Dragonball Z Episode 11 Review -- Terror on Arlia

 

Dragonball Z Episode 11 Review – “Terror on Arlia”

Okay, this is the episode I remember.

I have this weird habit of imagining overpowered characters showing up in universes with less powerful fighters. I’ve had it ever since I was a little kid, but it’s become a lot more reasonable since then. Take recently, for example—my roommate basically was the reason I sat through Avatar: The Last Airbender twice, which, don’t get me wrong, that’s not a bad show in the slightest, but it’s also not necessarily on my wavelength. I don’t really care about Eastern mysticism, Shakras and all that bullshit, and the show became full of that sort of thing at times. Thankfully, there was enough stuff in there that I could latch onto so I wasn’t bored. I was merely… I don’t know, it just wasn’t the kind of show I would have pursued on my own. As I was watching it, I was just imagining like, Younger Toguro or Mercenary Tao showing up and bulldozing all these scrubs to the fucking ground. It’s stupid, I know, those characters wouldn’t fit at all. I guess it’s sort of a “Death Battle” thing, where people deliberately mismatch fighters from different franchises to prove an immature point about how OP their favorite hero/villain is. I swear, I mean no disrespect towards ATLA. I’m just a hopeless nerd with a bias toward big, powerful killdozer-types from my childhood.

Anyway, the point of this is that Nappa and Vegeta showing up on Arlia and just fucking wrecking everything is the sort of thing I imagine when I come up with those mismatch scenarios. Internally, DBZ does this all the time, with the most noteworthy example being Frieza, but we’ll get to that when we get to it. Nappa and Vegeta treat the Arlians as nothing but sport the entire time they’re there, and as awful as it is to see them blow up the planet they just got through liberating, it’s pretty hilarious too. This episode perfectly illustrates just what is so threatening about Nappa and Vegeta. You couldn’t imagine Raditz one-shotting an entire planet the way Vegeta did, and he doesn’t even seem winded.

Plus, we don’t see Nappa and Vegeta murdering innocent beings, for the most part. The new King of Arlia is just as ruthless a bastard as any Saiyan. The first thing that happens to Nappa and Vegeta upon their arrival to Arlia is them being arrested and held in an Arlian prison for the crime of, I guess, trespassing. Hell, a King doesn’t need a reason to arrest someone, so “just cuz” is as good a reason as any. Some other prisoners, who are actually Arlian, inform the Saiyans that the king is a murderous dictator who is marrying one of their ex-fiancees against her will, not to mention making her watch as he forces Arlian warriors to battle each other for sport and throwing them into death pits when they lose. Not a good guy, which just makes Nappa and Vegeta demonstrating their horrific power against them feel less like a genocide, even though it still technically is.

On Earth, things are progressing smoothly. Gohan has pretty much become the master of his domain (not in the Seinfeld sense, don’t be gross). He’s gone from being afraid of that giant T-Rex from the beginning of his stay here, to trying to fight it unsuccessfully, to being able to not only defeat it, but lop off pieces of his tail to eat as dinosaur steaks. You start to feel a little sorry for the dinosaur, until you remember that this is nature, and the asshole was trying to eat Gohan and still is. Besides, Gohan’s not killing him or even mortally damaging him. Just a little tail meat, is all. Piccolo looks on at this with pride. He's mastering his training. His training of being left outside to almost die a bunch of times. Man, could you imagine how fucking mad Goku would be at Piccolo if his kid got eaten by a T-Rex on the first day?

We don’t get Tien this episode, but we do get Launch, who attentive viewers may recall as the woman with two personalities that she switches back and forth on every time she sneezes. If you do recall her, congratulations, you officially care more about this character than Akira Toriyama, who pretty much lost all recollection of her existence by the time the Saiyan saga ended. She was always a useless, vestigial comedic character, and I honestly can’t remember her doing anything of value during the original show. She was always just kind of there, existing as a joke character, getting in the way but ultimately just wasting screen time that could have been devoted to the important characters. It wasn’t so bad in early Dragonball where there wasn’t a whole lot of plot in the first place, but by the time Z rolls around and our protagonists are faced with their biggest existential threat thus far, Launch’s existence can’t really be justified anymore.

In any case, we have us here a really solid episode. Maybe the last truly interesting one until we get to the Saiyans’ arrival on Earth. We can infer from the behavior on Arlia that these Saiyans don’t fuck around, and we’ve seen the first outright destruction of a single planet by a character. Vegeta establishes the baseline power level necessary to destroy a planet as being 18,000, and even as other characters—including Vegeta himself—surpass that number by leaps and bounds, no one makes blowing up a planet look easier than Vegeta does right there. I’m not sure if the showrunners knew that Saiyans weren’t supposed to be able to breathe in space, but that minor plot snaggle is easily overlooked. This is an important milestone in this series, where the danger is no longer from a King Piccolo-type wanting to simply conquer the world, to a race of intergalactic pirates more than willing to destroy a planet with a single terrible beam. And this is only the very beginning of Z. The power creep is just getting started.

(4/5)

A Few Final Thoughts:

--Apparently Vegeta can communicate with Nappa via telepathy. I don’t think this ever comes up again.

--Of course the King of Arlia believes Nappa is stronger just because he’s taller.

--Vegeta: “Of course, it’s the old ‘giant-bug-in-the-ground’ trick.”