Ash, Misty, and Brock spend yet another day hopelessly lost on the road to Vermilion City when they stumble across a lone, exhausted Charmander sitting on a rock, stubbornly waiting for a trainer who isn’t coming back. What starts as a simple encounter quickly turns into one of the anime’s darkest early stories, as the group learns Charmander has been deliberately abandoned and left to survive on blind loyalty alone—rainstorm, Spearow attacks, and all.

The episode leans hard into early Pokémon anime logic: trainers arguing about type matchups while a Pokémon is clearly dying, a single Nurse Joy somehow running an entire Pokémon Center during a medical emergency, and Ash repeatedly throwing Poké Balls at a Pokémon that very obviously doesn’t want to be caught. Through it all, Charmander’s flickering tail flame becomes the emotional center of the episode, turning a basic “lost in the woods” plot into a survival race against time.

Everything comes to a head when Team Rocket actually executes a competent plan, Damian reappears to reclaim what he abandoned, and Charmander is forced to choose between blind loyalty and a trainer who genuinely cares. The payoff lands hard: Damian gets his long-overdue reality check, Charmander finally stands up for itself, and Ash gains not just a new Pokémon, but one of the most emotionally earned catches of the entire Kanto run.

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Raving Energy (faster) by Kevin MacLeod

Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/5030-raving-energy-faster-

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/