"Who are you calling criminals? What we do is take from others and give to ourselves!"
Score: 3/10
The heroes are going to Whales Island, a nature preserve that hasn't changed "in a thousand years!" Really? It's remained unchanged since the middle ages? You're going to make this claim when you clearly show a city on the island?
Do you have any idea how much a city changes the surrounding area? It doesn't only affect the area with buildings, and this island isn't that large. And if it's a nature preserve, why are random children allowed to come to the island with no adult supervision? God, we're thirty-seven seconds into the episode and already nothing makes sense.
The heroes decide to train at a beach, and May excitedly announces that Bulbasaur has learned petal dance after an enormous amount of work. I, uh, I wasn't aware you were trying to teach it petal dance, there, May. Seriously, the episode acts like this is as significant as when Pikachu learned iron tail, but that had multiple episodes of build up, this is brought up out of nowhere.
Max encounters a Cradily, so May checks the pokedex for information on an extinct pokemon it shouldn't know about because when could that information ever come up in her travels except in a situation like this that could not have been predicted. I mean, they didn't put Blaziken in the Johto pokedex, and it's a lot more likely that Ash will be a traveler than an extinct pokemon. Well, in any case, when the heroes tell him that's impossible, because it's not like they've encountered extinct pokemon multiple times in the past (well, May hasn't, but still), he runs into the forest and they follow him, quickly encountering Professor Proctor, his wife Annie (who calls her husband "Proctor," so either she refers to her husband by her own last name, or he goes by "Professor Proctor" like I would go by "Professor Adam").
They have a laboratory of Cradily and Armaldo, and explain that they've cloned them from ancient fossils. Proctor's dream is to clone enough pokemon to turn the entire island (which already has a city on its coastline, mind you) into an amusement park. You might be thinking that I'm going to make a Jurassic Park joke here, but let's be honest, if the technology actually existed, someone really would make Jurassic Park in real life and be completely heedless of the consequences. Probably Disney. The only thing that bothers me here is that Ash supported another scientist who found some ancient Omanyte but decided not to make it public because it would be bad for them to not live naturally, but Ash now has no problem with the opposite.
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Not changing this sig until I decide to change this sig.
Started: July 6, 2005