Pokemon S01E66-67 Review: Buying Time

Pokemon, Season 1, Episode 66: The Evolution Solution; Episode 67: The Pi-Kahuna

As the narrator in these episodes keep reminding us, we're "two months away" from the Indigo League, which means that we have... eight episodes of filler to fill time before we actually get to the league? Eh. Early Pokemon anime be like that sometimes.

Episode 66, "The Evolution Solution", is... it's actually pretty interesting. We take a single Pokemon out of the 150 and basically revolve the episode all around it. In this case, Slowpoke/Slowbro, and the odd confusion on just how the 'fused' evolution when a Shellder bites onto a Slowpoke's tail and triggers the evolution into Slowbro happens. It's something that's pretty quaint watching this episode for the first time more than two decades after Slowbro's original debut, but it's definitely a neat showcase back in the day of one of the Pokemon with more interesting features, as well as showcase part of the in-universe Pokemon researcher community as we meet Professor Westwood the Fifth, who apparently is part of the research team that was behind the Pokedex.

The actual episode, though, doesn't pan out that well, because the actual 'mystery' about how Shellder changes into a spiral shape, or just how the process of the two becoming a single Slowbro is... it's basically just glossed over with a bunch of bad exposition, while the rest of the episode focuses on Westwood V's unfunny antics and the Slowpoke/Psyduck "two idiots meet each other" interactions, which gets old for a while. I do appreciate the little explanation, mind you -- Shellder gets carried around now that it's stuck to Slowbro's tail, and the counterweight allows Slowbro to use his hands to unleash Mega Punches. It's a bit less creepy than the actual games' explanation that the Shellder's a symbiote-slash-parasite that's feeding on Slowbro's tail, but it works relatively well. Also, the anime sort of explains to us that when a Shellder bites on Slowpoke's tail... the Shellder sort of doesn't belong to its original trainer again? Poor Jessie, 60+ episodes and she finally catches a Pokemon, and she doesn't even get to show it off to her boss.

Anyway, the plot of the episode is simple. Ash and company go to Professor Westwood's lab on Seafoam Islands, they get introduced to Slowpoke and the whole mystery about its odd evolution. Team Rocket shows up to cause trouble with a Shellder that Jessie quite literally caught two minutes ago, in the ensuing fight a combination of Psyduck's migraine-ex-machina and Slowpoke evolving into Slowbro, Team Rocket gets sent blasting off again and Professor Westwood gets all the research nots he needs after witnessing a Slowpoke evolve into a Slowbro.

Ultimately, the episode is... it's an all right way to spend 20 minutes, I suppose. It feels kind of off, although apparently that's because the English dub can't decide just which part of the Slowpoke/Slowbro evolution that's the big mystery. Between the neat Slowpoke/Psyduck moments and the little touches like Ash trying to worm his way out of training, the gloriously cringe-y "Team Rockedex" moment, or Giovanni and Persian having a beach vacation, it's got enough touches to be a bit more than the otherwise straightforward story that it is.

Episode 67, on the other hand, is a straightforward story that's exactly just that. There's not much flair or anything particularly interesting. It's just... it's just a story you pick out of a pile of a list of one-line brainstorming sessions of what could be a simple 20-minute episode. And sometimes you get something that's standalone but absolutely bizarre like "Clefairy Tales". Sometimes, though, you just get a bland one like "the Pi-kahuna". And there's really nothing wrong with the story for "Pi-kahuna", but it's just so bland, it's just the sort of story that we've seen thousands of times in other anime and manga, and even slice-of-life anime like Crayon Shin-chan would probably throw in an extra twist or two to make it neat. Hell, Team Ash doesn't even do anything this episode beyond just observe the story -- even taking out Team Rocket is mostly due to the interference of wild Pokemon.

Ash and company arrive on a surfing shack near Seafoam Islands right when a massive surfing wave called the -googles- Humungadunga is about to arrive, a massive tsunami-like wave that arrives once every 20 years, and the only person to have ever rode the wave and planted a flag on a rocky column in the middle of the sea is some dude called Jan. And then Ash and company meet like, his wannabe successor, Victor, and his sea-sensitive and blue-eyed Pikachu, Puka, who can surf. There's the expected and overly-long story about how Victor is inspired by Jan, lost his motivation and then regained it when he met Puka and I really don't care. Team Rocket tries to at least make the episode a bit less randomly shoehorned in when they arrive with their Gyarados Submarine, but a school of real Gyarados blow them the fuck away with hyper beam. Victor and Puka conquer the giant wave, and that's it.

Like... I dunno. Not every episode has to center around a specific Pokemon or whatever, because that'd get samey real fast, but when you just kind of shoehorn in a melancholic, quasi-inspirational surfing story with vague Pokemon elements glued in, it's not particularly exciting. Comparing the Slowpoke/Slowbro episode, which just focuses on a single Pokemon (the very point of the franchise), episode 67 feels like it could've had a twist, but beyond a Pikachu on a surfboard, there's not much of a hook.

Anyway, two episodes down and Ash has been consistent in not actually training for the league, something that the narrator really loves to point out.

Featured Pokemon:

• Episode 66:
• Pokemon: Pikachu, Togepi, Mr. Mime, Slowpoke, Shellder, Slowbro, Psyduck, Krabby, Magikarp, Persian, Giovanni, Meowth, Weezing
• Humans: Misty, Ash, Brock, Delia, Professor Oak, James, Jessie
• Episode 67:
• Pokemon: Pikachu, Togepi, Meowth, Gyarados
• Humans: Ash, Misty, Brock, Officer Jenny, James, Jessie

Random Notes:

• Seriously, though, I was definitely genuinely surprised that Jessie actually made that capture of the Shellder! It didn't last long, but main cast capure moments, especially Team Rocket capturing a Pokemon, tended to be treated with far more gravitas and tended to be the focus of the episode that it caught me by surprise when Jessie not only tries to capture it (with a Poke Ball and not a net, too) but even succeeds.
• Professor Westwood V's appearance, of course, is a homage to Astro Boy (Mighty Atom)'s resident professor, Professor Ochanomizu, known to international audiences as "Dr. Elefun". His original Japanese name, Nishinomori, is a homage to Shotaro Ishinomori, who is responsible for Kamen Rider, Super Sentai and various other sci-fi tokusatsu shows. 
• I absolutely love that we get to see an adaptation of Slowpoke's original pokedex entry, which describes the critter as being so dumb that it takes a while for them to even register pain. 
• Episode 67, of course, is a reference to the Pikachu's Beach minigame, a segment in Pokemon Yellow accessible only if you have an event distribution Pikachu that knew Surf, allowing you to play a surfing Pikachu minigame in a beach house in route 19. 
• Dub Changes:
• An interesting change is that while the location of the beach is given as Binnes (a play, sort of, on Cannes) in the original Japanese dialogue; the English dub had not only episode 66, but also episode 67 explicitly taking place on Seafoam Islands, a location from the games that never actually shows up on the anime, and is decidedly not a tropical resort in the games.
• In the original dialogue, Westwood V was merely one of the researchers who wrote the entries of the Pokedex. In the dub, he's the head programmer of the Pokedex, and attributes Slowpoke's entry (which sounded 'mean' to Misty) to one of his assistants.  
• The original Japanese dialogue sort of emphasizes that the huge discovery is Professor Westwood V witnessing the instant change of Shellder from a bivalve shape into a spiral shape, whereas the English dub sort of loses that emphasis, instead having Westwood basically repeat the same exposition that Oak did earlier in the episode. 
• A dub-exclusive error in episode 66 is Misty telling Psyduck to use 'tail wag' attack instead of tail whip. 
• Episode 66 has Team Rocket do a fair amount of real-world references in the dub, including the term "digging to China" (silly American lingo!) and mentioning Henry VIII. 
• There's an attempt to homage the movie Big Wednesday, which... is actually a movie that features surfing but mostly deals about a coming-of-age story with themes revolving around the Vietnam War or whatever. The main characters-of-the-week in the Japanese version are named Jan, Michael and Vincent, and the massive tidal wave is called "Big Tuesday" (which sounds slightly less stupid than 'Humunga-dunga'). Michael's the Pikachu. 
• So, uh... Giovanni apparently decides that between the couple of episodes that Mewtwo blew up Team Rocket HQ and escaped and episode 66, clearly the sane thing to do is to buy a tacky Hawaiian shirt and go on vacation. You'd probably do it too, if both your day job and your secret criminal organization were blown up in the span of three episodes. 
• Brock claims that Slowbro's attack, Amnesia, is supposed to make enemies forget, while Slowbro apparently ends up forgetting one of its moves. In the games, Amnesia has the user boosts its defensive stats up, flavoured as the Pokemon 'forgetting' the damage done to it. 
• It's funny that a couple of decades down the line, "Kahuna" ends up actually being a term in a Hawaii-inspired Pokemon game, huh. 
• Somewhat of note is the fact that Team Ash spends the entirety of episode 67 in different T-shirts compared to their usual outfits. In the Kanto seasons in particular, they almost never change out of their normal clothes.