Dragonball Z Episode 55 Review – “Piccolo vs. Everyone”

 “They just keep underestimating the true powers of a Saiyan!” --Vegeta

  This is perhaps Vegeta’s most spectacular moment in the show up to this point, and one of his greatest efforts as a villain. We don’t get to see the entire thing this episode, but we do get to watch where it begins. It is a triumph not dissimilar to Andy Dufresne literally digging himself out of prison with a spoon, only Vegeta has a fucking bulldozer, and he steals everybody’s fucking money before he leaves. If Frieza was underestimating Vegeta before, he sure as shit isn’t now.

  The show puts a bit of a scare into us at first, with Appule saying Vegeta may never regain consciousness. Another conspicuous example of a cohort of Frieza’s grossly underestimating Vegeta. I guess it’s hard to blame them—up until this point, they’ve never gone up against Vegeta, beyond just fucking with him as an ally of theirs. It’s not like Frieza went with Vegeta to Earth—if he had, the Saiyan saga would have been the last saga of the show, unless they named the show to “Frieza Gets the DragonballZ.”

  The fact that Vegeta was able to so easily find the dragon balls underscores Frieza’s ultimate folly of arrogance. Not pride—there’s a key difference, though they manifest themselves so similarly. It was something Trunks picked up on with Vegeta after spending a year with him in the Hyperbolic Time Chamber. Vegeta believes himself to be stronger than everybody else. Frieza believes everybody else to be weaker than him. Those things sound exactly the same, sure, but there’s a big gap in how those two sentences make a person act.

  Zarbon is getting increasingly in Frieza’s doghouse because of the events of the last two episodes, and that’s going to color his behavior for the remainder of his time in the series. If there’s one thing you don’t want to do, it’s piss off your manager with repeated failures, and when it comes to your manager being Frieza, let’s just say he can revoke your life insurance and health benefits in the blink of an eyelash. When it comes to fucking around, Frieza is not a man with whom you do it. So Zarbon is eager to finish off Vegeta, to actually do what he believed he did when he left Vegeta at the bottom of that river.

  “What’s the only kind of dog in the world that doesn’t bark? A hot dog!” –King Kai

  Obviously, due to the title of this episode, we need to talk about what kind of training shenanigans and general tomfoolery are taking place on the King Kai planet. The boys get past the Bubbles training stage, move very quickly past the Gregory stuff (except Piccolo, it isn’t worth his time), and by the end of the episode, Tien, Yamcha and Chiaotzu are having a sparring match against Piccolo. At first, the fighters are told to split into two groups of, well, two, but Piccolo thinks he can take the other three on by himself. So he does, and to his surprise, the training that he thought was a load of bullshit turns out to have actually made his three opponents a lot stronger, so he actually gets some blows dealt to him. Piccolo falls probably more toward the arrogance end of the pride/arrogance scale. He may be a good guy at this point in the show, but he is by no means a nice guy.

  And really, that’s the hallmark of a great action show, or hell, any kind of good show. You want a slightly more complicated moral universe than just “good” and “evil.” There’s a lot of in-between going on. You have Piccolo, who is only just recently a heroic character who still has some lingering stubbornness and discomfort with being around the goody-goody, still considering himself superior as most villains are wont to do. You have someone like Vegeta, who is no doubt evil, but in his opposition to Frieza and his minions may also be key in throwing those very people off of the scent of our real heroes. You have Gohan with his inexperience in the battlefield, Krillin with his pragmatic cowardice, Goku with his pure and gentle nature but also a willingness to let a good fight go even if they’re dangerous in the future. This isn’t the Care Bears, sometimes our heroes can be selfish and our villains can be noble, and while it’s not so morally grey that you’d ever find yourself rooting for Frieza and believing he’s the real good guy (it’s okay to root for villains, btw, as long as it doesn’t extend itself into real life), it’s grey enough on the side of the good guys that you can sometimes cast a leery eye on somebody’s intentions.

  That somebody is almost always Vegeta, but we’ll get to that when he’s no longer outwardly a villain.

  We spend pretty much no time with Goku in this episode, which is a little dire because he’s the one who is supposed to be coming to Namek as its savior. On the other hand, we never would have known that Yamcha, Tien and Chiaotzu are stronger than a cricket if we had to spend too much time with Goku, so maybe it’s for the best. Honestly, I don’t understand why we spend so much time in Other World this particular season, because it’s not like Yamcha, Tien and Chiaotzu are going to be able to influence the outcome of this particular saga, being that they’re waiting for their revival. Notice how I left someone out of that? Hopefully not, oh god lets move on

  I’m not sure if it’s because I took bad notes for this particular episode, but I don’t have any read on what Krillin, Dende, Bulma and Gohan are doing for these 22 minutes. We know Bulma and Gohan are just straight chillin’ at Bulma’s house, we know Krillin and Dende are on their way back from Guru’s house, but we don’t know if they have any thoughts on the current situation. We can surmise, sure, but I’m just saying, it would have been nice if we could have gotten commentary from them. Maybe it was so dull I didn’t notate it. Who knows?

  Anyway, pretty good episode, if it were nothing but the Vegeta/Zarbon/Frieza subplot, I’d probably give it a five. But, understandably, we as viewers need to see what’s going on with (almost) everybody else, and since anyone who isn’t in those first three people is doing some pretty boring shit, it’s hard to stay interested the entire time. Nevertheless, it is always a pleasure to watch Vegeta pretty much outwit his opponents like Bugs Bunny twirling Elmer Fudd in a circle and sending him off a cliff. And, no, you aren’t the only one who just pictured Elmer Fudd’s voice coming out of Frieza’s mouth, or vice versa. Trust me, you can’t out-weird me. But what you can do is out-analyze me. What do you think about the fact that Vegeta owns and is good? Don’t be shy about putting your opinions in the comments section of this YouTu-I mean, this blog post.

(4/5)

A Few Final Thoughts:

--“Damn… monkey…”

-- Piccolo starts to grab King Kai by the shirt and threaten him, but feels… I guess that he’s really strong?

-- King Kai asks what Piccolo is in such a hurry for, wondering out loud if he’s going back on his promise not to fight Frieza.

-- Yamcha: “Now that I’m full, you’re in big trouble, ape-face!” King Kai: “Hey! Don’t call me ape-face!”

Dragonball Z Episode 54 Review – “Guru’s Gift”

  We get to see the hubris of a DBZ villain manifest itself in a couple of unexpected ways this episode. Zarbon choosing to leave Vegeta alive is going to haunt him for the (very short) remainder of his life. Until you are ABSOLUTELY SURE, you never just leave the battlefield when you haven’t seen your opponent’s corpse, haven’t checked to see if they’re still breathing—haven’t checked to see if they’re still in the same HOLE you left them in! It’s just common sense, this is not the kind of situation where you want to go off the fucking smell test!

  Now, we need to take a moment to speculate on what the fuck Zarbon was thinking when he decided to leave Vegeta behind, knowing Frieza could murder him with a single wave of his hand if he found out Zarbon fucked up. What kind of sheer laziness and apathy could propel you to not at least, I dunno, find a corpse and decapitate it just to be absolutely safe? We’re not talking about a normal human being here, someone who would easily die from being pile-drived into the ground at a starting point of miles above the ground. We’re talking about Vegeta. The most durable man in the history of this show, with the possible exceptions of Cell and Majin Buu, and that’s only from cheating. Well, okay, Garlic Jr. too, but we’ll get to that when that good old filler saga comes up.

  Much of the main meat of this episode is from Krillin interacting with the Eldest Namek, a.k.a Guru, a.k.a Super Kami Guru. I’m sorry, folks, but after TFS, it’s a fucking miracle if I can take Guru seriously for a second. I’m not even someone that obsesses over the TFS version all that much, but goddamn, did they knock it outta the park with Super Kami Guru.

  I’m sorry, I’m getting way off track.

  Guru has the ability to awaken the hidden powers of any warrior who comes within contact of his hand. Unless, of course, they have no latent hidden powers, but this is DBZ and both of our heroes do, because if they didn’t, they wouldn’t be able to keep up with Vegeta’s ridiculous Zenkai powers, not to mention Frieza being basically a mortal god. But before that, Guru reads Krillin’s mind and deduces that the Ultimate Namek, the one who was once Kami and Piccolo together, must’ve split apart, and that was the only reason they were able to be killed. He literally says, “one who could have defeated a Namek like Kami must’ve been a Super Saiyan,” before he reads Krillin’s mind and finds out that they split, so you know we’re talking about some serious power here. Foreshadowing?

  Krillin wants to know if Guru can do the same for his friend Gohan, which just makes me laugh my ass off, because imagine if Guru is actually able to unlock Gohan’s full potential.

*SPOILERS FOR A SORTA 30 YEAR OLD SHOW*

  Imagine Gohan at the level he’s in during the near-end of the Buu saga, where he’s just tearing through Super Buu like he were tinfoil, not even hitting him with any energy attacks, but still just chopping his ass up one punch and kick at a time. Frieza would basically explode in one punch like in the Janemba movie. It would be so ridiculously anti-climactic, you’d demand your money back, even if you’re watching the show as a grade-school child, for free, and your parents are trying to get the phone away from you because you’re creating so much more trouble than you’re worth. The point is, Gohan’s potential is talked about in this show on a very consistent basis, and nobody seems to be able to agree on how deep it runs. There are at least one or two times in this show where someone swears to holy God that Gohan has hit the roof of his potential, only for some other asshole to come along and be like, “no, wait a minute, there’s a little more residue here at the bottom to take advantage of.”

  Bulma seems to have found herself a ball. She goes for it and we have to wonder what the fuck she must be thinking to want to go on a suicide mission like this one. This is where we remember, oh yeah, Bulma has always been like this. She would have been dead so many times over if it weren’t for supers like Goku and Vegeta pulling her nice ass out of the fire. I guess it’s only fair to acknowledge that Bulma’s insatiable quest to collect all the dragon balls has stopped worse people, such as Emperor Pilaf and Commander Red, from getting to them first. Her invention of the dragon radar by itself has gotten the world out of more fixes than it cares to count. Still, let’s be honest, Bulma doesn’t have the world’s most finely calibrated moral compass.

  There’s not much left to say about this episode. Going into it, I was a bit more enthusiastic than I wound up being for this episode. Like a lot of episodes in the original Z, it’s a whole lot of setting up for more exciting stuff that’s going to come later. Vegeta turns out to be alive and Zarbon has the audacity to say he’s going to torture information out of Vegeta about the whereabouts of the next ball(s) from him. It’s like he hasn’t even read the Saiyan Compendium ™ yet. But don’t worry. Zarbon’s going to find out very quickly that he’s fucked right in the down under.

 (3/5)

A Few Final Thoughts:

--Frieza tells Appule to send for the Ginyu Force. It’s about to really go down.

--“Clear your mind so that I may feel your past.”

--Vegeta left one Namekian villager alive. One of Frieza’s men happens across the villager and before the dude can even explain beyond Vegeta being the one who took the ball, Frieza’s idiot henchman killed him. Guess what Frieza does to the idiot henchman afterwards.

Dragonball Z Episode 53 Review – “Zarbon’s Surprise”

 We knew it wouldn’t be easy.

  I mean, let’s be honest, whether you’re coming into this blind or whether you know every facet of this show, you knew this wasn’t going to be easy when Vegeta started picking off Frieza’s men and going around his back to gather dragon balls. Vegeta knew it wasn’t going to be easy, either, and that was why he snuck in the first place. He was well aware of how dangerous Frieza was when he started to openly defy him and murder his most important men, all in a quest to basically kill Frieza AND deny him what he wants before doing so.

  What I don’t think Vegeta anticipated was that Frieza didn’t pick all of his men out of a garbage chute. Dodoria had no chance because he was just a second-string bruiser. Vegeta is dealing with the first of Frieza’s men who are capable of masking their true strength. Before this, it seemed like Vegeta was under the assumption that all of Frieza’s men—maybe even Frieza himself—had no access to the ability to mask their power levels, not just from scouters, but from “normal” methods of detection. But he’s now been rudely introduced to a power that, spoiler alert, is not getting old any time soon: transformation.

  (By the way, yeah, Oozaru is a transformation too, but it’s a very conditional one that relies on you having a tail and then having a full moon available. Right now, Vegeta has neither, and he can’t just will himself to turn into a giant monkey.)

  Zarbon does a “Beauty and the Beast” metaphor here, which implies that someone either wrote the same story somewhere else in space, or somebody came to Earth, took the story and brought it to the rest of the universe. Or, maybe I’m not being fair—maybe some English-speaking space alien just happened to write a different story that just happens to share that title with the one we know on Earth. Statistically, it’s pretty damn likely, because every other alien species has already invented English.

  Anyway, I got side-tracked. Zarbon’s not fucking around with that beast part. When he transforms, he basically balloons into this Shrek-like monster man without a nose whose fighting style immediately turns into that of a brute, and the rest of the fight is just him fucking pummeling Vegeta. If you wanted to see Vegeta meet some kind of karmic retribution for what he did to the Namekians a few episodes ago, here it is. Zarbon uses his joints a lot, you’ll notice. He elbows, he knees, he at one point grabs Vegeta’s head and starts just headbutting the fuck out of Vegeta’s face over and over again. There’s no real grace or style, it’s just pure aggro carnage, and it’s definitely not the kind of thing you usually see DBZ characters doing. It’s more like a World Star fight, where one guy gets the jump on the other right away and just starts kicking the shit out of them when they’re already down.

  Not that Vegeta doesn’t put up a valiant effort, but he obviously just can’t keep up. There are a few times where he and Zarbon are basically trading blows at super-fast speed, you can probably picture what I’m talking about because of how often it happens in the show, and you can visibly see Vegeta just struggling to maintain a pace with Zarbon. Again, this is definitely the place you want to be if you want to see Vegeta get some comeuppance for slaughtering a village full of innocent Namekians, because by the time the fight is over, Vegeta has been seemingly laid to rest in a watery grave, while Zarbon regresses back into the state Vegeta was kicking his ass in—that almost feels like an insult itself—and flies off to joyfully tell Frieza how he totally merc’d that fucking Saiyan.

  In other news, Krillin and Dende meet up with Guru this episode. Guru, as it turns out, is an enormous and morbidly obese lump in a chair who is on the verge of death for reasons that the show seems to be stating are from age, but actually, I think it’s because Guru is hiding Namek’s only burger joint under his big-ass chair. Seriously, I just go back to that bit from TFS where Frieza shows up to Guru’s house and is like, “Namekians just drink water, how the hell are you so fat?!” TFS doesn’t give a satisfactory answer to that question, and I don’t have one either, so I’m just going to settle on my burger-joint theory.

  We also get to meet NAAAAAAIL this episode, and I actually quite like the original Nail AND the TFS version of Nail, so I’m pretty hyped about his introduction to this series. Nail is the strongest of the Namekians, pretty much full-stop. Without spoiling too much, at this point he’s definitely stronger than Vegeta or Zarbon right now, and as for Frieza, well, we’re going to get to that one in several episodes. Nail is here to guard Guru from any threats, and obviously he’s keeping a close watch on Guru now that the Frieza clan is out here causing chaos, so he intimidates Krillin initially with his stoic and no-bullshit nature. Krillin can’t help but note how Nail looks like Piccolo, and it’s like, no shit, Sherlock, all of these people look like Piccolo, that’s the whole idea. They’re a RACE.

  The training up at King Kai’s place is still going along at a brisk pace, except I find it a little funny because they’re chasing Bubbles with the mallet they’re supposed to use on Gregory. I have no idea if that was King Kai’s idea or theirs, but even if it was theirs, somebody had to have given them the mallet, so I’m going to say this is all King Kai’s fault. Bastard. Anyway, to be specific, Yamcha, Tien and Chiaotzu are still chasing around the damn monkey, and at one point Bubbles hops on King Kai’s table as he’s eating a steak, and Tien—not to be deterred—slams the mallet right down on King Kai’s steak, knocking everything up in the air for a second and just narrowly missing a hit on Bubbles. King Kai ponders this for a moment, and then says “Guess that steak’s been… TIEN-derized!”

  …Okay, I’ll give King Kai that one, it was pretty clever. Guess the guy does have a somewhat-calibrated sense of humor after all.

  So, the Vegeta/Zarbon fight alone makes this a good episode, but getting to meet the Eldest Namek and Nail adds a nice little sweetener to the deal. I’m still shy on giving this one a perfect five because not much actually happens to advance the plot beyond Vegeta being momentarily out of the equation. Sure, Krillin gets to meet Guru, but that’s right at the end of the episode, and it’s not exactly the most exciting cliffhanger in the entire world. Still, the pieces are being put in place for some exciting confrontations in the future. We all know it’s a matter of time before another direct confrontation happens between the Bulma gang and the Frieza gang. It’s just a matter of when.

(4/5)

A Few Final Thoughts:

--It’s great how conspicuous Guru’s house is. The house sitting on the giant narrow pillar, no, nobody’s gonna notice that if they happen to pass by it. Come on.

--Vegeta pulls some baby dragon thingie down into the drink at the end of the episode as he’s getting himself back on land, swearing revenge on Zarbon. Somewhere out there, a father dragon swears revenge on Vegeta in turn.

--Dende tells Krillin about the fact that Namek has three suns, which explains why it’s never night-time. Krillin says, “no wonder you’re green!” I still don’t have a fucking clue what that’s supposed to mean. Maybe because plants are green, and plants would thrive in that kind of environment? Except they wouldn’t, because I feel like constant daytime would make for a poor ecosystem.

Dragonball Z Episode 52 Review – “The Past and Future”

Now here we go, this is what I’m talking about. We get King Kai’s warning to Goku about Frieza this episode, we get the start of King Kai’s training of Piccolo and the boys this episode (and this, crucially, includes the “making King Kai laugh” challenge), we get the start of the Vegeta/Zarbon fight this episode, it’s a real treat to see an episode this briskly paced after last week’s episode proved a bit of a snoozer.

Let’s start with Goku’s conversation with King Kai and his old, dead friends. Goku’s conversation with Yamcha goes pretty chill until he mentions that Krillin, Gohan and Bulma are on Namek with Vegeta, and there’s another, even stronger group on Planet Namek that he’ll have to deal with when he gets there. King Kai quickly does a scan of Planet Namek with his antennae, because he’s a weird, blue cockroach man, and discovers that Frieza is on the planet, resulting in him having a near-nervous breakdown, insisting that Goku stay the fuck away from Frieza at all costs, and making Piccolo and the boys swear they won’t fuck with Frieza either, or he won’t train them. “ABSOLUTELY NOOOOOT!” King Kai screams at the top of his lungs when Goku gives him pushback on not dealing with the tyrant.

I don’t remember, because it’s been a while since I watched this show front-to-back, but I wonder if King Kai knows the full extent of Frieza’s power or just has a surface-level reading of it, not even being aware of his transformation abilities. Either way, Frieza easily outclasses any other fighter in the show at this point, with his power level in his current form maxing out at a ludicrous 530,000(!), but that’s not even the beginning of Frieza’s actual maximum power level. We’ll get into this a lot more when Frieza gets on the battlefield himself, but it cannot be understated how much Frieza broke the power scaling of this show. Before Frieza showed up, things were growing quickly but still pretty reasonably, not going extremely higher than the way things were left at the end of Dragonball. Frieza and his monster of a fucking power level changed that for good, and necessitated increasingly ridiculous power-ups and transformations in order to keep the tension going.

But enough about that, it’s time we move on to the important stuff, the real meat of this episode. I am, of course, referring to King Kai’s Joke Test, a grand event of significant proportions that requires puns almost as ridiculous as Frieza’s power level in and of itself. Yamcha and Chiaotzu manage to skate by pretty easily, we are told, but Tien and Piccolo do not, for reasons we can immediately infer if we’re even a little familiar with them. You have to feel bad for poor Tien, he’s really wanting to get this thing done, unlike Piccolo, who’s just like, “nah.” It’s a testament to how great this show is that I totally relate to and laugh at these characters’ reactions to King Kai’s weird little test, even though they’re both approaching this with the exact opposite intensity. Tien’s studiousness and Piccolo’s sheer apathy are equally funny for two totally different reasons, and they both make perfect sense for the characters.

Tien finally does get a joke off—granted, Yamcha gave it to him, but I guess King Kai’s pretty liberal about the rules of this challenge---and when Tien tells that joke, my friends, he pulls off the multiform, the Tri-Beam, he goes all-out and goddamn if it doesn’t work. This is the kind of high-quality, premium content that filler should be made of. If you’re going to put filler in your show, at least make it fun, don’t do some tedious shit like have two fighters stand around and size each other up in some grotesque parody of a Mexican stand-off, only without Mexicans, or guns. Well, maybe some guns—Android 17 does carry a pistol around, for some ungodly reason.

By the way, the joke Tien tells: “You can tune a piano, but you can’t tune a fish.” Get it? Like “tunafish”? YA GET IT?

(I haven’t had tunafish in a while, I should get on that. None of that canned shit, either, I want the fresh kind.)

The boys are then introduced to Bubbles, and are told to catch him. Everyone who isn’t named Piccolo struggles with the challenge, but Piccolo catches Bubbles immediately, and with such speed that it embarrasses the shit out of King Kai. However, Piccolo inadvertently passes the “Make Me Laugh” challenge when he refers to catching Bubbles as “monkey business.” This just proves the fundamental adage of DBZ: if you’re better than Goku/Vegeta/Gohan/Piccolo at something, you won’t be for very damn long. It’s depressing to see play out in real time, too, folks. Yamcha doesn’t even try to keep up after the Cell saga, and Tien takes Chiaotzu and bolts for some part of the Earth where there are least likely to be Saiyans. Piccolo, of course, will face his fate much later than these tortured souls, but it will be no less bitter to see him become Gotenks’ babysitter. Hey, that kinda rhymed!

We need to talk about the fight between Vegeta and Zarbon. Krillin tells Dende that Vegeta is hot on their trail, and at first he is… but then he senses Zarbon and decides that fucking up another one of Frieza’s boys is more important than messing with some other random power levels. So off he goes. You have to love his commitment to the bit—the man is absolutely determined to kill off Frieza’s men one-by-one as soon as they leave Frieza’s orbit, like baby birds dumped from the nest after a failed attempt to learn flight. As viewers, we expect Zarbon to get merc’d in the same exact way Dodoria did. After all, we get no indication from the show that Zarbon’s considerably stronger than Dodoria, and our expectations are fully proven when Vegeta easily counters and kicks Zarbon face-first into the Namekian dirt, making him eat dirt in the most satisfying way. Even though, y’know, both of these men are equally evil. Vegeta’s a more fun kind of evil.

Yet… something’s off. Zarbon starts to laugh at the end of the episode. Dodoria was begging for his life when Vegeta got him in an armlock a few episodes ago, but Vegeta manages to easily best Zarbon in a round of battle and… Zarbon laughs? That’s when you know, even the young’uns out there, that even though Vegeta won the first round, Zarbon is in complete control of this situation. This is early DBZ, mind you, when transformations had happened before but were mostly confined to Saiyans transforming into giant apes. We were still new to the concept that a fighter could change their shape mid-battle and alter the course of the fight, so we have no idea when this episode closes out what kind of shit Zarbon has up his sleeves, which by the way are not connected to his actual under-armor and that really bugs me because what, does he have some fucking sensitivity to the cold, why is he doing that?

Anyway, few shows knew how to end on a cliffhanger better than DBZ. In fact, that should be a Top 10 video if it isn’t already—“Best DBZ Cliffhangers.” If you aren’t wondering what the fuck Zarbon’s going to do after this episode ends, you are a stronger individual than I.

(4/5)

A Few Final Thoughts:

--I don’t know why, but whoever art-directed this episode decided to put these weird color patterns over Vegeta and Zarbon while they talk tough at each other. Someone just bored at the editing station?

--Goku decides it’s time to pump it up to 50g. Even if he hasn’t said it out loud, he knows it’s going to end up with him alone on the battlefield with Frieza.

--“I’ve never felt pressure like this!” –Tien, on the subject of telling King Kai a bad pun.

Dragonball Z Episode 51 Review – “Vegeta Has a Ball”

In which Vegeta obtains and then has a ball, all the while creating terrible tragedy for the already put-upon Namekian people.

Vegeta’s brutality in this episode does two things: first, it establishes to the audience that Vegeta may be fighting against Frieza’s cohorts, but that by no means makes him a remotely sympathetic character. When it comes to his tactics against the innocent Namekians, he is equally as brutal as Dodoria and Zarbon, murdering every living thing in the entire village to get what he wants, and nothing he wants is for the betterment of Namekians, or his own race, or any race in the universe. He wants that ball because he wants to kill Frieza, and he wants to kill Frieza because he wants revenge. He is a villain protagonist in the purest sense of the term, and as the enemy of Krillin, Gohan and Bulma’s enemy, he is not their friend. Not by a longshot.

Second, Vegeta’s destruction of the Namekian village solidifies how doomed the Namekian race is. Between Vegeta, who can track them with his own power and not the use of a scouter, and Frieza, who is still several orders of magnitude stronger than Vegeta, the Namekians have no hope of altering their fate. We know as viewers that it took the combined strength of Krillin, Gohan, Yajirobe, and Goku to take down Vegeta, and by just barely. Now: Goku isn’t going to be around for a week, it’s only Krillin and Gohan, and not only is Vegeta skulking around, but if Frieza catches a whiff of anyone trying to take away his dragon balls, it’s curtains. There just doesn’t seem to be any hope in the near future for the Namekians, and with Vegeta hot on the trail of anyone with a ball, the near future may not be soon enough.

Besides Vegeta destroying the shit out of a Namekian village and getting a dragon ball for himself—which he promptly hides in a Namekian lake at a random location—nothing much happens here. We get a spot of cool news, though, even if it’s something that’s not going to matter for a long time: Yamcha, Tien, Chiaotzu and Piccolo have made it to King Kai’s planet and are undergoing a little training with the man himself! We’re going to have periodic visits to King Kai’s planet for the rest of the saga as Piccolo and the gang work on getting stronger, and for the most part, it’s filler. Sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it's dull as shit, and sometimes it just serves as an opportunity for us to get reactions from other people regarding what’s going on with the Namek situation. It’s a pretty epic reveal, too, happening right at the end of the episode when King Kai telepathically communicates with Goku as he’s training. Everyone’s trying to get stronger, knowing the dangers lying ahead.

We get to see Bulma come up with the same idea as her future lover: all they need to do is take one ball and hide it! After all, the balls are useless unless you have all seven! Crucially, however, Gohan points out that Frieza and Vegeta will just become even more genocidal trying to find that last ball. To be fair, however, Frieza and Vegeta are already being ridiculously genocidal in their methods. I don’t think there’s such a thing as being mildly genocidal. You’re either murdering the entire population of a planet, or you aren’t. I guess the argument is that if the Namekians are killed more slowly, it gives time for Goku to show up and start kicking some ass, but I’m pretty sure most of the Namekians are dead anyway, with how many dragon balls Frieza has.

It's in this episode where Krillin and Dende decide to go visit the Eldest Namek, who should technically be called the Eldest Namekian, but I’m being pedantic. Gohan stays behind with Bulma, which is smart. Gohan can protect Bulma, and Krillin can protect Dende! Or, at least, Krillin can protect Dende in-between bouts of crying to himself about the fact that he’s going to die having never had a girlfriend before. You already died without a girlfriend once, my man, this should be standard fare for you by now. I will say, Krillin is at least trying. He’s whining the entire time, but he’s not shirking his responsibilities. He's absolutely going to keep trying to get those dragon balls.

What else is there? Oh, well, there’s Frieza and Zarbon callously brushing off the death of Dodoria before Zarbon goes out with Appule to hunt down the last two dragon balls blind. Good luck with that. I guess between the two of them it’s possible they could find a village in the next few days, but my impression of Namek is that it’s similarly-sized to Earth, and it also has a handful of villages in it. It’s not like all of the Namekian enclaves are metropolis-sized megacities with fucking McDonald’s or McDende’s at every other block—it’s all tiny farming villages with populations of not much greater than 20. So, the Frieza gang has their work cut out for them. They should consider getting the shit beaten out of them by Gohan, Goku, Krillin and Yajirobe. It seemed to work out pretty well for Vegeta, I don’t know why it wouldn’t work for Zarbon, Appule or Frieza. Y’all are fucking amateurs.

(3/5)

A Few Final Thoughts:

--The village elder tells Vegeta he’ll never find their dragon ball. He immediately finds it, in one of the five or six houses comprising the village. Something tells me the Namekians are not hide-and-seek champions.

-- Bulma: “Sounds like you guys had a rough time out there!” She is way too used to shit like this by now.

--If you and about 50 of your friends have a guy—say, Vegeta—surrounded, and he just starts laughing at you, you should probably just run. He’s either superpowered or he has a bomb strapped to his chest.

Dragonball Z Episode 50 Review – “Unexpected Problem”

  It’s kind of a shame that the show’s 50^th episode, which is normally a major milestone for a television show, is rather uneventful. The last couple of episodes have been much more tense, but here the show slows its pace, takes a breather, and gets into a little bit of boring filler shit.

  Not to say that it’s a bad episode, or that nothing of value happens in it. The rest of the heroes other than Bulma learn that Goku is going to be on Namek in a few days. Krillin, who was on the verge of giving up on the whole venture, can finally have something to be happy about, as can Gohan. Poor Dende, of course, has no idea what the hell is going on, generally.

 Imagine being in this kid’s shoes. Not literally, because his feet are small and his shoes look uncomfortable with how they come to a sharp point. But imagine your entire town gets murdered, your childhood friend killed right in front of you, and you scrape by only because some strangers swept in at the very last second and saved you. Next thing you know, you’re taken to this house that seemingly came out of nowhere and introduced to this alien who has a gender you’ve never even seen before, and then they all burst out into effusive celebration like a group of cultists when it’s revealed that GOKU is going to be coming to Namek soon to kill Frieza! Goku’s lucky he kicks so much ass, otherwise this would come off as very, very creepy.

  Speaking of creepy, we have Vegeta just a-creep, creep, creepin’ on our heroes, nearly catching them just by sniffing out their power levels, only to be sidetracked by a huge sea-beast which he assumes is the source of the power level. Vegeta is not having it, he is going to seek and destroy anything that isn’t Frieza or near Frieza, and to be honest, he’s turning into sort of the second protagonist of the show for me. A little naughty to say, I know, because he does such awful shit while he’s on Namek, but you root for him in the same way you might root for Seto Kaiba or Sesshomaru, just to name some other anime examples. He’s often a thorn in the real protagonists’ side, but what makes him interesting is his existence as a spanner in the works and his own private motivations as opposed to the benevolent OR malevolent intentions of other cast members.

  I could go on and on about how cool Vegeta is in this saga, so I guess we might as well talk about the most despicable thing he does on Planet Namek by a longshot, since… well, it gets started in this episode, and gets worse in the next. Vegeta manages to scout out a Namekian village that Frieza and his men haven’t touched. Up to this point, we’ve only seen Vegeta pay evil unto evil, dishing out some vigilante justice/vengeance on Frieza’s gang, and even the people who’ve never seen this show are probably getting the sense that Vegeta’s going to join the good side sooner or later, even if just out of necessity. Well, if you thought Vegeta was going to be any gentler with the Namekian innocents than Frieza’s crew… let’s just say I have a bridge I want to talk to you about, next review.

  Meanwhile, Goku deals with some bullshit on his ship, I dunno.

  Anyway, this was a pretty decent episode, nothing great, and I…

  *sigh* Okay, fine, let’s talk about the Goku subplot.

  Goku’s ship veers off course, sending it careening toward a nearby star, and Goku has to avoid his spaceship being immolated in a terribly fiery tragedy by going out onto the surface of his ship and re-plot it with the remote help of Dr. Briefs. Now, let’s just get this straight: shit like this in the middle of other, more dire stuff happening is just a pointless distraction. Everybody knows Goku is not going to train in 20g for three straight episodes only to be randomly murdered in the vacuum of space by faulty technology. It’s ridiculous from a narrative standpoint and it would piss off everyone you can imagine if the creators of the show actually went in that direction. It would be the poster child for anti-climaxes, the one to end them all.

  But, okay, let’s be a little more fair and look at this in a vacuum: a man has to go out onto the surface of his spaceship and divert its course before he flies directly into the sun. When you put it that way, hell yeah, that’s a thrilling premise, and if it weren’t happening in the middle of the Frieza arc in DRAGON BALL FUCKING Z, it may even be justifiably the premise for two or three full episodes. But here, it isn’t, and furthermore, a lot of what drives the drama of this segment is Goku’s stupidity. He glues himself to his own goddamn ship by his boots, he has to shoot a Kamehameha at a LITERAL SUN to divert his course, and when it’s all said and done, he’s still going to hit Namek in about six days. Whatever. I’ve never seen the movie Armageddon with Bruce Willis, but I’m aware it takes place in space and has a lot of action. I wish Goku could be the protagonist in all of the Bruce Willis films.

  (3/5)

A Few Final Thoughts:

-- Vegeta: “I should have figured out how to sense power levels a long time ago.”

--The nametag on Goku’s suit says “Gokuh,” so I guess that’s what we need to call him from now ohahaha I’m not fucking doing that.

-- Even Vegeta is surprised at how easily he defeated Dodoria.

Dragonball Z Episode 49 Review – “The Prince Fights Back”

  Finally, just when we were starting to go through some withdrawals, we get some prime Vegeta action.

  Vegeta humiliates Dodoria this episode. To call it a fight would be an insult to fights, in or out of this story. It’s a humiliation. It’s bullying. Vegeta might as well be fighting an armless man, with how little Dodoria can challenge him this episode. Dodoria should have never left Frieza’s side, because the only place Vegeta would not utterly murder Dodoria is within Frieza’s eyesight—that is, if Frieza even cared enough to intervene on Dodoria’s behalf (he doesn’t).

  Dodoria tries to bargain with Vegeta after a brief scuffle where it becomes clear that Dodoria can’t touch Vegeta, and to his credit Dodoria does tell him the truth about what happened to the Saiyan and to Planet Vegeta, when he could have easily spun a web of bullshit to protect his boss. Then again, his boss doesn’t really need protection, at all, in any way, unless you’re Majin Buu or Beerus or some other ridiculously overpowered villain. Dabura, maybe? Whatever, anyway, I’m getting off track: Dodoria tells Vegeta that Frieza killed all the Saiyans, including his father, and it wasn’t some meteorite like he and Raditz and Nappa had been told.

  Dodoria also shares Frieza’s reasoning with Vegeta, which may be more important because Vegeta probably already suspected that Frieza murdered the entire Saiyan race. Frieza was afraid of how strong the Saiyans could get in a short amount of time—a fear that will be well-justified later in the series—and while they were useful for a little while, Frieza ultimately concluded that destroying them was the practical option. You have to hand it to Frieza, he’s displaying a lot of smarts compared to other DBZ villains who think they’re untouchable. Granted, he does think he’s untouchable for the most part, but he recognizes a potential problem when he sees it, and a race of battle-obsessed aliens enslaved by a tyrant isn’t a very good proposition when YOU’RE the tyrant.

  Now, Dodoria’s reasoning is maybe not the best here. He thinks that by telling Vegeta that Frieza—the man Dodoria is literally working for and who Vegeta has been working for up to this point—murdered his family and friends, Vegeta is going to spare his life. If someone told me they’d known for years about the person who murdered my family, and had worked for them this whole time, I wouldn’t exactly be inclined to let them skate by. Unfortunately for Dodoria, his gamble doesn’t pay off, and it probably never would have, because Vegeta always was going to kill Dodoria. Dodoria’s little hail mary just bought him a few extra minutes of life, and he spent them pissing off his would-be murderer even more.

  Now, the reason Dodoria wound up encountering Vegeta in the first place is because he did the thing a lot of DBZ characters—hero and villain alike—do: he attacked his enemy with one or more energy beams and then smugly left, confident that they had secured a victory. Of course, he hadn’t, and if he weren’t over-reliant on the scouter, he’d have known that. Actually, even characters who can sense energy levels make the mistake of thinking they killed their opponent, but we’ll get into that as it happens. For now, Krillin, Gohan and Dende are alive and are now safe from Dodoria, even though he did catch sight of them and fire their way.

  At Bulma’s capsule cabin on Namek, she learns from her father that Goku is headed to Namek, which causes her to drop her transmitting device she was talking to him on in the bathtub. And yeah, this show and the preceding one both are pretty fond of showing Bulma lounging in underwear or submerged in a warm bath. What kills me is how absolutely casual Dr. Briefs is about the fact that his daughter is trapped on an alien world with no further means of escaping. I swear, that dude must be a sociopath, because I don’t think I’ve seen him ever express concern for his daughter’s safety, in spite of the insanely dangerous shit she’s always mixed-up in. He was more concerned about the fucking cappuccino machine in the gravity chamber than he was when Bulma told him she was stranded in space with Vegeta and Frieza.

  We learn that Dende can sort of fly this episode, so that’s a thing. He must not be very good at it, because when they were tearing ass trying to get away from Dodoria, they had to carry Dende by the hand the whole time. I guess you can argue they were in the heat of the moment and didn’t bother to ask Dende if he could fly, but something tells me the Namekians who were raising him didn’t train him to fly very fast. It’s not like they were anticipating a horrible alien planet-broker to show up and start demanding eternal life. Or, actually, I think they did, I think they have some kind of prescience. Oh, well. Didn’t seem to help them at all.

  Goku’s not up to much in space, he’s just continuing to do push-ups and sit-ups and drink plenty of juice in the gravity chamber while the gravity is still up to 20g. He mentions at the end of the episode that he’s going to turn it up a notch after another session of 10,000 fucking push-ups, Jesus Christ, but for now, he’s keeping it down to a sensible 20. Good for him.

  Speaking of Goku, I was really captured by Vegeta’s line at the end of the episode, a line which I think perfectly encapsulates the stakes as far as Vegeta is concerned. Yes, Vegeta wants eternal life for many similar, selfish reasons Frieza wants it, but the key difference is Vegeta is fighting to avenge many, many people who died unjustly beneath Frieza’s terrible reign. Vegeta says “I promise you this, Frieza: your downfall will be at the hands of a Saiyan.” Now that is some powerful, prophetic shit right there, and it’s going to pay off in spades when we get to the end of Frieza’s story in Z itself. I haven’t watched any of the Super stuff, so I don’t know how prophetic it’s going to continue being, but probably still strong. I don’t think any of the human characters in the show make it to Frieza level in terms of power. Spoiler, I guess.

  So with one of Frieza’s two most reliable henchmen dead, and with all of his organization’s scouters destroyed, it would seem like Vegeta is succeeding so far. Frieza and his cohorts are flying blind while Vegeta can scan power levels with his mind and make sound judgments based on what he knows about his own power compared to Frieza’s men. Guys like Zarbon and the rest of Frieza’s motley crew, on the other hand, wouldn’t know if Vegeta was as strong as, well, Vegeta, or as strong as the Supreme Kai or something equally crazy. And with Krillin’s group in the mix, it would seem as if things are going to get a little buck-wild on this little planet we call Namek. I sure hope Goku lands soon, said everyone ever.

(4/5)

A Few Final Thoughts:

--“These Earthlings did me a favor when they almost killed me!”

--“It’s amazing what a coward you can become when you aren’t hiding behind your master!”

--“How will you and Zarbon ever find Frieza’s backside to stick your noses in it?!”

--Dodoria: “Shooting people in the back always was your style!” Oh, Dodoria, trust me; he got the jump on you for fun, not because he needed to.

--Yeah, I could pretty much have written this entire review with nothing but Vegeta and Vegeta-related quotes, what of it?

Dragonball Z Episode 48 Review -- "The Hunted"

 

If “Namek’s Defense” was the action, “The Hunted” is the reaction, detailing the first ever—if indirect—confrontation Krillin and Gohan both have with Frieza, through the thwarting of Dodoria’s attempt to, for no good reason at all, murder a Namekian child. After he already murdered one a moment ago. Real stand-up guy, that Dodoria.

Dodoria really pulls the most weight this episode, which is a funny metaphor to use given the shape of his strange body. He starts to kill the Namekian village elder, but Frieza stops him, telling him he needs to focus on the three Namekian warriors first. He knows the more immediate threat has to be taken care of first, and he also knows that the village elder is more scared of watching more of his people die than he is of dying himself. So it makes the most sense to coerce the dragon ball out of him by killing more of his friends and guaranteeing safety for the ones that remain… if he just hands over that ball.

The Namekian warriors, of course, don’t stand a chance against Dodoria, who is over twice as strong as all of them put together, assuming they all peak at around 3,000. Even if they don’t, they’re just so out of their league, it’s tragic. Dodoria literally stabs his hand through the back of one of them, then unceremoniously mouth-beams another one into oblivion. The third one puts up a bit more of a resistance, dodging a few attacks and striking Dodoria with an energy beam, but it’s no use. Dodoria is a Namek saga-level warrior and the Namekian defense was made up of Saiyan saga-level fighters. It was never going to go in their favor.

Frieza proceeds to get truly slimy after the Namekian warriors are disposed of. He presents the idea of a trade, the elder’s dragon ball in exchange for the scouters he destroyed. The village elder, who at this point has exhausted all of his resources and has two children left he needs to protect, finally just gives in and agrees to give Frieza the ball. That alone must be incredibly painful for him, because he knows Frieza is going to get one step closer to immortality, and by extension becoming unstoppable. But as soon as the elder gives over the ball, Frieza demands the location of the last two balls. Any protestations made by the elder are, of course, useless, because Frieza is too strong and too evil to be held to any sort of deal. He has no moral qualms whatsoever about what he’s doing, he’s strong enough to make the laws rather than be held by them, and he green-lights Dodoria, in one of the most horrific scenes in this show yet, to murder the two Namekian children that the elder’s trying to save.

We talked a bit in the last review about Gohan’s moral compass, and it’s fair to say that after Dodoria mouth-beams one of the two Namekian children—named Cargo—into smithereens, that moral compass starts pointing hard in Dodoria’s direction, demanding some sort of retribution. But it’s not quite retribution that pushes Gohan into finally acting after so much time. Dodoria breaks the neck of the village elder, deciding to just go full blood-lust on the hapless remainers, and you just know in your bones it was always going to end this way. Dende, the other Namekian child, finds himself completely trapped by Dodoria, who raises his fist and…

Gets kicked the fuck away by Gohan. At long last, the heroes intervene.

Now, I feel I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that Krillin goes along with it entirely once Gohan commits. Krillin may have been content to let Frieza and his gang slaughter a village of Namekians before his very eyes, but only because he knew that they might just become another statistic if they were to intervene. Again, Krillin is acutely aware of his limits as a fighter. Gohan, if he is aware at all, doesn’t give a shit, and this is what separates him from Krillin and makes him display his father’s dual traits of heroism and recklessness.

The rest of the episode is basically a chase between our heroes, with Dende in tow, and Dodoria, who has been ordered by Frieza to get off his “fat butt” and go get those motherfuckers. Frieza, as annoyed as he is, continues to be fully self-assured in his powers, and proves as such to Zarbon by blowing up a mountain range miles away with nothing but his fucking mind. These are just the kind of frightening little glimpses into Frieza’s off-the-scale powers that make it perfectly reasonable that Vegeta and the heroes wouldn’t go for a direct attack approach. At this point, every other character in the show is a flea in the face of Frieza’s awe-inspiring power, and nothing I’m saying is a spoiler, because we know this from the very beginning. If even Vegeta, the blood-knight to end all blood-knights, won’t take on Frieza head-to-head, we know we’re dealing with something special.

 Anyway, Dodoria gives chase, and for a big boy, he’s pretty fast. He fires some energy beams, one of which manages to skirt Krillin, and he drops Dende. As he’s flying down to get the Namekian child, Dodoria grabs his foot, but Krillin, ever the wise man, uses his head. To headbutt the shit out of Dodoria’s face. Dodoria whines in pain as Gohan and Krillin rescue Dende and continue to put distance between themselves and the roly-poly bastard chasing after them.

I think what happens next is the second instance of Solar Flare being used in the entire series, as Krillin demonstrates it for Dodoria to see, and then promptly not see. This attack might as well be called “Get The Fuck Away From Me” because in all of my years of watching this show, I don’t think I can name an instance of Solar Flare being used to incapacitate an opponent so that the user can actually attack them. It’s always just, “okay, blind them, then fly as fast as you can away until it wears off.” It feels like a missed opportunity, especially against a villain like Dodoria who can’t sense power levels. Krillin and Gohan could probably devastate Dodoria with a few well-placed attacks, no matter how much stronger he is than them.

If I were a DBZ character who used Solar Flare, I’d be using it all the fucking time, even in situations where me and my opponent are the same in strength. There’s just no disadvantage to you for taking away your opponent’s sight for a brief period, especially since it also seems to cause pain in the person it’s used against. In particular, the trope I always hear is, “Krillin should use the Solar Flare and then strike his enemy with the Destructo Disk,” and I completely agree with that scenario. A lot of lives could have been saved over the course of many sagas had Krillin simply decided to use Solar Flare for a practical purpose instead of just pussing out of a fight.

Well, anyway, it works for the purposes of Gohan and Krillin, as they are able to suppress their power levels and hide away in a nook amongst some mountains. Now Dodoria, who doesn’t even have his scouter anymore, has to search for them with just his eyes, and the scenery of Namek doesn’t exactly work well for his purposes. And there the episode ends, with Dodoria circling the air above Krillin, Gohan and Dende, looking out for a sign of their existence.  

(4/5)

A Few Final Thoughts:

--“They’re quick! Just makes killing them all the more fun!”

--Gohan asks Krillin what he used against Dodoria, Krillin tells him “it’s just a little trick [he] learned from Tien.” At least Tien gets to have some smidge of relevance for the rest of the series.

--Let it not be said that Gohan cares about architecture. When he kicks Dodoria, he does so straight into a Namekian house. I’d love it if there was a Namekian sleeping in there who thought Gohan was one of Frieza’s guys bullying Dodoria.

Dragonball Z Episode 47 Review – “Namek’s Defense”

 If there’s anything you get to learn in this episode, it’s that Namek’s titular defense is nowhere near good enough to deal with the threats they face.

 I absolutely love this episode, I think it’s one of the greatest episodes to this point, and the reason it’s so great comes down to the tension created in all the scenes between the Namekian villagers and Frieza’s organization. You get a feel for Frieza this episode that none of the previous ones where he appeared have been able to create. Frieza is essentially the negotiator who holds all the cards and is merely humoring you by negotiating at all. Because let’s be clear, by the end of this episode, you know damn well that Frieza’s strongest goons can just slaughter all of these people on sight and destroy shit until they find the ball, assuming there is one to find. But why do that, when they can just coerce it out of the elder and then murder him anyway?

 But let it not be said that the Namekians, or at least some of them, don’t have the brains to ameliorate their situation. The elder Namekian of the village Frieza’s goons are attacking just happens to notice that the villains are wearing these devices—the scouters—that allow them to read power levels, and deduces that these same devices are what the villains are using to quickly find and kill whole villages full of Namekians. So he, of course, takes it upon himself to zap the scouters—every last one of them, dealing a significant blow to the Frieza gang because it basically blinds them until they’re able to get some more scouters delivered.

 It should be noted that, while this entire attack is going on, Krillin and Gohan are observing from behind some rocks, and Gohan is finding it increasingly difficult to mask his rage at what the Frieza gang is up to. We get enough insight into Gohan’s character this episode to determine, yep, he’s basically his father except a lot more mild-mannered and serious-minded, preferring not to fight unless pushed and being studious in a way that his father never was, both traits I presume come from his mother’s side of the family.

  Don’t get me wrong, Goku has his own kind of smarts, but said smarts mostly manifest themselves when he’s fighting or in otherwise some kind of ridiculous danger. You wouldn’t put Goku on a fucking Nobel Prize panel, is what I’m saying, although if he were real and all of the things he battled against were also real, he would 100 percent be the winner of every Nobel Prize imaginable. The point is, Gohan is equally as angered by injustices being perpetrated against innocent people, and has a very difficult time suppressing his anger at the sight of said injustices.

  Krillin, of course, is the moderating influence to Gohan’s more action-oriented instincts. Krillin, perhaps more than any other character on the entire show, is deftly aware of his own shortcomings and is not afraid to admit when he’s way out of his league. That’s not even just because he’s a human while Goku and Gohan have Saiyan blood—Krillin straight-up knows this shit. Sometimes the best fighter you have is the one who knows the fights he can’t win, and in Krillin’s case, he has this in spades. Everyone makes fun of the poor bald bastard because he’s not a hero like Goku or (much later in the series) Vegeta (spoiler alert lol), but what makes him heroic is his ability to recognize, unlike even some of the human fighters in the series, that he’s out of his depth and he needs to only do what he absolutely needs to do and flee when the gettin’s good.

 We don’t have much time left to spend with Dodoria, so I guess we better talk about the fat, pink bastard while we can. After all, there are going to be so few other opportunities to talk about a fat, pink bastard in this series, you guys seriously have no idea. Anyway, Dodoria and his spiky head are going to be facing a lot of resistance in the next few episodes, and he does not take it well. I mean, to be fair, none of the other villains in the series take being overwhelmed well, but Dodoria’s right in front of our face right now, so y’know, we ain’t got much choice. He’s basically a dumb grunt, just smarter than Cui because he at least does a better job of talking down Vegeta during their inevitable confrontation.

 Meanwhile, in space, Goku’s exercising in some of that good 20g shit. He apparently decided against jiggering it down to 11, and is instead taking it as the challenge it is. By the end of the episode, he’s done over 10,000 sit-ups. What I find interesting about Goku’s training in space is that it’s nothing at all like King Kai’s training. He’s not actually being taught or teaching himself anything, he’s not trying to master techniques he already knows how to use. This is all about beefing up in the harshest conditions he can muster, so that by the time he hits Namek, he can just completely out-speed and out-power his enemies without the need for special moves like the Kaioken and the Spirit Bomb.

 Because, when you think about it, Goku did get stronger with King Kai’s training, but at his base Goku was only just shy of 10,000. And yes, I am going out of my way not to describe Goku’s power level at that time as “over 9,000,” and I do it so that poor meme can finally just die a peaceful death. Anyway, Goku had to rely on Kaioken and the Spirit Bomb to overwhelm Vegeta back on Earth during their first fight, and even with those at his disposal, it became a team effort in the end. So Goku settling for just pure “get stronger” style training is the best move for him, and we’re going to see several episodes from now that it pays off in spades.

 As for the titular Namek’s Defense, in this episode it manifests itself as a trio of Namekians who are able to mask their power levels. The three of them register as 1,000 apiece on the scouters, so they are left to the nameless grunts to take care of. These grunts pretty much exist as fodder for stronger, more important characters, and of course the Namekian warriors completely outclass and defeat them with ease. Not like Frieza and his lieutenants give a shit, one of the grunts is even sent careening toward Zarbon, and instead of Zarbon catching him he just kicks him the fuck away, like, “bitch, you already know you failed.”

 These poor Namekians are 100% outclassed, and we already know this, but just how badly they’re going to get their asses kicked is left to our imagination as the episode ends on Dodoria heading for the village elder after said elder just destroyed all of their scouters. This and the next several episodes after it are going to be bloodbaths for the fledgling Namekian race, but for now we can at least take solace in the fact that Frieza and his cohorts have been crippled by their ineptness at sensing energy.

(4/5)

A Few Final Thoughts:

--“Who am I? I suppose you can say I’m an aspiring dragon ball collector!”

--“You underestimate our powers of persuasion.”

--“Aww, hell! You guys are way out of your league!”

--Even after they’ve gotten good and warmed up, the Namekian warriors clock in at only about 3,000 each. So, y’know, not a good sign for them.

--One more great one from Frieza: “All the horrible stories you’ve heard are true.”

Dragonball Z Episode 46 Review – “Defying Orders”

  In which Goku breaks out of the hospital, and then the surly bonds of Earth, to touch the face of Frieza. With his knuckles.

  Roshi is still randomly groping the nurse’s ass at the hospital, the same blonde one, and at this point even the doctor’s getting pissed off about it. If it wasn’t for the fact that Roshi has a triple-digit power level, he’d be in fucking jail, no question about it. A while back, there was some twitter user who was trying to “cancel” Master Roshi, and while I think that’s really dumb, I can also understand how people can be uncomfortable with him constantly groping women and getting away with it. I think what mitigates it, for the most part, is that when he gropes Bulma or Chi-Chi (or Android 18, later in the series), they kick his ass and then everyone just moves on. Bulma and Chi-Chi just kind of put up with it because it’s just what Roshi does, and while that doesn’t justify it, it’s hard to get mad on their behalf when they extract their blood toll from Roshi’s face and then promptly forget it happened. This, though, with the innocent hospital nurse who’s just trying to do her job, it legitimately does make me a little mad on her behalf.

  Anyway, Yajirobe shows up at the hospital, and lo and behold, he bringeth a plentiful bounty of senzu beans. Goku takes one and is promptly back to full strength. Literally, the only reason Korin ran out of senzu beans was so that Goku couldn’t travel to Namek with Bulma, which would have been not beneficial to Goku, since he wouldn’t have been able to get any practical training done. Also, it’s just awkward, the idea of Bulma and Goku being on that spaceship by themselves for a month. That may have been even more upsetting to Chi-Chi than her son going to Namek with Bulma and Krillin.

  We get to hang out with Bulma’s parents a bit in this episode, and I have to say, the two of them don’t feel like the parenting types. Especially Bulma’s mom, I’m not sure if I’d trust her with a goldfish, never mind a child. When we first see her this episode, she’s twirling around while watering plants, and it’s like, I didn’t know that clowns could also get in on the whole Stepford Wives thing. Bulma’s dad, Dr. Briefs, is a little less eccentric, but still seems like exactly the kind of father who would be absentee because of their dedication to science and building shit. They’re both delightful characters, don’t get me wrong, but they’re also both oddballs who collect dinosaurs as pets and water plants while dancing and speaking in a Brooklyn accent.

  Goku commandeers the ship upon finding out that the only thing Dr. Briefs was working on when Goku got there was the cappuccino machine, which just makes me wonder how Goku would deal with caffeine. I don’t think this show or the one before it ever addressed that. I feel like it would either have the complete opposite effect on Goku and make him very sleepy, or it would make him so hyperactive that he’s basically in Kaioken mode all the time. Then again, being that he’s an alien species, it might just kill him or have no effect whatsoever. Saiyans are incredibly similar to humans, except for their power and their ability to turn into giant apes, so I don’t know how much water that theory holds.

  I know I’ve gone off track several times this review, and the reason is nothing much happens in the episode. Nothing exciting, at least. Goku goes into space and is on his way to Namek, he’s fully healed, that’s all good but it doesn’t advance the situation on Namek itself, not right away at least. The episode sounds significant when I type it out like that, but there just isn’t much excitement after the tense previous episode.

  Bulma, Krillin and Gohan have a somewhat-encounter with Frieza at the beginning of this episode, and the power level Krillin and Gohan sense from Frieza is enough to absolutely scare them shitless. According to the dragon radar, Frieza and his group already have four dragon balls, and that is not good news for our heroes, because like Krillin says, not only is Frieza stronger than Vegeta, it isn’t even close between them both. Frieza, even just lounging around in his little hover-chair, is massively stronger than anything the crew has dealt with before. You have to feel bad for Krillin here—the dude always winds up having to deal directly with foes who are completely out of his league.

  But you can’t feel that bad, because he at least stands up against them, or in this case, goes with Gohan to hide behind a rock to watch Frieza and his gang bully around a whole other village full of Namekians. This scene—coming up in the next episode—is one of the cornerstone scenes of the Namek arc and really introduces you to Frieza and his group. Yeah, we’ve been following them for the first couple of episodes, but this is where we get very familiar with them and their style of operating. Let’s just say we find out pretty quickly why Vegeta turned out to be such a shit. Well, that, and his Saiyan genes.

(3/5)

A Few Final Thoughts:

-- Krillin notes the size of the Namekian dragon balls. They’re like basketballs, basically, in comparison to the baseball-sized Earth dragon balls.

--I didn’t mention the gravity machine in the main review, but yeah, there’s a gravity machine on Goku’s ship that goes up to 100x Earth’s gravity. Goku opts to try out 20, only to immediately struggle to move and state outright he should have tried 11.

--Goku literally tells Dr. Briefs, who is delaying Goku’s takeoff because of a goddamn coffee maker, that his daughter is on an alien planet, in danger, and he’s still like, “are you sure, man? Breakfast beverages.”

--I didn’t mention this, either: Goku’s ship is built using parts from his original space pod, which you may recall Piccolo blowing the fuck up in a filler episode way back when. How did he manage to get any of that tech salvaged? Presumably using the same scientific witchcraft allowing him to defy physics by containing vehicles and entire houses into a small capsule.

--According to Chi-Chi, Goku did not pack clean underwear. Eugh. The smell of his grundle alone should paralyze his opponents on Namek.

Dragonball Z Episode 45 Review – “Frieza Strikes!”

  In which Frieza does not organize a bunch of working people in an attempt to negotiate for better wages and working conditions, but instead continues his genocide of an entire planet’s rightful population.

  What do we learn about Frieza in this episode? Well, first of all, he is just a terrible boss, straight up. One of his men gets murdered on the other side of the planet, Frieza just laughs it off, that guy was a suck-ass anyway. Two of his other guys get merced earlier that episode, much weaker guys? Frieza points out that his stronger henchmen shouldn’t give a shit anyway, those guys were wussies. It’s obvious from the outset that Frieza is perfectly willing to let you just die if you prove to be weaker than any obstacle that comes along. There’s no point at which Frieza is like, “oh, fuck, my organization is in a heap of trouble if such-and-such dies.”

  Vegeta is well aware of Frieza’s apathy towards his own men, and is more than willing to exploit that. One of the many things that Vegeta uses to his advantage early in his time on Namek is his knowledge of how Frieza’s mind works. He’s not going to send anyone to check on Cui if he seems to have been killed, and even if he does, he’s not going to care much if that person gets killed. Why should he? He’s a god-like monster on the verge of immortality, these soldiers of his, even at their strongest, are just fleas to him.

  As for how Frieza perceives Vegeta? Well, that’s the best trick of all, out of all those that Vegeta pulls. He knows Frieza sees him as no danger at all, due to out-powering him so vastly. Frieza is aware that Vegeta is rebelling against him, is waiting patiently for the day where he gets to show the Saiyan prince a “lesson,” and is focused too much on collecting the dragon balls to have any desire for hunting down his former employee. This, along with the fact that Frieza and his goons are all unable to sense power levels and are thus all but blind without their scouters, whereas Vegeta can sense them wherever they are because they don’t bother to hide their own power levels, makes Vegeta a very capable and dangerous opponent, much more so than Frieza realizes at this juncture.

  And lost in the mix are Krillin, Gohan, Bulma and their ship, which meets a sad death during this episode at the hands of two of Frieza’s weaker goons, mentioned in a previous paragraph. Krillin and Gohan are quick to dispatch the goons after they’ve already done irreparable damage to the ship, and they celebrate briefly before Bulma rightly tells them off for forgetting that, barring intervention of some sort from God or Goku, they are stuck on this planet for at least the foreseeable future. And this is pretty much how these characters are left by the end of the episode, lost on a planet in the depths of space so far away from Earth our own technology can’t get to it in ten lifetimes, their only hope now the dragon balls.

  We have the Vegeta vs. Cui “fight” this episode, obviously, and it’s as gloriously one-sided as I remembered it being. Seriously, starting with Cui, all of Frieza’s minions underestimate Vegeta as a threat, even the ones who are still way stronger than him. Cui’s clearly been spoiling for a chance to fight against Vegeta for a long time, and now he gets to settle their rivalry (?) once and for all. Turns out, he does settle it, just not in the way he wants. Vegeta starts off by powering up so hard that both Cui’s and Zarbon’s scouters blow up, right on their respective faces. That had to smart. To give Cui credit, he at least realizes what he’s dealing with after Vegeta powers up, being the first of many, many of Frieza’s minions who will beg the merciless Saiyan warrior for mercy, which I LITERALLY JUST GOT THROUGH TELLING YOU HE DID NOT HAVE. He even goes for the old “we’ll team up and beat Frieza together,” which is just adorable, both because it’s a fat-ass lie and because even if it weren’t, it would be like two rotten tomatoes striking the haunches of an elephant. You probably wouldn’t even wake it up from its sleep.

  And then—no shit—Cui does the literal “HEY LOOK OVER THERE” and you know something? It fucking works. At least, Vegeta allows it to work, I’m not sure if he actually believed Cui or was just humoring him, but either way, Cui takes the opportunity and fires a sizable energy beam at the prince, seemingly landing a direct hit and wiping Vegeta away for good. Well, I’m sure that’s that, there’s no way he—WHAAAAT? HE SURVIVED?! Yeah, folks, DBZ characters are basically the equivalent of the slasher villain who refuses to stay dead. You have a better chance killing Jason with a machete to the face than you have of killing a DBZ villain with a simple large energy blast, unless it’s at the end of the movie/saga.

  Vegeta brushes off Cui’s attack, Cui runs, gets blasted to death by Vegeta, and there we go, I’ve now mostly run out of reasons to type the word “Cui,” thank fuck for that. With Cui out of the way and Frieza’s men utterly apathetic to that fact, Vegeta can now focus on thwarting Frieza. Knowing that the bastard can’t be everywhere, no matter how powerful he is, Vegeta decides if he can just get one ball before Frieza gets to it, he can stifle Frieza’s plans to gain immortality, and then at that point it’s just a matter of time before he can sneak the others out from under Frieza’s nose. A daring gambit, because in spite of Frieza’s inability to read power levels and the overdependence he has on his men, Frieza is still insanely powerful and more than capable of coercing the ball away from Vegeta by himself.

  This is a solid set-up episode, with enough action in it to justify its existence in the larger tapestry of a DBZ saga. Vegeta blowing Cui off the face of the planet Namek is a quick, satisfying display of Vegeta’s ruthless nature, and is perhaps the first time in the entire series he’s successfully killed a warrior who was fighting back, unless you count the filler from before he and Nappa made it to Earth. In the diametrically opposed sides comprising Bulma’s posse and Frieza’s army, Vegeta is the violent wild-card between the two of them, bouncing back and forth, inconveniencing one and destroying a member of another.

  And all of this set on a strange new land, a literally alien world unlike nothing anyone has dealt with in this series up to this point. Kid Goku and pals never went to outer space. I think the closest they may have come is sending Monster Rabbit and his goons all the way to the moon, where I assume they resided until Roshi blew the motherfucker up later during the World Tournament. Yeah. Dragonball Z may get weird sometimes, but Dragonball was weird all the damn time.

(4/5)

A Few Final Thoughts:

--“Once again, you’ve underestimated your enemy, Cui!”

--I love Frieza’s constant reminders that the power levels Dodoria and Zarbon are sensing don’t even hold a candle to Frieza’s own power. Like, hello, you guys? Frieza takes 24,000 power level SHITS.

--“Looks like the little one is having stomach cramps or something!” Interesting how alien species’ biology continues to be so very similar to ours.

--Apparently if Krillin or Gohan flies around while carrying Bulma, it’ll put out too much energy and the scouter will sense it. Veiled attack on her weight? I’d imagine she hasn’t had much opportunity to exercise, being on that ship for a month straight.

--Oh, and Krillin and Gohan can’t help but notice that Frieza and his dudes are wearing Saiyan armor.

Dragonball Z Episode 44 Review – “Brood of Evil”

 Dragonball Z Episode 44 Review – “Brood of Evil”

  When I rewatched this episode, I was pleasantly surprised to find that we start the episode with the continuation of one of the most boring filler arcs in the show’s history and manage to end it with the introduction of Frieza on Actual, No-Bullshit Namek. I couldn’t remember if there was any filler after this, but I was sure there would be just based on the precedent the Saiyan saga’s seemingly endless filler set. Yet, I sat there happy when the episode ended, ready to get back into the R E A L S H I T.

  I’ll give a brief summation of the end of the bug-man arc. The guys are able to successfully subdue Krillin, Gohan and Bulma long enough to attempt to use the ship, only, hurr-durr, they can’t actually open the ship because they don’t know the password. They steal Bulma’s radar and Bulma gives chase, only to find herself captured by the monsters, at which point Krillin and Gohan—having escaped the octo-monsters, show up and just one-shot both bug-men. The bug-men lament their fate of being stuck on this abandoned hell-planet forever while Bulma and the boys have a fun trip through a vortex, resulting in them ultimately getting to… Planet Namek.

  The planet is somewhat like ours, only greener. Fitting, considering the inhabitants’ collective skin color. The skies are green, the water is green, the people are green—this is basically Space Ireland, and I am stunned that TFS didn’t make that connection when the Namek saga came around. Or, maybe they did, and decided not to go with it. Besides, that would probably get very tiresome, very fast. Ironically, the grass and other vegetation seems to be blue, or more of a greenish blue at least. You know what? It reminds me of the Futurama episode where they go to the weird dimension where everything is almost the same except for the colors of stuff. I think they even had a green sky there, too.

  Even though the planet is so Earth-like, Bulma still wants to make sure the oxygen on the planet—or lack thereof—won’t kill them or be otherwise debilitating. I, personally, think this is a very reasonable thing to do, but what I also have to acknowledge is the same thing Krillin and Gohan quickly discover: every fucking planet in the universe has perfectly good oxygen and we can live there no problem. Naturally. The only other defining characteristic I can say about the planet itself, without getting into the inhabitants or their idea of architecture, is the Takoyaki trees. Or, for the layperson, trees that are basically a tall, thin trunk with a blue-green ball on the top, like a meatball having been speared on a toothpick, dyed green and stuck in the dirt.

  Our heroes get about two minutes to celebrate having landed on Namek before I get to celebrate the best thing about the Namek saga: Vegeta showing up in his space pod and proceeding to, slowly and methodically, unravel everything about Frieza’s machinations. Right now, all he’s doing is showing up, but it’s fucking hype like hearing Stone Cold Steve Austin’s entrance music, with the sound of glass shattering immediately triggering a “FUCK YEAH” Pavlovian response inside one’s mind. God damn, Vegeta is really at his most devious and fun in this saga, and I can’t wait to get into the parts where he just owns bones all up and down the Namekian wilderness.

  With Vegeta showing up—they can sense his specific power level coming off the space pod—and another one following right after it with another strong power inside, the crew is understandably shit-pants terrified. Krillin and Gohan, in particular, must be petrified of the idea that they may face Vegeta again, only he hasn’t been thoroughly tenderized by Goku beforehand. Bulma, of course, is scared because she’s in way over her head, a sensation she should be plenty familiar with. Let’s be honest, if it wasn’t for the fact that Gohan and Krillin know fuck-all about piloting a spaceship, Bulma would be the worst escort mission in the history of anime. Actually, I shouldn’t say that, having not watched that much anime.

  We might as well talk a little about what’s happening on Earth. Well, Goku’s back in the hospital, having been found collapsed in the middle of nowhere, trying to train when his body still hasn’t recovered, thanks to a lack of access to senzu beans, Mystic Water, a healing tank, Dende, or one of fifty thousand other cheat-healers that exist in the Dragonball canon. It’s amazing that a show like this can justify having this much filler, when all the characters can have as many mulligans as they want. Chi-Chi is keeping a watchful eye on her zealous husband, making sure he doesn’t advance the plot too much until he’s out of his assless gown. I kid about the gown, of course; no clothes Goku occupies is assless, because he is an ass, and within the clothes at the same time.

  Roshi, meanwhile, gets a call from a recently frightened Bulma, who reveals to Roshi that Vegeta has already made it to Planet Namek and they are in a world of shit and fuck as a result. She doesn’t word it that way, but if I were here, that’s the way I would have put the point across. Roshi is told NOT to reveal any of this information to Chi-Chi, on account of her being a barely-stable lunatic. The plan now is for Bulma to go back to Earth, pick up Goku, and come back to Namek with him in tow. Because, of course, they have two months to wait around for her to do that, and yes, the show explicitly says that’s how long it’s going to take. Any long-suffering DBZ fan knows how long five minutes is in this universe, now imagine how long two fucking months is going to take.

  I kid, of course. Krillin and Gohan will be dead at Frieza’s hand long before Goku and Bulma make it back to the empty space where Namek used to be.

  Speaking of Frieza, it is here that we get to see him on-screen for the first time, and I’d imagine if there’s anyone left in existence who hasn’t seen DBZ, is interested in seeing DBZ, and sees this character for the first time here, they’re disappointed. Well, let me just say two things: first, if you don’t like villains with pink skin, you are going to be a frustrated motherfucker when we get to the last main arc of Z. Second: the old adage, “never judge a book by its cover,” comes up again and again in this series, with Frieza being a very noteworthy example. I won’t say he’s the BIGGEST example, again thinking ahead to the final arc of Z, but he most certainly defies the expectations we have of what a badass monster man is supposed to be. One thing I can guarantee, by the time you get to see Frieza in action, it’ll no longer be a wonder to you that this guy is the most feared, most infamous villain in the history of this show.

(4/5)

A Few Final Thoughts:

--“Welcome to the armpit of the universe!”

-- For two guys on a completely abandoned shithole planet, they sure are resourceful, able to create a makeshift laboratory and a mind-reading machine. I guess them being shapeshifters is also a stroke of good luck.

--Krillin gets so mad about Vegeta showing up, why by God he just throws his hat on the ground, which amazingly does not burst into flames like when an Aqua Teen Hunger Force character spikes something to the ground.

 

Dragonball Z Episode 43 Review – “A Friendly Surprise”

In which our intrepid heroes discover that they are not, in fact, on the planet Namek.

Of course, by the time we get to that point, we’re so soon after the discovery that the narrator is still like “omgzors, is this not planet Namek after all?????” At that point, you just want to shoot the bastard. The animated medium does not have the capacity for subtle deception, because the characters cannot possibly express with their face and body language as well as actual actors can, so when the show tries to act like they pulled the wool over your eyes the entire time, it just feels embarrassing. And I know what you’re thinking, “why are you even bothering to complain about this?” Well, normally I wouldn’t, because I’m aware of the limitations of this medium. What SUCKS is that this isn’t just a single episode of some animated TV sitcom, this is DBZ FILLER. Not only is it paced the way a sloth climbs a tree, it’s pitched at the level of a fourth-grader, and to boot, you KNOW more interesting shit is coming up and you just want to FUCKING. GET TO IT. ALREADY.

Ahem. But anyway, about the episode…

We have Vegeta having his motivations diverted in this episode to Namek as opposed to any sort of revenge on Earth. This is terrible news for our heroes, when it should normally be great news. Hey, Vegeta’s not going to come blow up the Earth! But he is going to Namek, to confront our heroes, who he doesn’t know are there, and steal the dragon balls, and then probably blow that planet up before going to Earth and blowing it up too. Vegeta finds out about Frieza getting to Namek first and decides, well, fuck that noise, he’s not going to let Frieza get the balls first. As far as he is aware, the dragon balls are the only chance Vegeta has to get out from under his malevolent boss, unless he wants to just keep grinding out experience by blowing up planets.

The fun stuff is Vegeta’s interactions with Cui, because it’s totally an encapsulation of a rebellious, half-interested employee dealing with somebody who is exactly at their level and who is a giant ass-kiss and trying to fill the boss’s shoes. Cui is every asshole cashier or grocery stocker who thinks if they just act like the boss and try to enforce the rules on their behalf, why, the boss will see them as a model employee and maybe give them some actual authority! Which is why it’s all the more satisfying to see Vegeta completely brush him off like the insect he is, a complete toady and a fly buzzing around the heads of people around him. Shitheads like that need putting in their place once in a while, and soon Cui is going to be permanently sent to a very special place. That’s right: the next dimension. But not before he is killed.

Goku’s still training. Goku still shouldn’t be training. Roshi and Chi-Chi are out looking for him. I think Roshi’s able to sense Goku, because he knows exactly where to go to find him. Nothing more to report on this front.

Finally, the fake Namekians spring their trap at the end of the episode, turning into evil bug-like humanoids and the planet from a lush green into a rocky, cold gray/blue. The entire thing was an illusion created by the bug-men, which just makes me wonder why they didn’t use their powers to make their planet look nice and habitable instead of making a group of goobers waste their time gathering fake dragon balls until they were ready to steal their spaceship. Maybe I missed something, but the bug-men never explain why they didn’t just kill the crew and take their ship when they were unconscious. Like, you wouldn’t even have to kill them, if your point was to escape, just fucking leave them there.

I don’t know, whatever. This episode blows.

(2/5)

A Few Final Thoughts:

--“SEE MY FRIEND OVER THERE? HE KNOWS KARATE!” – Bulma, about Krillin.

--Why in fuck do Krillin and Gohan keep forgetting they can fly? This happens all the time in DBZ filler, they have to make these situations extra contrived in order to get any kind of action out of them, otherwise all the super-warriors would just blast through them and carry on. But seriously, you expect me to believe that Krillin and Gohan at this point in the series would be threatened by or unable to run a giant Indiana Jones snowball? Fuck right off.

-- Bulma asks if her frostbitten face will scare Yamcha when she sees him. Little does she realize, by the time she sees Yamcha again, she will be in love with none other than Vegeta.

--Speaking of Vegeta, he’s already figured out that he can sense power levels now. What changed? I don’t know, but he almost doesn’t take a scouter with him to Namek.

Dragonball Z Episode 42 Review – “The Search Continues”

Dragonball Z Episode 42 Review – “The Search Continues”

  This is where the whole Fake Namek mini-arc really starts to take it up the ass, slowly, un-lubricated. The crew, along with the so-called Namekians who are helping them, get into all kinds of nonsense trying to get the remaining fake dragon balls, and it’s so goddamned frustrating to watch, because there are no stakes. We know these aren’t the real Namekians, we know these aren’t real dragon balls, we know the crew is just wasting their time and putting themselves in danger for nothing.

  Like, it reminds me of the Twilight Zone episode, “I Shot an Arrow Into the Air,” where these astronauts think they’ve landed on an alien planet and are hopelessly lost without food or water, and at the end the last remaining survivor climbs up some hill only to find a billboard stating they’ve been in Reno, Nevada the whole fucking time, the ship didn’t even get off the planet. That’s what this feels like, except while that was tragic in its ultimate meaningless, this is just a tiresome slog, because we already know the crew is actually in Reno, Nevada the whole fucking time.

  And yet, what saves this episode from being a waste of time is all the stuff that doesn’t involve Krillin, Gohan and Bulma. The most interesting stuff is happening with Goku and Vegeta. And you guys might as well get used to Goku and Vegeta running the whole show, because spoiler alert, it isn’t going to get old any time soon. Goku is trying to get back into training, even though his body is still broken from his last battle with Vegeta. He can’t really fly, he has some power but when he uses it he’s immediately exhausted, and now he’s actually got Chi-Chi worried as shit. As “tsundere” as Chi-Chi has been with Goku thus far, she really does want him to stay in the hospital until he’s well, and I think what makes her sympathetic in that regard in spite of her piss-poor attitude is that her attitude doesn’t matter to Goku one bit. Like, even if she were the most supportive, loving, caring woman in the world, nothing is going to stop Goku from trying to get stronger and get trained because he knows more battles are coming his way.

  He remembers Vegeta’s words from right before he left the planet, he knows Vegeta is ruthless and capable enough to come right back after he heals and murder everyone he cares about. Chi-Chi doesn’t know this, at least not to the same extent, and her only concern is making sure Goku gets better, especially now that Gohan’s in space. Goku’s all she has now (save for Ox-King), and she has to protect and preserve that. These two characters who love each other are also on extremely divergent paths with polar opposite goals, so we can already see that they’re going to see little of each other in the near future, and that’s pretty sad.

  Speaking of Vegeta, we find him finally waking up from his slumber in the healing tank. When he emerges from that tank at the end of the episode, you can practically hear the Imperial Death March playing in your head. You know that bad news is back and worse than ever, because the Vegeta that has emerged from the tank is far from the same one who emerged from the space pod back on Earth. This is a Vegeta with a renewed sense of purpose, who has seen what it is like to be confronted and defeated by a force that isn’t Frieza, and is willing to channel that humiliation through his rage to make sure he is never beaten so soundly again. Or, in layman’s terms, he’s pissy, and needs to take it out on a few of Frieza’s mooks. He will get his wish soon.

  As much as the Fake Namek arc sucks, it just makes it even more satisfying when they get another dragon ball, and they get about two this episode, which is as grindingly slow as it sounds. They fight a giant ogre and a bunch of strange grass birds this episode, which kidnap them and take them to the castle of said giant ogre. All the while, you’re just having nostalgic thoughts of when there were things happening in the show that weren’t as stupid. I know I made a big thing in the last review of making the Fake Namek arc sound like a harkening back to the days of old Dragonball, and I did, and to be honest, that’s also kind of why I don’t like it. For one thing, without someone like Kid Goku, it just feels empty. Gohan isn’t a good enough replacement, as he doesn’t have his father’s charisma at that age. For another thing, in DB, this wasn’t filler—this WAS the adventure. So it was okay, because we knew it was building to something. This is just a distraction while we wait with bated breath for Vegeta and Frieza to come into play. We’ve been teased with this Frieza guy for a few episodes now, we know Vegeta’s about to make some moves again, and yet here we are, watching this pointless-ass filler. This episode is saved entirely from being a 2 or even a 1 by the sheer fact that Goku and Vegeta are having way more fascinating arcs at the same time, otherwise, fuck this slog.

(3/5)

A Few Final Thoughts:

--“This thing wouldn’t wake up if we screamed in its ear!” You want to wager your life on that, Bulma?

--“We should be able to go home much sooner than I anticipated!” Don’t fucking count on it, Bulma. I can see into your future, and it is full of more filler.

--“ARE YOU READY TO GO HEAD-TO-HEAD WITH A TORNADO?!”