Wow! Did I blink and miss the episode? While it was absolutely a great episode, the hugest mark against this was its pacing, holy cow was that fast. At first I appreciated them getting right to the point with Ash getting the letter immediately (Aw, Sirfetch’d opened the letter for cool points, somebody tell him he’s not coming this episode) but then they decided to cram in Goh catching Panpour and Pansear, conveniently leaving out the grass monkey since he already has one, have the gag of Goh trying to catch Iris who I guess didn’t know what time Ash would be coming and decided to snooze, have Drayden tell the viewers to put their pitchforks down because that’s his Axew and infodump that Iris is now the champion of Unova in practically about 10 minutes. And for what? The hyped up Dragonite vs Dragonite battle that barely happened because Ash’s panicked and Dracovish had to come in and one-shot Iris’? Did they not wanna spoil Axew evolving?
I wish this episode was a two-parter because it really needed it, especially for Dragonite’s sake since it was the one with the problem. It would have been a nice little arc of it feeling nervous about battling such strong dragons. Maybe Ash could have been grinding his way through the super class in preparation while Iris was watching so she could pick up on Dragonite getting worried. She talks to it and Ash the day before about cheering up, bringing up her journey with Axew, but during its battle with Haxorus (there would be no teasing Dragonite Vs Dragonite), it starts to falter again, so ASH reminds it to relax and have fun, leading up to it learning Draco Meteor.
The way that they did it feels like Iris gave the match to Ash by nudging Dragonite back in-sync with him rather than it being because of Ash. If she never gave it that dragon master pep talk in the middle of the match, she probably would have won. Ash was using his same old technique of using opponents’ moves against them, he didn’t have to do any work to help Dragonite. So congrats Iris, you played yourself. Such a kid.
But yay, Ash is now in the Ultra Class. Hopefully this means no more time skips and his opponents are serious threats that have full episodes dedicated to their fights. The rankings have no sense of scale as it seems like every win Ash gets changes his rankings either by the hundreds or maybe a few points. I don’t want his next win to launch him from 99 to 34 and the next battle is THE tournament.
Pacing aside though, this was still a great episode because it wasn’t all just find Pokémon, fling pokeball. And just because your Pokémon in fully-evolved, it doesn’t mean it can’t have anymore important episodes.