"What type of pokemon do you think you work with best? What do you think of reporters who ask a lot of questions?"
Score: 7.5/10
The heroes have finally reached the Battle Dome, and surprisingly, dozens of onlookers and reporters are there. It seems that Ash is pretty popular here and everyone is looking forward to his upcoming fight. You would think this is because he’s the Orange Islands champion who’s placed in the Top Sixteen of three different other tournaments, but no, it’s because he already has two frontier symbols.
Cut to the Battle Dome. Literally tens of thousands of fans, who are almost all teenage girls, are here to watch Tucker. Sorry, uh... I'm not an expert on teenage girls, I will admit that I had only one girlfriend throughout all of my elementary, middle, and high school years, but, uh... aren't they generally attracted to either annoying girly teenage boys like Justin Bieber or manlier stock than... this?
I'm not really an expert on Japanese teenage girl culture, but I can recognize what it means when girls surgically replace their eyeballs with giant novelty pink hearts.
Literally the only girl in the stadium who isn’t all over Tucker is May, who instead only admires the theatrics of everything, which makes sense given her coordinator status. So, uh, you'll forgive me if I'm a little confused about Tucker's popularity.
Tucker tells Ash that this is a double battle, and his theme is Hot and Cool, which means Fire and Ic-- Fire and Water, and throws out an Arcanine and a Swampert. The announcer gives Ash access to a teleporter and tells him that he can use any pokemon he owns, so he decides to use Corphish and Swellow, two that he already had with him. Honestly? It's not a bad choice. Grovyle would obviously be the ideal anti-Swampert, but Arcanine counters it, so honestly, this is acceptable. Ash even makes a special point of explaining why he can’t use Pikachu against a ground type, which clearly disappoints it.
Swellow's quick attack is countered by Arcanine's extremespeed, and we quickly realize Tucker's plan: Arcanine attacks, Swampert spams protect and gets in the way of Ash's attacks. Arcanine is incredibly versatile and powerful, and even knows aerial ace of all random moves. Ash loses an interaction, and Scott starts criticizing him, saying that he's versatile but not very tactical. Even double team proves useless against Tucker, who has trained Arcanine specifically to use fire blast on double team images and dispel them. Eventually, Swampert uses the ultimate water move, water pulse, and combines it with fire blast, and Tucker reveals his true strategy: combining opposite elements.
After a long battle, Ash tricks Arcanine into using extremespeed on Swampert, and when Arcanine uses flamethrower, Corphish hits it with bubblebeam to create steam. Finally, he has Swellow fly Corphish into Arcanine and use aerial ace on Swampert while it uses crabhammer on Arcanine. I understand crabhammer knocking out Arcanine in one hit, but aerial ace defeating Swampert in one hit? Well, it doesn’t matter, because Ash is now awarded a symbol.
Probably the only reason I rank this episode so high is Tucker. I honestly expected him to sound like Harley, but instead he has a ridiculously deep, booming voice and explains everything that happens around him using needlessly flowery dialogue. It’s pretty great.
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Not changing this sig until I decide to change this sig.
Started: July 6, 2005