Digimon Adventure:

Episode 18

I just can't let my guard down around Digimon Adventure:! We spent the past couple episodes really bouncing back from the previous slog of an arc, me happily praising it for its thematic progress and character consistency. So now I sit here, twenty-two more minutes later, the series having tried to replicate its initial successful first-three-episode outing only to wind up absolutely imploding. The original Digimon was hardly a bastion of consistent quality, but I can only take forgiving comparisons so far. This episode isn't measuring up to anything – it fails on its own, simply as a conclusion to the couple of episodes leading into it.

On paper that shouldn't be a hard thing to do. What story is left here is an incredibly simple cartoon climax: Orochimon still isn't quite dead, he evolves into a new, more powerful form, and the kids have to make a last-ditch attempt to beat him for real this time before the ticking clock on Tokyo runs out. The stakes and emotional energy were laid out in the preceding episodes so successfully; all this one needs to do is set off the fireworks display and go home. But alas, they can't. It's instead a mess of mismanaged pacing, like they couldn't come up with enough action-oriented episode content to fill the time-slot, so we get artificial stretches trying to make five pounds of stuff fill out a twenty-pound bag. The titular ticking countdown clock is the most obvious offender, going on while characters gawk and explain it in a way that makes it feel like it was really just here to take up half the episode before stuff actually started happening.

Explanations of things being doled out to us is a major issue with how this episode's pacing works out. The freshly-evolved Nidhoggmon just announces his arrival and then explains to the kids what his new Mega level means. Koshiro gets a reading and just explains to us what the countdown clock is and how it will annihilate Tokyo. There's no focus on the raw characteristic urgency or the emotions driving the characters to confront this disaster as in the previous episode. Instead it just keeps cutting between the same few shots of the big monster, the distraught kids, the panicking people in Tokyo looking at the clock on their phones, or Takeru and Hikari still teasing out their magical mystery powers. It's repetitive and ineffectual and worst of all, terribly obvious in the shortcomings it's covering for.

Because as troubled as the pacing is in getting this leftover morsel of story to take up a whole half-hour, it's not even half the whole issue here. What the constant reuse of shots and dragged-out exposition still can't cover up is that something has gone terribly wrong with the production by this episode of Digimon Adventure:. It borders on being obviously unfinished, with constant back and forth pans across the same roughly-drawn shots of the Chosen Ones or their backdrop bad-guy that only increase this episode's tedium in what should be a climactic blowout. Nidhoggmon's supposedly devastating attacks are just a couple animations (including some distressingly cheap lasers) repeated over and over. Even the triumphant return of Omegamon is rendered in flat, sketchy, repetitive form, sucking all the life out of a finish that these last few episodes seemed so confidently heading towards.

The focus on Omegamon also betrays some more critical long-term issues with the story's future development. I don't know if it was a consequence of the clear resource issues with this episode not letting them even try to animate anyone else, but it's firmly the Taichi and Yamato show wrapping things up here. I actually like a couple of shots this episode gives us, showing their determination in helping to hold up their Digimon as they fire off some futile, last-desperation attacks before the surprise power-up rebound. But the rest of it is frustratingly-unspoken combination conspiracies, leaving us with Omegamon debuting simply as an easy beat-the-bad-guy button yet again, no closer to understanding how they actually earn that aspirational ability. It could be that's where we're finally headed with the next phase of the story, since the writing sees fit to just yeet the rest of the team into a void so we can focus solely on Taichi and Yamato for the foreseeable future. It is therefore baffling that they would exacerbate an issue that everyone knows as an elephant in the room for the franchise, which this one episode couldn't even coast on successfully.

It's the same one-step-forward two-steps-back frustration I seem to hit regularly with Digimon Adventure: these days. It can do stuff seemingly so right for a little while, but then it just kneecaps itself with poorly-planned story ambitions or mismanaged resources. I want to let myself keep getting excited by it when it does succeed, because I frankly enjoy being entertained by this series on a base franchise level. But letting those hopes continually be dashed feels like I'm getting into a “Fool me twice, shame on me” situation.

Rating:

Digimon Adventure: is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.