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.