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.

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers S01E26-30 Review: Ultramegadragonzord

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, Season 1, Episodes 26-30:

S'been a while since I did one of these. Five more episodes, and these... are honestly not the best episodes I've seen, even by MMPR standards. Let's go, I guess?

Episode 26: Gung Ho!

The premise of this episode is pretty... interesting. There's a "Team Ninja Competition" going on, and Jason and Tommy are part of a team that's joining said martial arts match. A lot of the complaints directed at MMPR is how toothless and bland most of the main characters are, and it's actually refreshing to see Jason and Tommy actually argue at each other. The main cast of the Power Rangers have always been portrayed as squeaky-clean best buddies forever that the only times we've evre seen inter-personal conflict between our main cast is if mind control (or, well, that one terrible birthday surprise) is involved, so it's genuninely surprising to see some conflict come between two main characters. Hell, it's even a believable conflict, too -- I can totally see these two dudes going at each other over testosterone-fueled macho nonsense.

This does go on for a while, mostly as an excuse to show off the two actors busting out action sequences and accidentally knocking each other on their asses. Trini gives the titular advice of "gung-ho", which is a phrase that means "working together" in Mandarin, and... and I am genuinely surprised to learn that "gung ho" originated from Chinese language. Power Rangers is educational!

But the whole gung-ho speech really doesn't amount to much, particularly when Bulk and Skull show up with Skull dressed up in what can only be described as a flamboyant pimp that moonliights as a rapper. And you'd think that Bulk and Skull are going to join the competition, because we're 26 episodes in and that's the obvious formula... except, no, they're not the ones entering the competition. Bulk has ninjas. Let me re-iterate this again. Bulk has ninjas. Somehow, this high school bully is able to employ two gosh-darned real ninjas. In Angel Grove, California. And said ninjas show up decked out in full gear and everything and they're ready to throw down in a god damned martial arts competition. We don't get any explanation to where they come from, what their names are, just that they're ninjas and Bulk employs them. This end up becoming an excuse to pad things out as the ninjas basically do more martial arts.


All that insanity sort of gives away when we get to the space witch plot, thogh, which isn't something you'd think would happen. We do get a pretty neat nod of continuity as Rita and Finster are making a new monster with the super putty material Rita mined last episode... and Finster's making Super Putties. Okay!

Said Super Putties show up and begin to menace Kim and Trini, who are forced to call for backup, and everyone's flabbergasted that they're having trouble with fucking Putties. And... and the fight's pretty fun, with some great utilization of the gym equipment and whatnot to knock the Putties around. The fight lasts for a while before they pull out a Goldar and teleport back to the Zordoncave. And Zordon's huge plan is... uh... have Jason and Tommy put aside their differences and work together to go to a random mountain and get some deus ex weapons while the other four rangers hold off the putties... you couldn't let the other four just chill out in the base, Zordon? You irresponsible giant head.

Granted, it does give us some neat little fighting footage, including a neat one where Black Ranger uses his shotgun-axe to slice a putty into two and it just goops into two more putties like a Mega Man boss. The Jason/Tommy stuff doesn't work quite as well, though, the two just sort of bicker while they're holding two halves of a map that look like they're meant for five-year olds, and when they arrive at the weapon stash... a giant brachiosaurus robot attacks! Wait, aren't these dinosaur robots supposed to be on the good guys' side? Well, Titanus, as he's known, is shooting missiles at our heroes. Jason and Tommy transform into their ranger forms and basically sort make up, decide to work together, swap weapons and end up distracting Titanus long enough to get the weapons, which are never actually named in the episode. Also, they clearly have "ZYURANGER" written on the side. And in a very anticlimactic way, we just cut away to the other rangers fighting the putties, Jason and Tommy teleport in and deliver the New Toy(tm) Guns, and they just one-shot the Super Putties.

Then we cut to the ninja tournament... which... doesn't really deliver on the zaniness of ninjas being employed by local school bullies. The fight scene is decent but it's pretty bog-standard, and blah blah Jason and Tommy learn to work together and win the match. The other rangers also learn from Zordon that the whole freaking episode is a test, and that Titanus is apparently one of them all along. Which honestly leads me to wonder why Zordon hasn't activated Titanus before, or had the Power Rangers bugger off and get those New Toy Weapons. I dunno. The whole episode's moral seems to be that Zordon's a huge fan of convoluted plans just to try and get two dudes who had an argument to make up together.

Ultimately, despite the silliness of Bulk and Skull employing ninjas, and the novel (for this series) idea of the Super Putties, the execution of the episode is definitely lacking. The conflict between Jason and Tommy felt pretty bland, and the way that the Titanus and Super Putty fights ended was insanely abrupt.

Episode 27: Wheel of Misfortune

Another pretty bland episode, and one that I won't spend too much time talking about. In this episode, we get our main characters performing in the school play of Rumpelstiltskin, and after a sequence of actually well-executed bad-acting, Bulk ends up breaking the spinning wheel prop... and Kim freaks the fuck out because apparently that spinning wheel is an antique that belonged to her grandmother and why the fuck are you bringing such a sentimental, irreplaceable item as a prop in a shitty high school play? Kimberly, you dunce.

Speaking of dunces, Rita has been watching and is inspired to use a spinning wheel to menace the Power Rangers this week. Okay then. While Kim is drinking her sorrows away with some milkshakes in the Youth Center, Goldar and a bunch of goons teleport down to the school to steal the spinning wheel. Between this and the float-model destroying episode, Rita has it out for Kimberly personally, huh? The Rangers return to the play room and find that the wheel is gone, and we... cut to a pretty bizarre scene where Tommy is helping Kim ask random people in the Youth Center if they've seen a fucking spinning wheel. It's pretty odd, and really should've been a scene they shot at the school set.


Rita, meanwhile, has transformed Kim's grandma's wheel into the monster of the week, the titular Wheel of Misfortune. Meanwhile, Tommy, whose first appearances in this series involves him kung fu fighting putties, gets attacked by putties... and they hog-tie him onto a tree, which is our Tommy excuse of the week. Silly Tommy. Because the plot needs to go on, Zordon calls the Power Rangers, fills them in about both Tommy's hostage situation and the fact that Rita's turned Kim's wheel into a giant flaming sentient wheel.

We get a fight-scene between Scorpina and Goldar versus the five original Rangers, then Rita shows up and makes the two monsters grow. For some reason, the Rangers summon the Dinozords but do not combine, causing the hilarious visual of Goldar tossing a giant net over the T-rex Zord... and that's about it. Wasn't there supposed to be a Wheel of Misfortune involved? Okay. Meanwhile, Tommy breaks free because the plot demands he show up now, beats up the putties, and Zordon tells Tommy to bring together all their robots to form the "Ultrazord".

Tommy and the Dragonzord show up on the battlefield, the Wheel of Misfortune show up and is insanely underwhelming, but freaks Jason out that he combines the other Zords to make the Megazord. And... and it's a pretty oddly-cut together battle, because the dialogue has Rita reacting like the wheel's doing something and the rangers are like 'look out' and 'oh no', but the Wheel of Misfortune's just... kinda hovering around? It's not even attacking the Megazord like the way it attacked the T-Rex and the Dragonzord a couple scenes before. Somehow this segues into the creation of the Ultrazord, where the Megazord, the Dragonzord and Titanus (who shows up) sort of combine together into a robot-man standing on a platform, and the combination sequence causes explosions to spontaneously erupt. It's supposed to be this huge badass final form of the entire Power Rangers arsenal combined into one, but the debut and the scenes leading up to it is so underwhelmingly bland that it becomes pretty unimpressive as a result.

Oh, and the titular Kim's Grandma's Wheel of Misfortune we spent half the episode angsting about? That thing was sort of forgotten, was it? Not even a token line from Kim angsting about the precious family heirloom being an enemy, or a determination to destroy the monster or something. And because the series hates stakes, somehow the spinning wheel shows back where Goldar originally stole it for absolutely no reason. You can't even have "the moon crew beamed it back since they have no use for it" like they did with the statue in the park from that bug episode, because Rita explicitly turned the spinning wheel into the monster they blew up. Gaaaah this episode. Oh and the episode ends on the Rumpelstiltskin drama, but basically Bulk bumbles his way through his lines, tries to flirt with Kim and rips his pants on stage, exposing his underwear.

What a fucking mess of an episode, honestly. It's just pretty bad, the 'spinning wheel is gone' thing is terribly handled, the play seems to be shoehorned in, the Wheel of Misfortune is a shit excuse of a monster, there's the terrible ending, the action scenes aren't super impressive and the debut of the Ultrazord is crap. Pretty terrible.

Episode 28-29: Island of Illusion, Pt. 1-2

This one is a two-parter who borrows the Sentai footage from what's apparently a pretty huge event series in Zyuranger where the villains actually enact the world-domination plan that they have building the series up to. In Mighty Morphin, though, it's just a pretty mundane two-parter. And a pretty shitty one at that, too. And... I don't have a high standard for MMPR episodes, I really don't -- otherwise I'd probably have stopped at episode 3 or something, but there's just something about "Island of Illusion" that felt so painful to sit through. Partly it's because of the length of the two-parter, but there's also the fact that the plot in this is all over the place and things are introduced and sort of ignored for the story in what I felt was a fair bit more egregious than most MMPR episodes. I'm not sure if "Island of Illusion" or "Wheel of Misfortune" is more poopy, though.

The high-school civilian plot for the two parter focuses on Zack again... and it's sort of a rerun of his previous focus episode only substitute "fear of bugs" for "arbitrary insecurity". Y'know, it'd be great if they had actually taken the couple of times that Zack has had terrible luck with women and actually built it up to be his insecurity for the two parter, but no, the source of his existential angst... is a dance competition. Where he's going up against Bulk and Skull. Bulk and Skull, who, obviously, make goddamn fools out of themselves by falling over within a minute of showing up in the episode. There's perhaps some poignance to be made out of insecurities showing up in the clearly-talented Zack, but the episode really doesn't show it well at all and throughout the dance-off scenes Zack just seems like he just didn't have his morning coffee or something.

Oh, and there's a random sub-plot with Tommy teaching random kids how to do karate, which is just an excuse for Tommy to do more spin-kicks and give the same "remember, kids, martial arts is about self-meditation and improvement" speech that Jason and Zack have given a million times before in this show. A sentiment that rings insanely hollow since everyone uses karate to solve every problem in their lives.

Meanwhile, Rita and her goons prepare to summon two of their mightiest minions, and this Lokar dude is apparently a monster with the ability to send people with shitty self-esteem into the Island of Illusion. There's a bit of neat build-up of Rita's goons being all panicky about how scary and dangerous Lokar is and how they nearly wiped them out the last time he showed up, which is neat. The summoning ritual to bring Lokar into Angel Grove causes and earthquake, and we learn why Tommy had to tutor karate -- the writers wanted an excuse to get him out of the way. So Tommy sort of... stays behind in the Youth Center to protect the kids instead of, y'know, grabbing them and running the fuck out of the building when an earthquake is happening.

The four Power Rangers then proceed to completely forget about the earthquake as they meet up with the moping Zack in the park, where everything is absolutely peaceful. Insert a generic putty fight at this point, and I feel like the episode missed a big opportunity by not showing Zack, like, missing a beat in the fight or something. If you wanted a premise of Zack having shitty self-esteem, the least you could do is at least commit to it, y'know? We then cut to a very awkwardly-spliced fight between the Rangers against Goldar and Scorpina, which was rushed as all hell before Rita summons another monster, Mutitus (Mutatus? Mutitis?), who looks pretty damn neat.

Goldar and Scorpina disappear off-screen as Mutitus fights the Power Rangers in their Megazord, which is apparently a distraction on Rita's part, as she telepors to earth, creates a pretty cool apocalyptic set-up with dark skies and lightning bolts and fireballs and whatnot as she summons Lokar, a giant demonic floating head with spiky hair. Which I guess is different? It's not a dude in a rubber suit, at least. Lokar doesn't actually do much but float in the sky and occassionally shoot lightning bolts, but he uses his 'breath of evil' on Mutitus to upgrade him, leading to a pretty damn badass form where Mutitus's original skull face seems to have split open to reveal a hideous boney worm face within. Terrifying but cool. Zordon calls Tommy to stop dicking around (he's literally just standing in the Youth Center with Ernie and the kids) and show up.


And at this point, it actually feels pretty epic (the dance-off plot aside). Mutitus was already beating the Power Rangers in the Megazord, this is now him upgraded with a floating head buddy to boot! It's a neat sense of threat, and even when the Dragonzord shows up we still get Mutitus holding his own against the two robots, eventually winning by... uh... shooting white foam that shuts down the Zords. Okay? (Lokar just laughs, he's kind of just there). And then Rita unleashes her master plan. No, it's not the giant demonic head in the sky. Or the evolving Resident Evil monster that can clearly hold its own against the two Zords.

Nope, Rita just teleports the six teenagers to the Island of Illusion, leading to the characters just dicking around in said island for the rest of Part 1 and the majority of Part 2, where they theoretically face off against their 'worst fears' or something. We get some pretty obviously spliced-together footage of a komodo dragon and the Power Rangers pretend-reacting to it as they wander aroud the island looking for their Power Ranger equipment. Also, by the way, there's some random dwarf in a shitty Robin Hood cosplay watching the kids. That's someone's first D&D character, some dude named Quagmire who hates Rita, is stuck on the island, and is a straight-up elf or something I dunno, because he speaks in obnoxious rhyme, teleports in and out of the plot and honestly makes me go "why?"

Speaking of "why?", after getting blueballed from the fight against Lokar and Mutitus, Goldar's giant head appears in the sky and talks about how the Rangers are all going to die and shit, and summons five past monsters that the Rangers have faced off before (and these are monster suits that the US crew has access to). Shellshock! Eye Guy! Pine-Octopus! That one lizard dude Kim single-handedly killed! And the best creature of all, Pudgy Pig! Holy shit, okay, that's pretty neat, it's an excuse to get past enemies to show up and fight the Rangers while they are un-morphed.

...except it's all just an illusion, and they disappear withot even throwing a punch. What's the point? No, really, what's the fucking point? Even if the suits aren't in good enough of a condition to do elaborate stunts with, at least do something with them, y'know? Instead we get... a shitty 'your true fear' nonsense plot where Goldar gives a gloating speech about illusions (that our heroes ignore), Zack gets scared of a snake (that's an illusion) and then is about to disappear (with the usage of shitty 90's effects). That's our cliffhanger. And then the next episode starts, where Quagmire shows up out of nowhere, the other Rangers make a friend out of him by saying "no, we hate Ria too" and he's like "oh okay, fine then" and then the way that Zack can avoid slow disintegration? Think happy thoughts.

Which he does, and "Island of Illusion, Part 2", does yet another terribly cheap thing. It's a clip episode. God. Zack flashes back to the Nasty Knight fight, but the way it's cut makes it look like Zack defeated the Knight on his own (he didn't, he quite literally got his ass handed to him in that episode until the other Rangers showed up) and then he doesn't disappear.

Of course, we basically have the same thing repeat for all the other five Rangers, with Quagmire offering inane advice every single god damn time. Speaking of pointless filler scenes, we cut away no less than three times to Alpha trying to fix a computer or some shit in the Zordon-Cave and accidentally zapping himself in the butt. Which is not funny, and neither the physical acting or the voice acting is endearing enough to make me appreciate the joke.

The writers shoehorn some mumbo-jumbo by telling us that Billy is using the wind velocity and the light reflected off from the power morphers to decide where they should go, because... uh, okay, that's so stupid it ends up being funny. Okay. The next illusion, Kim's worst fear, is actually quite hilarious, mostly because it involves Bulk and Skull, a duo of characters who manage the "do the same joke over and over again" far, far more successfully than Alpha Five can ever hope to be. Bulk and Skull... are dressed up all prim and proper, with Skull having a Scottish accent out of nowhere, and they're helping little animals in the woods while speaking properly. It's ridiculous, it's funny, and the fact that this is apparently Kim's greatest fear somehow ("If Rita can make those two be decent, she can do anything!") is just such an absurd concept, I love it.

Sadly, the payoff is terrible. Quagmire tells Kim to remember the fight against the Terror Toad (how would he know?), Kim doesn't want to because it's gross (oh, '90's feminism) and she does so anyway. And... credit where credit's due, Kim does defeat the Terror Toad single-handedly because Kim's actually got a fair amount of episodes where she's a badass.

The other four rangers then basically go through the same thing, but the episode had a really terrible cut to Tommy's phase, going from a scene where Tommy congratulates Kim on beating her fear, to a random shot of Putties in a distance, to a random zoom-in on Tommy's face, and it's just bizarre editing. Anyway, Tommy sees his friends as Putties and starts fighting them, because Tommy spends most of his screentime either brainwashed or making up inane excuses to avoid the second act, apparently the only significant thing they can draw from is "being tied up by Putties last episode". And then he remembers that, hey, "Green With Evil" had like three extended Tommy-beats-up-Putties scenes and his confidence is restored.

Then Trini hallucinates the events "High Five" where Billy's about to fall from a cliff, and unlike the previous three, apparently we ran out of budget at this point because instead of a visualization of the hallucination, we just see Trini screaming at the groud. Trini doesn't have a lot of spotlight episodes either, because her flashback's basically exactly that scene from the episode where she conquered her fear of heights. And then Billy disappears because... at this point the writers ran out of fucks to give and didn't even bother with a hallucination. And then Billy flashbacks to the fight with Madame Woe, which... like Zack and the Nasty Knight, Billy didn't defeat Madame Woe by himself like the episode claimed.

We end with Jason, and... at least there's some thought put into this instead of "haha snakes lol" because Goldar's head shows up, mocks Jason about how he's not a good enough leader since he can't save his friends, and Jason ends up sort of questioning himself... and it's not helped by the fact that the illusion he sees is of his friends disappearing. That's actually pretty neat. Of course, one obnoxious Quagmire speech, a flashback to the King Sphinx fight, and everything is fine and dandy. Despite the whole island supposedly being a creation of Rita's, this somehow causes their Power Ranger gadgets to appear before them. And also a giant Rita shows up, picks up the island and smashes it just as the Power Rangers call Zordon and teleport away.

...back to the Zords. Right. Mutitus and Lokar. That inane nonsense made me almost forgot the giant monsters. The Megazord and the Dragonzord combine into a new form, the Mega-Dragonzord, which is... the Dragonzord being worn on top of the Megazord like a large-brimmed hat. Okay! The Mega-Dragonzord's pretty cool, though, and it faces off against Mutitus, ending the fight almost instantly by summoning a spinning glowing ball with a "Z" on it (gee, it would be cool if the show's title started with Z, huh) and then it spins around and does some cool-looking Dragon Ball explosion that obliterates Mutitus from the face of the earth. Not going to lie, it's cheap 90's CGI but it's a pretty cool scene.

Lokar's still there, floating and laughing, but the Rangers just summon Titanus and form the Ultrazord. And... and it's such a better debut for the Ultrazord than the half-assed nonsense we got in Wheel of Misfortune. Judging by the slow panning shots of the different parts of the suit's appearance, this is definitely the Ultrazord's first appearance in Zyuranger, because that sort of "dun dun dunnnn!" shots are reserved for a new form's debut in tokusatsu. And, sure, Lokar's not the most eventful enemy out there, but he sure is a whole lot more threatening than a goddamn flying wheel that has maybe 20 seconds of screentime.

Anyway, that almost washes away the 40 minutes of dire nonsense that came before it. The shots of these plastic dinosaur toys combining into the Ultrazord, the shots rotating around it, and then it just unloading a frick-ton of firepower to scare Lokar into brunning away like a bitch? That's cool.

Oh yeah, and there's the dance competition or whatever t the beginning of part 1, which the writers and the characters completely forgot about throughout the Island of Illusion. Boy, wouldn't it be great if Zack's huge moment in the Island of Illusion was him coming to terms with his self-esteem? Maybe he could think that the other Rangers are better off without him since he keeps bumbling around, or something along those lines? Nope, have a fucking snake. Anyway, Zack wins the competition and inexplicably Quagmire survived the island to become the DJ of the party. I am not making that last bit up.

Overall... it's not terrible, but there's just so many random concepts shoehorned in that they didn't follow up with, between Zack's self-doubt or an island of fear or the cockblock of the return of a bunch of past monsters or, hell, even the island of illusions itself. Throw in the absolutely obnoxious Quagmire, and the clip show, and the two-parter just drags on and on. There are some neat moments in the two-parter like angelic Bulk and Skull and the Ultrazord's proper debut, these two episodes ultimately end up continuing the pooh-poo streak MMPR has lately.

Episode 30: The Rockstar

...and it doesn't change with "The Rockstar". I don't think it's as bad as the previous three episodes, but it's still pretty dire. If Quagmire was a shitty Jar Jar Binks, then Jeremy in this episode is a shittier Episode 1 Anakin. And... and this is a Jason-centered episode. For a show where Jason's supposed to be the main character, our Red Ranger actually has never had a focus episode outside of "Green With Evil", and even then those are just parts of a longer five-parter. Except that like Trini before him, Jason ends up being saddled with babysitting some kid cousin called Jeremy. Who, by the way, is dubbed over, and I had to wonder just what the kid actor did wrong that they had to bring someone to dub over every single one of his lines.

The rest of the rangers make a brief joke about how gross escargot are (ha ha foreign culture is gross and funny HA HA HA HA '90'S JOKE) before they pile their stuff into the Radbug and bugger off for a holiday somewhere. Tommy's also inexplicably absent without any reason this time around, and they couldn't even bother to have one of the other actors record a line about how Tommy's, like, karate-ing in the woods or something.

Jason and Cousin Jeremy show up at some random set where Bulk and Skull are eating some gross sloppy joes pizza or something, and apparently Jeremy knows that these are the "famous bullies" that he's heard so much about or something? Kid's kind of a dick, isn't he? Anyway, the bullies end up with gross pizza in their face because of their bumblingness and the episode moves on, and this is pretty bland and uninteresting, honestly. You could count on Bulk and Skull to deliver some laughs with their scenery-chewing in the first act of MMPR episodes, but they're kinda off in this one. Anyway, we get another obligatory Jason shows off martial arts and gives a martial arts speech scene.... but this one is different! Jason's actually sharing about how martial arts got to give him confidence (and pecs) and allowed him to feel better about himself. Y'know what? I'll give MMPR that. The rest of the episode is kind of a hot mess, but that was like, all right.

Rita is absolutely angry because she's planning for some devious plan, and said plan involves waiting for the Power Rangers to go on a vacation out of town. She sends the putties down to bother Jason and Jeremy, and... it's a putty fight, and you'd think that we'd have more drama out of Jason having to protect his secret identity and his kid cousin, but instead we just get a generic karate scene, and then we cut to the J-cousins fishing.

And Jeremy fishes up a bottle, opens it, and causes an earthquake. Inside the bottle is apparently a map to the Mirror of Destruction, the plot device that Rita wants to utilize to destroy the Rangers. No explanation is given as to what the random bottle with a map comes from, but apparently everyone wants this map. Why are you complaining about your plan being ruined when you clearly have no idea where the Mirror of Destruction is located, Rita? Zordon fills Jason in on the mirror, but the Scorpina and the two stooges show up. Scorpina snaps her fingers to fuse a bunch of rocks together to form a rock golem called Rockstar. Rockstar has the power to shoot rocks that are able to pin people to the ground. You'd think the blunt impact and shattered ribs would be enough to disable Jason, but nope, it's the gravity powers that's going to do you in.

We then have some awkward cuts as Zordon summons the other four rangers, teleporting them to the beach, where they rescue Jason from a rock, then they teleport into some random nearby jungle to rescue Jeremy, who's run off in all this. Because this episode seems to have a terrible case of ADHD, Zordon then telepors the Rangers to the 'beach club' where they fight Scorpina and Rockstar next to a pool. We get a pretty cool sequence of Scorpina doing some cool shit, and Rockstar nearly drowns Zack and Trini by sticking boulders to them and then kicking them into the swimming pool. And then the villains bugger off when they decide to hunt down Jeremy, who has the map that they need. And then Scorpina declares that she has found Kim and Jason, forgetting that she's supposed to be hunting the kid. Man the scripting and scene cuts in this episode is horrid.

Anyway, with the Rangers on the ropes, Jeremy outsmarts some Putties by throwing rocks, and then follows the incredibly stupid instructions of the map (it's literally "walk 6 steps forwards") to get to the Mirror of Doomy-Doom, shaped like a weird book or some shit, and basically anyone who looks at it gets blown up. As Jeremy displays against the Putty, vaporizing it into nothingness. Rockstar shows up to smash Jeremy, who goes "yikes" and then points the mirror at Rockstar, blowing him up. Despite none of the backgrouds syncing up (Jeremy's in a forest; Rockstar's still at the beach). And then... Jeremy just yeets the mirror into the beach. For no real reason, making all the scenes we wasted seeing him look for the mirror even more of a waste. Scorpina and the Power Rangers fight for it, but Scorpina gets the mirror and Rita makes her grow.

Anyway, we all know what to expect here. The Megazord shows up, and then has to fight handicapped because it can't look at the mirror... because I guess robot eyes count? Whatever, I'm not going to question any more of the logic in this episode. Goldar shows up to help his girlfriend and beats up the Megazord, attempting to force it to look at the mirror. Eventually, though, the Megazord manages to force Goldar in front of the mirror, causing a panicked Scorpina to toss it away, and then the Megazord summons their sword and blows up the mirror and the bad guys call it a day.

Jeremy shows up and fanboys all over the Power Rangers, and I do like that they threw in the little joke of the Red Ranger just remaining silent and stoic so that Jeremy doesn't recognize Jason's voice. We then finish the episode with Jeremy recounting the awesome stuff that happened that day to Jason and his friends, talking about how cool the Red Ranger is, and Jason lets out a lame excuse about how he 'has to go somewhere else" when Jeremy asks him where he went in the fight.

Overall... pretty crappy. The premise of the episode is pretty bland enough, with a generic weapon of doom and a scrappy kid sidekick, but throw in a very underwhelming monster in Rockstar, and pretty terrible editing that tosses the characters here and there, and there's not much to like here. Jason gets a bit of focus early on but it doesn't amount to much. At least we get a fair bit of Scorpina in this episode. I like Scorpina.

Anyway... these five episodes are pretty blah. I'm not sure if the rest of the season will be of this quality or if it's going to have some attempt at being decent. I don't mind silly or stupid plots as long as there's some effort behind it, but judging by the chunk of the series that I reviewed here, they clearly didn't have put in much for these specific episodes at all. 

Random Notes

• So apparently despite the past five episodes or so calling the combination of the Dragonzord and three of the original dinozords "Mega-Dragnzord", that's actually the hideously-named "Dragonzord in Battle Mode". The Mega-Dragonzord is actually the combination of all five Dinozords and the Dragonzord. Toy forms, am I right? 
• Mega Dragonzord is basically the Megazord wearing the Dragonzord's split-apart parts like a hoodie. 
• Frankenstein dude shows up in the background of some of the moon base scenes in "Gung Ho" -- that's because Dora Franken is actually a recurring character that shows up for a couple of episodes in Zyuranger, and actually becomes Dora Zombie, a.k.a. Mutitus! It's bizarre why they don't just take footage from literally any other episode, though, since so much of the moon-base scenes are similar enough.
• This, of course, means that Mutitus was a far more threatening figure in Zyuranger, actually being a recurring enemy that got upgraded into a stronger form instead of just some random bloke-of-the-week.
• Apparently the huge accessory that hangs aroud Tommy's shoulder and chest is the "Dragon Shield", and you can transfer it to you by tenderly touching the diamond in the center. 
• I know it's Kim ad-libbing to get Bulk to pull his shit together, but it's completely missing the point of the story if the princess knows Rumpelstiltskin's name, isn't it?
• Episode 27 has the return of Mr. Caplan and the toupee joke.
• Lokar, in the original Zyuranger series, was actually freaking Satan himself, and was actually the Big Bad of at least a huge chunk of the series where the plot was more or less building up to Witch Bandora (Rita's Japanese counterpart) unleashing a child-sacrifice ritual to summon Satan from hell to earth. Okay!
• It's interesting that Zordon wasn't a big floating head in Zyuranger and is just some old dude, so it's kind of a neat coincidence, I guess, that Lokar/Satan is a floating head?
• Dora Zombie (Mutitus) actually does have his face split open and grow a second demonic face when Satan upgrades him. The scene of the face splitting open is cut in MMPR, but the remnants of the split-open face is certainly still there. 
• We get another usage of unmorphed Zyuranger footage of the Mirror of Doom being used against one of the Zyurangers. 
• Speaking of some bad editing, Zack refers to Goldar as 'her' at one point in the Island of Illusion, and I guess someone didn't check if it was Rita or Goldar that was supposed to be speaking.
• Another odd cut is Scorpina siccing the Putties on Jason... which cuts immediately to another scene of Scorpina siccing Rockstar on Jason. The production crew also forgot to dub in a line of Scorpina giving orders to Baboo and Squatt, causing her to just mouth orders into thin air. 
• The Blue Ranger is absent for a huge chunk of episode 30's action scenes. Which has something to do with whatever plotline Zyuranger had -- you can actually see the unmorphed blue ranger in the background of the swimming pool scene, but the writers just didn't bother to explain it.