Pokemon S01E26 Review: Scared Flower Child

Pokemon, Season 1, Episode 26: Pokemon Scent-sation / Erika & Gloom

That's actually a relatively short gap between Saffron and Celadon's gyms, considering the long, long meandering trek we've got between Cerulean and Vermilion, and the whole St. Anne shipwreck episodes being in between Vermilion and Saffron.

Anyway, this is an episode that I definitely felt to be kind of boring. After the setup of Brock really liking a group of women who sells perfumes, and Misty herself loving the perfumes (and so do Pikachu), Ash ends up insulting the owner of the perfume shop, who, of course, turns out to be the leader of the Celadon City gym and has a small little army of ladies that bar Ash from entering because of how rude and disrespectful he is. It's... it's actually interesting to note that Ash was significantly more rude in the Japanese version, straight-up insulting Misty and the perfumes, whereas the dub gives Erika and her cronies a dose of eccentricity that makes Ash's offense feel more insensitive and accidental instead of him just straight-up being a dick.

And I really hoped that the episode gave us some sort of character development of sort for Ash. Either he learn to be less of a dick, or to accept other people's point of view, but nope! He just gets roped into infiltrating the gym with Team Rocket. Team Rocket, trying to steal the valuable perfume, gets kicked out as well by Erika's Gloom (that whole sequence was admittedly pretty funny), who unleashes a gigantic cloud of foul smell to repel Team Rocket. Ash helps to free Team Rocket from where they are literally tied up and hung from a tree, and Team Rocket teaches Ash the fine art of crossdressing, which is... it's funny for all of three seconds before the joke ends up getting drawn out.

I do like that Team Rocket's attempts to get Ash to wear a dress and speak like a girl is just meant to be a distraction for them to charge in and get revenge on the Celadon gym by stealing their precious perfume and... and blow the gym up with a goddamn bomb, which is surprisingly dark considering Team Rocket hasn't actually had a properly villainous plan since their first appearance.

After some crossdressing hijinks that get quickly foiled when Ash realizes that his friends are hanging out with Lady Erika in the huge grass pokemon garden, we get an adorable scene of Pikachu recognizing his trainer, rubbing up against lady Ash and then shocking his wig off. We also get Erika and Gloom's backstory, which is honestly pretty bare-bones. We do get the detail about how Gloom lets out strong smells only as a defensive instinct, and it will stop doing it if it's at ease.

We get a 3-v-3 fight, and it's... it's a fun gym battle considering both Surge and Sabrina had been 1v1 affairs. The first fight has Bulbasaur fight Tangela, but Tangela counters Bulbasaur's vine whip by using constrict to basically reel in Bulbasaur's vines, trapping Bulbasaur and reeling him close enough for Tangela to use stun spore. Ash decides against using Primeape to not make an even bigger fool of himself, and unleash Charmander against Erika's Weepinbell, and Charmander's flamethrower quickly burns Weepinbell's razor leaf attack and distracts Weepinbell long enough for Charmander to get a good skull bash in.

And then Erika sends out Gloom, who immediately takes out Charmander with its stench, and we get this scene of Ash panicking because "none of my Pokemon will work!" Gee, thanks for the vote of confidence there. We get an extended sequence of Pikachu volunteering and Ash being happy, which honestly feels pretty unnecessary, but the gym battle is interrupted by Team Rocket. In the midst of reciting their motto, an overly-excited Meowth ends up interrupting it by detonating the bomb... which sends them blasting off again. Silly Team Rocket! We later learn that even the perfume they steal turns out to be the raw material, Gloom extract, causing them to get exposed to concentrated stink. Poor Team Rocket!

The Celadon gym gets caught on fire, though, and everyone present scrambles to rescue the Pokemon and put out the fire. We get a fun display of our heroes' water-types shooting water, Geodude sprinkling dirt and sand to put out the flames from above, and Pikachu doing his god-dang best to use a watering can to save a flower. Pikachu is adorable. You go, little guy!

Somehow, despite Gloom being right there in the battlefield when Team Rocket attacks, Gloom ends up being left behind in the burning gym, causing Ash to charge in to rescue the poor scared little corpse-flower. They do some really nice, expressive animation with Gloom in this episode, too. Of course, taking advantage of the pre-established property of Gloom, turns out that Ash's arrival causes Gloom to feel so at ease that it stops emitting its stench, allowing Ash to get close and rescue Gloom. After the fire's put out, Ash and Erika basically shake hands, and Ash ends up earning the fifth badge, the Rainbow Badge... although, again, this is yet another badge that Ash wins without actually defeating the gym leader. The only one that he won legitimately in a fight would just be Lt. Surge and maybe Brock if you want to argue. Oh well.

I feel like this episode isn't quite that well-done. It's relatively solid, with some fun Team Rocket hijinks, and the actual contents of the gym leader fight is pretty fun before it was interrupted, but the episode feels sort of confused about what message or moral it's trying to really send, leading to what I think is a pretty forgettable episode. Gloom's adorable in this, though.

Pokemon Index:

• Pokemon: Pikachu, Gloom, Meowth, Koffing, Exeggcute, Bellsprout, Oddish, Weepinbell, Vileplume, Omanyte, Tangela, Victreebel, Grimer, Bulbasaur, Charmander, Primeape, Squirtle, Staryu, Starmie, Geodude
• Humans: Ash, Misty, Brock, Erika, Jessie, James

Assorted Notes:

• Gloom has a wonderful dub voice.
• I do love the detail that the two Pokemon that Gloom's stench ends up taking out are James' Koffing and the Grimer in the flashback, two other Pokemon that are super-poisonous and super-smelly, and are the embodiment of pollution and filth. 
• Erika does note (more explicitly in the dub, and more implicitly in the Japanese) that a gym leader is obligated to accept all challenges, so I guess the ladies kicking Ash out is just kinda... illegal, of sorts?
• I'm not sure why Erika doesn't use the Vileplume and Victreebel she clearly has running around in the gym, instead resorting to the second forms of both evolutionary lines. After all, the whole "gym leaders have different parties depending on the challenger" deal wouldn't come into play in fiction until a couple decades later. 
• Dub Changes:
• Meowth's dialogue in the original Japanese has him talk about not having a nose and forgetting it, but the dub changes it into a fourth-wall breaking comment by Meowth about how the cartoonists never gave him one. The original also had a pun on hana being able to mean both 'nose' and 'flower' in Japanese. 
• The dub changes Erika's pretty generic rant about the usefulness of perfume into a bizarre cheerleading sequence. "P is for Pretty! E is for Elegant!" and so on and so forth, which is just utterly stupidly ridiculous. I love the dub. 
• Ash is a lot more rude in the original Japanese, whereas the dub has Ash's lines of noting how "perfumes turn men into zombies like Brock" and how he doesn't need any more energy making him sound significantly less like an ass. 
• In the dub, Ash has to use some effort to use a more high-pitched feminine voice, whereas the original one has Ash relapsing into rude, masculine pronouns instead of maintaining cover with feminine or gender-neutral ones.