65?

"Showdown at the Poke-Corral" has always been an interesting episode that I watched once as a kid, but it left kind of a huge impression because we don't really get a whole lot of these world-building episodes in early Kanto episodes. We actually get to see what goes on in the "Pokemon Box", and in the anime continuity, Professor Oak actually personally takes care of all of the Pokemon that trainers like Ash and Gary sends to them, and the showcase of a massive Pokemon habitat that Oak maintains as part of his research is genuinely neat world-building stuff. Hey, we even get a whole lot of stuff between Ash and Gary, which is neat because I've always felt like their interaction in "Battle for the Badge" was abrupt, and Gary's respect for Ash felt random and out of nowhere. Glad to see that it was mostly just the two of them banding together to deal with the Team Rocket gym for the moment, and that Gary's still got a fair amount of smarminess within him.

That said, though, despite the two relatively episode hooks being pretty dang interesting on paper, how this episode is executed feels a bit... off. We just sort of jump from scene to scene without that much preamble beyond "hey, let's look at the next cool thing in Oak's Poke-ranch", which, I suppose, isn't that far off from actually going to tour in a zoo or a ranch or whatever.

Oh, and more Mewtwo tie-in stuff, this one being a lot more significant than the previous one. As Team Rocket whimpers and drag their feet as they go off to kinda-sorta apologize to Giovanni for fucking up in the Viridian Gym, the Team Rocket HQ blows the hell up as Mewtwo zips off into the air, away into the distance to star in a movie coming to theaters near you. Giovanni goes off to give chase on his helicopter, dismissing Team Rocket and telling them to basically go off and continue maintaining the status quo and doing what they keep doing. It's kind of a shame from a storytelling perspective -- I could see an alternate world where instead of filler episodes we actually have a proper Mewtwo/Team Rocket arc, but it's admittedly part of the Pokemon anime's charm that the super-epic stuff are the exception and relatively contained to movies (and later seasons) instead of the norm. Anyway, I guess this also sort of counts as the 'resolution' to the bigger Team Rocket as a whole, leaving only the bumbling trio as our main representative, at least until the Generation V anime.

Team Rocket spends the entire rest of the episode being fucked up by the Pokemon in Oak's ranch. Stung by Beedrill, blown up by Voltorb and Electrode, whacked by Onix, blocked by Snorlax... It's not a good day for Team Rocket.


In Professor Oak's lab, we get a neat little pissing contest between Gary and Ash, which continues all the way throughout the episode. It starts off with a neat dick-measuring contest as Ash and Gary compare the size of their Krabbies, and an argument regarding their different style in training. Gary rotates his large roster of Pokemon so they all get to fight equally, while Ash insists that really really spending time with the first six creatures you catch is the right, decent thing to do. We get a neat little bit of Oak evaluating Gary and Ash's pokedexes, basically noting that Ash saw more (and is implied to explore more), but Gary catches a lot more creatures. We get to see the sheer amount of Pokemon that Gary has captured, compared to Ash's -- which amounts to Krabby, Muk and a whole ton of Tauros.

We then get Oak giving a long information dump about what he does every day and how he structures both his schedule, his research and his laboratory complex to care for the Pokemon, and while it's all relatively basic stuff, it's neat to see just what a pokemon researcher like Oak gets up to. Reviewing differences between individual Rattata, seeing how they behave in wild, all that neat stuff. We then get to check in with Gary's Doduo (which is kinda random) and the glorious return of Ash's Muk, and this is the first time we get to see Ash's Muk glomp the hell out of Oak. In later seasons this is a gag that gets absolutely old, but for the first time it's actually kinda funny.

Then we get a philosophical speech about how there's a lot more Pokemon in the world and what they're seeing here is the tip of an iceberg (oh it certainly is) and how people should treat Pokemon with care and respect and how amazing Pokemon are, all inspirational stuff. Gary and Ash very nearly battle, but get interrupted by Team Rocket... who promptly gets knocked straight off into the sky shortly after saying their motto when Ash's thirty Tauros happened to stampede past them. That's kind of an anti-climactic way to end it, and for someone who insists that he cares and loves his Pokemon, Ash really doesn't care for his Tauros, huh? Hell, Oak had to point out that those were his Tauros. I felt that was kind of off.

It's still ultimately a pretty entertaining, if slow and disjointed, episode. Kinda do wish that we end with a little Ash-vs-Gary battle as they kept hinting but eventually didn't show in this episode. The episode ends with the promise that it's going to be two more months until the Pokemon League, so, uh... eight more filler episodes I guess.

Featured Characters:

• Episode 64:
• Pokemon: Pikachu, Togepi, Mr. Mime, Meowth, Persian, Mewtwo, Rapidash, Ponyta, Machoke, Tangela, Exeggcute, Dodrio, Charizard
• Humans: Ash, Misty, Brock, Delia, James, Jessie, Giovanni, 
• Episode 65:
• Pokemon: Mr. Mime, Togepi, Pikachu, Meowth, Mewtwo, Persian, Krabby, Kakuna, Beedrill, Snorlax, Parasect (image and present), Diglett (image), Oddish (image), Weepinbell (image), Poliwag (image and present), Raticate, Rattata, Growlithe, Nidoran F, Nidoran M, Horsea, Seel, Goldeen, Staryu, Starmie, Mankey, Primeape, Rapidash, Ponyta, Pidgey, Pidgeotto, Spearow, Doduo, Paras, Exeggcute, Dugtrio, Rhydon, Rhyhorn, Onix, Vulpix, Muk, Geodude, Sandshrew, Dewgong, Slowpoke, Ho-Oh (flashback), Electrde, Voltorb, Tauros
• Humans: Ash, Brock, Delia, Misty, Jessie, James, Giovanni, Professor Oak, Gary

Random Notes:

• Nope, the dub did not explain Ash's herd of Tauros at all, which was captured in an episode that wasn't aired in the US. Professor Oak just says that these are Ash's Tauros that he captured before, and that's that. It's really bizarre, surely they could've spliced in some dialogue to explain it for the US audience? 
• Dub Edits:
• An error unique to the dub is that episode 64's title card mis-spells "Mr. Mime" as "Mr. Mimie". Episode mis-spells "corral" as "corrall".
• Original!Stella's problem was actually spoiling her Mr. Mime, which is why it was so, well, spoiled. Dub!Stella, meanwhile, is portrayed as realizing from the first meeting with Ash that Mr. Mime is angry due to how tough she is as a trainer. This means that in the dub Stella sort of loses her brief character development of learning to adapt to be a better trainer to Mr. Mime. 
• Original!Ash recites a couple of lines from the Team Rocket motto when unmasking himself from the Mr. Mime costume. 
• Original!Ash was a bit more grumpy and wants a bit of a credit for himself, whereas Dub!Ash readily accepts that maybe his Pokemon deserves more credit than him.
• Dub!Oak was far more blase about Gary and Ash's bickering, whereas original!Oak tells Brock that the bickering has been how the two behaved since they were kids. 
• Misty and Brock discussing how Ash and Gary could learn to "like each other" since they both like Pokemon is a dub-only addition, the original Japanese lines are discussing how the two rivals get each other fired up. 
• Original!Gary calls his Doduo specifically "my sweet" (in English), which actually is a nice touch that shows that he at least knows some of his Pokemon specifically and he's not super-duper aloof. 
• I'm pretty sure that this is the first time we've seen a character in the anime give a Pokemon a nickname, other than Gary's Japanese-exclusive "my honey" remark with Arcanine. Which, when you think about it, is pretty demeaning -- calling a Pikachu "Pikachu" is like calling your pet dog "Dog", but it's a necessary evil the show has to live with since they have to promote the names of the merchandise! In either case, it's a simple nickname -- "Bari-chan" in Japanese and "Mimey" in English. 
• Some of the Pokemon are off-model thing due to the (relatively, for that time) large amount of featured Pokemon in episode 65 -- most notable is that the Primeape briefly shown had Mankey's face drawn in, and the two Nidoran sub-types have their colours swapped. 
• Gary notes that he kept rotating all of his Pokemon so they all get experience, criticizing Ash's method of just focusing on the first six Pokemon he encounters. 
• Gary has seen 60 Pokemon, while Ash has seen 100 Pokemon... but Gary caught a lot more, more than 200. Gary notes that he catches multiples of the same species, and attributes his low 'seen' numbers to the fact that he doesn't need to pull out the Pokedex to register Pokemon since he knows information about them already.
• If Mewtwo is a secret from the whole world, and Mew is mythological, the whole 'only 150' Pokemon thing doesn't hold up, does it? It doesn't hold up even more when you realize just how many freaking creatures there are even in the neighbouring region of Johto. 
• Togepi's existence as a Pokemon outside of the original 150 is noted by the cast, but no one really makes a particularly big fuss out of it. 
• We get a return of the TCG type symbols in the border around Professor Oak's little tour of his daily routine. 

Pokemon S01E63 Review: Giovanni's Conspiracy

Pokemon, Season 1, Episode 63: The Battle of the Badge

This is actually the last episode that I have on VCD as a kid, and after that I'm missing a significant chunk of the Indigo season, only catching up later on at the beginning of the actual Indigo League conference, so the next couple of episode reviews will be the first time I've actually properly watched some of these episodes. "The Battle of the Badge", though, was an episode I watched a lot of times as a kid. It's bad-ass, y'know? As someone whose only real exposure to movies having been Disney movies and live-action Batman movies, it was pretty mind-blowing to realize that, hey, this story in the cartoon is actually a tie-in to the huge big movie with prettier animation and higher stakes and more badass action about this big bad scary most powerful Pokemon, Mewtwo. It's also a pay-off to both the leader pulling the strings behind Team Rocket, as well as the final gym leader in Ash's gym challenge. It's epic, right?


Well... not quite. If you want a better-handled lead-up to what the Mewtwo/gym challenge/Team Rocket storyline could be, read Pokemon Adventures (or Pokemon Special). It's a manga with some of its own issues, but it sure handled the Giovanni stuff a lot better by actually building him and Team Rocket up as villains. Anime Giovanni, on the other hand, is such a nebulous presence in the show, a funny voice with a Persian , while Team Rocket itself is pretty much the bumbling goons we're familiar with, while things like the grunts that attacked S.S. Anne or Butch-and-Cassidy were the exception rather than the rule.

Still, as a kid, there was a neat sense of epic badassery as we get to see a couple of battles that isn't just Ash bumbling his way to victory. It's just kind of a shame that we didn't get a two-parter out of this episode, though -- even if it's a rule that Team Ash has to be the primary focus of any given episode, you'd think that they would have given an eipsode to build up the Gary-vs-Giovanni fight, and another one for Ash's gym challenge. They did, after all, already do a two-parter with the Blaine one.

Instead, the first half of the episode moves pretty quickly. And there's nothing wrong with that. Gary shows up with ten badges (!), talks shit to Ash, and then challenges the gym, where he immediately meets Giovanni (who only the audience recognizes). It's cool, right? We get to see Gary actually live up to all of the boasting he's done, and he even throws in pretty badass-looking fully evolved creatures like Nidoking and Arcanine against Giovanni's own gaggle of fully-evolved creatures with Golem and Kingler. There's just something pretty jarring compared to Ash, who uses primarily non-evolved Pokemon. Which is smart from a marketing perspective, sure, but this actually made me go squee as a kid. Except... except we keep cutting back and forth between Gary's battle and an insipid B-plot with Togepi getting lost after a Fearow accidentally drops her in front of Team Rocket, and it kind of ruins the pacing of the entire episode.

Giovanni, of course, unleashes his most powerful and prized Pokemon -- an unnamed, enigmatic humanoid creature clad fully in armour. Gary's Pokedex fails to give him any information about the creature, something it's never done before, and Giovanni even allows Gary to use more than one Pokemon in the fight... and Mewtwo just one-shots both Arcanine and Nidoking effortlessly by waving its hands. And as a little kid watching this episode bac in the day, it's pretty dang impressive, even if now I do acknowledge the whole scene as being pretty basic.

Of course, for the rest of this episode, this is entirely not followed up upon. Giovanni berates Team Rocket for bringing him a useless Pokemon like Togepi, before an emergency catches his attention and he leaves behind three Pokeballs for Team Rocket to deal with this 'gym leader' business while he goes off to check on something. Giovanni stands in front of Mewtwo for a bit in his secret basement, noting that he's letting Mewtwo out for some sort of emergency, but that's really all we get to see of the two in the anime for now. Unless there's something in the next couple of episodes, we never really find out what Giovanni's planning to do with Mewtwo.

It's about this point that the Togepi sub-plot resolves itself, and Ash enters the gym to find Gary beaten and mumbling about some unbeatable Pokemon. But who's got time for proper foreshadowing and payoff, here's Team Rocket standing on the ledge and taking over Viridian City's gym! (We handwave quickly the oddity of Giovanni being both a gym leader and a Team Rocket member) As a kid, I thought this was a way to allow Ash to get the Earth Badge without actually prevailing against Big Bad Giovanni, and that they're saving the Ash/Giovanni confrontation for later on... which took around a decade and a half's worth of episodes to happen. Still, I guess there's thematic sense in the anime to have the actual representatives of Team Rocket that battle Ash be Jessie and James? I guess?

There's a silly gimmick where the platforms zap the trainers when the Pokemon take damage, something that Meowth also rigs Jessie's platform to do so. We get a serviceable fight, I suppose -- Jessie's borrowed Machamp overwhelms poor Squirtle, Kingler manages to tank Bulbasaur's attacks and attack him, before Pidgeotto ends up taking out Rhydon. Meowth is about to blow up Ash's platform, but it's heroic Gary to the rescue as he action-movie-tackles Meowth's remote away. And then we get a free for all as Jessie throws in Arbok and Weezing into the fray alongside Giovanni's three Pokemon, causing Ash to unleash Pikachu and his protagonist powers of thunderbolt to zap everything and everyone, Togepi finds the remote for the explosives and presses it, sending Team Rocket blasting off again, demolishing the gym and dropping the Earth Badge. And that's it for the gym challenge, and Ash and company head off to go through some filler episodes before the actual tournament begins.

And... and there's a lot of things that happen here, but on the other hand it sort of is all jumbled up and none of the payoffs are done right. It's supposed to be a big dramatic revelation that Giovanni is both the final gym leader in Kanto and also Team Rocket's boss, but the actual revelation is handled with so little care that it's basically just a throwaway line that's quickly handwaved aside. The buildup to Mewtwo is just that -- empty buildup, and neither Mewtwo nor Giovanni really end up bringing much to the second half of the episode. Even Gary being humbled by his defeat and acknowledging Ash feels hollow -- Gary was brought to his knees by freaking Mewtwo, and he's supposed to suddenly do a massive 180 and acknowledge Ash as a good trainer for fighting Jessie and James? I dunno. The episode does have a bunch of neat, classic moments, but ultimately it's kind of messy.

Featured Characters:

• Pokemon: Pikachu, Togepi, Fearow, Meowth, Persian, Nidoking, Golem, Kingler, Arcanine, Mewtwo, Cloyster, Machamp, Rhydon, Squirtle, Bulbasaur, Pidgeotto, Weezing, Arbok, 
• Humans: Misty, Ash, Brock, Gary, Jessie, James, Giovanni

Random Notes:

• So obviously this episode was meant to be a tie-in to the "Mewtwo Strikes Back" movie, as a prequel for audiences to get a little taste and excitement about this mysterious Mewtwo monster, but thanks to the Porygon incident, the entire series was delayed, leading to episode 63-65 all debuting way after Mewtwo Strikes Back has finished its theatrical run in Japan. In US, though, the episodes are broadcasted as intended and the movie was released after this episode aired. 
• As a kid I've always mis-remembered that the 'emergency' and 'accident' that Giovanni has to leave the gym battle for is Mewtwo escaping... but it's not that, apparently.
• Gary has ten badges, and the anime has always sort of implied that there are more than eight gyms in the Kanto region, it's just that we only see the ones that Ash visits. Among the badges that Gary have, the only ones that he has in common with Ash and the games are the Boulder, Cascade and Rainbow badges. We've seen that Gary certainly didn't fight Blaine and didn't manage to beat Giovanni, but this episode sort of tells us that Gary didn't fight Surge, Sabrina or Koga.
• Dub Changes:

• One of the more egregious one is Ash noting that it's been "one year" since he left Viridian City. While it's certainly true from a production standpoint, the Japanese version works on Detective Conan anime time-rules and while time passes it's kept deliberately ambiguous so all the characters remain the same age. Likewise, Giovanni and Team Rocket talking about them taking "months" to turn up with nothing is also a dub addition. 
• Everything about Giovanni's voice filter, and the fact that he doesn't have one in this episode, is all a dub addition. Giovanni also gives out his name when introducing himself to Gary in the Japanese version of the episode, where here we don't get to learn Giovanni's name at all. 
• Ash's line about how "there can't be an evil Pokemon!" is a dub addition, the original Japanese lines are just Ash and Gary talking about the sheer power of the enigmatic Pokemon. 
• As with previous Gary/Ash episodes, the emphasis that Gary makes in mocking Ash as "the fourth person to leave Pallet Town" is dropped for more generic douchebagginess.
• Gary throws in a bunch of random English in his fight, referring to his Arcanine as "my honey", and calling his cheerleaders his "girlfriends".
• In this episode, the referee declares the winning Pokemon, when in the original Japanese version (and in subsequent English-dubbed episode) it's the ones that are defeated and unable to battle that gets declared. 
• Once more, a Rhydon gets absolutely electrocuted by Pikachu. Did the anime team just didn't get the memo that Rhydon is part-Ground? Unlike the Brock gym situation, at this point we've more than a year of the anime being on air, so they certainly don't get the "well, this might've been changed late in production of the game" pass.
• The random Roman gladiator guards in front of the Viridian City gym are... pretty dang weird, isn't it?
• I know it's a gag to 'warm Ash up' or get him 'heated up' but I've always thought that the little sequence where Pikachu and Togepi pulls out a campfire out of nowhere was pretty damn random. 
• I think Gary sending out two Pokemon to fight Mewtwo is the first instance of someone who's not Team Rocket basically engaging in multi-battles. 

Batwoman S01E07 Review: Love Interest Origin Story

Batwoman, Season 1, Episode 7: Tell Me The Truth

So a huge theme of this episode, as the title tells us, is yet another superhero-secrets-are-painful one, and it's one that arguably the Bat-family ended up exploring the most especially amongst DC characters. The problem is that Kate isn't the best at making excuses, and this ends up wedging a fair amount of distance with everyone. Poor Mary thinks Kate's avoiding her because of what Catherine did, Sophie's still in turmoil over the whole Kate-is-Batwoman thing. Incidentally, secrecy is a huge part of Kate's backstory not as a superhero, but as a lesbian.

Sophie and Kate's former relationship take center stage in this episode via a bunch of flashbacks to the military academy they enlisted in, and unlike what Kate is doing now in regards to her Batwoman identity, she's waving around the flag of "I'm gaaaay" as loudly as possible, whereas Sophie, under some advice from Jacob, ended up picking the safe way out, refusing to sign the papers or to admit to Kate that she loves her. We get more scenes of this unresolved romantic tension at numerous parts of the episode, with Kate calling Sophie out to dinner (which ended up being interrupted when Kate ends up in an argument with a homophobic and sneakerphobic restaurant manager) and sort of dodging around the Batwoman thing. The episodic conflict ends with an Arrow-style 'get someone else to wear the super-suit and throw the suspicious investigators off' sequence, so... eh. It's just a good thing that Julia didn't get herself killed by the Rifle's anti-batsuit railgun.

That particular leg of the conflict ends with Kate and Sophie basically setting a boundary for themselves, moving onward as friends. Sophie did give Kate that medal she stole from the academy back to her, which is neat. What Sophie does not know, of course, is the fact that the whole last leg of the episode is Kate setting up an even bigger boundary by actively making a little skit to have Kate and Batwoman appear in the same place at the same time -- distinctly different from the evasiveness that Kate throws around in front of Mary or Jacob. Speaking of Mary, how adorable is Kate enlisting the help of bubbly ol' Mary to help her set up her new gay bar? Mary just looks so happy to be included, after deling with all this divorce nonsense throughout the episode and being miserable for being ignored by Kate last episode.

Also, it's pretty neat to have another friendly face. Our guest star of the week is Julia Pennyworth, daughter of Batman's esteemed butler Alfred Pennyworth, and throughout various bits of conversation we quickly learn that Julia is in the loop of the whole Bat-family vigilante thing, and also has had a fling with Kate when she was masquerading as a martial arts instructor under Bruce's orders. Of course, it's this same sort of 'betrayal of trust' and 'secret identity' that ended up driving a little wedge between Kate and Julia in the past, so that's thematically relevant at least.

The trio work together to fight against a new threat, some knockoff Deadshot called the Rifle, who isn't particularly impressive or memorable. Rifle ends up sort of working alongside and/or competing with Alice and Mouse to get their hands on the Coil-gun that can punch a hole through the Batsuit. It's a bit confusing just how Alice and Rifle's working relationship is meant to be -- there's mentions of an employer called Safiyah, and by the end of the episode Alice has sabotaged the anti-Batsuit cannon by stealing one of the parts, and everyone who can fix it is dead. Also, with all the faces and voice mimicry going around, Mouse seems to b set up to be mimicking Jacob, isn't he? They are setting up some insane 'tea party', and it's going to be interesting to see what's going on with that -- next week is the pre-Crisis mid-season finale thing, so yeah.

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• Julia Pennyworth is an interesting character. First published in the pages of Detective Comics as Alfred's daughter with a French WWII heroine Mademoiselle Marie, Julia was unaware of who her true father is until a conflict to avenge her mother brought her into contact with Alfred and the Bat-family. Julia then disappeared from the pages of the comics and was basically ignored for multiple decades until finally showing up again in 2014, reconciling with her father and eventually serving as mission control for Batwoman. 
• The Rifle is original to this show. 
• The little dinosaur in the Batcave, of course, is a neat (low-budget!) homage to the gigantic robotic Tyrannosaurus rex, that, alongside a similarly large penny, is one of the two staple giant trophies in the comics' version of the Batcave.
• Briefly mentioned is another criminal overlord called Safiyah, a likely reference to Safiyah Sohail, a pirate adversary of Batwoman's. 
• Both Metropolis and ARGUS are mentioned at various points in the episode. 

Kamen Rider Zero-One E19-20 Review: Apple Cider

Kamen Rider Zero-One, Episode 19: She's A Home-Selling Humagear; Episode 20: That is 1000% the Best House

A bit late about this, but I didn't really have a whole ton to say about episode 19, really. Episode 19 is a solid tokusatsu episode, but I don't find that it's... it's kind of samey with a lot of the previous episodes. It's really weird that we seem to be up to stretching out this competition out for a two-parter each round, and I felt it was bizarre after the madcap dash to end the post-Dodo Mestubojinrai.net storyline before new year's. As we continue the company competition arc, this two-parter's theme is selling real estate. We get a lot of the same beats as episode 17 -- Gai, Aruto and Izu on that open-air cafe, Gai talking shit about robots and talking about human evolution, Gai threatening the human working for him to not fail or his career will be fucked, "Death" showing up to transform the human into a Raider, and eventually the nice Humagear getting transformed by the Ark into a rampaging Magia because of mistreatment by asshole humans.

Our human guest-star of the week is called Arayashiki Tatsumi, and he's... he's amazing at chewing the scenery, let me say that much. The actor is great at just hamming shit up, even if the character's basically just a right detestable cunt. We get a brief flash back and forth to a random bit where he confesses to his co-worker that he sells houses because he was stuck in less than ideal living conditions or whatever, but man, Arayashiki's long, extended abuse of poor Sumida Smile at the end of the episode, mocking her, dragging her around and tossing her into a pool... it's pretty terrible. And that's not counting him being convinced to sabotage the competitor's houses either!

Sumida Smile is our Humagear of the week, and she's... well, she's a nice little house-selling Humagear, and at this point we've sort of seen other variants of the nice, demure Humagear who just wants to help people around a lot of times. Smile's all right. We sort of have a neat showcase of Smile going around showing people to their prospective houses, noting things like the house having a nice environment to raise children and whatnot, whereas Arayashiki spends most of his time Wolf of Wall Street-ing in his office, talking over a phone and promising great investments. It's a neat contrast, I guess, even if I don't neccessarily think that Arayashiki's methods should be villified. Before the sabotage, anyway -- "Death" shows up and slaps a Raidrise belt onto Arayashiki when he gets stressed after a meeting with Gai, and he later turns into the Whale Raider to blow up the house that Smile is selling.

We get a pretty cool sequence with Zero-One and Vulcan (who shows up) fighting the Splashing Whale Raider, who has this awesome giant water-controlling fan-spear thing, and we even get a brief bit of camera angle manipulation from the tip of the spear. Fuwa is all caught up with the Raid Riser stuff thanks to the conversations with straitjacket Horobi, and Assault Wolf gets a pretty cool, if short, fight scene against the Whale Raider, who escapes. Then the house-selling competition continues, Team Hiden gets the help of a carpenter Humagear, and we get a brief argument about these dang robots taking human jobs and shit. And turns out that... Gai might be actually be a bit more aware that the malice from humans will affect the Humagear around them or whatever, and he's intentionally fucking with Arayashiki to get him to cause Smile to go crazy or something? It's weird and pretty convoluted.

We then get the aforementioned horrible scene with Arayashiki bullying poor Smile around, calling her a faker and a soulless robot and it's a bit hard to watch as Smile just numbly gets dragged on by this wildly angry man, while Aruto tries his best to stop Arayashiki from dragging Smile around only to get pushed back multiple times. Smile, of course, gets infected by the Ark, and turns into a Neohi Magia, who wants to exterminate evil, malice-filled humans. And that's sort of terrible but on the other hand Arayashiki does deserve it, y'know?

And the suit acting in the next fight is great. Unlike the other Magia, poor Smile/Neohi isn't even rampaging around, not really. She's screaming and yelling and doing things like punching the ground and just flailing around in confusion, only really attacking Zero One or Thouser if they get in her eyesight. It's a lot harder to watch compared to the far more hostile Magia from last episode. Gai shows up with his umbrella and gives a brief speech about how Humagears are only useful as tools and self-sentience is dangerous, and we get the three-way fight between Thouser, Zero-One and the Neohi Magia, and I absolutely love how Aruto tries to stop the fight, blocking Thouser's attack towards the Magia and slicing apart the Neohi's tentacles when they attack Thouser. The fight is pretty great, but eventually Thouser Jack-rises Zero-One's shark powers, and summons the massive hologram CGI saw-tooth blades of Biting Shark to murder the shit out of poor Smile. Gai talks some trash about how Aruto is a shitty, naive president of a company, and then leaves Aruto.
____________

Episode 20 continues on with this, with Arayashiki and Zaia having a massive lead on Hiden in terms of sales. Is it still a fair competition, though, with all of the sabotage going on? Smile gets restored pretty quickly, and we set up the episode's conflict pretty quickly. Some huge business mogul called Ohsiro Ginnojo is prepared to spend a huge amout of money in order to buy a house after retiring, and both Arayashiki and Smile go off to meet him. Of course Arayashiki's the kind of dick who would insult his competitor in front of the customer, by the way.

This part of the episode has the typical nice message that Kamen Rider shows have. Ginnojo makes it clear that his wife has just passed away and he just wants somewhere peaceful, but still big enough to handle his children and grandchildren when they come to visit. And faced with an older customer like this, obviously Arayashiki's huge speech about the expensive house being in the middle of downtown or having huge profit prospects isn't going to fly, and we get to see that Arayashiki's so tunnel-focused on 'big person = big house' mentality that he lost sight of what makes a house important. Meanwhile, despite Aruto's attempts to gently nudge Smile towards the profit-making mentality, all Smile wants to do is to bring smiles to her customers, which is why she selects a cheap, way-under-the-budget cabin in the woods she means to renovate. All the sappy talk about how it's the right place and how it's ideal and low-maintenance for a senior citizen while affording a large amount of space for visiting family isn't something you really can't say no to if you have a heart, though, and I do like that it's the same emotion that Aruto's going through.

Because, surprisingly, instead of just making bad puns and beating up the bad guy, Aruto actually goes through a neat sequence of character development! Clearly caught within his own desire to win the competition (he knows they have to turn a profit) but also at the boundless, innocent enthusiasm that Smile shows in selling the happy house, this episode gives us a nice scene where Aruto is just mulling over Smile's idealistic approach versus Gai's "a president that can't turn out profit has zero worth" speech. And I really do like that Aruto was this close to trying to get Smile to be a bit more profit-minded, but just doesn't have him the heart of a soulless corporate overlord. Thankfully Izu and her apple cider shows up and gets Aruto thinking about the textbook definition of a company president and everything, and he decides to not be a soulless, profit-driven machine.

While all of this is going on, we have the Fuwa B-plot, which involves him mostly being angry and getting up to the captive Horobi's face about a blurry photo, and Horobi matter-of-factly says that he can't dang well identify the mysterious person without seeing her face. Fuwa ends up wandering in the main plot just as we see Arayashiki basically show up next to the carpenter Humagear (Oyakata had a bit role in 19 that was kind of unremarkable, but does set him up for this one) while he's trying to renovate the cabin in the woods, and then beat him to the ground and stomp on him. This leads to the now-familiar berserk scene as yet another abused Humagear gets access to the Ark and transforms, this time turning into the Mammoth Magia. Perhaps a bit more disturbingly is how it's clear in this scene that Arayashiki knew what was going to happen, and it's not enough that he blow up the cabin like he did later on, he also had to essentially drive Oyakata insane to do it. We get a three-way fight between Fuwa's Punching Kong form, Arayashiki in his Splashing Whale Raider form and the berserk Mammoth Magia. Gai shows up just to turn into Thouser and blow up the Mammoth Magia (and leaves?) while the Whale Raider blows the hell out of the Hiden cabin.

Fuwa tells Aruto about the identity of the Splashing Whale Raider, and... and Izu, being the smart cookie in the room, tells them to call off the competition since Arayashiki is clearly cheating. But a couple of errant lines from Smile about just wanting to sell the customer a happy house gets Aruto to beg Fuwa to hold off on arresting Arayashiki until after the competition. Which... it's nice and all, Aruto, but mabe you can still sell the house after the competition is canceled or re-scheduled, y'know? Because Arayashiki's sabotage extends to all the other sales that didn't happen in episode 19, and you don't really need the competition to sell Gennoji his house.

After an impromptu show-off of five Oyakatas because these are robots and there are multiples of them, the Hiden cabin is restored, and, of course, Gennoji ends up picking the Hiden cabin becuase of the aforementioned fact that, y'know, Smile thinks more about the customer than about profits. While this whole speech is going on, Fuwa gets distracted by the appearance of "Death", and gets led into a warehouse, with some dizzying camera effects going on. I guess it's supposed to represent Fuwa himself getting hit with some vertigo or headaches or something? It's not clear and Fuwa sort of disappears after that scene, so we don't really see if he arrests Arayashiki after the events of this episode or not. He better!

Arayashiki walks out angrily out of Gennoji's office after his defeat, and Aruto runs up to him, trying to get Arayashiki to think about his own goal and career as a house-salesman, similarly to how Aruto has had time to reflect about his goal and career as a company president. Of course Arayashiki is a shit, pushes Aruto away and turns into his monster form. At this point, though, Aruto pulls out the biggest gun in his arsenal and transforms into Shining Assault Hopper, and as a pretty neat slow rendition of the opening theme plays in the background, we get Aruto absolutely owning the Whale Raider, zipping and outspeeding all of his water attacks, leading to an awesome shot of him appearing right in front of the Whale Raider and shotgunning him in the chest. Aruto even offers a hand to Arayashiki at one point to stop the fight, but eventually has to unleash a Shining Storm Impact finisher to blow him up.

Arayashiki isn't dead, unfortunately, but he ends up admitting he lost sight of what was important and gets a flashback of how happy he was with his family despite living in a cramped house. Which is nice and all, but someone please arrest this fucker. I also do like the resolution of the episode as Gai and Yua shows up to claim both the whale key and also talk about how Zaia still won the competition since the minimal-profit sales that Smile made didn't really benefit the competition at all... and while it's cold-hearted, there is some point to the fact that businesses -- and someone responsible for heading a company -- really can't be sentimental all the time and turn a blind eye to profit and results. It's going to be interesting; I wouldn't put it past Kamen Rider to be all smiles and dreams > soulless profit all the time, which is a pretty message but very impractical to actually have in real life... and it seems we're going to reach an answer in subsequent episodes that lead to more of a middle ground between the two? Obviously being a soulless evil corporation is bad, but it's also not particularly beneficial or responsible to not think of profits at all.

Random Notes:

• Throughout episode 19, one of the stylistic choices unique to the episode is random gigantic introductions of companies and the salespeople with massive kanji, and I'm not familiar enough with what this is trying to homage, if anything. It disappears in episode 20. 
• Finally, Thouser's Jacking Break looks a bit more appropriate for a power-stealing ability, actually manifesting the giant CGI saw when copying Biting Shark in episode 19, and a gigantic kong fist that splits into tiny kong fists in episode 20. 
• I do like the little detail that apparently in the time between the first emergence of the belt-less Magia and now, Izu and Aruto scanned all the Humagears for any abnormalities in their programming -- and they also put in new programs for circa-episode-20 Smile. It doesn't help, but at least they're trying something. 
• One of the more awkward usages of reused props in this episode -- the cast of Zero One are using repainted Progrise Keys (or is that the Hiden Risephone?) as cell phones, and it just looks so awkward, clunky and obviously a prop, it works a bit fine in the interrogation scene in episode 20 since it's Fuwa and Horobi, but was especially jarring any time it's one of the civilians like Arayashiki using it like a phone. 
• For lack of a better name, since the shrouded lady that's clearly part of Metsubojinrai.net is the "death" part of the four kanji, I'm using that as a stand-in for her name. 
• We get a neat little tsk-angry face from Izu at one point during the Aruto/Gai conversation and it's adorable. 
• 
  
• The Gimmick Watch:
• "Wave! Raid rise. Splashing Whale! An Aqua current that encompasses everything aroud it. " It's a bit hard to listen to the English text-to-speech for the Raiders, huh? Thank goodness for subs. 
• Apparently, the Splashing Whale's finisher is called "Splashing Bolide". 
• I actually do like the fact that the large amount of collectible Progrise Keys that we saw in Gai's office is going to be used as monsters-of-the-week instead of just one-off forms that won't really matter after their debut. I love Build to bits, but its insanely large amount of forms ended up being redundant when the actual mid-season power-ups show up, and it's nice to see them make better use of the collectibles.
• Tatsumi's way of slurring his "100% pwaaa-sentoh!" is hilarious, not just in the way that he says it, but because Gai shuts him down immediately afterwards because it's not up to his 1000% creed.
• Aruto gets a random super saiyan hair at the reaction of 500 million yen. He and the carpenter dude have way too much fun hamming things up this episode.
• The first time Arayashiki slaps Oyakata in the face, I thought we were going to get some TNG-style "Data's a strong superman robot despite looking like a twig", and am disappointed to not see Arayashiki get beaten up by an old carpenter. 

Black Lightning S03E06 Review: Picking Sides

Black Lightning, Season 3, Episode 6: Knocking on Heaven's Door

As we start off the "Book of Resistance" arc, it is an interesting opening as the events of the previous episode lays sort of a grim tone over the cast.... although most of this episode feels more of a setup as our main characters sort of grow into the mindset of resisting the ASA in one way or another.  Jefferson and Anissa are hit the hardest over their perceived failures of Tavon's death, and while they understand that it's the ASA that caused Tavon's death, there's still a huge part of themselves that blame their decisions. The resistance is brewing, although it's still kind of the B-plot -- we've got Henderson pretending to play bad cop with Jamillah Olsen before immediately recruiting her to be the new voice of the Resistance. 

Anissa, though, spends most of the episode struggling with Painkiller's toxic poison, which is slowly creeping up her body and there's like a part of her that accepts it or something? Basically it gives us some neat scenes between her and Gambi, and later on with Grace, but ultimately it's self-contained through this episode as they develop the antidote, albeit at the cost of Anissa being unable to do any superheroing for a while. Also, Gambi realizes that the venom in Anissa is identical to Khalil's poison, and he finds out that Khalil's grave is empty. 

Jefferson, meanwhile, goes ballistic, apparently taking out a bunch of ASA agents off-screen, earning him not just the ire of Agent Odell, but also Lynn, who's angry at Jefferson for putting their alliance and their stability with the ASA at risk. Lynn has a point, to some extent -- fighting the ASA and the Markovians would be a gigantic mess, the ASA hunting their family down would also be a gigantic mess, and the ASA is allowing her to cure the pod-kids, but at the same time the ASA is pretty evil so yeah, Lynn's not making the best decisions at the moment. We'll blame that obstinance on the drugs, though. She's also interacting a lot with the captive Tobias, who is certainly getting in her head, threatening to reveal Jefferson Pierce's secrets if Lynn doesn't supply him with a list of metas in ASA custody, something that she eventually relents, albeit giving Tobias an altered list.

Jennifer, meanwhile... continues to sort of bounce around? She interacts a fair bit with Brandon the mysterious energy-absorbing metahuman, sneaking into his house and eventually discovering that he snuck into occupied Freeland to find information on Dr. Jace, who killed his mother. Brandon can apparently manipulate the earth, and considering his connection to dr. Jace we may or may not have an analogue for Geo-Force in the show... but ultimately I don't find Brandon super-duper interesting in an already packed season. Nice to give Jen someone else to interact with other than Odell, though. 

And in the final act of this episode, we actually see the dang Markovians actually do something that sort of shows that they are actually serious about this whole war thing. The teleporting metahuman from the previous season, Instant, gets to kill a bunch of ASA soldiers in a cool sequence and hijack the vehicle, show up with Markovia's Colonel Mosin, and sneak into an ASA site to steal something... but then Agent Odell show up with a small army and teleportation disruptors, leading to a fun shoot-out. Instant and Mosin actually are good enough to take out the entire ASA unit and even seemingly mortally wounds Agent Odell, but Black Lightning show sup to prevent Mosin from delivering the killing blow. The Markovians manage to escape, while Odell mocks Black Lightning for being too weak to kill Colonel Mosin... and then dies anyway. Apparently. I don't think this is the last we'll see of Odell just yet, because that honestly is kind of a random sequence. Instant and Mosin meet up with Dr. Jace, who has been feeding Lynn clues so she can work on the metagene stabilization cure, and since Lynn's basically figured it out, Jace can now copy Lynn's work to stabilize Markovia's metahuman army. 

Anyway, it's interesting setup. The Markovians are making their move, the Resistance is building up, the Pierce family are all buckling under the pressure, Gambi found out about Khalil, there's the mystery about Brandon and the ASA has seemingly lost their leader. Presumably either Agent Gray or that one racist commando dude from the season premiere will take over, to aid with the escalating war? Also Tobias is planning something and may have access to the outside world? Kind of a slower episode and honestly the Markovia stuff felt a bit sudden, but still a neat watch.

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• Wendy "Windfall" Hernandez is among the metahumans whose name is recognizable in Lynn's list. I googled the others and they don't seem to be existing DC comics characters. 

Arrow S08E04 Review: Canon Welding

Arrow, Season 8, Episode 4: Present Tense

So I guess I should be thankful that we're not forcing a-season-homage-per-episode thing, because I think that'd come off as pretty forced, especially with some of the more recent ones. There's a lot of references to the past episodes in this one, of course, but it's not quite a walk down memory lane or wrapping up extraneous plot-lines before the big Crisis as the previous three episodes. Because... well, there's the problem of the three time-traveling kids arriving from 2040 to 2019. And I guess it's a hallmark of the crossover season when something as momentous as meeting your time-travelling children isn't the weirdest thing that happens to our character -- last year, The Flash spent an entire season dealing with a time-traveling kid! The Arrow cast just sort of remark at how strange it is, but just quickly accept it and move on -- and, hell, these guys seem to be taking time travel in better stride than the STAR Labs crew over in The Flash does despite doing so multiple times every year. In fact, the biggest problem of this episode is the fact that, in true Arrow fashion, both groups are keeping secrets from each other.

And most of all, it made me care about the future cast, which... to be honest, hasn't been something I've been doing even throughout season seven. Like, the actors are relatively decent, and it's neat to see what existing characters William and Zoe are up to when they grow up and kick ass and Mia's an interesting character and Connor Hawke was unexpected... but ultimately they are just kinda there, and that problem is compounded when we don't have the honeymoon period of just meeting these characters for the first time, nor the huge revelation that Mia and William are step-siblings. Everything that has happened throughout Arrow's season 8's 2040 storyline has been the season 7 2040 storyline, but with me caring a lot less.

So having the actors being able to actually interact with the main cast is definitely great. The actual plot of this episode is honestly mostly just there to fill up time and to give the episode a sense of urgency -- the Deathstroke gang (who the 2040 trio assumes is J.J., also transported to the past) has surfaced a couple of years too early and are blowing up rich people. Surprise surprise, turns out that the Deathstroke wannabe is not J.J. (or Slade, or Joe), but rather... Grant Wilson! From Legends of Tomorrow's "Star City 2046" episode. Which I guess means that the inconsistencies between Arrow's seventh season and the one-of Legends of Tomorrow episode has just been sort of handwaved aside with Grant's capture here leading to the Star City 2046 timeline being retconned or something. And honestly, with all of our future characters interacting with our present-day characters and all of this timey-wimey Crisis mumbo-jumbo, I'm not even sure if the sequence of events is going to lead the 2040 in season seven.

The Deathstroke storyline, and the fact that the gang being broken down a couple years too early, sort of is just a vessel for our characters interacting with their parental figures. They hide the details from the original Team Arrow, but we quickly get to see the awkward conversations that happens afterwards. Of Oliver trying to explain to Mia why he left her and Felicity in the cabin in the woods without bringing up the Crisis, of the general awkwardness of how Oliver and William's last meeting was not the most ideal one, of Connor trying to explain that John Diggle adopted him, and also Diggle's actual biological son J.J. became the new Deathstroke. And also J.J. killed Zoe. That's a rough thing they had to hide from Rene -- who's way to excited to know that he becomes mayor in the future, when the audience and the 2040 cast knows that Rene ends up being an antagonist.


I feel like John's reactions to the revelation is perhaps the best of all. Here is a man who's just coming to terms with the fact that time travel is even a thing, but the multiple emotional gut-punches to what happens to his son in the future, compounded with his own guilt over his terrorist brother Andy (remember that plot point?) leads David Ramsey to give some of his best performance yet. Joseph David-Jones also gets a fair amount of moments portraying his guilt at... at the torrent of information that he's giving to his not-yet-father that he knows is probably destroying him inside.

Oliver has a lot of great moments with the still-confrontational Mia and the far-more-ready-to-talk William, although it's clear that we're probably saving a bit more of their interactions for the next couple of episodes. And... and I'm okay with that, if the whole point of Arrow's final season is, in fact, Oliver Queen training his own time-displaced kids and bonding with them. William, as a kid, has had a lot more positive interactions with Oliver, and having the two characters meet each other after thinking that they will never have a chance to do so again (Future!William having his Oliver be straight-up dead, while Oliver having lost William's custody to his grandparents) and the tender moment they share as a parent/child pair catching up after a long time... including William telling Oliver he's gay and Oliver just shrugging it as "we've always known". That's very, very sweet, even if it's tinged with the sadness that both characters know that this happiness won't last.

We also get a neat reunion of Neo-Team-Arrow, with Echo Kellum making a return as a guest star. Complete with beard! Mr. Terrific doesn't get to suit up this time, but he does make every second he's on screen count with a zinger or two. Rene, Dinah and Laurel all go through a bunch of neat character moments, even if it's a bit abrupt -- Laurel-II's moment with Mia is probably my favourite, two hard-ass women just sort of bonding with each other, Laurel-II snarking about her (potential?) future self and bonding over Oliver being a doo-doo head. Rene does go from the confusion and anger at the thought that Zoe is dead in the future (and also he's a villain) to "well, what we can do is to stop that from happening, okay never mind I'm no longer angry" in perhaps record time, but I suppose with only 40 minutes some of the character development has to happen off-screen. Oh, and also the Monitor recruits Laurel-II for some sinister purpose, telling her that she must betray Oliver Queen! Dun-dunn-dunnn because we're led to believe that the Monitor may or may not be evil, but it's probably some sort of silly character development test.

I am rushing through these reviews and I feel like I'm really underselling it. Ultimately while nothing super-significant happens, so much of the lines and acting are great. All of the funny lines land, all of the heartwarming moments are top-notch, and overall it's probably one of the strongest hours in Arrow from a character development standpoint.

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• Grant "Ravager" Wilson's only appearance in the CW-verse was in the Legends of Tomorrow first-season episode, "Star City 2046", where he was the main villain of the episode, which featured a dark Star City in the future defended by a new Green Arrow, Connor Hawke. 
• Andy Diggle's death is brought up a couple of times by John. Also, less dramatically, is the running gag throughout multiple crossovers of John Diggle throwing up whenever the Flash takes him for a super-speed ride. 
• Blackgate Prison is mentioned as a place they are bringing Grant Wilson to. It's an off-shore prison most associated with Gotham City, being located just off its shore, but of course with Batwoman being in CW canon the showmakers are free to reference Batman material now. 

Pokemon S01E62 Review: Pink Alien Invaders

Pokemon, Season 1, Episode 62: Clefairy Tales

This is kind of a strange episode to fit in here, huh? After the insanely long gap between the Fuschia and Cinnabar gyms (which lasted some 20+ episodes), we get like three random filler episodes going from Cinnabar to Viridian, and none of them are especially interesting. The real-life reason for this was apparently the episode-scheduling team had moved up the production of the Viridian City gym episode in order to tie in to the Mewtwo movie... but the entire series itself ended up being delayed for months thanks to the Porygon episode incident, making the tie-in to Mewtwo end up being aired a couple of months after the movie itself, but thanks to production orders and whatnot, the episode order isn't changed, leading to this rather odd ordering and pacing of episodes. Not that Pokemon is the most well-thought-out series as a whole, mind you, and I'm just talking about this because this episode really doesn't give much for me to talk about and I would prefer to keep the Viridian City gym episode as a standalone review.

And honestly, why this episode felt so weak is that it's a rehash of episode 6 in this very season, "Clefairy and the Moon Stone", where we highlight Clefairy and its premise, which amounts to maybe these pink fairy balls are aliens?! And also there's some geek conspiracy theorist thrown in as a guest star of the week? Except episode 6 was a bit more ambiguous and set up the Clefairy as something that's a bit more mysterious and magical, as these strange pixies that worship a stone that may or may not came from space and may or may not have brought them from space. "Clefairy Tales", on the other hand, has the premise of a spaceship crashing, bringing with it a small horde of Clefairy who then proceed to raid the local town for random knick-knacks to rebuild their ramshackle spaceship. Which is actually kind of a cute concept, but the execution feels partiularly bland. The Clefairy themselves are pretty much just kinda there to not do much after the initial premise, and not even adding the Jigglypuff/Clefairy pink-puffballs-slapping-each-other rivalry really amounted to a whole ton and having Jigglypuff's song solve the episode's plot is starting to be a rather irritating trend.

To the episode's credit, at least it kept bouncing around concepts so it's nowhere as straightforward as its predecessor. We go from Jigglypuff witnessing the UFO crash landing and the Clefairies bouncing out, then we cut straight to Team Ash eating ice cream and meeting a cute Clefairy, which of course is just a distraction for the other Clefairies to steal their bags. Turns out there's a string of robberies throughout town, and local conspiracy theorist Oswald sort of blames it all on aliens.

And then a straight-up UFO manned by tall silver-skinned Gray-style aliens show up, who proceed to quite literally take Pikachu and just walk back to their shuttle while our heroes gawk in stupidity, and Pikachu gets stuffed into this weird little glass bulb dome. But these particular aliens are actually Team Rocket, our heroes figure it out, and Pidgeotto attacks the crane. The confrontation with Team Rocket gets interrupted by Clefairy stealing Pikachu (who's still trapped in the dome) and the actually funny gag of Oswald claiming oh my god Clefairy is an alien... and so is Jigglypuff, and so is Misty, and apparently he got his alien detector from one of those old-school mail-away coupons that come with comics. That's actually a funny gag.

Then Jigglypuff shows up and I think this episode was where, as a kid, I realize just how much more expressive Jigglypuff's design is and how much objectively cuter it is compared to Clefairy. It's the eyes and the little sphere body with nub limbs. Anyway, Jigglypuf leads our heroes (sans Brock, who quite literally got separated from the rest of the team) and Team Rocket to the Clefairy's secret underground base, where they're repairing their hilarious UFO, which is basically half of a rocket glued onto a big spherical UFO. They plan to use Pikachu to power their spaceship, and also somehow they are able to use like baseball bats and woks to fix the spaceship.

We get a confrontation where Jigglypuff faces off against like six Clefairys at the same time and we get a pinky-pink slap slap contest, which is kind of cute, and then Jigglypuff reclaims its microphone-marker, which the Clefairy had co-opted as a lever in their cockpit. Jigglypuff puts everyone to sleep, and the Clefairy ship takes off, which also apparently knocks out all of the missing items right to their owners. Team Rocket gets blasted off with the booster portion, while Ash and Misty rescue Pikachu and escape with Bulbasaur's aid. The Clefairy ship then crash-lands again next to a village, still making it ambiguous as hell just whether they're actually aliens or if they're just going through the motions and they're earth-born creatures trying to go to space or whatever.

Anyway, this episode exists. I only vaguely remember it as a kid, and it's no wonder that it didn't leave much of an impression beyond the general ridiculousness of a secret space-base in the sewers. This one isn't a bad episode, but definitely kind of a forgettable one. Next up we're getting the Viridian Gym!

Featured Pokemon

• Pokemon: Jigglypuff, Pidgey, Caterpie, Clefairy, Togepi, Pikachu, Meowth, Pidgeotto, Bulbasaur
• Humans: Ash, Misty, Brock, Officer Jenny, James, Jessie, 
• Various Pokemon in stock images are seen in a scene transition.

Random Notes:

• We're still in the Kanto seson and it's not quite as prevalent, but as the series goes on into its hundreds, we'll get a bunch more episodes like this where we sort of realize that the show's episodic nature tends to mean that the show writers (and, to an extent, the characters) are very much operating on a very loose memory, because no one even mentions the fact that this is more or less the same plot as episode 6, "Clefairy and the Moon Stone". 
• Dub changes:
• A relatively minimal amount, actually! Really, the only major thing they changed is inexplicably removing a line from Team Rocket lampshading that they're finally on a rocket, and the word 'chicken' being added into the chef's dialogue. Everything other dub change are relatively minor puns thrown in. After the sheer amount of stuff changed for the Blaine episodes, it's refreshing. 
• I guess this is where I could talk about the "Who's That Pokemon" segment? At around the Blaine episodes, the dub (which has been inconsistent on whether they copy the Who's That Pokemon segment or do their own) ends up switching all of the Who's That Pokemon segments to sort of preview next week's episode. It doesn't work every time (that Paras one in episode 59 has nothing to do with 59 or 60), but it's been otherwise a neat pattern. Episode 61's Whodat feature features Clefairy, which stars in this one, and this episode features Arcanine, which features in the next one. 
• I did love the fact that Jigglypuff's doodles on Oswald and the lead Clefairy aren't even actual attempts to doodle like a mustache or monocle or whatever, it's just straight-up scribbles. 
• That curved building that allows the Clefairy's ship to take off is very convenient, isn't it? 
• That massive rocket-booster portion that detaches and falls down to the city, uh, probably caused some property damage, didn't it?
• Did no one really care that they left Oswald abducted by a bunch of insane Clefairy? Eh. 

Pokemon S01E60-61 Review: Horsea's Last Rodeo

Pokemon, Season 1, Episode 60: Beach Blank-Out Blastoise; Episode 61: The Misty Mermaid

Yeah, from here on out I'm moving to having two episodes in a review permanently, I guess.

"Beach Blank-Out Blastoise" is sort of an underwhelming episode, and it's one that I feel is sort of a formula that's going to be repeated a bit frequently in some of the show's less-fondly-remembered segments. Like the Johto era! Which... which admittedly isn't a segment of the Pokemon anime I've watched in a long time, so my memory might be inaccurate, but it sure feels like the sort of forgettable episode that's just there to sort of 'debut' a new Pokemon in a throwaway, standalone storyline. Insert a Jigglypuff-song sequence to either kick-start or wrap-up your plot as needed.

And that's honestly sort of the entirety of the episode. After Cinnabar Island, Ash and company meet a Wartortle, who's arrived from an island shaped like a tortoise shell, in search for help because all of the Squirtles and Wartortles in the island has fallen asleep, and so has the big boss Blastoise. So after Ash's Squirtle puts on his badass sunglasses, our heroes travel there, and so do Team Rocket in their fancy Gyarados submarine-mecha.

There's some sort of sleeping sickness among the turtle Pokemon, and Ash and Squirtle end up succumbing to it, but after a while it becomes very clear that it's freaking Jigglypuff, stuck inside Blastoise's cannon, and apparently the little puffball is somehow still singing while stuck, creating this aura of sleepiness that extends all around Blastoise. Team Rocket tries to steal Blastoise with their Gyarados mecha, Ash's Squirtle gives a rousing speech to make the other turtles rescue Blastoise, then Pikachu and Squirtle zap Blastoise so hard he wakes up and launches Jigglypuff our of the cannon. Blastoise then fights the Gyarados mecha, Team Rocket blast off again, and Jigglypuff does the face-scribble gag to end off the episode.

That's the entire episode, stretched over 25 minutes, and I know that the past three episodes have been a bit more content-packed than usual, but man it really feels like there's nothing interesting happening in this episode in particular. I realize that they probably wanted an episode to focus heavily on the third starter evolution (since Charizard and Venusaur both had an episode) but man, "Bulbasaur's Secret Garden" set up Venusaur and the Bulbasaur society as this pretty cool, mysterious plant-creature society and ended up with Bulbasaur learning Solarbeam. The various Charizard episodes set him up as Ash's most powerful flying fire-breathing lizard and had him go through cool action scenes. Blastoise... sleeps for three-fourths of his debut episode. Overall, highly forgettable.

Episode 61, "The Misty Mermaid", is another one that focuses on Misty and her nasty, passive-aggressive asshole sisters as we do a bit of a backtrack through the previous parts of Kanto en route to Viridian City. After finding out that Horsea's not feeling well and requires a bigger pool to swim in, they sort of drop by Cerulean City... only to find out that Misty's three bitchy sisters have set up this huge underwater ballet play and basically passive-aggressively pressure Misty into helping them out as the star role, because after all it's "for the good of Cerulean" or whatever. The three sisters' assholishness end up being a bit more exaggerated in the English dub with, like, such a grating stereotypical dumb valley girl, like, accent, like, and it actually works in making them a bit more unlikable.

Basically, Misty's sisters and her friends sort of shanghai her into helping out in the performance, which at least gives us some decent visuals as Misty swims around both her and her sisters' water-type Pokemon. Team Rocket shows up to steal Cerulean Gym's water Pokemon, although this time around they ditch the giant water-draining vacuum in favour for some Swan-Lake inspired crossdressing costumes and a whole lot of flair, and, of course, the audience thinks that Team Rocket's part of the show. That's the entire crux of the episode -- Team Rocket shows up to steal the Pokemon, but because of their hamminess, the audience think Team Rocket's part of the show.

Misty ends up commanding the gym's water pokemon to battle against Team Rocket (well, mostly Arbok, because neither Weezing nor Meowth are willing to duke it out underwater) and we do get a relatively interesting fight in that everyone has to keep holding rebreathers or whatever? Despite this being theoretically a Horsea spotlight episode, poor Horsea ends up being relatively useless and completely overwhelmed by Arbok, while Misty ends up using the gym's Seaking and Seel to fight. Seel ends up even evolving throughout the battle, defeating Team Rocket and freezing them solid after its evolution. Our heroes rescue the captured Pokemon, evacuates the pool, and then Pikachu thunderbolts the pool to send Team Rocket blasting off again.

The show ends up as a success, but good luck replicating that exciting show without a way to evolve a Seel and without the massive hamminess and conflict that Team Rocket brings to the table. Misty ends up being somewhat-pressured by her sisters to leave Horsea behind in the gym. At least with Horsea, there's the fact that it was clearly not doing very well earlier in the episode, but then her sisters make Misty leave behind Starmie too, and... and it feels like honestly kind of a dick move on their part that no one calls them out on. I'm genuinely not sure what this is for -- it's a pretty poor exit episode for Horsea and poor Starmie hasn't even been around for much.

And honestly, between this episode and James getting Victreebel in the Breeding Center episode, it really does strike me just how terrible this show is at showcasing recurring party members, huh? If there's one thing that the later seasons really ended up being good at, it's making it a huge event whenever a Pokemon ends up joining or leaving the main cast's party. When I first watched this episode as a kid I even missed out that this was Starmie's exit, considering how half-hearted it was done. And, yeah, none of Misty's Pokemon other than Psyduck really have much of an interesting personality, but that's more because the show really makes it a point to not use them a lot, huh? Kind of a shame.

I kind of want to say that I liked "Misty Mermaid", but I really don't. The plot's pretty bland, the animation's very inconsistent (Seel spinning around Arbok's cool, though) and overall I'm just not a fan of it.

Featured Pokemon:

• Episode 60:
• Pokemon: Pikachu, Togepi, Wartortle, Squirtle, Starmie, Staryu, Goldeen, Horsea, Meowth, Blastoise, Jigglypuff
• Humans: Brock, Ash, Misty, Jessie, James
• Episode 61:
• Pokemon: Horsea, Pikachu, Togepi, Seel, Meowth, Goldeen, Seaking, Starmie, Staryu, Shellder, Arbok, Weezing, Psyduck, Squirtle, Dewgong
• Humans: Misty, Ash, Brock, Misty's Sisters, James, Jessie

Random Notes:

• It's always implied that all Pokemon could understand each other, particularly in "Island of the Giant Pokemon", so it's a bit odd why Pikachu ends up calling out Squirtle to communicate with Wartortle. 
• Arbok is able to fight underwater, while Weezing just floats straight to the surface. When you think that Weezing's a bag of poisonous gas, it makes sense! Plus, some snakes can swim. So. (Less sensible is the fact that Psyduck can't breathe underwater, although it's easily just rule of funny.)
• Speaking of Arbok and Weezing, it's been a while since we last saw them, hasn't it? Team Rocket's relied more on random gadgets and mechas for the past couple of episodes. 
• More real-world fishes are seen in the Cerulean gym in the background. 
• Dub Changes:
• Nothing too major in episode 60, I think the most significant one (if you can call it that) is that the original argument between Team Rocket is who gets to keep Blastoise, not who gets credit for it.
• The lines about James asking if they could 'steal men's clothes next time' and his insistence that he did modern dance as a kid are all included in the dub. Original-Japanese Kojiro has absolutely no problems with crossdressing at all. 
• In episode 61, we get a bit of a recurring observation from Ash how odd it is that a Pokemon gym also doubles as a water show stage. 
• The dub title of episode 60 is a reference to "Beach Blanket Bingo", which is a reference that I am pretty sure went through the heads of an exact 100% of the children watching this episode air in 1999.

Arrow S08E03 Review: Worlds Will Collide

Arrow, Season 8, Episode 3: Leap of Faith

So we continue, at least for the moment, the trend of homaging different aspects of Oliver Queen's journey over seven seasons of superheroing. We've got a call-back to the original state of Starling City in episode 1, and the Hong Kong plotline in episode 2, and this one calls back the long League of Assassins storyline that took place primarily in season 3, but also across subsequent seasons. It's also a nice little cap-off to how that plotline has been implied to be brewing in the background with Thea, Nyssa and Roy supposedly going around blowing up Lazarus Pits and whatnot.

The 2019 era storyline is pretty neat. In his journey to hunt down anything that might tell him any sort of information about the enigmatic being that is Mar Novu, Oliver ends up returning to the abandoned fortress of Nanda Parbat, eventually meeting up with his sister Thea, and Willa Holland is always welcome to see on this show, being one of the more criminally under-utilized characters when she was on the show. She got better near the end of her run on Arrow, for sure, and it's nice to see Thea back and basically giving Oliver some neat life advice on her own -- that talk on the ridge next to the mountain about their parents was easily one of the highlights of the episode, with the chemistry between Amell and Holland really being fantastic.

The rest of the episode honestly plays off in a surprisingly mundane way. Talia al Ghul shows up as a reluctant ally that ends up double-crossing them; the Thanatos Guild and Athena, which are a group that was foreshadowed but we never really follow up on, end up fighting the three main characters, and there's a silly Indiana Jones feel going on as our heroes enter Nanda Parbat to try and look for a specific scroll hiding a little metal ball that's also a star map or something. There's a bit of an argument about how Oliver still refuses to treat Thea as an adult superhero and tells her to stay behind at one point, but this ends up being pretty much glossed over with a "I told you so" by Thea, while Thea just basically rolls her eyes and goes "god my brother is so protective" instead of being enraged. Basically, the moral of the story is that they're stronger together, and doing this superheroing business alone is folly.

Anyway, at the end of the episode Athena gets killed by falling rocks, while Thea and Talia are somehow working together to create a non-assassin League of Assassins, which... okay? I'm genuinely not sure where they keep getting a seemingly endless supply of people willing to become ninja assassins, but okay. That farewell between Thea and Oliver is genuinely heartwarming.

The 2019 B-plot sort of folows up on the Lyla thing, but not really. Diggle and Lyla head off to save Bronze Tiger's wife, Sandra Hawke, as well as her young son Connor, who we know will eventually come under Diggle's care. There's a neat call-back to the Suicide Squad episode with Gholem Qadir's son being the villain of this one, but ultimately it's not particularly noteworthy, I feel.

The 2040 plotline is even less noteworthy, not helped by the genuinely generic dialogue that our heroes are supposed to belt out and how interchangeable most of the characters are. There's supposed to be a parallel to "trust your partner in the field" to the Diggle/Lyla and Oliver/Thea situations, and this time it's Mia and Connor... but the conflict is honestly bland, the dialogue superficial, and even setting up J.J. as a generic terrorist leading the Deathstroke gang doesn't really amount to all that much. At the end of the episode J.J. ends up stabbing Zoe and seemingly killing her...

...and then in a genuinely unexpected twist, Mia, Connor and William get transported to 2019 in the bunker, which... okay! That, I did not see coming. The 2040 scenes in this season haven't been working at all for me, feeling like generic placeholder scenes with flat characters, so it's going to be great to see the Arrow kids interact with their parents. This means we don't have to detour every episode to check in with the 2040 storyline that won't really matter for the purposes of this season (save it for the spinoff) while also allowing the actors and characters to interact with the main Arrow cast. And, hey, it's "world will collide", and apparently this extends across time, too.

Overall, it's kind of a strange direction to take this episode in, but I can't argue with the results. The interactions between Oliver and Thea is worth the price of admission alone, and while a lot of the Nanda Parbat stuff feels kind of like filler to take up the entire episode, it's all right and pretty entertaining. Next episode's going to be pretty interesting for sure, with this unexpected crossover!

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• This time around, it's the League of Assassins storyline that gets the homage treatment. Nanda Parbat was a major location throughout season three, while a lot of storylines regarding to the League of Assassins are followed up from subsequent seasons -- the Thanatos Guild and Thea's journey to destroy the Lazarus Pits are from season six; Talia is a major character in seasons six and seven, where she had worked together with Oliver in the latter; Malcolm Merlyn's rise and fall as head of the League played out over multiple seasons.
• The Tomb of Al-Fatih is apparently located on the same mountain where Oliver and Ra's had their iconic mid-season sword duel in the season three episode "The Climb". 
• The Gholem Qadir mission, and the fact that Lyla and Bronze Tiger were involved in it, took place in the season two episode "The Suicide Squad". 
• Thea notes how she udes her mother's middle name, Mia, while in Corto Maltese throughout the early half of season three. Mia, of course, is the name of Thea's comic-book counterpart. 

Pokemon S01E58-59 Review: Quiz Game Show

Pokemon, Season 1, Episode 58: Riddle Me This; Episode 59: Volcanic Panic

A two-parter in Cinnabar Island and... it's interesting? On the other hand, Cinnabar Island in the games was filled with so much fun stuff that could've been adapted into entire episodes of their own -- the Pokemon Lab and resurrecting fossil Pokemon; the mysterious, abandoned Pokemon Mansion where the Mewtwo experiments happen; the subtle implications (at least in some media) that Blaine's a scientist that's somewhat involved with the Mewtwo stuff... and all of those are completely abandoned in favour of a bizarre take-that on turning small towns into tourist traps or whatnot? And I guess the Pokemon anime was always more episodic than serialized? I dunno, though. The first half of episode 58 felt particularly bland, although at least making the Cinnabar Gym into a two-parter does make it feel more like an event in the same way that Sabrina's Saffron Gym ended up feeling? I dunno.

Episode 58 starts off with Team Ash arriving on Cinnabar Island, but quickly being informed by Gary and his walking harem of cheerleaders that Cinnabar Island is a resort and no pokemon trainer's been there since the time of Professor Oak... yet Ash and company somehow knows about the "Volcano Badge" and stuff? They quickly run into this bizarre dude with sunglasses and glorious hair, who, of course, is the gym leader Blaine, disguised as a generic hotel promoter -- and voiced with a completely stoned-hippie voice in the dub, which actually works relatively well in this case. Blaine rants about how the Cinnabar gym is abandoned, and how the entire island has been turned into a tourist trap because of all of the hot springs, and leaves our heroes a name card for the Big Riddle Inn.

Ash and company attempt to go the Pokemon Lab, only to find that it, too, is swarmed by tourists. And then they try to look for a hotel, only to be rejected at every turn... eventually coming across Gary and his posse in a fancy Japanese-style hotel with Pokemon geishas and Gary being a dick as usual... and then Jigglypuff shows up! Team Ash run the hell away while Jigglypuff puts Gary's room to sleep and does the usual Jigglypuff gag.

Meanwhile, as they continue in search of a hotel, Ash and company realize that there's a riddle written on the card that Hippie Blaine gave them before, and they eventually realize that it leads to the only building in the island with a visible clock tower. Which is kind of impractical and ridiculous, honestly. What if Ash and company actually found a room at one of the local hotels? What then? Silly Blaine, this is why you don't have any business.

We need to have a Team Rocket plot, so Team Rocket arrives on their Meowth balloon, not to steal Pikachu this time but to attack the Pokemon Lab! Which... is a literal work-out-with-training-equipment gym for Fighting-type Pokemon in anime continuity. Because the police are useless, the Pokemon Lab ends up calling Blaine, which in turn causes Team Ash to run towards the Lab. Pikachu rides Pidgeotto and unleashes a thunderbolt to send Team Rocket and their balloon blasting off again. As a reward, Blaine tells Team Ash that there's a secret gym, but to reach there they had to go solve another riddle. The riddles, by the way, are completely nonsensical in the dub and barely made sense in the original Japanese.

This leads to a hot springs scene, and it's Togepi that ends up wandering around and stepping on the Gyarados fountain to accidentally activate it, causing a boulder to move and reveal a secret staircase. The moving boulder also destroys the wooden wall separating the boys and girls' bath -- and, sure, Misty's wearing a towel and all, but god damn it Blaine, you're a terrible man for designing your secret gym doorway like this.

Anyway, our heroes change, enter and find Blaine's gym and it's actually badass, a slab of arena suspended over magma held in place by chains. It's like something out of a more serious video game, actually. The hippie man takes off his fake mustache and wig to reveal that he's Blaine, the gym leader! Whudda thunk?

It's pretty decent setup for the battle, and Ash sends out the water-type Squirtle against Blaine's Fire Pokemon... and Blaine's Ninetales takes the poor turtle out with a Fire Spin. It's... it's very anticlimactic, actually, with the (relatively weak) fire move taking out the water pokemon for no particular reason. They could've had Ninetales use a different-typed move, or focus on Fire Spin's immobilizing properties, or something, but nope, Ninetales just wins 'cause.

Round two is Ash's Charizard versus Blaine's Rhydon (surprisingly, not a fire type!), but Charizard is still disobedient and flies off the battlefield to take a nap. So Ash tosses in Pikachu. An electric type against a giant ground-type dinosaur? Madness, Ash! Pikachu's attacks refuse to do damage, but then we get the memetic "aim for the horn" scene, where apparently thunderbolting Rhydon's giant metal drill causes him to be zapped and knocked out because the horn is a lightning rod or something. Okay. Sure.

Blaine's last Pokemon is a Magmar, and we get a genuinely badass scene of the magma around the stadium bubbling and rising up like a giant wave before revealing Magmar's form within it. It's a scene that stuck with me as a kid, because of just how different it is -- it's not just sending a creature out of a Pokeball; Blaine's Magmar literally rises up from the depths of molten magma, and it's so hot that even Pikachu's thunderbolts are deflected. The episode ends with the cliffhanger of Pikachu about to be roasted by the massive Fire Blast that Magmar unleashes...

And episode 59 picks up where 58 leaves off. Pikachu barely hangs on after dodging the fire blast, but Ash calls off the match, conceding it because he doesn't want Pikachu to fall into the lava. Blaine leaves Ash, noting that while he lost the match, he respects him as a Pokemon trainer now or something. As they recover in Blaine's inn, Misty and Brock suggest that Ash try another gym since clearly Blaine's out of his league, but Ash's a single-minded boy and insists that he's not leaving Cinnabar Island without a Volcano Badge.

So it's Team Rocket time! They show up with a pair of fuck-off missile launchers that shoot out ice missiles, and they arrive at Blaine's gym, and start launching their seemingly-infinite amounts of freezing missiles at Magmar. This freezes Magmar, but Magmar just melts his way out, and Team Rocket just launches even more missiles. Not sure why Magmar's just standing there instead of attacking, though. What a dumb fire duck. The massive amount of ice unleashed throughout the volcanic cavern ends up causing a chain reaction that will lead to a volcanic eruption (the science is definitely bogus, but Blaine and Brock try their best to explain it). Said volcanic eruption sends Team Rocket blasting off again, and to protect the island from being wiped out from the volcano, Blaine sends Magmar to try and stop the lava flow by throwing rocks to dam up the magma.

Our heroes join in, but Charizard, being Charizard, takes a nap like a dick and refuses to help out until Magmar's manliness sort of inspires him to join in. The other Pokemon also help out, which is kind of adorable, although I really do think that Brock really should've tossed out Onix a lot earlier -- that huge rock snake, fire-type or not, would've been able to help toss boulders to dam up the lava flow faster than Magmar or Charizard could, surely?

This sequence really did take up a bit too long, honestly. for how little impact it has. But eventually Blaine agrees on a 1-v-1 rematch, on top of a bunch of pillars sticking out of a different volcano, which brings up some neat JoJo vibes. I do really like how Ash fully expected Blaine to give him the badge as a reward for helping Blaine out, and Blaine pratfalls at that. It's a neat little nod at how the little twerp really hasn't been properly earning his badges through battle, and I love it.

The battle between Magmar and Charizard (who wants to fight a worthy opponent more than actually listening to Ash) is helmed by animator Iwane Masaaki, who's famous for being the mastermind behind some of the better-animated episodes in the original Pokemon series, and it really, really shows. The battle between Magmar and Charizard isn't super-duper unique, but we get so many scenes that look pretty, and that's not something I ever associated with the original season, whose fights generally last less than a minute. But hey, this fight genuinely looked impressive in a way that Charizard-vs-Aerodactyl didn't, and I can easily believe this is the moment where everybody sitting down watching the telly in the '90's end up really loving Charizard as this badass fire dragon.

The Skull Bash knocking Charizard off of his footing; Charizard tumbling down the rock pillars, only to reorient itself and fly back up and leaving the lava spraying around in the wake of his wings; the airborne divebomb down towards Magmar; Magmar's somersault behind Charizard; the animation of the magma as Charizard bursts out from being trapped there; and finally, the Seismic Toss sequence with the over-the-top animation of the Earth itself showing up as Charizard spins around... it's pretty well done. The fight clocks it at around three or so minutes, but it's still pretty neat, and unlike the rather bland Rhydon and Ninetales fight from the previous episode, I actually do like the way that both Magmar and Charizard make use of their respective favoured terrain -- Magmar tries to drag the enemy into the magma itself; while Charizard makes use of its flying ability to blindside Magmar. It's pretty neat, and while it's Charizard's victory more than Ash's, it's a neat way to close off the Cinnabar Island gym.

Seven badges out of eight, and as our heroes prepare to leave Cinnabar Island and get Ash's eighth gym badge, we are apparently going to do a bit of a backtrack through Kanto all the way to Viridian City. Which means... more 'filler' episodes! I didn't mind this two-parter, though. It's very uneven, but there are a lot of parts that I liked, and it is capped off by one of the prettier fights in this leg of the show. 

Pokemon Index:

• Episode 58:
• Pokemon: Togepi, Pikachu, Jigglypuff, Meowth, Hitmonlee, Electabuzz, Hitmonchan, Machoke, Machop, Poliwhirl, Primeape, Pidgeotto, Ninetales, Squirtle, Charizard, Rhydon, Magmar
• Humans: Ash, Misty, Brock, Gary Oak, Blaine, Jessie, James, Nurse Joy
• Episode 59:
• Pokemon: Magmar, Pikachu, Togepi, Meowth, Charizard, Onix, Geodude, Squirtle, Staryu, Psyduck, Jigglypuff
• Humans: Ash, Brock, Misty, Blaine, James, Jessie

Random Notes:

• Blaine's portrayal here uses a radically different design compared to how Blaine usually looks in the video games or other media. Only the 'quiz' gimmick was kept from the Red/Blue/Green video games, but that's because the anime drew from an early, pre-Red/Blue design for Blaine that doesn't characterize him as a scientist, but as just an old bald clean-shaven dude. 
• Pikachu aiming for Rhydon's horn and causing damage to the Ground-type Pokemon is absolutely bizarre, and it's often mis-quoted (as "aim for the horn!") by Pokemon fans as a way to disparage how the anime's battles sometimes contradicted the rules set by the games.
• Speaking of wacky anime-only powers, Magmar in this episode has an aura of superheated air that causes Pikachu's thunderbolt to be sent upwards with the air updraft. Which is kinda cool, I won't lie, but also doesn't make that much sense. 
• I've always thought the set-up of Cinnabar Island's gym being dilapidated and everyone thinking that there's no gym there to be weird, since for some reason Ash and company kept talking about how the Volcano Badge could only be found on Cinnabar Island. It's just kinda weird, y'know?
• I do like that there's the unique implication in the anime how Kanto has more than eight gyms, with Brock and Gary telling Ash at some points to look for his seventh badge elsewhere. As the series goes on it's something that's dropped to tie in to the games a bit better, though. 
• In Gary's meal, we get even more examples of random real-world fish showing up in the Pokemon world! A tiger is also seen on a mural on one of the hotels, apparently a reference to the real-life Azuchi Castle. 
• The geisha Hitmonlee and Electabuzz are... they're weird. 
• There's a complete non-sequitur in episode 59 where Jigglypuff shows up during the scene of all the Pokemon trying to help dam up the magma flow. Jigglypuff completely disappears after that scene. I don't understand. 
• "Will Pikachu be turned into the world's cutest lava lamp" is such a hilariously odd-sounding cliffhanger to end on, silly dub narrator!
• Dub Changes:
• A lot of the riddles in this episode don't make sense, particularly in the dub, and that, obviously, is thanks to the dub changing a lot of the riddles. Here and here are a breakdown of all the changes made in this two-parter, and I agree that at least some of the original Japanese riddles actually could be translated as-is into English. (One of the particularly bad riddles involves the implication that wigs keep your head dry. No they don't.)
• Gary didn't mention Professor Oak at all in the Japanese version of the episode, which is actually a neat addition here to help give him a more snobbish attitude.
• Blaine's "hotel card" was originally a pack of tissues, because in Japan, tissue-pack marketing is something that's done with the (pretty good) logic that people will throw name cards away, but a pack of tissues are cheap to produce and will actually be kept around by the prospective customers. 
• Gary telling Ash to spin around three times and say Pikachu is actually a pun on sankai, the dish he's eating in the Japanese version, which could also be read as "three times".
• Blaine's Japanese name is itself a pun on 'wig'. In the English dub, we end up just getting the impression that Blaine's just doing it all as a generic trickster dude. 
• Dub!Blaine in episode 59 randomly ends up throwing puns all over the place instead of riddles. 
• The recap segment for episode 59 was particularly atrocious for being bad, using completely different lines for Blaine and Ash compared to what's said in 58, and changing Ninetales' Fire Spin into Ember. 
• Dub!Misty says "Starmie" when she's summoning Staryu. 
• The scene of Team Rocket spying on the twerps on the hot springs in 59 (and choking when they impulsively try to say their motto) is changed to them training to handle the heat in preparation to entering the volcano in the dub. 
• When Charizard tosses Magmar's Fire Blast into the air, the shape of the Fire Blast (kanji for 'big') briefly changes to 'medium' and 'small' before petering out. The English dub just edits this to have the Fire Blast stay as the 'big' kanji all the way through. 
• In the dub version, I think this is the first episode to swap out the Pokerap for Pikachu's Jukebox, which features some 'hip' Pokemon songs. Ah, the '90's.
• "Aerial Submission Attack" is actually something from the Japanese version too. It's not a real Pokemon move. 
• Episode 59 is the first time in the Japanese show that the episode ends with a "Professor Oak's Pokemon Lecture" segment, which was cut entirely for the dub -- presumably the haikus and random Japanese culture references are a bit harder to translate? It's basically a little 'spotlight' episode of Oak briefly describing a Pokemon.