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.