Today's entry does not at all count as a digimon or even a D-Reaper "agent" per se, but there's no possible way I could resist its inclusion as a monster review in its own right. Yesterday we got a refresher on a kid named Jeri, and as the D-Reaper invades, analyzes and attempts to absorb her mind, she's plunged into a series of disturbing, twisted visions, including an encounter with her own monstrous doppelganger...

Perhaps this is rather tame by today's standards, but I was floored by how bizarre and horrifying this scene was when I first saw it on Fox Kids in 2002. Jeri's nightmare counterpart not only sports a toothy monster mouth with no nose or eyes, but an unpleasantly organic version of her beloved hand puppet, the kind of imagery we might have expected more from a movie like Jacob's Ladder than from something called Digimon Tamers.

Best of all, bizarre and horrifying though it may be, I feel as though this design hearkens back to the same classic digimon style that had almost been entirely abandoned by this series and onward. That particular toothy mouth, the stitches on the puppet's little body, even the flesh connecting the puppet to the arm all have that Season One design sense about them, making this little girl's traumatic fever dream into one of the last great throwbacks to our "first generation" of digital monsters. It's Jeri's past and Digimon's past coming back to haunt them both!

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