June 18, 2023|

Filed under: Editorial, Featured

Pikachu in Picture Chapter 24: Goh Smart (Journeys Smarter)

We put in an extra week for “Pikachu in Pictures” (not to be mistaken for the bonus week next time; that was always planned). After all, we gotta see what Pokémon Journeys looked like by the end! And while our taste is still pretty limited, it was nice to have a better picture of Ash’s last adventure.

Episodes reviewed:

2345: “Sword and Shield… the Legends Awaken!” (November 13, 2020). Galar is threatened by the all-powerful Eternatus, origin of the Dynamax phenomenon. After beating the villainous Chairman Rose and his assistant Oleana, Ash and Goh stop Eternatus by summoning the ancient heroes Zacian and Zamenzenta.
2422: “Take My Thief! Please!” (June 11, 2021). Exasperated by how it regularly steals their food, Team Rocket desperately tries to shake off a wild, endlessly ravenous Morpeko. After repeatedly failing to trick Goh into catching it, James eventually feels too connected to the varmit and catches it himself.
2523: “Chasing to the Finish!” (June 3, 2022). It’s Goh’s last trial to enter Project Mew, and he and Gary are sent to investigate the Split-Decision Ruins. But before they can even encounter the Legendary Regieleki and Regidrago, rival candidates force the two to start working together instead of competing.
2538: “Partners in Time!” (November 11, 2022). Ash and Leon are knee-deep in the “Masters Eight” finals to determine the world’s greatest Trainer. It’s an action-packed finale featuring a cameo by Eternatus that reignites the stage with energy, a vision of every one of Ash’s partners, and a reprise of the classic series theme as Pikachu takes down the unstoppable Charizard.
2545: “Must Be Our Heroes and the Witch!” (January 27, 2023). Ash, Misty, Cilan, and Brock have all met up in Stow-on-Side, but the latter’s down in the dumps over a girl and retreats into nearby Glimwood Tangle. Inside he becomes enchanted by an illusion-conjuring Hatterene, who feeds off of Brock’s emotional energy and confounds his friends with visions.

The big climax of “Partners in Time” is so big, so dramatic, and so filled with fanservice it inches close to parody. After spending an episode barely holding his own against Leon’s Charizard, Pikachu is barely standing on the field. The referee floats towards him on his Aegislash (great detail there, by the by). Suddenly, Pikachu collapses as his eyes shut. He wakes up in an ethereal dream to the sight of Ash’s beloved Charizard, Bulbasaur, and Squirtle. The other Kanto partners show up too, then Johto, then Hoenn, and on it goes. Even the ones who left Ash, like Greninja and Lapras, are there. This gives Pikachu the edge he needs, and he stands tall, gets ready to kick Charizard’s overexposed ass, and then the original Pokémon theme plays as he does! It’s so blatant and cheap, and lemme tell you, it f___ing works. It’s a great ending, backed by animation that isn’t one of the series’ best but is a big step up from what I’ve otherwise seen from this era of the anime.

Image: The Pokémon Company. The defining image of Journeys: Ash and his newest team, having grabbed the brass ring. This image was published after “Partners in Time” aired in Japan, revealing to international audience the victory they’d be seeing in a few months.

This is the promise of Pokémon Journeys fulfilled. It’s not just that Ash gets to actually be the very best (like no one ever was). It’s not even that it happens on the biggest stage, against… well, Leon may not be the cartoon’s best final boss, but he works fine. It’s that it feels entirely fair and entirely earned. It would be insane to suggest having an end fight like this at any time in the show’s first sixteen seasons, but now it feels eminently right. And while it might’ve been nice for his last committed team to draw from every generation, a point of contention amongst viewers who found Dragonite, Genger, et al shallower, it’s still cool.

What’s weaker about Journeys? Well, tragically, after two weeks I feel confident saying that Goh is probably the big one. For all that he’s meant as a compliment to Ash—more “thoughtful,” disinterested in battling—he’s basically the same character. They’re both loud, they’re both aggressive, and the show seems to do little with the fact that Ash is, if not “older” (as always, he’s forever a ten-year-old), at least far more experienced. We’ve seen him coach May and Dawn, of course. But it does feel weird when one member of the duo is at the cusp of his ultimate triumph, the other is just starting out, and they’re kind of at the same level. More to the point, Goh’s generally uninteresting and boring. His goals are somehow less compelling than Ash’s constant fighting. He seems to be best at drawing things out of other, better people, or at the very least one character: Gary. I did enjoy “Chasing to the Finish,” and a lot of it was seeing how Ash’s old, obnoxious rival has become a newer, far nicer rival. The mission structure also seems neat, closer to stuff Battle Frontier and Sun & Moon were doing.

Image: The Pokémon Company. Man, how did Gary, the dictionary definition of a boring rival, become not just good but way better than the second dedicated protagonist?

This week also had a more specific low point in its adaptation of Pokémon Sword & Shield’s own wild, comically over the top climax. As has happened a lot, it’s hard to judge one-fourth of an arc, but the general plotting was boring and the action less animated than what I’ve become used to from this show. There’s this part where Goh’s Raboot (the evolved form of his starter Scorbunny) and Ash’s Riolu evolve at the same time, but then Cinderace and Lucario don’t end up doing much afterwards. It feels uncomfortably forced, like they were required to do some of the game’s plot and just had to trod through it. A shame; Rose’s weirdo British nationalism and the Arthurian Myth-inspired story of Zacien and Zamenzenta was fun in the games.

Perhaps it’s notable that of the ten episodes of Journeys I did, only one of them came from Season 24. The middle child largely seemed mostly fluff mixed with various World Coronation Series battles and Project Mew trials, all of varying levels of drama or quality. At least the episode with Morpeko was a fun bit of classic Team Rocket tsuris. It was nice having another episode about them, and it is one of the only times in their final era where we got to see James actually bond with a Pokémon. Of course, Morpeko was also controversial from how much of a “mascot” it got to be. Fans don’t like when the Pokémon are too overtly mercenary.

Regardless of everything else, though, it seems like Ash’s last rodeo ended well. He won a bunch of big fights, he got to be what every fan in 1998 wanted him to be, but the epilogue was the highlight. Terribly forced pun title that it has, “Must Be Our Heroes and the Witch” managed to be a great tribute to this series’ lighter, more famous “walking the earth” side. It’s Kanto, but prettier, less psychotic, and able to connect to two other regions. Hatterene’s a fun antagonist. Cilan’s more tolerable, and it’s nice seeing his obsessiveness and Misty’s abrasiveness collide. In America it’s just part of Pokémon Ultimate Journeys, but in Japan, it’s an explicit miniseries called Aim to Be a Pokémon Master (though both have new intros commemorating the whole anime, complete with their classic opening songs). They’re basically fillers framed by a lost Latias hoping for Ash’s aid, but they don’t need to be more. They show the Pokémon whisperer Ash has become, what his “Pokémon Master” ambition even means—to befriend all the Pokémon of the world, the stupid and kind dream of a child—and how far we’ve come.

Image: Bulbapedia. One thing that’s nice about the reunion is that Ash, Misty, and Brock do all feel just a bit older and wiser. More proof of the show’s slow, pained growth over the past two decades.

I think that’s something the Pokémon fandom might have needed to steadily understand. For half a year I’ve been arguing that fillers are good, fillers are important, and fillers are a concrete part of making a franchise like this one. And letting Ash simply be himself and be knowledgeable about the world of Pokémon is one part of that. The ability to understand that there’s something wrong with Hatterene and the forest is something you’d have trouble doing in a standard battle, and it’s arguably not “important” enough to sustain a short arc. But this kind of story can do that and, thankfully, it seems like the anime has taken as many lessons about writing self-contained episodes as Ash has about when to use Thunderbolt and Iron Tail.

“Movie” reviewed: Pokémon: The Arceus Chronicles (January 21 – 28, 2022)

Ash, Goh, and Dawn meet up with Cynthia in a living recreation of what the Sinnoh region was like in the ancient past. Meanwhile, Team Galactic has reformed and, with a captured Heatran and Arceus’ Flame Plate, tries to build an interdimensional portal to retrieve their lost boss Cyrus. But the procedure turns Heatran into an unstoppable inferno, and it takes everyone, Brock and the Lake Guardians included, to stop it from destroying the entire region.

Here’s the thing with The Arceus Chronicles: its title is dishonest. Sure, this television special references the Hisui region of the distant past, but the game in which it appears and which this special is promoting—last year’s Pokémon Legends Arceus, which imagined the Sinnoh of 150 years ago—is barely here. There are nods to Pokémon that debuted in the game, and it ends on a shot of the game’s male player character, but standouts like Kleavor and Hisuian Zoroark fail to make an appearance. Within the admittedly only one and half-year-old lore, these Pokémon disappeared after this point in time (hence why you couldn’t capture them in older games). I wonder if that’s potentially if accidentally problematic; the game’s set in an approximation of the Meiji Era, they’re largely based on the culture of the Ainu people, and the Meiji government committed genocide to destroy that very culture. This might just be me, but it seems like even in a fictional, abstracted land that’s destined to be a utopia, Hokkaido’s rich indigenous heritage is still kind of under threat. Less politically thorny is that this detail keeps us from getting to see Ash capture one of Hisui’s very cool new creatures.

Image: The Pokémon Company. Pokémon Legends: Arceus was an entirely new window into the world of Pokémon, not unlike the anime.

This lack of new material is undeniably frustrating. For whatever technical issues it had, Legends was a fine game. No, it was more than that; it was one of the most fascinating, compelling, and essential Pokémon products in recent memory. The Monster Hunter-esque sandbox structure that reimagined one of the series’ best regions was delightful. The Breath of the Wild affectations was beautiful when it could have felt derivative. And the structure that let you catch Pokémon as aggressively as Goh, chart their moves and lives, and commune with gigantic local gods was exhilarating. With Pokémon Scarlet & Violet being cool, ambitious, but painfully undercooked, this bizarre prequel has effectively become the standard of Pokémon in the HD world. A promotional special lacking basically any one of its virtues puts it at a loss.

Instead of being an advertisement for the glorious Legends, this special (a four episode miniseries in Japan retooled as a Netflix movie for international releases) feels far more like an advertisement for Pokémon Brilliant Diamond & Shining Pearl, and that’s where things get a bit depressing. Ultimately, the Sinnoh remakes are inoffensive but boring. They had some new ideas, but not many, and history will not see them with the starry eyes it sees the Hoenn remakes’ crazy space battle or the Johto remakes’ expanded locales. And with nothing new in the way of plot points, it instead involves a revival of Team Galactic because that’s a thread from the Diamond & Pearl anime and because there’s literally nothing new to incorporate save the admittedly cool Grand Underground.

Like “Aim to Be a Pokémon Master,” it’s also an homage to a beloved era of the show: Pokémon the Series: Diamond & Pearl. Brock notably dresses as he did then and not in the Sun & Moon redesign that Aim to Be a Pokémon Master retained. Croagunk instantly starts up its old rivalry with Saturn’s Toxicroak. But it lacks the more serialized, dark aspects of that era that made it fun. There isn’t a Paul to represent crueler attitudes; he’d have to wait for a guest spot near the end of Journeys. And while Dawn has Piplup and Mamoswine, and Brock made sure to back Croagunk and Blissey (the evolution of Happiny he spent most of Sinnoh caring for), none of Ash’s old buddies are there to help. Though it did give me my only taste of his Dracovish, one of the Pokémon of his I wanted most to see.

Image: The Pokémon Company. About the extent of Pokémon Legends: Arceus you can find in Pokémon: The Arceus Chronicles. Hell, it’s about the extent of Arceus itself you can find, too.

To its credit, the “film” does get a lot more fun as it goes on, where you have everyone contending with a horrific (and extremely rad looking) lava monster. If the Legends tie-ins are way too pat and the Team Galactic stuff half-baked, the struggle against this bizarre monster is really cool. Fighting a Fire-type who’s literally so hot that water only feeds it is smart. It’s the closest The Arceus Chronicles gets to the film series it’s technically not part of. It also makes me think once again about the idea of Ash starring in the movies even after he’s left the show. It could let him interact with friends he’s had across the series and total strangers outside of their eras, as he does here with Goh, Dawn, and Brock. In that sense, it’s a fitting counterpart for this week’s episodes, which started at the bottom and worked their way up.

Pokémon: The Arceus Chronicles won’t be going on my final rankings of the Pokémon movies next week. It’s, well, not one of them. It’s even less of a movie than that Mewtwo Returns special I didn’t want to watch. Were I to have a more open and generous mind, however, it would be in the “bad” section, albeit nearer to the top. The big final battle is cool; I’ll give it that. It’s just far too slim to really be much more. And not being one of the actual movies does hurt it; the animation is on the admittedly fine standard Journeys made, but you can tell it lacks the budget for the nicer backgrounds or settings of the films. The closest it gets is a pretty intro that mimics Legends’ lovely, scratchy calligraphy. That part’s there to be there, and that’s what this special feels like: inoffensive, safe, and there to be there.

Conclusion: Since I watched these episodes last Sunday to today, doing final edits while grooving to the music of Harry Belafonte, I’ve had one recurring thought: perhaps Pokémon Journeys was just a bit of a whiff. Perhaps nothing; Goh in this preview was a nothing at best and an albatross at worst. And it also seems like the weird position it was in when it came to advertising Pokémon Sword & Shield hurt it, too. We hit such strides in the six seasons that preceded it that a few aspects (aspects, to be clear, not the totality) of the final three seasons can’t help but feel like small disappointments.

Image: The Pokémon Company. It’s sad just how perfunctory the Sword & Shield of it all was depicted (though I did like the Split-Decision Ruins in the other episode).

Seasons 23, 24, and 25 were probably at their best when they were exploring the anime’s entire history. If it was Ash getting to show everything he’s learned, it could be exciting. If it was calling back to his old friends, it was nostalgic. And when it was doing smaller and more intimate stories—just with far better animation and writing than it employed for most of its life—it was able to perfectly capture the magic the show can weave when you’re a kid and less worldly. The Pokémon anime has indeed grown, significantly so. And while I’d expect Ash to be a hindrance of that growth, the opposite is true. This children’s cartoon has found in him a protagonist any shōnen would be proud to have. He’s managed to feel bigger than he was back in Season 1 without losing those core elements. And while they’ve had their ups and downs, Team Rocket has stayed excellent foils and villains for him. Generation VIII seems at its weakest the further it got from those two staples.

Still, the mission-based structure isn’t a bad one, even if I sadly didn’t get to see much of it. If Ash did grow, it wasn’t in a vacuum. One of the mild improvements of Johto was starting his reliance on unconventional tactics. Hoenn let him be a mentor. The serialization and darkness of Sinnoh challenged him. He had to step up as a Trainer to match Kalos’ pace, but it also helped him be a kind of leader. Then Alola gave him a family to build and protect. And while I’m admittedly unsure where Unova fits within this, perhaps giving him a much larger roster (and recognizing the limitations of that) was an important part of the writing. The evolutions to his character went hand in hand with the evolutions to the show.

Image: Bulbapedia. And it wasn’t just Ash who enjoyed the fruits of Journeys. Near the end, Team Rocket reunites with every single one of the Pokémon they caught and hadn’t released, representing six regions if you count Wobbuffet and Morpeko.

This final era of Ash’s fits in with that completely. For all my various complaints, Journeys is significantly better than most of the show had been from my as-always limited experience. It looks better than the first sixteen seasons by far. The writing’s stronger than it was in several of them, too. I’m not here to decry anyone’s nostalgia for the “classic” era, but Season 1 was just markedly weaker than this. Sure, it still had a lot of energy and that wonderful scent of weirdness, and sure it wasn’t under the thumb of this series’ notoriously extensive editorial demands, but it was also uglier, dumber, more problematic. Sometimes, moving from that is okay. And speaking as someone who had to engage with this show for such a protracted amount of time, thank the lord that move happened.

Errant thoughts:

So here’s something we haven’t had for a while: an American intro that’s better than the Japanese one! Two thirds of the original Aim to Be a Pokémon Master intro is clips just of Season 1; the most the other 24 seasons get is a collage of screenshots, a collage of photographs of the eras’ casts, and remade snippets of Infernape fighting Paul, Greninja at the Kalos League, and Pikachu’s final battle. The English language counterpart instead splices in tons of footage from across the anime of Ash’s Pokémon, including his farewells to three of the ones he released, him chasing Ho-Oh, and Lucario being added to the montage of his “aces.”
I wrote “Raihon is a f___ing d___” on Sunday, right after “Sword and Shield… the Legends Awaken!” I guess I should elaborate; he’s way too flirty and forward to Sonia. I guess the shadow of Brock’s worst will never be fully gone from this show…
Perhaps this is too charged for Source Gaming, but I thought it and now you all need to hear it: if you replace “Mew” with “Adolf Hitler,” Goh shares an origin story with Nixon hatchet man, deeply regrettable celebrity, and all around lunatic G. Gordon Liddy. And that little revelation is what got me to finally check out White House Plumbers.
The Team Rocket “R” has now meshed the original Rutgers logo with the weird, super sharp thing.
Throughout much of Journeys, Ash and Goh are there for each other’s challenges, pushing the idea that they’re equal partners and their stories are equally important. However, for “Chasing to the Future,” Goh finally goes it alone. Ash spends the episode training offscreen. And for the most part, much of their final adventures after that are spent on their own. I’m kind of ambivalent to this direction, but it ultimately fits the show. These stories are ultimately separate, and one simply doesn’t measure up to the other.
Eternatus doesn’t look great in 3D.
Cameo of the Magikarp salesman in Arceus, the one with the somewhat unfortunate mock Hispanic accent. That guy’s been living rent free in my head since I was a lad, so it was nice seeing him for this project.
Structurally, Arceus is still very similar to the movies; Ash and Goh are just… on a generic mission that takes them to the one place in Sinnoh where they’re having a festival.
Alluded to this earlier, but the special is my first and only real look at Dracovish, one of Ash’s most delightfully off-kilter choices for a partner. In Sword & Shield, it’s a disgusting chimera of two unrelated extinct species inspired by the notorious Crystal Palace dinosaurs; it can run incredibly fast but supposedly can’t breathe on land. Gross, weird, and utterly delightful. Always good when he gets something like that.
There this hilarious part of Arceus where Brock gives Cynthia his Pokémon and she gives him her Garchomp so that he can join the main characters while she digs a trench for which his team is better suited. The show literally had to write him into a scene. That’s perfect for Brock, isn’t it?
Pokémon movies and specials by design can’t really influence the mainline show (or rather, the creators probably don’t want them to for the sake of accessibility). In fact, the special has flashbacks to the Team Galactic plot in Sinnoh but not Arceus and the Jewel of Life. Even so, Ash has a Quilava, Oshawott, and Rowlet, so not having any of them evolve into their Hisuian versions seems like just a bit of a waste.
- Though it does have one change in that Brock’s Chansey simply evolved into a Blissey at some point in the time he was offscreen. That was nice.
But, again, I should make clear: the transformed, violent lava monster Heatran looks cool as hell:

Image: Bulbapedia. And this is just its first form!

And here is Wolfman’s favorite Gen VIII Pokémon: Kleavor, Toxtricity, Frosmoth, Dragapult, all four of the “Crystal Palace” fossils, Flapple, Centiskorch, Corviknight, Grabbloct, Grimmsnarl, Basculegion, Zacian, Zarude, Eternatus, Spectrier, Calyrex.
- Naturally, here’s the compendium of favorite Galarian forms, Hisuian forms, and their evolutions: Obstagoon, Typhlosion, Electrode, Zoroark, Darmanitan, Rapidash, Mr. Rime, Slowking, Arcanine, Perrserker, Zapdos. Even ignoring the fact that Game Freak managed to make a Pokémon based on KISS both non-repellant and awesome, it was nice having this expansion of the regional forms idea. We get ones based on Pokémon made after Gen I, and several of them evolve into entirely new forms.
I suppose I should also get Wolfman’s favorite Gen XI Pokémon out of the way, since we ain’t doing Horizons: Gholdengo, Palafin, Klawf, Sprigatito, Ceruledge, Tatsugiri, Pawmot, Kingambit, Grafaiai, Orthworm, Greavard, Veluza, Glimmora, Brambleghast, Revavroom, Annihilape, Garganacl, Chi-Yu, Koraidon, Miraidon, Walking Wake. Scarlet & Violet has the largest batch of new Pokémon in over a decade, so it might seem like I don’t like them from such a small list. Far from it. While many of Paldea’s weirdest choices aren’t here, I love how wild and demented the new ‘Mons are in this Generation. Minecraft rocks that cure their opponents like meat! Nuclear families of mice! Superman dolphins! Quaquaval!
- And, of course, here are the favorite Galarian forms, Paradox Pokémon, and what fans are currently calling “convergent” species: Iron Valiant, Toescruel, Flutter Mane, Iron Bundle, Scream Tail, Iron Moth, Wooper, Sandy Shocks. Similarly, the idea of both Paradox Pokémon and independent species that underwent convergent evolution is an amazing extension of the regional form concept. It’s a bit sad as a Violet player that the “Future” forms were a bit more similar, but I think they look better in motion than they looked through ugly, barely perceptible initial images.

Next movie: Pokémon Detective Pikachu

Next episodes: [CONSIDER CHANGING SOME OF THESE]

“Pikachu Re-Volts”
Pikachu Short 7, “Pikachu and Pichu”
“Crisis at Ferroseed Ranch!”
“Why Not Give Me a Z-Ring Sometime?”
“Radio Lulled the Mischievous Stars!”

Other movies watched:

6-5=2 (2014)
Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night 2. Why is Darkseid in this movie?
Picnic at Hanging Rock
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. Now that, The Pokémon Company International, is how you reference a Donovan song.
Suspiria (1977)
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street – In Concert with the New York Philharmonic

Other television episodes watched:

Cheers 103, “The Tortelli Tort”
Cheers 104, “Sam at Eleven”
Cheers 105, “Coach’s Daughter”
Cheers 301, “Rebound, Part 1”
Cheers 302, “Rebound, Part 2”
Columbo 1003, “Columbo and the Murder of a Rock Star”
Frasier 102, “Space Quest”
Frasier 324, “You Can Go Home Again”
Frasier 416, “The Unnatural”
Frasier 921, “Cheerful Goodbyes”
Murder, She Wrote 106, “It’s a Dog’s Life”
Smallville 519, “Mercy.” Ohh, baby. Terrible pastiche of the already terrible Saw movies. Wolfie likes that!
Smallville 520, “Fade”
Smallville 522, “Vessel”
White House Plumbers 101, “The Beverly Hills Burglary.” So this is indeed quite fun, surprisingly historically accurate (if giving too much credence to the “Hunt killed JFK” conspiracy theory), but perhaps a bit shallow, too. I wonder if someone who’s less familiar with Watergate would get more out of it.
White House Plumbers 102, “Please Destroy This, Huh?”
White House Plumbers 103, “Don’t Drink the Whiskey at the Watergate”
White House Plumbers 104, “The Writer’s Wife”