"The only talent this team's got is getting our clueless clocks cleaned by a bunch of babbling boneheads, and you know it."
—Meowth
Japanese Title: Rocket-dan Breakup!?
Original Airdate: March 5, 2009
US Airdate: August 1, 2009
When they find that a former Team Rocket member they once mentored has gone straight and is now a wildly successful chef, Jessie, James, and Meowth get jaded at their constant failures. Having himself discovered a knack for cooking, Meowth quits after yet another defeat to the twerps. Jessie quickly follows suit to dedicate herself as a Coordinator. James refuses to give up on Team Rocket, but bites off a lot more than he can chew when he tries to single-handedly tackle a wild Shiny Metagross. Who can he rely on to save him from himself?
This episode contains examples of the following tropes:
- Always Someone Better: When Christopher trained in Team Rocket, Jessie and James had this relationship (though abiding by Christopher, they were much kinder examples than Butch and Cassidy were to them) with him. In the present it's almost reversed, with Christopher's success representing what the trio could achieve if they weren't stubbornly attached to the organization and their obsession with capturing Pikachu.
- Bait-and-Switch: Meowth thinks Christopher would insist more on employing the former, only for the latter to agree on him staying with Jessie and James, not wanting to inconvenience them. Meowth is not happy.Meowth: Oh great, oy vey.
- Breaking the Fellowship: Following an argument, Meowth and Jessie disband from Team Rocket (again) to pursue their own careers. A heartbroken James tries to catch an elusive (and dangerous) Pokémon to bring them back, though it just persuades them to regroup to save him from getting himself killed.
- Brutal Honesty:(Meowth slices some dough into noodles with Fury Swipes in midair)Christopher: Technique like I've never seen before!Meowth: Don't get out much, huh?
- Call-Back: Those who have seen Training Daze will recognize the red uniforms donned by Jessie, James, and Christopher.
- The Cameo: One of the feline Pokémon in Meowth's "noodle king" fantasy is Meowzie.
- Chekhov's Skill: Christopher commends Meowth on how his Fury Swipes can come in handy in making noodles. While Meowth's noodle making career screeches to halt even before it begins, that skill will crop up again during a later Contest, while his culinary skills will develop throughout several later appearances.
- Continuity Nod: Team Rocket's second mecha is the same one from "Pasta La Vista!"
- Early-Installment Weirdness: As we're still one generation from "Shiny" becoming a canon term, Dawn refers to the Shiny Metagross as "differently colored", which is the translation for the pre-Generation V Japanese terminology.
- Innocuously Important Episode: As mentioned Meowth having culinary talent would come in handy in several of Jessie's coordinator escapades later on, and even more acutely in XY-series showcases. It will even be alluded to in Sun and Moon with the malasada food truck they run to make ends meet in Alola.
- The Last Straw: What triggered Meowth to quit was being blamed for the swift failure of their re-hashed noodle mecha. It includes an Alertness Blink and a Beam of Enlightenment.
- Nothing Is the Same Anymore: James notes how things aren't the same without Meowth. And then Jessie quits, too.
- "The Reason You Suck" Speech: When Meowth quits, he rips into Jessie and James after they blamed him for the failure of their latest plot.
- Pet the Dog: In the training academy, Jessie and James treat Christopher with kindness, even treating him to ramen noodles to cheer him up when he fails in training.
- Remember the New Guy?: Christopher, a noodle chain owner, refers to Jessie and James as his mentors when he was still a Rocket trainee.
- Scissors Cuts Rock: Jessie’s Seviper is able to damage the shiny Metagross with Poison Tail, despite Steel being immune to Poison
- Stealth Pun: Christopher serves Hokkaido note ramen.
- Unusually Uninteresting Sight: For once, the twerps don't respond with outrage to Team Rocket, and are just rather jaded by them antagonizing them for the millionth time.
