I’m going to separate these posts into seasons and then, once each season has been covered, determine a best, dullest and worst episode overall.

Prefacing with a disclaimer that I’ll probably be using a mashup on English and Original names for characters.

Best

Episode 43 – “Playing Games” (“The Dangerous Game! Pinocchimon”)

This is by far one of the most enjoyable and thrilling episodes of Digimon Adventure.

Digimon Adventure, being the first season of Digimon, for the most part, is ‘just okay’ – a lot of the episodes don’t really dare to do much in terms of surprising things (the season more or less just follows the same pattern of ‘Kids show up! bad guy appears! Kids evolve Digimon and fire a bigger shot of fire! End of Episode!’ Which, y’know, is fine, Pokemon follows the same pattern and is still doing so and it was Digimon’s first season so they didn’t really pull out any of the big guns (Revolmon is introduced in the second season. Har har).

However, an episode that really steps out of the usual pattern is the episode where an 8 year old boy outsmarts a homicidal puppet who is chasing him around his house with a very real revolver and is forcing him to play.

The gun was obviously removed in the English dub, but even without the gun being removed (and the addition of a zoomed in shot where Puppetmon, instead of reloading the revolver that he just shot at the 8 year old boy, is said to be him scratching his leg as he’s made out of poison oak), the episode is still pretty thrilling and has an important theme of friendship.

Puppetmon is lonely and has no friends, when Takeru asks him about this in an attempt to torment him, Puppetmon has to build a friend. While he has lackies (who don’t like him but living is better than the alternative), co-workers (and all four of them don’t work together anyway), and a tree that just really wants to upset people, he doesn’t really have a companion, making you almost sympathise with him, even his dying words (this scene is not in the episode) are him wondering what he’s missing (the answer is ‘friends’).

The episode gives Puppetmon something a lot of baddies in Digimon don’t really have – a motive towards his actions. Puppetmon appears to be doing all of this out of loneliness and boredom, so much so he appears more interested in attempting to make friends with the heroes instead of actually trying to kill them. While Mugendramon fired missiles and nukes at the children, Puppetmon just kind of played with them.

Compared to the other three Dark Masters, Puppetmon is just a fun loving kid and if his aim was better, he would have killed Takeru which meant that Takeru wouldn’t have been able to kill Piedmon in Episode 52.

I could have easily seen an interesting ending where the children befriend Puppetmon and turn him over to the side of good, but no, Takeru decides to make fun of him and torment the already damaged puppet.

Takeru is the true villain here.

Another reason that this is, in my opinion, the best episode in Digimon’s first season, is how the episode has a Digimon fight going on in the background (the kids VS Kiwimon) which is barely shown which is very un-Digimon to have an episode that doesn’t focus on a fight.

Episode 43 ends with Takeru triumphantly returning to the others feeling like he’d accomplished something and Yamato wondering off because he feels like his brother no longer needs him. Heavy.

Dullest

Ah man this was a hard one, as I mentioned before, the entire first season of Digimon is fairly ‘okay’ and follows a fairly basic pattern. There are some amazing episodes such as ‘Playing Games’ (where the solution isn’t necessarily ‘fire the big attack’ it’s outsmart until the older brother shows up to try to kill Tai’s Digimon and kind of just steps on the heartbroken Puppetmon a bit) and ‘Flower Power’ (where we learn about the interesting family dynamics and our heroes’ home lives) but a lot of episodes, especially in the first half of the show, is fairly forgettable.

Episode 1 – ‘And So it Begins…” (“Adrift? The Island of Adventure!”)

So my dullest episode is the first episode because I HATE HAVING TO REWATCH IT, it’s just..so boring…

It’s fine as a start, meet the characters, learn the 7 kids names, there 7 in training level Digimon names, and then their 7 Child Level names. This is 21 names, 22 if you include Kuwagamon. So much information for a kid. Game of Thrones has less characters.

It’s not bad, it’s annoyingly boring.

Strong contender is ‘Departure For A New Continent’ but it’s probably more ‘okay’ than this one which is a level of ‘just okay’.

I’ve considered watching this with a friend and then putting up an episode talking about it but I just don’t want to watch it again. I’d sooner watch a bad episode than this one. Probably.

Worst

While the best episode had a few candidate but one easy choice, and dullest had a lot of candidates and no easy choice, the worst episode, considering the season, as mentioned before, is full of ‘okay’ episodes, there aren’t that many choices, so I went with an episode that really, really annoyed me.

Episode 22 – “Forget About It!” (“The Small Devil, PicoDevimon”)

I hate fighting story arcs especially when the characters are acting their age and we have a baby Digimon fighting with an 8 year old boy and both of them are being equally immature but they’re children anyway so who cares.

Also it’s annoying that the episode, unlike ‘Playing Games’, wasn’t able to be solved by Takeru alone, Taichi needed to swoop in and say ‘nah you’re bad’.

If a problem needs to be solved by the main-main character (as in, the goggle boy or, in some cases, the rival) showing up and magically solving everything (Digimon has this problem a lot and they even made an entire season about it), chances are I’m going to complain.

Alright! That’s it for Adventure! Did you agree? Aggressively disagree? I want to know your thoughts!

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