Two lost episodes of Pokémon the Series: Black & White were too similar to the Fukushima disaster to air, but they could have changed Team Rocket forever.
The Pokémon Black and White games are lauded for their thoughtful story, ingenious antagonist team, and well-oiled gameplay. As such, their inevitable anime adaptation would have a lot to live up to. In another reality, it might have met that challenge, too. At first, the plot that the evergreen Ash Ketchum and his pals seemed to be facing in the world of Pokémon the Series: Black & White was a breath of fresh air. And it was headed to an explosive two-parter, one that promised a shake-up in a change-resistant series. The kind of event that fans would spend years talking about.
Until two episodes of the Pokémon anime suddenly rhymed with a real-life tragedy.
Ash Ketchum’s journey is one of endless restart without reinvention. With each new region, he retains Pikachu as his best bud/franchise mascot, and he gets a new team, new friends to travel around with, and a new league tournament to set his sights on. However, Black and White had brought something different to the long-running game series, and if adapted properly into the anime, they could’ve provided a similar jolt.
For over a decade, parents and PETA alike had been confounded by what they deemed as “virtual cockfighting” in the games, with fantastical laser pets sicced on one another. And Black and White’s enemy team, a cultish operation by the name of Team Plasma, declared that it sought to liberate Pokémon from humankind’s control. Now a game was finally addressing the fridge logic of Pokémon… as much as it could. Turns out that Team Plasma was evil. Battling is kind of a communal thing between Pokémon and trainer, and for the most part, the Pokémon dig it! Nonetheless, when it came time to filter the game’s world and story through Ash Ketchum, expectations were high. And in the beginning, it seemed like they might be met.
Even if the anime would never get around to completely tackling the games’ Team Plasma adventure (which wouldn’t have been surprising, as the series has always played at least a little loose with the plots of its video game source material), it was clear that big things seemed to be in motion. According to the scripts for two lost episodes, war would be had between villainous mainstays Team Rocket and the new Team Plasma, as they fought over the energy-conducting Meteonite.
Before the episodes concluded, an entire city would have been threatened by explosions and the destructive power of the Meteonite. It surely would’ve kicked off Team Plasma’s run with a bang — plus, two antagonist teams duking it out for supremacy is the kind of story that seems to come out of wish-fulfillment fanfiction rather than the actual series. “Team Plasma would actually beat Team Rocket” is the kind of thing that message board dreams are made of.
The first of these two episodes was set to air on March 17, 2011. On March 11, one of the most powerful earthquakes in recorded history occurred in the ocean just east of the Tohoku region of Japan.
