Now Apocalymon

The group come face to face with the true enemy, and quickly discover that defeating him will be no easy task when they're robbed of their power and converted into data.

thumb|225px|left|Episode recap for Now Apocalymon.

Synopsis
The Digidestined fall into darkness before stopping in midair. Gennai then contacts them and tells them of an ancient evil that the original Digidestined defeated and that a similar evil has returned and created the Dark Masters. The connection is broken and Apocalymon appears. He reveals that he was created from the pain and suffering that is caused when digimon attempt to digivolve, but ended up disappearing. He says he hates the Digidestined for being able to be happy when he is forced to be miserable and attacks them using abilities of the enemies that they've defeated in the past. Apocalymon then uses Reverse Digivolve to return all the digimon to Rookie level (with the exception of Gatomon). When the digimon attempt to digivolve again, Apocalymon destroys the Digidestineds' crests.

The children begin to lose confidence and Apocalymon uses that fear against them to trap them and their digimon in a binary prison. The children begin to lose hope, but their digimon encourage them, reminding them of all the apparently unbeatable odds they overcame. They all realize that they've grown up and become stronger, better people and the symbols of their crests begin to glow over their hearts. They realize that they never needed the crests and and that they had the power inside them all along. Their digimon all digivolve to their highest levels. They are then capable of reassembling themselves before Apocalymon and prepare for the final battle.

Animation errors

 * As Apocalymon's dodecahedron opens up, when the view changes to zoom in on his upper body rising up, the dodecahedron disappears below him for a moment.
 * When Apocalymon is shown in the Digimon Analyser, the holes in his dodecahedron, where his claws emerge, are filled in with blue rather than black.

Dubbing changes

 * The English dub cuts out all clips of Apocalymon digging his claws into his shoulders. The scars they left, and the green blood which flowed down his arms were also cut out.
 * Whilst in the English dub, Apocalymon sees himself as his own being, in the original episode, he acts as more of a justice-seeking representative for all those lost Digimon, referring to himself by "we" rather than "I".
 * In the original episode, it's stated during analysis that Apocalymon may not even be a Digimon.

Real-world references

 * Kari uses a variation of the often misquoted line from the 1948 film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre: "Crests? We don't need no stinking crests".

Miscellaneous trivia

 * While Gennai is speaking of the original DigiDestined the outlines of Tai, T.K., Sora, Izzy, Matt and their respective Digimon are shown.
 * Apocalymon announces the episode title in the Japanese episode.