Out in the forest, squirrels frolic, but not for long, as Sir Darkly is afoot. Taking garbage from a nearby trash can and dumping it in the lake, he creates the titular wisps, with the intention of turning all the citizens of Wharf City into litterbugs.
With a whiff of their odor, anyone has the
overwhelming urge to dump trash all over the ground.
The next day, The mayor tries to give a press conference, despite having a terrible cold, but Ikura changes the channel to Sophia Tucker interviewing the wisp's first victim. Wasabi, meanwhile, is out for a jog near the lake that Sir Darkly used the night before, and does a little victory dance after kicking a bottle into the recycling bin. He encounters some animals, but rather than having a heartwarming scene as he expects, the woodland creatures
burst into tears, and t
he fish spit water at him. He rushes back to the Green Donut to fill in the others, and they all go out to investigate.
Meanwhile, two kids picking up trash outside the Green Donut (with the promise of five bucks for a job well done) become the latest victims of the stinky wisps, dumping
all the trash onto the Pack as they walk out. As the kids run off, the Pack use their powers to pick up all the trash again, but the scent of the wisps lingers on. The forest forgotten, they split up to figure out what's up with that smell. Ikura and Wasabi encounter a wisp at the park, but they fail to capture it, since they lack ghostbusting equipment. Tako and Kani have similar encounters near a hotdog cart and garbage truck, respectively. Kani even ends up pinching herself in her pursuit of a wisp!
The current situation has not eluded the Mayor, for as he notices, all the trash makes the citizens crabby, and the only thing tourists hate more than trashy towns are crabby citizens. I wonder how good the tourist trade is in Wharf City, anyway, if that's the mayor's prime concern about all the trash. The mayor's less than altruistic motives incite him to take matters into his own hands (after all, when the garbage men can't be trusted to clean up the town, who can?), and he uses a
leafblower to blow away the trash. While the Mayor blows stuff around, the Pack gets together to add up what they know about the wisps: 1. they're ethereal; 2. they stink; 3. they make people litter. They don't come to any conclusions, but the two kids show up to throw more trash on them, which the Mayor promptly blows away into a huge pile.
Climbing to the top of the pile, the Pack notices that, thanks to the Mayor's plan to get rid of the litter, all of Wharf City is, well, littered with similar piles. The Mayor promises them any resources they need, and they take him up on that by calling a conference in front of town hall. They implore the people of Wharf City to help them clean up the town again, but the citizens are in no mood to do anything but accuse each other of stinking. When they start pointing out the stink of the town, though, the Mayor (
still stuffed up thanks to his cold) objects, only for the Sushi Pack to refute that yes, Wharf City really does stink. Kani suddenly realizes that the Mayor can't smell the stink, hence why he still has the desire to not litter. As the wisps close in for another attack, Tako orders everyone to
plug their noses. The inability to be smelt robs the wisps of their power and they retreat. But there's still two minutes to go in the episode...
Back at the lake,
Sir Darkly tosses more and more garbage into the lake, revealing that it's all part of his plan to make Wharf City miserable. The wisps return to him with the Pack in fast pursuit, but Sir Darkly laughs at them, telling them there's no way they can beat him on their own. Only they aren't on their own: all the citizens of Wharf City are there, and together with the animals of the forest, they get down to cleaning up all the trash. Clean-up continues in the city, and the sight of a pristine town causes each wisp to dissipate. The Sushi Pack
chases Sir Darkly out of town with brooms instead of pitchforks.
A few weeks(?) later, the two kids deliver their winning "Keep Wharf City Clean" essay, and Tako tries to take credit for getting things back to normal, but the woodland creatures arrive in time to call him on this. He agrees to share credit with them, and the episode is over!
This one was just so-so for me. The only thing that made it worth writing up was Mayor Martin.