Pokemon S01E12 Review: Teenage Gangster Squirrel Turtles

Pokemon, Season 1, Episode 12: Enter the Squirtle Squad

It's the last of the "get all of the Kanto starters" episodes, ending with the water starter Squirtle. And the trio are still wandering the coutryside between Cerulean and Vermilion before they fall into a pitfall once more! Except this time it's not those dastardly Team Rocket, but rather... a gang of Squirtles with sunglasses! Enter the Squirtle Squad. Our heroes are ready to throw down with these tortoise gangsters and Pikachu straight-up takes one out with a Thundershock when the sirens of Officer Jenny shows up and sends these little criminals running away.

We get some backstory from this Jenny (after, of course, a now-running-thin joke of "all Jennys are the same"), establishing that these are a gang of Squirtles abandoned by their trainers, and have been causing all sorts of havoc. It does sort of set a theme continuing from the previous episode about abandoned Pokemon, and I really wish the show had more to say about it beyond "oh no the poor things", but... eh.

Team Rocket also encounters the Squirtle Squad as they are about to eat their lunch, where the Squirtles arrive with rope, tie them up onto a tree, and munch on their onigiri and sandwiches. Meowth gets the bright idea of... kicking James in the face, and claiming that he's the boss of these lowly humans and that they should totally team up as fellow villains! And they do, with the Squirtles spraying Ash, Brock and Misty with water so that Pikachu's thundershock will shock his human allies, and in the ensuing fight, Pikachu gets thrown into the river and stabbed in his back by a random wild Goldeen.

As Meowth and the five Squirtles celebrate, the humans are captured and are worried that Pikachu, held in a cage, is sick and they need to find some medicine. Ash cries while begging the Squirtles to let him cure his buddy, which touches the Squirtles enough to let him go to town and buy a super potion, under the threat of executing Misty. Ash makes good on his promise, although the road ends up becoming pretty randomly treacherous... and Ash also gets stabbed up the bum by the same wild Goldeen.

This injury apparently hampers Ash's journey so much (to be fair, it probably hurt a lot), and to add insult to injury, we get a random Gary cameo as he walks out of the shop and whacks Ash in the face in the process. As Ash finally stumbles into the cowboy-style shop, though, Jessie and James are doing some straight-up armed robbery with a bazooka and some sort of machinegun. I remember this because unlike most depictions of guns in the Pokemon anime, this one wasn't censored! Also surprisingly, after Team Rocket makes their getaway with the gunpowder, Ash barges in and gets like four shotguns pointed at his face.  Considering that Dratini episode was taken out of rotation for Western audiences, it's surprising that this scene wasn't cut either.

Anyway, with the intervention of the pretty incompetent officer Jenny, who shows up late, Ash hops on her sidecar and go of to the Squirtle Gang hideout. And... the extremely responsible Jenny sends Ash to crawl through a side-entrance, and I have so many questions about this scene. Why not just walk through the front entrance? The Squirtle Squad was expecting Ash, after all. And Jenny could've sent her pokemon to accompany Ash or something, even if she herself can't fit in. It's weird. Ash shows up, and we get a brief imaginary spot of Misty being thrown into a dark chasm, but apparently the entire group just ended up moving outside of the cave for no real reason but to have this brief bit of faux-drama. Also, to set up the stage for the climax, I guess.

Ash cures Pikachu with the super potion, but then Team Rocket arrive with fucking bombs and air-drop them onto the Squirtle Squad to get their revenge, and also to allow Meowth to abscond with Pikachu. Ash ends up risking himself to shield the lead Squirtle (who has spiky sunglasses), who ends up rescuing Ash instead, carrying him to the safety of the cave, and then using a water gun to blow a hole in Team Rocket's balloon, rescuing Pikachu and sending them blasting off again.

Oh, and the Squirtle Squad put out the resulting forest fire from the bombs, and are deputized by Jenny into the town's fire-fighting squad. And as Ash leaves, the lead Squirtle shows up, and is happy to join Ash on his journey. For... for some reason, despite him being shown to be in a closely-knit gang. It's always bizarre, even with Ash saving Squirtle before, it's always something that felt shoehorned in. Which means... full party get!

Not the biggest fan of this episode, honestly. The Squirtle Squad are pretty charming, sure, and I do like the fun concept of a gang of rowdy Pokemon troublemakers ending up being suckered into becoming accomplices of the comparatively worse Team Rocket, but at the same time, the set up for the final conflict is a bit muddled and the real moral of the story or whatever feels kind of mdudled as well. Not the worst by any means because it's at least not boring, but far from being my favourite episode. 

Pokemon Index:

• Pokemon: Pikachu, Squirtle, Meowth, Goldeen, Charmander
• Humans: Ash, Misty, Brock, Officer Jenny, Jessie, James, Gary

Assorted Notes: 

• This epissode marks the first usage of a Pokemon item in the Super Potion. I'm not sure if it was the anime or the TCG that codified the appearance of potions as a spray bottle, but that's how the potions have been consistently portrayed since the first generation. 
• Dub Changes:
• A bit of an addition in the dub is Ash subtly hinting that Gary chose a Squirtle as his starter Pokemon by saying "with my own Squirtle". 
• Meowth and the Squirtle Squad threatened to 'execute' Misty in the original Japanese, whereas in the dub, it's a more playful threat to dye her hair purple. I remembered this because Ithought it was an utterly silly (but pretty effective - for Misty at least) threat.
• Team Rocket claims their guns are "ice guns" in the dub. I mean, they do apparently shoot flower petal confetti when they escape, so maybe those really aren't real guns. 
• This will be a pretty consistent change in the dub, but the rice balls (onigiri) that Team Rocket is preparing to eat is referred to as donuts in the dub. Because clearly American kids are too dumb to know about any sort of cuisine other than their own?