Digimon Data Squad comes out on the 5th of September (tomorrow) on DVD in Australia (it arrived yesterday for me since I preordered with fast shipping).
So it’s a great time to think about what the best, dullest, and worst episodes in this season are.
This might be difficult as this is one of my favourite seasons and is definitely in my top 3. It’s also probably one of the most underrated seasons of Digimon next to Xros Wars.
Best
Episode 22 – “The Wrath of SaberLeomon” (“Defeat the Ultimate Level! The Anger Wave of Saber Leomon”)
Goddamn do I love family moments in Digimon and Digimon Savers focuses on family issues probably more than any other season (and that’s not knocking the other seasons – every season focuses on family issues, Savers just really, really focuses on it. It’s great).
While the episode was fairly simple – nothing much happened really: Ikuto is staying with Masaru’s family, SaberLeomon shows up and dies in about five minutes – the episode feels so important as a break from fighting; we find out more about Masaru’s home life and Ikuto and Masaru bond.
It’s just really nice.
This episode could arguably count as filler except for the last five minutes but it’s just so darn charming!
It reminds me a lot of the episode ‘Flower Power’ in Digimon Adventure – family moments, character moments, then we see a bad guy doing a thing at the end of the episode.
I almost had Episode 46 as my favourite which is when we find out BanchouLeomon is actually Masaru’s father and then Masaru and ShineGreymon have to kill him in order to stop Yggdrasil but the episode is worse due to these two reasons:
- Yggdrasil isn’t stopped
- Suguru comes back to life in the last episode
Both of these mean that Suguru’s sacrifice hardly seems worth it – you can remove it and the end remains the same (arguably, you could say if Suguru hadn’t came back Masaru would have stayed in the Human World).
Digimon, commit to killing your characters, ok?
Honorable mention goes to the clip show/recap episode where Yggdrasil explains why he’s decided to destroy the human world. It’s an effective and enjoyable recap episode and actually makes sense, not to mention that it’s rare for Digimon to give the ‘bad guy’ motivation to destroy the human world.
Dullest
This was actually really hard, even the intro episodes I didn’t find dull as they gave a good insight into the mechanics of the season and its Digital World.
Episode 40 – “The Royal Knights Assemble” (“The Strongest Order of Knights – The Royal Knights Gather”)
So I guess the episode where the Royal Knights show up and have ‘new character buff’. I don’t really remember this episode particularly well despite only watching it in Japanese and English less than a year ago and I can remember basically every other episode of the season.
So I’m guessing it didn’t really resonate with me as anything particularly interesting.
Worst
Hey remember that time when we had an episode focused on Izumi in Frontier except she didn’t win the fight and a boy had to?
Episode 8 – “The Singer’s Secret” (“Yoshino Gets Her Cinderella Story?! Chrysalimon’s Shadow”)
Yeah, they did it again but Yoshino didn’t hit anything with her bum. She was just smitten with some dude.
Brilliant.
Brilliant.
Also isn’t it weird that Yoshino has a musical background (as we find out later on) and this isn’t mentioned in an episode where she is dating a singer?
Also the best part of the episode is clearly how everyone is gossiping and Masaru says it’s not his business and people shouldn’t care.
He’s so good.
Okay! Xros Wars is next, which I’m going to class together as one season overall because only a handful of episode actually matter (for memory) in Young Hunters.
Most of Xros Wars is fairly fresh in my mind as this week we’re covering episodes 40, 41, and 42 of Digimon Xros Wars (near the end of Part 2) so hopefully it won’t be too hard. Though I don’t think I can think of any bad episodes considering a lot of episodes rank as ‘okay’ (not dull, just okay).
Anyway! What are your thoughts?
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