WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Season 1, Episode 16 of Digimon Adventure 2020, "The Dark Shadow of Tokyo Erosion," now streaming on Crunchyroll.
The DigiDestined have now gotten several big battles under their belts over the course of the reboot's first season. From a redeemed Ogremon to a digital Terminator to a wasp-themed Death Star, each and every one of the kids' Digimon have had the chance to make it the Ultimate level while fending off increasingly powerful threats. The latest episode of the reboot series, "The Dark Shadow of Tokyo Erosion," is no exception, but this time the group is woefully underprepared for what they're walking into.
Not only is the enemy Episode 16 introduces the creepiest and trickiest Tai and his friends have encountered so far, but it also proves to be surprisingly tough to beat for a Digimon at the Champion level.
At the end of the last episode, Tai, Mimi and Izzy found an escape route taking them from the Digital World back to the real one. Elated at seeing Tokyo back to normal following the power cut, Mimi's mind immediately turns to the joys of consumerism, insisting that she and Palmon go and get an avocado cheeseburger (a real product sold by Japanese Burger Kings) before returning home. Tai and Izzy, meanwhile, decide to head back to their family's apartments in Shibuya. The first warning sign that something is wrong is the fact that no-one around them reacts to the abnormal presence of three monsters following them around. The second clue is when the separate trains they take lead them back to where they started.
Speaking to some of the adults around them, they get the same responses on loop, accompanied by freaky glitching faces. The answer finally becomes apparent: like some kind of Inception-meets-The Matrix nightmare, Tai, Izzy and Mimi are in a fake version of Tokyo. Considering how homesick the kids must be at this point, it's a particularly cruel trap.
The culprit is Eyesmon, who looks exactly as terrifying as it sounds: a moving ink stain whose only other defining characteristics are two red-slanted eyes and a toothy mouth. In its "Scatter Mode," it doesn't pose much of a threat but once it collects itself together and digivolves to the Champion level, it can shoot laser beams and block attacks by manifesting buildings and other large objects like shields. "Eyesmon's body can be scattered to eat data," Izzy explains, "and from that data, Eyesmon can rebuild objects." By downloading, copying and pasting Tokyo's data, Eyesmon reconstructed the city in the Digital World, which is what Izzy suspects caused the real capital's power outage in the first place -- and is still causing it, 72 hours later.
Even worse, three Ultimate-level Digimon aren't enough to break through its clever defenses. Even when Matt, Sora and Joe's group arrives to join in the battle, the combined attacks of all of the DigiDestined's partners at this high level can't eradicate the creature entirely. Instead, Eyesmon lurks in the shadows before regrouping to achieve its own Ultimate form: the eight-headed serpent, Orochimon.
If they can survive another round, this will be a valuable lesson to the DigiDestined. Winning a battle isn't just a question of superior evolutionary levels -- you need strategy and skill, too. After all, Devimon, Season 1's Big Bad, is only a Champion-level Digimon himself. But if they want to take on the devilish villain at some point, they'll need to get past Orochimon first.
