Pokemon S01E84-86 Review: Alolan Island Challenge

Pokemon: Episode Orange Islands, Episode 84: The Lost Lapras; Episode 85: Fit To Be Tide; Episode 86: Pikachu Re-Volts

Episode 84: The Lost Lapras
I think I'm pretty comfortable in doing three episodes at once for these Orange Island episodes, because at this point I feel like the show's making use of its original Orange Island setting to be a bit more experimental, swapping back and forth between being completely self-contained standalone episodes or having shorter arcs that extend across multiple episodes. Throw in the fact that they sort of changed the dynamic a little with the introduction of Tracey Sketchitt, Brock's brief replacement, and gave Ash a semi-permanent addition to his team, and this segment as we properly start the Orange Island arc is... interesting. 84 is essentially a huge introduction for Lapras (and to a lesser extent Tracey) while also setting up the small but definitely palpable changes that the Orange Islands bring. Also, this is the episode that basically introduces that the Orange Islands have their own gym/tournament system, throwing Ash straight into a variation/repeat of the Indigo League. Hopefully it's paced a bit better with less of an episode quota to fill.

The plot for "the Lost Lapras" is honestly just pretty simple. Ash and Misty survive the crash-landing of the blimp in episode 83, and they find that they've crash-landed on the tourist resort of Tangelo Island. They quickly see a bunch of assholes beating the shit out of some poor Lapras stranded on a beach, and Ash, of course, goes in to confront these asshole animal abusers. Before the battle can begin, though, some dude in a green T-shirt called Tracey shows up and starts running his mouth as he measures, sketches and comments on all of the Pokemon. It's an interesting thing to give Brock's replacement kind of a gimmick with the sketchpad (surely Snap's photographs would be a lot more practical, though?) but ultimately I can see why so many kids are kind of turned off by Tracey. With a far plainer design than Brock and basically being there just to do the same 'commentary on Pokemon by someone who knows what they're talking about' that both Brock and the Pokedex filled in previous episodes, it's easy to see why people saw Tracey as redundant.

That said, it's not that Tracey really gets a good showing in his first outing. After his first scene where he's only barely more memorable than any wacky character-of-the-week, he sort of just fades into the background beyond a brief scene of him being excited at knowing someone who knows Professor Oak. Ash's Pikachu zaps the hell out of the punks, they find out that this young Lapras was probably left behind by its pack, and then Ash and company end up deciding to try to rehabilitate Lapras and get it to trust humans. The scenes that happened are what you would expect, but it is pretty neat nonetheless to see dumb ol' Ash try his best to befriend Lapras in his usual dense manner. Also, Ash learns about the Orange gym challenge, gets excited, and talks to Oak a bit about delaying the delivery of the GS Ball for a while.

After an obligatory and honestly at this point very tired Jigglypuff bit, Team Rocket show up and steal Lapras with a smoke bomb, tying the poor giant ice-dinosaur thing to a flatbed truck and driving off. We get the return of action hero Ash as he rides around on a bicycle, chases up to the Rocket truck and basically rescue Lapras after a bit of a scuffle. It lasts a bit too long, I feel, but I do think Lapras seeing Ash try his damnadest to stop the runaway bed part of the truck from driving off of cliffs does work in selling that, yeah, Lapras trusts Ash now. The episode ends with Ash riding in on Lapras, revealing that he's getto-da-ze'd Lapras off-screen as they are hanging out in the sea. It's an all right episode, pretty solid and not too remarkable other than the whole slew of tone-setting it does. With Lapras as their newfound transport and Tracey latching on as another traveling companion, we march on!
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Episode 85: Fit to be Tide

Episode 85 then throws us immediately into the first gym battle in the Orange Islands in Mikan Island. It's honestly pretty quick, without much build-up. They arrive there, Tracey and Oak tell Ash about the gym on the island, they meet some brat who sets up a trap, who turns out to be the little brother of the Mikan gym leader Cissy, and we quickly set up the fight. The little brother (named Senta in the original but unnamed in the dub) is honestly completely pointless, and other than delivering the expected shonen trope of "oh, last season's tournament? That's peanuts compared to what we have here" is kind of there to fill up screentime.

Cissy tells Ash (and us) that the gym challenge in the Orange Islands are a wee bit different, in that instead of just straightforward battles, there are also competitions involved, and it's a neat excuse for the animation team to not have to animate too many action scenes while also delivering something visually interesting that makes it look like Ash and his crew are doing something to earn the badge instead of, hey, let's deal with the fire that's set off at the gym.

Cissy's fight is pretty neat, I suppose, with the first part of it being a water gun sniping competition between Ash's Squirtle and Cissy's Seadra, which is actually pretty neat looking. The second competition is a surfing competition, where Ash and Lapras have to compete against Cissy and her Blastoise to reach a buoy and back to the beach. Before they can do this, though, Team Rocket shows up in their Magikarp submarine and try and catch the Pokemon present, using a net to capture Blastoise. But there's this running gag of the Rocket submarine having its rotor blades tangled up by Dhelmise seaweed, causing them to sink and panic and whatnot before Blastoise proves strong enough to return back to the shore even while dragging the submarine behind it. And then Blastoise and Pikachu just zap Team Rocket and send them blasting off again. At this point it just seems like Team Rocket is just there as an obligatory distraction, y'know?

The actual race between Blastoise and Lapras are... neat, and Lapras ends up using Ice Beam to create an ice-skating rink and somehow this causes it to move faster than the swimming Blastoise. Okay! That's how Ash wins the first badge in the Orange Island gyms. It's... it's not a terrible episode, but definitely not one that I'll be remembering a couple of weeks down the line. I do appreciate the effort in making the Orange gym challenge a bit different from the norm we're used to, but ultimately the end result is just... it's just kind of there, y'know?
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Episode 86: Pikachu Re-Volts
Episode 86 is a bit more exciting despite not being a gym battle episode, because it features a lot of Pokemon and the return of Butch and Cassidy. As far as filler standalone episodes, this one is pretty fun. Ash and company arrive on Mandarin Island to find a bunch of trainers attacked by their own Pokemon. As Ash and company try and help, suddenly Pikachu and Togepi, those outside-their-Pokeball deviants, jump out of their trainer's arms and start showing off an evil grin and Pikachu starts zapping Ash, before running off with the berserking Magnemites and Grimers. Oh no, Pikachu went evil! The local Officer Jenny show up and tell our heroes that the Pokemon in the island have been going berserk and disobeying their masters and whatnot, with the only Pokemon that's unaffected so far being Jenny's own Gastly, who is a spooky ghost critter and apparently that grants him immunity from whatever's going on.

Team Rocket also arrive on the island and get surprised when Meowth suddenly gets mind-controlled as well, and it's a lot more obvious on the normally talkative Meowth as he basically walks around zombie-like. Team Rocket fellow Meowth through some secret alleyways or whatever and they arrive on an underground warehouse room where they meet up Butch and Cassidy, who uses a massive psychic-amplifier machine to amplify their Drowzee's hypnotic powers, and shows off an actually impressive line-up of Pokemon that they've managed to brainwashed. Why doesn't Team Rocket as a whole do this a bit more often? Weaponize these dang mind-controlling Psychic types, you fools!

Jessie and James decide to steal the Pokemon for themselves to make a name for the boss, but when they bring out their full fighting force of Arbok, Weezing, Victreebel and the completely-forgotten Lickitung, they all get quickly mind-controlled by Drowzee as well and join Cassidy's army of hypnotized Pokemon. The Pokemon beat up Jessie and James, who end up waking up in the Pokemon Center. They manage to identify Butch and Cassidy as the ones behind the crimes, but refuse to stain their reputation further by working with the cops, or help Ash. As a side-note, I am not impressed by Ash's dub voice particularly in this first season, but Veronica Taylor does a pretty decent job in these scene selling Ash begging for Team Rocket to please please please help him get his buddy Pikachu back.

Still, Team Rocket obviously ended up having a change of heart after Jenny offers them the chance to be heroes or something, because we all know that Jessie and James are secretly softies on the inside. They show up outside of Butch and Cassidy's base with a peace offering of a massive cart filled with Pokeballs, but of course it's a trojan horse containing team Ash and Officer Jenny in it, and Jenny sics her Gastly on the Pokemon army. Said Gastly ended up being a complete champ as it basically tanks a fuck-ton of elemental attacks from the Pokemon present, in a surprisingly well-animated scene of it splitting apart a bunch of fire/electric/water attacks by placing itself in the way of the attacks.

Ash, meanwhile, beelines Pikachu and actually ends up tricking the brainwashed Pikachu into zapping him in front of the Drowzee machine, blowing it up and freeing everyone present from the mind-control. There's a whole bit of "I will let myself get hurt to rescue you" heartwarming sentiment going on, but I do like that for someone who tends to be portrayed as a buffoon, this is an example of Ash completely winning the fight with nothing but guile.

We get the big final fight, but Drowzee is apparently still too dang powerful, using its psychic powers to disable Pikachu and knock Team Rocket's four Pokemon around like dolls, but when they command Drowzee to use Metronome, Togepi mimics Drowzee's movement... and we cut away to the base blowing up, sending Butch, Cassidy and Drowzee flying into the air. So yeah, Togepi is able to use Metronome now, and it's... it's kind of going to alternate with Psyduck's headache-ex-machina as a way to pull a surprise random victory in subsequent episodes. I'm completely surprised that this completely unrelated episdoe is how this little thing first gets brought up, because it honestly does feel like a pretty random thing that gets tacked on to the episode, which has previously been a highlight of Drowzee's psychic powers, as well as the team-up with Team Rocket.

Of course no one realizes it's Togepi that won the day, and they attribute their victory to Drowzee's Metronome backfiring, and we close the episode with Team Rocket overlooking the city from a rooftop, realizing but refusing to accept the hero's welcome that Mandarin Island has prepared for them, before walking off into the sunset. It's kinda cool, I suppose, for these goofballs to pull off these reluctant anti-hero vibe every now and then.

Anyway, I kind of like this episode a fair bit, random Togepi Metronome aside. The team-up with Team Rocket felt natural and earned, Butch and Cassidy being a slightly more serious opponent is neat, both Drowzee and Gastly feel like complete badasses thanks to their powers, and it's overall a surprisingly solid episode, which I liked a fair bit.

Featured Characters:

• Episode 84:
• Pokemon: Pikachu, Togepi, Lapras, Spearow, Hitmonchan, Beedrill, Krabby, Tauros, Dodrio, Meowth, Sandshrew, Voltorb, Starmie, Jigglypuff, Weezing, Venonat
• Humans: Ash, Misty, Tracey, Nurse Joy, Jessie, James, Professor Oak
• Episode 85:
• Pokemon: Lapras, Pikachu, Togepi, Meowth, Chansey, Muk, Seadra, Squirtle, Psyduck, Blastoise, Weezing
• Humans: Ash, Misty, Tracey, Jessie, James, Professor Oak, Cissy
• Episode 86:
• Pokemon: Lapras, Pikachu, Togepi, Grimer, Voltorb, Magnemite, Gastly, Meowth, Primeape, Electabuzz, Hitmonchan, Jolteon, Starmie, Poliwag, Vaporeon, Wartortle, Vulpix, Ponyta, Mankey, Growlithe, Flareon, Magikarp, Kingler, Arbok, Likcitung, Weezing, Victreebel, Drowzee, Seaking
• Humans: Ash, Misty, Tracey, Cassidy, Butch, Officer Jenny, Professor Oak, Jessie, James

Random Notes:

• As of eipsode 84, the English dub changes openings from "Pokemon Theme" to "Pokemon World", which is... it's kinda there?
• It is very interesting to note that the whole gimmick of the Orange Island gyms is that the gym battles are not just pure fights, but also include other skills that the Pokemon must be able to do. To some degree, I feel that this concept ended up being revisited in the Island Trials in the Sun and Moon games, which had non-standard gym equivalents that tended to have wacky coming-of-age activities for your character to do before the battle.  
• Speaking of familiar plots, Butch and Cassidy's evil plot in 86 is basically what the Lake of Rage bit in Gold and Silver are supposed to be, right?
• Very convenient that the Tangelo Island Pokemon Center has a huge swimming pool that can accomodate Lapras, huh?
• Tracey has a Venonat with radar eyes, which shows up in 84 but I completely forgot to mention it. Venonat's adorable! 
• "The Lost Lapras" is, I think, the first time in the anime we've seen the Potion item from the games, which have had artwork in things like TCG's and whatnot during this time period, but the anime treats the Potion as a drinking medicine instead of the wound-spray that it tends to be depicted as in other media. 
• This is the first debut of Team Rocket's Magikarp Submarine! While they've used a Gyarados Submarine in the Kanto arc, in the Orange Island arc they swapped to the smaller Magikarp submarine. 
• Episode 85 is the first time that "Muk shows up to smother Oak" ends up being a long-running gag that will be repeated particularly often in the Johto and Hoenn seasons. 
• This happens a lot as the series goes on, but I think this is the first time that Ash compeletely forgot about a Pokemon that he's seen before, having to check out Seadra in his Pokedex despite fighting one in the Indigo League. The real-life reason, of course, is that this is basically a combination of advertising and exposition.
• Jessie's Lickitung finally makes a re-appearance some 30+ episodes after it first showed up!
• A particularly noticeable animation error resulted in a pretty uncanny-looking Jolteon without its white spike collar. 
• Ghost-types (and especially not Gastly) are not immune to psychic powers! That'd be the Dark-type, introduced in the next generation!
• Dub Changes:
• The hula girls in the original Japanesse said a phrase that could be interpreted as either "these look good on you" or "the two of you are a good match for each other", which is why they are blushing. The English dialogue is just generic welcoming.
• Mikan Island was originally Natsukan Island in the original Japanese. Both draw from "Natsumikan", a type of mandarin orange in Japanese, which is a surprising thing to keep, even if none of the dub voice actors pronounce it properly (the dub pronounces it as myke-AN instead of mee-KAN)... it's an interesting decision for them to change it from a Japanese name to a different Japanese name.