Adventure Episode 17: The Crest of Sincerity

In this episode, Sora and Mimi run around wearing towels as they battle a giant cock monster who had hardened his male opponents. Yes, this is still a kids show.

 
Let us cite the Laws of Anime, a tome that has existed since the dawn of the internet, handed down from the gods to explain anime physics. This is rule 34:

(No, not that Rule 34, although this episode certainly helps enforce that one too.)
“Any female with an excessive amount of clothing will invariably have her clothes ripped to shreds or torn off somehow. If there is no opportunity to tear off the afore-mentioned female's clothes, then she will inexplicably take a shower for no apparent reason.”
Yes, we have reached the Gratuitous Shower Scene episode. We've already had the public bathhouse episode, which we got a couple good jokes out of. Then we had Mimi's bath episode, which was a pretty good punchline to a pretty good scene. The gratuitous shower scene, on the other hand, was not at all funny and lingered for most of the episode. It's one of a series of bad decisions that make for a truly awful episode.

The pain starts with two cases of selective memory as the children are yet again wandering the desert aimlessly. With the heat bearing down, Matt and Gabumon joke about how the latter's pelt really needs to be removable, even after it's clearly been established that it is. Gabumon's just self-conscious about removing it. The second is Palmon who fantasizes about turning into a giant cactus to offer the whole group (including herself, apparently) some shade. As it so happens, Palmon can turn into a giant cactus and it would have actually been a pretty damn clever thing to do. Instead, they see a non-Togemon giant cactus... which turns out to be a non-real giant cactus.

The cavalcade of stupidity continues when Holo-Gennai shows up and is not only completely useless in giving the kids direction, he goes out of his way to make them doubt their ability to properly raise and train their Digimon. As if they aren't freaked out enough by Tai's stunt in the last episode. In these initial appearances, Gennai's kind of an asshole.

Suddenly- take a good hard look at the motherflipping boat! This Boat Is Real, and Sailor Numemon lets them all aboard after Mimi sluts it up for him. For a moment, let's assume that this is an elaborate trap by Kokatorimon to trap the digidestined on a boat. Why the hell does Mimi need to slut it up to gain passage?

Anyway, this time Izzy and only Izzy is suspicious of the free room and board, and even recalls the two previous times they were fooled. Naturally, Izzy shrugs it off and dives into the food with Matt and TK. Tai and Joe (the two with crests) get their swim trunks and their flippy-floppies and go poolside. Sora and Mimi take off all of their clothings and hit the showers. A human captain, whom neither the viewer nor the digidestined had seen before, sheds his quite unnecessary disguise to reveal Kokatorimon. He's working for Etemon and would have contacted him if the Gazimon weren't such doofuses and kept the dark network functioning. Somewhere in here, there's also an unnecessary scene to remind us that Etemon is also quite the doofus.

Stunningly, it's all a trap and all the boys are captured and their Digimon turned to stone. The effort to trail the girls goes cold as they had apparently sensed danger with enough time to throw on towels and escape out a very high window (yes, in the shower) to the deck. So then... yes... they run around in towels as the big giant chicken chases them. Biyomon and Palmon digivolve and beat him up.

The final moment of stupid is after they disembark and a not yet dead Kokatorimon chases after them with the whole damn ship. Rather than dodging to one side to take advantage of a cruise ship's limited ability to turn, they run straight ahead until they reach the fabled giant cactus. They hide behind it, hoping that a plant is strong enough to resist a cruise ship plowing into it. By a stroke of luck, it is, the ship's destroyed and Mimi gets her crest. Palmon stares up at her, dumbfounded at the events of this entire episode. I'm not going to bother trying to explain or defend this one.

My Grade: D

Loose Data:
  • The first shot of the cruise ship's interior is a grand staircase eerily reminiscent of Titanic. Nobody ever uses it.
  • They tried to make it a big scene when Koromon turned back into Agumon, symbolic of him forgiving Tai for last episode. He got a pretty long transformation sequence. Shame Agumon was incredibly useless fighting.
  • Here's the million dollar question- With the boys tied to a netting and left to cook in the intense heat, do you think the girls rescued them before or after they put their clothes back on?

6 comments:

  1. Don't forget where that crest was hiding.

    It was in the giant cactus. The tip of the cactus large enough to stop a cruise ship opened up and empowered one of the females.

    G-d, this episode.

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  2. Yyyeah, this is my least favorite episode of the arc and probably the single weakest episode of the entire series, IMHO. This blog grades episode 26 and episode 53 worse, but I really think that's just because of how the dub handled them. This episode was tripe bullshit in the original as well, and not only that, it's literally the only episode in the series that can be written off as complete and utter filler. Not even Mimi getting her crest can make it not filler since that's an inevitability, and I already covered how this particular plot beat gets handled in the arc. It's worst here since the episode leading to it had SHIT to do with the crest, Mimi, or her sincere qualities. Literally nothing else about this one ever comes back into play. Everything you stated about Gennai's uselessness, the ridiculousness of the desert cruise ship, the plot holes, Kokatorimon's antics, the absurd bogus climax, and the tacked on crest obtaining in the episodes last few seconds. Etemon's doofus scene was probably the highlight, all things considered.

    The dub makes it even worse, including a downright painful moment where the script writers didn't realize that Sora and Mimi were supposed to have already been led out of the shower by Numemon even while the water was still running, so they added a line by an off-screen Mimi as if she was still taking a shower, even though it makes NO SENSE that they'd be able to escape Cokatorimon in a matter of SECONDS after the line was spoken! (I also think I've totally misremembered things because I swear that the dub had Kokatorimon scream out "KOKATOOOORIMON!" as he was getting killed, as though he were a Pokemon or something!)

    Also consider what your summary puts into perspective: this is an episode designed for pure fanservice of the two girls in the group (though them taking on an enemy while wearing nothing but towels is something I actually kind of liked) have to fight a literal cock who has hardened the boys of the group and who gets defeated while he's driving a ship that gets done in by a large, phelic cactus piercing through it. Yeah, this episode was such a load of cock!

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    Replies
    1. The weird thing is I kinda like Kokatorimon in this episode. He's ridiculous and terrifying at the same time. Ridiculous because he's a big, egotistical chicken with an envy of flying Digimon, who gets knocked out by Togemon in the goofiest way possible. Terrifying because of his ability to turn his enemies to stone just by looking at them, his casual joking about cooking and eating his human victims, the creepy way he bursts out of his human disguise, the way he just ruthlessly smashes through to the shower room on the hunt for more victims, and how deranged he seems when he's trying to ram the kids with his ship.

      He deserved a better episode, in my opinion.

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    2. About your point that finding Mimi's crest had nothing of her character; you're right, but the same is true of every crest. That's a big problem with this season - the crests are in the most random places, usually as part of a wall or something, and the kids just kinda... stumble across them. None of them really do anything to earn them, they just happen to get them at opportune moments.

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  3. So basically the ending of this episode was Prometheus before Prometheus?

    While I'm not going to defend the episode, I quite like how the crest pops out of a flower on top of the giant cactus. A neat bit of forshadowing I thought.

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  4. This 17th episode should be banned (reason: idk)

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