Plot: On a trip to the beach, Ikki and Metabee face off against a bunch of jerks who want them off their beach. Meanwhile, there’s a sea monster looming in the shadows.
Medabot Debuts:
Sharkkan: A SAK Medabot, Sharkkan’s design is based off of a shark. Sharkkan is an aquatic Medabot that can move very swiftly in the water. It also has arms in the shape of shark jaws.
Tentaclam: A CLA type, Tentaclam is based off of an octopus. Like Sharkkan, it is an aquatic Medabot that can move easily in the water. Tentaclam has two pincers on the ends of its arms that can be detached, shot off and latched onto nearby objects before being pulled in by cables.
Robattles:
Ryan vs. Ikki: Winner – Ryan (Metabee surrendered his legs.)
Ryan vs. Ikki (Rematch): Winner – Ikki (Metabee earned his legs back.)
Breakdown: Ikki, Metabee, Erika and…..I’m gonna be honest – I don’t know who the frick this guy is. It has been a hot minute since I last picked up Medabots, but I legitimately can’t remember who this person is, they never say his name in this episode, and, for the life of me, I can’t find a way to Google who this is. No one seems to match his description in the Wiki’s character list. He’s an adult, I guess, and that’s all you need to know.
Anyway, they’re all taking a quaint trip to the beach. The adult dude falls asleep while the kids head off to swim. Metabee has a scuba mask on for some inexplicable reason.
Metabee: “Swan dive!” That was not, in any way, a swan dive. You might as well have just stepped off the ledge.
When Metabee dives in, he freaks out when he realizes the water is salt water, which will make him rust. How’d he know the water was salt water? Why did Ikki take his Medabot to the beach when he can neither swim nor tolerate salt water?
By the way, does anyone want to tell him that all water makes metal rust? Salt just speeds up the process.
Ikki: “Oh come on. Medabots don’t rust that fast.” Still a shitty way to care for your Medabot. Ya know, the one you couldn’t afford in the first place.
Metabee sulks on the beach after Ikki tells him to just leave the water if he’s going to be crabby.
Metabee: “Ugh, I can’t believe Ikki let me go into the water. Me plus water equals rust. Rust plus me equals me getting ripped up the gill, ya know what I’m sayin’? GegegegegeGEKOW!”
No, Metabee, I don’t know what you’re saying. But I am about to research whether robots can have strokes.
First of all, now you’re just saying it was the water, not salt water, that you’re averse to. And you’re also mad at Ikki for “letting” you go into the water because water makes you rust…..Kinda makes you seem like an idiot if you knew water makes you rust but you went in the water anyway. At least when the salt was the reason you could make the argument that you didn’t know ocean water was salt water and Ikki should have told you.
Additionally, it’s a bit ironic that you’re mad about him ‘letting’ you do that when you were just adamant a minute ago about not being his to control.
Second of all, what in the glitchy matrix just happened to you near the end there? I can’t even tell if I accurately transcribed the last words before the gibberish correctly, but then you go off and spout random noises like someone was electrocuting your ass.
Three beach brats come over and start bullying Metabee, even poking him repeatedly in the head with sticks. Ikki arrives, and he seemingly gets angry with Metabee for some reason? Once they have a little spat, Ikki tells the jerks to go away, but they’re locals so, like a beach movie set in 1954, they tell him to leave their beach because strangers aren’t welcome.
They then reveal that the local sea monster also hates strangers.
Later, at a restaurant, Ikki asks the owner if she knows about the sea monster. She noticeably gets very nervous and tries to avoid the question. Erika says, if there is a monster, they should investigate. The owner tries to warn them to stay away from the rocks of the beach when a bunch of people run by the restaurant screaming. They claim to have seen the monster, but none of them can agree upon what it looked like.
Ikki and Erika head to the beach to investigate only to find that it’s entirely abandoned due to sea monster sightings……Uh, yeah, calling it right now, this is some Scooby-Doo bullshit right here.
Also, the entire beach was cleared out because of sea monster sightings? No skeptics, no people who think they’d be safe on the sand, no people with Medabots who might try to fight it – just a couple of tweenagers and their Medabot?
Erika is psyched about figuring out the scoop behind this sea monster, but Ikki couldn’t care less.
They spot a mysterious old man sitting quietly on a rock playing a shamisen by the water. Metabee tries to talk with him, but he only gets a few words out of the old man.
His Medabot, Tentaclam, arrives and catches a huge net full of fish. They then walk off together.
The three jerks arrive wondering why Ikki, Erika and Metabee haven’t left yet. Blah blah blah, the leader, Ryan, challenges Ikki to a robattle.
Ikki boasts that he and Metabee have never lost a robattle…..so yeah, now that he said that he’s totally going to lose.
Ryan’s Medabot is Sharkkan, and he immediately heads into the water. Metabee tries to follow by boat, but his bullets can’t hit Sharkkan underwater. Suddenly, Metabee gets very dizzy and nauseous. He’s so sea sick that he has to forfeit the match, surrendering his legs to Ryan.
Yes, you read that right. Metabee, the undefeated Medabot, lost his first match…..because he got sea sick.
Metabee, the ROBOT, lost because he got sea sick.
Metabee, the robot without a stomach and balance sensory systems/perception systems that don’t work in any way like a human’s would……got his first loss, via forfeit no less….by getting sea sick.
This is monumentally dumb.
At sunset, Ikki and Metabee lament their loss – Metabee wearing a goofy pair of spare legs that I think he got from Banisher.
Ikki: “He knew Metabee couldn’t swim, so he tricked him into a water robattle. Seems like cheating.” Uhm, shut your stupid lying mouth, Ikki.
Metabee didn’t even try to swim, so you’re already wrong there. Ryan didn’t trick HIM into anything. He and his goons just egged you on a bit, and YOU accepted a challenge for a robattle. Finally, using an aquatic Medabot in the water is just using the Medabot the way it was intended to be used. If anything, it was quite even. If he used his aquatic Medabot on land, he’d have a major disadvantage, but Metabee would have a huge advantage. If you had just said ‘Metabee don’t go in the water.’ then either the robattle would end in a stalemate because neither party would choose to leave their respective areas, or Skarkkan would leave the water because he was sick of waiting.
Basically, both of you are idiots, but Metabee’s less of an idiot because….
Metabee: “Nah, that’s just good strategy. He just won it fair and square.”
Of course, he loses some points with his next line.
Metabee: “Urgh, I’d love a rematch, but where am I going to learn how to swim?” I thought you plus water equaled rust and you didn’t want rust? Now you want to swim?
But again, just DON’T GO IN THE WATER. Even if he learned how to swim, he’d still be at a major advantage because Sharkkan’s a full aquatic Medabot with parts and weaponry designed for water robattles. Why give him that?
Ikki and Metabee have a brain blast, so they head to see the old man. They beg him for help in getting Metabee ready for water robattling. The old man loans him some spare legs from his Tentaclam. And, of course, Ikki and Metabee being the way they are, they bitch about the free shit they’re getting.
Metabee: “They’re so old.”
Ikki: “Do they even still work?” No, Ikki, he gave you non-working garbage because he’s trolling you.
Metabee jumps in the water, but he soon capsizes. Seems like just getting aquatic legs isn’t enough for him to function properly in the water, which makes sense. After all, the rest of him isn’t designed to be in the water.
They beg him to teach them how to deal with sea combat, and yeah whatever – what time is it?
The sun is going down quite a bit. Where is adult dude, and why are you guys not heading home yet? Your parents obviously aren’t here, you took a bus, and I can’t imagine that they approved of you guys staying at the beach overnight.
We then get a training montage of them doing a bunch of Karate Kid-esque chores for the old man. This montage clearly takes place over several days because we see more sunsets and implications of mornings. Again, where is adult dude and why are you guys not home right now? Are you missing school for this?
After the training montage, Ikki and Metabee collapse in the sand begging for water. Why is Metabee, the robot, asking for water?
The dog that’s with them, I forget to whom it belongs, brings them water bottles that look oddly like baby bottles. Ikki chugs his water and Metabee pours his on his head….because the Medabot who hated water at the beginning of this episode has suddenly decided that pouring it all over his head is the best thing ever.
Ikki and Metabee hear Erika screaming in terror of the sea monster. However, the ‘sea monster’ trips, and reveals that it was just the three Medabots owned by the beach jerks covered in seaweed. They made up the stuff about the sea monster to keep tourists off the beach. Yup. Scooby-Doo’d.
Also, I weep for humanity if literally everyone was scared to death of this thing.
Ikki and Ryan start a rematch. Metabee uses his Tentaclam legs, but this time he’s able to stand upright as the legs help him float on the surface. His training was meant to improve his sense of balance so he could stand on water, which…okay, but that solves literally no problems they were having. Metabee already had a boat, which allowed him to float on top of the water, soooooooooooooooooo…..???
Also, I don’t think that simply not being in a boat would prevent you from getting sea sick while floating on water, so what happened to that problem?
Whatever, Metabee still has problems fighting Sharkkan because he can move super quickly in the water and Metabee’s shots can’t hit him. Moreover, Sharkkan is now taking the offensive by hitting Metabee with torpedoes and leaping out of the water to strike at him directly.
Ikki is incredibly frustrated because he has no idea what to do to gain the upperhand. Metabee can now float on the water without issue, but he still can’t swim, giving Sharkkan a huge advantage. The old man reveals that the secret to this fight is in Sharkkan’s shark design. It gives off a warning before it strikes, and Ikki deduces that he means the dorsal fin peaking out over the surface before it strikes.
…Well…uh…duh. How did you not notice that before now? It’s the most signature thing about sharks. You show a dorsal fin sticking out of the water, people instantly think ‘shark.’ How are you this slow, Ikki?
The next time Sharkkan strikes, Ikki notices where he is via the dorsal fin, warns Metabee that Sharkkan’s behind him and Metabee is able to get a direct hit with his guns when Sharkkan comes out of the water.
Sharkkan is defeated, and Metabee gets his legs back.
At sunset, because they’ll apparently never go home, Ryan explains that his dad taught him that tourists are bad because they pollute the beach with their trash and they ruin the environment, so they decided to bully and scare every tourist away from the beach with their makeshift sea monster.
I guess this was supposed to be foreshadowed when Metabee threw his scuba mask on the sand, because that’s when they first met the beach jerks. It was also shown that the beach was filthy when the beachgoers were scared off, but they never draw attention to the littering. I had to go back and rewatch sections just to see if this out-of-nowhere PSA had some build up to it because it was never brought to the audience’s attention through dialogue.
Also, you’re kinda terrifying the locals too, if that restaurant owner was any indication. Unless she’s in on it.
Ryan and Ikki mend bridges, and the old man bids Ikki and Metabee farewell. He allows them to keep the Tentaclam legs as long as they always remember to respect the sea.
Our final shot is of adult guy still asleep on the beach, now horribly sunburned. Uh, can we get an ambulance? Because this guy has clearly been asleep for about a week, and he probably has third degree burns by now.
—————————————-
It’s at this point in the show when you really have to accept that this series is just plain bad. And it’s not only bad – it’s lazy. It’s probably one of the laziest series I’ve ever watched. Everything about it is just the bare minimum they can do without paying an iota of attention to the question “Does this make sense?”
One of the most basic things you can do when writing a story is establish a conflict, work out a resolution and resolve it. But this show can’t even do that correctly. I am still confused as to what Metabee’s actual problem was. First it was saltwater, then it was just water, then it was that he gets sea sick, then it was that he can’t swim, then it was that he couldn’t work the Tentaclam legs correctly.
The solution to any one of those problems was just to teach Metabee better balance so that he can stay on the water’s surface, but that doesn’t make any sense. He’s a robot. If he has balance issues, it’s either because of his design or his programming. You can’t really teach a robot balance. Not to mention that, while some of the chores the old man had them doing could be considered training in balance, like pulling the old man while they’re on stilts, most of it had nothing to do with balance.
He had them carrying wood, pushing one of those giant wooden crank things, blowing air onto a fire, carrying him on a giant rock up a mountain, giving him a frickin’ massage, which was just plain creepy.
A lot of shows do this, where they reference The Karate Kid’s training sequence of seemingly doing random chores only to show that it actually had practical applications in the student’s journey, but then a lot of them screw it up by not actually coming up with ways these chores applied to their practice. This is one of the worst examples.
It’s even more pointless because Metabee balancing on top of the water didn’t even do much. He could have defeated Sharkkan this way in the boat. All he needed to know was that you can detect Sharkkan via his dorsal fin. And Ikki didn’t even figure that part out on his own – he had to have the old man practically spell it out for him.
I will give this episode this much – there were quite a few funny expressions and even some funny lines. And I will never get tired of Ikki’s voice actor’s complete inability to scream in a believable manner. Just the terrible voice acting as a whole, honestly. I have a feeling this series was mostly a ‘Thank god, a paycheck.’ job for most of the voice actors. I don’t blame them for barely putting in any effort. Why do that when the series itself doesn’t? It makes for some funny moments anyway. That’s why I keep enjoying watching Medabots. It’s lazy, silly and stupid, but it has a lot of fun and ridiculousness to keep me entertained most of the time. Even if I’m just preoccupied trying to do the mental gymnastics around their writing choices, I tend to enjoy myself.
Plus, I do really like the designs of Tentaclam and Sharkkan. I wish we had seen the other jerks’ Medabots. We see them very, very briefly, but we never learn what they are, and the angles on them are so poor I can’t even remember what they looked like.
Next time, might as well keep in with the Scooby Doo-ness with some G-g-g-GHOSTS!
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The Anime Madhouse 