Adventure: (2020) Episode 25: Dive to the Next Ocean

In this episode, everything is falling! Taichi and Yamato, Takeru, ElDoradimon, US-Iran relations, the quality of the series… everything’s just plummeting hard!

If we’re not getting the satisfying and earned win over Devimon that last time wasn’t, at least give us a breather. Since this endless stretch of high intensity started, we’ve been aching for one. Taichi and Yamato have become nonstop fighting machines, with no room to exhibit personality or even argue with each other on flimsy pretenses. Other than being controlled by angels, we don’t know anything about Takeru. The other four have spent the last three episodes doing literally nothing besides huddle under a gazebo in the park staring at a computer screen (Sora and Koshiro have spent five!). While the action has occasionally been good, it’s a terrible bit of entropy begging for some change now that Devimon has apparently bitten the dust. Well, there’s good news: instead of going from episodes with nothing but intense action where everything’s on the line, we get an episode of intense action where absolutely nothing is on the line.

At this point, Yamato’s resorted to mocking our request to slow down and prove this series has actual characters. As much as a break is called for, Yamato points out we’re not going to get one as half the continent breaks up and plummets to the ocean underneath it. So instead we… watch them plummet to the ocean underneath it. That’s the extent of the drama. Yamato even teases the biggest character driver available: Taichi and MetalGreymon going berserk last episode. But instead of mentioning it directly, he demurs when asked and bottles it up instead of letting us know what he actually thought about it and forcing Taichi to deal with the monster he became. That sort of reflection could and really should have been the focus of the entire episode. But no, instead they’re falling. Taichi’s bout of pinkeye absolutely must be addressed again in the future. With this series you can’t trust that it will.

Normally, the kids falling to their deaths would be something wrapped up in a matter of seconds. For a large enough drop, maybe a few minutes, plus a couple if Gomamon’s not around to make a fish raft. Trying to extend it to an entire episode is a stretch and it shows. The return of Leomon’s crew is appreciated, but the presence of three flying Peckmon to escort our heroes really should have been the end of that. But no… we have a swarm of Mamemon that is just kind of in the way, attacking everything just because they’re too close, a considerable step down from Devimon raising a cult thirsty for unchecked evolution. Since it was the only way to inject any sort of stake in this fight, Leomon and Patamon rush a sloppy backstory to convince us that saving ElDoradimon, the castle holder Taichi and Yamato barely acknowledged in his first appearances, is absolutely essential. Yamato clearly disagrees, but remains silent for fear that Taichi will tattle to Sora.

And so we spend the remainder of the episode trying very hard to pretend to care about ElDoradimon enough to accept Taichi and Yamato’s stunts to guide him to a safe landing, while also trying very hard to take the Mamemon seriously as a threat. At first, accomplishing the latter got a big assist with Agumon and Gabumon too tired to fight. This makes sense as they’ve been fighting at the Ultimate level, plus upgrades, for the last five episodes. The concept of Taichi and Yamato having to fend off the Mamemon and land their turtle safely without their Digimon works well enough in a filler sort of way. But no, they run into a corner where, in lieu of any good ideas, the only solution is screaming really loud and getting the evolutions we were told were unfeasible for the first two-thirds of the episode.

Back home… they’re still huddled under a gazebo in the park staring at a computer screen. They’re not even helping their Digimon fight anymore, only continuing to realize the tanker crisis wasn’t actually fixed (which we learned last episode) and that there’s an infestation of tiny Digimon in the relevant part of the network (which we also learned last episode, only the Algomon have quietly been replaced with Zurumon). Literally the only moment of personality from any of the four is Mimi coming across as an airhead. Big leap forward that is. Hikari joins them… but only because she too wants to huddle under the gazebo in the park. No personality from her either. The net result is the worst kind of filler episode, where not only does nothing of value get accomplished, we don’t even get any downtime to feel out these characters. Given how badly we need the latter, and how the action we got wasn’t a respite from anything, the episode feels like even more of a waste.

My Grade: D+

Loose Data:

• So these tanker collisions are causing the US and Iran to jump to conclusions and strain their relations. Obviously not unrealistic, but bold of them to assume US-Iran relations could get worse. Since you know the show doesn’t have the stones to actually introduce a military conflict between the two, this is such a transparently empty way of pretending to raise the stakes on the tanker crisis.
• The military alphabet of the scrambling jets spells out “TOEI08.” The Toei part’s obvious. The 08 perhaps refers to this being the eighth Digimon TV series.
• Cloud Continent floating in the sky is about as subtle as the wall of fire in the original Adventure. But the kids also had to travel across the sea to Cloud Continent. Was that landmass also floating up there, even though it wasn’t “Cloud” anything?
• All that drama over falling into the ocean and you just know DarkKnightmon’s going to be waiting for them wherever they end up.

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