Comments: I really like the whole news set-up for this episode. It does a very nice job of recapping the story for everyone who forgot or didn’t see without actually having to be a dreaded clip show.

Great Lines: “That’s the great advantage of having nerdy friends, they never delete anything!” –Janyu, telling Yamaki that he’s got the original D-Reaper program (I found it especially funny, as I was looking at my insanely cluttered desktop at the moment)

Nits:

So, when is all this news footage supposed to be happening? The anchor begins the newscast by saying it’s the evening news at 11. Yet all the Tamers’ scenes are clearly during the morning. Plus, everything they show, including the reporter actually at Shinjuku is clearly day footage (and before you say that they were filmed before the actual broadcast, only the footage of the inside of the Chaos bears a “recorded earlier” message).

Forgive me, but I just don’t see how the D-reaper works. For one thing, what’s all this about programs growing outside their original parameters? What programs, outside of Digimon, actually do that? While I certainly can’t boast to be a master computer programmer or anything, I can’t recall ever hearing of programs that “grow” in the manner being discussed here. They’re not living things, after all, just lists of commands. Well, Digimon aren’t, but we’re led to believe that the D-reaper actually pre-dates Digimon, so that should count. BUT, that just makes even less sense. Who would worry about lists of commands growing? To make matters worse, how did D-reaper itself evolve? It’s supposed to STOP this sort of thing, right? True, it is suggested that the D-reaper absorbed the Digimon’s ability to digivolve and then evolved itself, but that ALSO doesn’t make sense. I mean, it DELETES stuff! How can it absorb what’s already been deleted? True, it gathers up and absorbs stuff NOW, but that’s after it’s already grown considerably. Digimon data can’t be blamed for the D-Reaper’s growth if it would already have had to grow some already to actually absorb any of it.

So, what’s the story with Alice? She just sort of pops up out of the blue and then disappears a little while later with little explanation. In the next episode, we see she’s got some kind of connection to Dolphin (a.k.a Rob McCoy) but other than that she’s really got no connection to the rest of the plot. The impression that I get is that Alice is another character from the Wonderswan Digimon games whom TPTB decided to throw in and hope the viewers would know the games, like Ryo in 02. Unfortunately, also like in Ryo’s case, we don’t have any of the games over here so we don’t know what the heck’s going on. Anyone know what Alice’s story actually is, if there even is one?

How can the sovereign give the tamers the power to bio-merge? They need outside help just to make THEMSELVES digivolve!