Worst part is that the reason is to apparently not confuse kids that may have missed the previous episode, hence the episodic nature.I'm worried about whether this means that Episode 68 is indeed the return to Pallet Town and everything from Ash's Reserves to Gary's reintroduction and then Infernape's battle against Moltres will all be rushed events crammed in a single episode, when all of them deserve to be spread out and be given more screentime/focus (the first one in particular).
I just hope I'm wrong and that said episode is about the introduction to Project Mew instead, and the characters who are part of the team as well as the mission of the team.
Screw Journeys and its episodic tendency to just hop around with disconnected plots.
But imo it does the opposite. If you haven't watched the first Bea episode or the first Rinto episode, you won't fully get into the second anyways. And even if a kid watched the first one, the second episodes are so far apart from the first, that they're bound to have forgotten most of it by the time they get back to the plot.
I mean, in previous series we would've had Ash training on-screen for Bea's rematch, so you wouldn't really forget what just happened. But instead we just had a bunch of fillers where Ash acted normally during most of them. Only one where he was feeling down and got better by Go catching Flygon (really?) and then nothing.
Hell if the PWC ranking changing so much off-screen isn't confusing enough. My kid self would be like: what have I missed, when did he get back to Super Class?
To be honest this series probably won't reach the potential I thought it had, mostly because it seems to prioritize episodic filler episodes and treats the actual main plot as secondary.