Written by Janis Robertson

Story by “Man of Action”

Directed by Gino Nichele

Rating: Awful

The Light family’s trip to a city park is quickly interrupted by Wave Man and Fire Man working together to drain the city’s water supply and turn it into fog. After Aki and Suna stop fighting with each other, they’re able to make Fire Man and Wave Man look like Scratch and Grounder.

Good Points

– You see the effects of this episode echo down the season in how Aki and Suna do seem to work better and more often as a team after it.

– It’s actually kinda funny how by this point, Fire Man does a lot better job at controlling his anger than Mega Man does when he has Fire Man’s powers.

– Fire Man: “Ha! Couldn’t event hit me when I was standing still.”

Mega Man: “I’m after the robot in charge! But… you’re not Wave Man.”

Fire Man: “Why you little…!”

– Using Ice Man’s weapon to cool the vapor and turn it into rain. If the show had been just a teensy bit more brain dead, Mega Man might have restored all the water by using Wave Man’s machine to suck all the clouds and fog from the sky instead.

Stupid Points

– Most of these episodes have been thoughtlessly named, but this one is particularly bad in how it implies incest between Aki and Suna. Yuck.

– Why would a robot dog need a snorkel? Do robots need to breathe oxygen in this canon too?

– The cartoonish portions of this show, like Aki and Suna pulling in pixelated cutaways from offscreen and a full lake completely draining in a single second, make it seem like this show has given up on having any sort of consistency. If this show cares so little about its world, why should the audience care either?

– Dr. Light is as buffoonish as Inspector Gadget here. The episode didn’t need to keep cutting back to him to show the latest contrived way he’s ignoring all the action around him.

– Suna is especially useless the way she tries to plug the hose draining the lake long after the lake is completely drained. I suspect this was done because the animation budget didn’t allow for splashing and wading through water.

– Aki and Suna’s conflict is pretty badly forced just to hammer in a moral about cooperation. This is like a poison that seeps into Fire Man and Wave Man’s conflict, making it also seem artificial even though they stay in character.

– Mega Man’s short temper from Fire Man’s schematics clearly isn’t his fault, yet the show keeps acting like it is. He’s treated as if he’s a bad person when it’s more like he has a disease, and this makes Mega Mini especially useless since he’s supposed to be able to mitigate those problems in Aki’s systems by overriding control of his transformations and weapon systems. A sharper contrast with Fire Man, who actually does a decent job at exercising self-control, might have helped there, but this episode in particular, not to mention the show overall, has too many problems weighing it down for any single fix to make a significant difference.

– The overall plot could have been easily accepted as standard kid’s show silliness, but Sgt. Night is such a poor character in every fathomable way that you can’t help but wonder how draining the city’s water supply would further his segregationist agenda. It’s not like anyone would believe him if he tried to claim robots did it simply because they’re all evil.