The Garden of Eatin'
"Yes! It's big, just the way my gifts should be! Complete with an enormous 'Good Morning' greeting card!"
Score: 3/10
The heroes come to a Slakoth zoo, which boasts of having more Slakoth than anywhere else in the world. Everyone is very excited to visit this place even though Max and May's father trains exclusively Slakoth and its evolutions and this should be really mundane to them.
The zoo is closed but not locked, so the heroes go in because "it couldn't hurt to look around." Nope, it couldn't hurt to break into a place with no supervision and dozens of dangerous animals everywhere.
They run into Marcel, the zookeeper, who is as stereotypically French as his name implies. He explains that the zoo has been attacked by a Snorlax, which ate all of the bananas they grow (you know. Because monkeys) and is now causing trouble. Until something is done, the Slakoth won't come out and the zoo is shut down, which doesn't explain why the gate wasn't locked but hey. This episode, I think, more-or-less confirms that the Pokemon World, for all of its advanced teleportation technology, has no equivalent to our animal control centers.
Ash wonders how this is possible: the zoo is in the foothills, and to his knowledge, Snorlax only live "way up in the mountains." Really? Really. You've met exactly two Snorlax in your entire life, plus a Munchlax, which lived in, respectively, a riverbed, an island chain, and a city. Brock determines that the Snorlax must have been pushed out of its territory recently, and this prompts Marcel to mention that a building project started a month ago in the nearby mountains. I actually thought that this episode would turn into an environmental thing, but nope! It's never brought up again. I find it weird that the episode took the time to justify why a wild Snorlax came to the zoo even though a previous episode, the one in which Ash caught his Snorlax, just had one bopping around without explanation, because it knew it didn't need one: Snorlax like to eat stuff, so they need to roam around to find stuff to eat.
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Started: July 6, 2005