This series, much like the previous Digimon series before it, brings out its own brand of horrors, including the worst human villain the franchise has to offer.
Unmarked spoilers ahead.
- Elecmon in episode 6. It's smiling in a kind of empty way when it first appears and when it is confronted by the protagonists, that empty smile becomes a full blown Slasher Smile combined with soul piercing eyes.
- Episode 15, which takes place during the Data Squad’s 1st major journey into the Digital World, has Gotsumon springing a particularly nasty trap to eliminate the Data Squad. He lures them into the Gorge of Deception, where they’re captured by the evil Digimon MetalPhantomon and his army of Dokugamon.
- According to Gotsumon, no one has ever escaped MetalPhantomon. The reason for this? He traps his victim in their worst nightmares, breaking their minds so he can absorb their life force. And he’s intent on turning Marcus, Thomas, and Yoshi into his latest victims.
- Marcus’s nightmare is simple, but hits home: he sees his sister Kristy being taken away by a Drimogemon, and rushes to save her. He’s stopped by a Numemon, and immediately punches it away…only for two more to appear. As Marcus keeps fighting, he’s overwhelmed by the growing wave of Numemon and literally buried beneath them as he hears his sister’s cries for help growing more and more distant.
- Thomas’s is the true focus of the episode, and the true source of the terror for the episode. MetalPhantomon traps him in a Pensieve Flashback to a particular day in his life. Which day is that? The day Thomas’s mother died. And it’s every bit as horrific as it is heartbreaking. The moment he realizes what’s going on, the normally cool and collected Thomas immediately becomes frantic, desperately trying to stop his mother from walking to her own death. All while MetalPhantomon sadistically taunts Thomas over his powerlessness to change the events unfolding before him and only being able to see once more how he lost his mom.
- How did Thomas’s mom die, as this episode reveals? She saved her son from getting hit by a truck…only to be run over herself. And the young Thomas, who by this point wasn’t even 10 years old, got to see it all happen. And now, he’s been Forced to Watch it happen all over again. No wonder he nearly shattered for good when he saw this memory.
- The Gizumon. They already look wrong, but then you see what they do. They're designed to kill Digimon. Not defeat, or capture, kill. And any Digimon they kill stays dead, without turning into a egg. And they rampaged across the Digital Worlds ten years before the series begins, massacring its population.
- Also, the shot of Digimon in a lab, hanging in tubes. The implications are all kinds of wrong, especially since many of those Digimon are In-training level.
- To say nothing of the man responsible for both of the above, Akihiro Kurata. He's hands down the most evil human in the franchise. Creating the aforementioned Gizumon, mechanical monstrosities that make other Digimon Deader than Dead by stopping them from reincarnating like usual, and experimenting in creating half-Digimon hybrids were only the start. Creating a weapon of mass destruction to kill thousands of Digimon in one shot, forcing the Teen Genius on the heroes' side to a Face–Heel Turn by threatening to kill his Delicate and Sickly little sister with an explosive collar, trying to replicate his hybrid experiments on said sister, and finally awakening a mighty Demon Lord and merging with it to destroy all of his enemies so that he could then wipe out all Digimon and have total control of both the Digital World and the human world...well, that should give you an idea of how loathsome this guy is. And his motives? Petty Greed, cowardice, prejudice, and Inferiority Superiority Complex.
- The sheer amount of damage that Kurata does while fused with Belphemon is so great that it rips open time and space to such an extent that it brings both the human world and the digital world to the brink of destruction, setting in motion Yggdrasil's response to have the human world be destroyed so the digital world may survive.
