Dragonball Z Episode 23 Review – “Saibamen Attack!”

  The Saibamen attack… and they draw first blood.

  I think I mentioned this in one of the earlier entries in this blog, but I am going to give Yamcha a little credit in this series, and my credit begins here. Yamcha showed up to the battlefield ready to fight, and he won. He defeated a Saibaman, going toe-to-toe with it before upping his efforts and giving it a pretty sound ass-kicking. Do Saibamen have asses? I don’t know and I don’t want to. But nevertheless, Yamcha’s death doesn’t happen because he was too weak. He was just too damn cocky, which was a major flaw of his in the original Dragon Ball. He’s not a bad fighter, he’s just a dumb one, and his lack of battle sense is what gets him killed here. Until your opponent is dead, you can’t turn your back on them.

  But let’s back up a tad, shall we? What is going on over at Master Roshi’s place? Chi-Chi and Ox King have made it to the house, and Chi-Chi, upon finding out that Gohan is on the battlefield, faints. She just dead-ass faints. Like some kind of opossum. Is this really the same woman who competed in the most recent World Martial Arts Tournament? For shame. Anyway, yeah, she faints dead away and the rest of the Roshi group watch helplessly on the television, because of course some of these idiot reporters haven’t taken the hint yet. I guess it’s hard to get advice to stay the fuck away when the people most equipped to give that advice had already been killed.

  There is one pretty heartbreaking moment with the Kame House crew that happens not long after Chi-Chi wakes up after the first time. Chi-Chi sees her son on TV, in his little outfit, and she mournfully states that “He’s growing up without me…” I think this is a pretty good window into Chi-Chi’s psyche, and I think I’ve come to understand her a lot better since I started this rewatch. Chi-Chi obviously cares about her son’s studies, but just as important—perhaps even more so—is that she does not want to be separated from him. Obvious, right, since she’s the boy’s mother? But more than that, I think she has this NEED for Gohan not to ever leave her because of what happened to both him and Goku in a single day. It’s going to be very rare in Chi-Chi’s life for both her husband and her son to be with her at the same time after Raditz landed on Earth. She knows full well that the superhero work her Goku does—and what he’s always trying to get Gohan to participate in—is incredibly dangerous and often results in him being gone for long stretches of time, her son too. Goku’s and Gohan’s entire existences are basically the worst nightmares for any well-meaning wife and mother out there. Imagine being married or the parent to someone who could always fail to come home every time they walk out the door.

  As for our young Gohan’s plight, he is still too scared to fight properly, and it is only because there are so many other more experienced fighters on the battlefield that he is able to avoid the Saibamen for the most part. Granted, the more experienced fighters may not be STRONGER than him in all instances, but they have faced terrible odds before—some of them dying as a result—and aren’t shy about facing them again. There’s a key difference between having a lot of power and being able to utilize it in a real fight, and learned experience is something you can never truly learn, even against someone as ruthless as Piccolo. No matter what, they will always pull their punches, and only when a fighter in DBZ is confronted with the real possibility of death can their true ability and talent be unleashed.

  People complain sometimes about Shounen anime having a habit of giving its characters bullshit power-ups or abilities at the last second to get out of a sticky situation where they should logically die. Sometimes those complaints are justified, but sometimes they’re missing the whole point about a narrative arc for a character in a fighting anime, or show, or video game, or whatever the fuck. Nobody knows how strong they really are until they have to either die or dig deep into the most hidden reserves of their power. We’ll see it time and time again with human, Saiyan and Namekian characters alike, with a wide range of results.

  With the Saibamen considered the least threatening thing on the battlefield, Krillin suggests they go along with Nappa and Vegeta’s idea to allow each individual fighter take on one of the Saibamen, with the fights occurring one at a time. This, he argues, will give Goku more time to make it to the fight and the implication is that he’ll save everyone’s asses. This lasts, oh, a single episode, until Krillin remembers that people can die. In the meantime, after Tien, Chiaotzu and Yamcha have united with the other three fighters, Yamcha takes it upon himself to go after Tien.

  As I stated above, Yamcha’s not a very intelligent fighter, and you can count the amount of successes he’s had in the entire series on one hand—hell, maybe on one finger. But you cannot deny the man’s enthusiasm, folks. He came here to get the fuck away from playing baseball and arguing with girls, and he is going to volunteer himself right away. He’s like the young, stupid cadet in the first act of a war movie who gets himself shot and acts as a wake-up call to everyone that, hey, this isn’t fun and games, this is that REAL SHIT.

  And REAL SHIT is exactly what Yamcha gets. The Saibaman he defeated grabs him in a bear hug (Saiba-hug?) and explodes, killing him instantly and producing that iconic image of him crumpled dead in a little crater. Again, it’s not that he wasn’t strong enough or fast enough. He just didn’t understand that this was the big leagues and not batting practice. Krillin kneels beside his dead body. He had originally been the one who would fight the first Saibaman, until Yamcha made his insistence upon being in line after Tien. So not only is Krillin experiencing crushing grief, he also has to bear the guilt of having let Yamcha take his place. “It should’ve been me!” says Krillin through tears, surely knowing that if it HAD been him, they wouldn’t be able to bring him back with the dragon balls.

  Another person being hit by incredible grief is Bulma, who collapses onto Roshi, sobbing. People criticize Roshi for being the pervert that he is, and by no means has that shit aged well, but to Roshi’s credit he doesn’t take advantage of Bulma’s vulnerability. He does, in fact, legitimately try to comfort her, and one wonders how he’s feeling about what he just saw happen to Yamcha. That was one of his students he just saw get blown up on live TV.

  As Krillin continues grieving Yamcha, a voice: “Give them a moment to clear this trash off the battlefield!” And just when we see Krillin’s rage begin to boil over, the episode leaves us on something of a cliffhanger. Is Krillin going to step up where his friend fell? Just how much progress can he make against the Saibamen on his own? Up until this point, the only real combat viewers have seen Krillin in is against Raditz on Roshi’s island, and I don’t need to remind anybody how that went. Is this going to be a repeat performance, or can Krillin finally demonstrate why he’s one of the Earth’s strongest?

  (4/5)

  A Few Final Thoughts:

--Piccolo’s thoughts as Vegeta murders the Saibaman who lost to Tien: “No mercy. Even for his allies. He won’t be taking prisoners. We’re fighting for our lives.”

--Puar’s grieving sounds make me wish a Saibaman would blow her up too.

--“They vanished!” “Nonsense, they’re just moving very fast!”

Dragonball Z Episode 22 Review – “The Darkest Day”

And thus starts the great confrontation.

For starters, Nappa blows up a city, and might I just add, he does so very efficiently. No “one building at a time” bullshit like the Future Androids, which I think makes him simultaneously more dangerous but also more merciful than them, but we can talk about that more later. Vegeta scolds his zealous partner for leveling the entire city, even though he gave Nappa permission to do whatever he wanted to the gawking earthlings, because they’re trying to get the dragon balls, damn it, and suppose one of the balls had been in that very city?! I feel like even this late in the game the dragon ball would probably have survived the blast—and anyway, the thing’s turned into a rock now, so it scarcely matters anyway.

Per Vegeta’s scouter, there are about six people on Earth who have power levels exceeding 1,000. So we’ve at least established that the Z gang has almost caught up with Raditz, assuming his power level is 1,500, which is the highest I’ve heard it estimated by a reputable source. Of course, none of those very high power levels are at Master Roshi’s place, and yet Bulma wants to fly out to see the fight after seeing the report on East City being leveled. Oolong states that’s a terrible idea, Bulma vehemently disagrees, then Roshi steps in to state, no, Oolong has a point, they’d be getting in the way if they tried to even spectate the Saiyan battle, never mind join it. The power creep has officially made it to the point—if it didn’t already during Raditz—where Roshi, once one of the world’s greatest fighters, is no more helpful in a fight than somebody like Bulma. It’s hard to see. It’s going to happen to a lot more characters.

On that note, what the fuck is Yajirobe doing in East City? He kind of just shows up at the same time as the police are starting to arrive on the scene, or what’s left of it. The police inspector, who is of course a talking dog, even suspects that he may have had something to do with the blast. I don’t think there’s any point in the series where we see Yajirobe even throw a single energy wave. But of course, how is the puppy police inspector to know that? By the end of the episode, Yajirobe has tricked a bunch of dumbass reporters into feeding him copious amounts of food, as he has claimed that he is part of the special forces who are fighting the Saiyans. A statement as infuriating as it is prophetic.

I like the scene where Krillin unites with Piccolo and Gohan on the battlefield. Gohan’s really excited to see Krillin, which is weird because they saw each other for maybe a few minutes in the second episode before Gohan was kidnapped by his uncle. What I like, though, is that Piccolo is also excited to see Krillin. Not in, like, a “we’re friends” kind of way, but Piccolo is stoked to see that they’re going to get some backup. Now I’m imagining some kind of hellish alternate universe where the only two people there to fight the Saiyans are Piccolo and Gohan.

Instead, all we get is the hellish ACTUAL universe where the other people who show up to the fight aren’t much help either. Tien sees Chiaotzu as so unhelpful, in fact, that he tries to convince him to stay back and not get involved, even though he was right there with them training throughout that entire year. Now that has to be insulting, to be with the rest of the guys and put in all this effort to become strong enough to beat the Saiyans, only for your best friend to tell you, “yo, sorry, dawg, but you’re too weak to go to Hollywood.” God damn. It’s like being picked last for kickball, only the team leader who’s stuck with you asks if he can just have five players instead of six.

Piccolo finds out in this episode that he’s Namekian. He is given no time to have his existential crisis before the fighting gets started, except for maybe a brief moment of reflection. Somehow, he knows it to be true, even though he’s never even heard of Namek before today, it somehow rings a bell with him. He knows intuitively that it’s his home, and the hook has promptly been set for us to want to go there and see it in the future. We are going to see fucking plenty of it.

It doesn’t take long for the Z gang to find out that Vegeta—maybe not so much Nappa—is not only much stronger than Raditz, he’s also a damn sight smarter. He immediately cottons to the fact that the Earth’s warriors can mask their true power levels, and this is yet another entry in the “why scouters are shit” file. You’d think in such a vast and varied universe as the one in DBZ, they’d find more fighters who can power up instead of just being maxed out all the time, but to hear Vegeta and other, later characters talk, it’s a rare ability indeed.

But enough bullshit! Piccolo wants to get it on, him being Namekian aside, he has no time to dwell on the fact of his species. Race. Whatever you call it. He wants to fight, and he doesn’t particularly give a shit whether Nappa makes fun of their power levels, which are all in the low thousands. Vegeta, however, decides that they should have a nice warm-up. The Earthlings, that is. And what better way to warm up your victims than with some Saibamen? Yes, the cabbage-headed critters with solid red eyes that jitter and screech like hell-monkeys are placed in the ground as seeds and soon emerge as monsters with power levels each comparable to Raditz. It’s just like TFS said: “we can actually grow Raditz!”

The fighting doesn’t get started yet, so this episode is basically Nappa destroying a city, getting scolded, destroying a helicopter—one that has PEOPLE in it, Ocean, you hear me?—and preparing to watch what he thinks will be a quick, amusing battle between our three heroes and the six Saibamen. Oh, and Vegeta’s there, too. But seriously, we’re going to see a lot of the big, dumb muscle that is Nappa, so we might as well get used to that for the next few episodes. As brainless and crazy as the Saibamen are, and those are Krillin’s descriptions directly, nobody beats the steamroller Nappa for brainless and crazy. That dude probably is responsible for more of the gang’s deaths than any other villain yet to be in either this series or the last, and his actions will have ramifications that span through the rest of the series. In fact, it can be said with utter confidence that without Nappa, there would have been no Frieza arc, and without Frieza, no reason for the Z Warriors to be strong enough by the time the Androids show up. So, when you think about it that way, Nappa basically saved all of their lives. Chew on that one for a while.

(4/5)

A Few Final Thoughts:

--“The blueprints for the balls exist in my mind and heart.”

--Vegeta must have a memory like a steel trap. He recognized Piccolo’s voice after hearing only a couple of sentences spoken a foot away from a speaker as small as a thimble that was broadcasting to an equally small speaker on a whole other end of the universe. That space tech must be some serious shit, even though we’ve already established that scouters are inherently faulty pieces of shit that can’t even pull off their primary function of accurately detecting power levels.

--Krillin on the Saibamen: “Well, at least they’re shorter than I am.”

--Much like in TFS, Vegeta comes off as a lot less of a Blood Knight when he acts as Nappa’s babysitter during the beginning of his arc.

Dragonball Z Episode 21 Review – “Counting Down”

Get hype, motherfuckers. It’s time for the Saiyans to arrive on Earth and kill all of us. Or, rather, “us” in this universe.

Heading into the second, bloodier half of the Saiyan arc, and we know Piccolo has been training Gohan for the past six months, but it doesn’t seem to have made Gohan any better at fighting Piccolo at least. We know that Goku has been getting stronger on King Kai’s planet, but we don’t know if he even compares to Raditz, never mind the two Saiyans that are arriving on Earth. We know the earthling fighters have been training consistently, mostly on Kami’s Lookout, but we don’t know where that puts them at all. We have, however, seen Vegeta blow up a planet with a single attack. We’ve seen Nappa simply power up his arm and raise it, causing everything close to him to be decimated. We have no idea how the Z Fighters stack up against power like that. Now, after weeks (assuming one episode per day on cable), we’re about to find out.

But first, we have to wish back Goku. Roshi communicates with Goku through King Kai while he’s on the toilet, telling him to gather up them dragon balls because it’s time to get Goku off of God’s toilet and back home in time to shit on the Saiyans instead. Okay, he didn’t word it like that, but this show reduced itself to poop jokes by having other characters hear Roshi through the bathroom door, so I’m doing it too.

Goku is wished back, but unfortunately has to travel down Snake Way back to Earth’s check-in station, and yes, this is going to take multiple episodes, and yes, that’s absolutely fucking infuriating. I guess even with Goku’s newfound speed, it’d be pretty crazy to have him traverse in like three minutes what took him about nine months earlier in the saga, but PRETTY CRAZY? THIS IS DBZ. We already have motherfuckers destroying entire planets with a single energy blast, is it too much to ask for the sake of narrative development that Goku simply be fast enough to get to Earth in an hour or two?

Oh, but I shouldn’t say that. This is going to be the other, B-tier Z Warriors a chance to shine on the battlefield, and some of them do… a little… not much. Listen, I’m going to level with you—don’t watch this show if you expect anyone other than Goku to make any difference, with maybe a handful of notable exceptions which are quickly overturned. This is still very much the Goku show, and just because he had a kid doesn’t mean the little upstart bastard (not in the literal sense) is going to kick him out of the spotlight too much.

Oolong has a little inspired moment of cowardice when he yells at the dragon to kill the oncoming Saiyans instead of resurrect Goku as was the plan. I’m not sure whether he knows or not that the dragon can’t wish someone back who’s been dead longer than a year, but that doesn’t make much of a shit to him, I’d imagine. I don’t know why the rest of the crew even keeps Oolong around. The dude never seems to exist for any purpose beyond being magnetically attracted to Bulma’s fist through the stupid ass shit he says. And yet, the show STILL has him in it more than Launch, and Launch at least has the interesting gimmick of being two people in one body. You can do something with that! You can’t do anything with a pig that can shapeshift for five minutes! Other than the time he “saved” the rest of the gang during the Pilaf arc by making a wish for Bulma’s panties, he… god damn, look at the first half of that sentence. I need to watch Dragonball again.

The Saiyans’ landing starts off being very unfortunate for Earth, because instead of occurring in a very isolated farm area like Raditz, our two new boys land in the middle of East City, a crowded area with plenty of innocent pedestrians who proceed to gawk and mutter among themselves. “Someone call the cops!” one says. “Yeah, right, what are they gonna do?! They’re just gonna say it’s a weather balloon!” another replies. There would seem to be a healthy mistrust of the police among the denizens of East City. I suppose a bunch of commies WOULD live in a place called East City, with its pagan Eastern culture of questioning authority.

In all seriousness, though, it makes you wonder what our actual reaction would be if two alien spacecraft just smacked into our planet. Two balls-full of evil alien monster might finally unite us as a species. At the very least, I’d like to think it’d unite us as a country. But probably not. The left would try to reason with the creatures, the right would shoot at them, both sides would argue amongst themselves, and eventually everyone would die equally wrong. Then again, I suppose it’s highly unlikely that two aliens would actually be super-powered beings like the Saiyans who can fly, shoot energy beams, return to monke, and have just the sharpest damn haircuts you ever did see, but otherwise look exactly like human beings, save the tails of course.

(3/5)

A Few Final Thoughts:

--I think the animators fucked up or the editors make a mistake or something, because one minute we see Gohan in his mini-Goku outfit, and then it cuts to another scene with him and he’s wearing the Piccolo training clothes he wears to Namek and during the early Android arc. Maybe the show just didn’t think it was important to note Gohan’s change of clothes. We all know Piccolo just used his damn clothes beam anyway.

--Nappa has a sore neck after all the travel! Quick, this is our chance, attack his neck!

--Goku starts to fucking RUN DOWN SNAKE WAY when he leaves King Kai’s planet, until he remembers OH YEAH, MY FRIENDS MAY DIE and starts flying, the daft bastard.

--Piccolo: “Never believe anything the enemy tells you!” “Yeah, but… you’re not the enemy…” D’aww, Gohan. Who could ask for a better morality pet?

Dragonball Z Episode 20 Review – “Goku’s Ancestors”

   And now that Goku has defeated the fastness of the monkey, it is time for him to get a mallet and play a game of cricket. And by that, I mean King Kai has a cricket friend named Gregory that Goku has to strike with a large mallet that, thanks to the gravity of King Kai’s planet, probably weighs around a ton. Gregory states that he, himself, is also a martial arts master, but it becomes apparent really fast that he’s just kept around to be a target for King Kai’s students with their mallets and all. Not that Gregory doesn’t serve a useful purpose, Lord (or rather, Kami, lol, lmao) knows this is some good strength training. It’s just, martial artist? Really?

  The biggest attraction, and the thing that titles this episode, is where Goku gets to learn more about the Saiyans. The way King Kai describes them puts them in a pretty damn unattractive light. Planet Vegeta once consisted of two populations, the technologically-advanced and sophisticated Tuffles, and the Saiyans, who were huge barbarians living out in the wilderness. Eventually, the Saiyans decided they were done living out in the sticks and decided to move out to Beverly, just like the Beverly Hillbillies, only the Saiyans would be more like Killbillies, let’s be honest. No relation to the Tarantino movie.

  With a little help from the moon, the Saiyans drive the Tuffles to extinction, and then find themselves a new tech-sugar-daddy species in the form of the, uh, Arcosians? I just looked that up and apparently I’m spelling it exactly right, so yay me, I know how to parse out the made-up names of outer space tech savants who supply arms to intergalactic pirates. Now that’s something I can put on my fucking resume.

  Goku is less than thrilled with what King Kai tells him about the Saiyans, and the wizened old blue bug-like person-thing has to remind him that he, too, is a Saiyan, and his Saiyan genes are in fact helping him a lot in the course of his training. This is true, but on the other hand, if I had been born German in the 1940s and then found out after all the Nazi shit had blown over that my people had committed genocide not too long ago, it wouldn’t exactly make me proud of my heritage. I can see where Goku is coming from here, even if I do agree his Saiyan genes are the reason he gets so much more out of his training than any of his friends.

  Actually, this is something I haven’t touched on much since the first two or three episodes, and it’s partly because the show misses out on an opportunity to address it; Goku was dealt a major blow to his self-image when Raditz revealed his heritage to him, or at least should have. I guess Goku’s a pretty care-free guy, doesn’t matter to him if he’s a human, Saiyan, purple people eater—as far as he’s concerned, he’s an Earthling, and that’s all that matters to him. Still, you can see a through line from Goku learning that he’s a Saiyan to Goku ACCEPTING that he’s a Saiyan, and it happens over the course of these first two major arcs. This is one of the key episodes where it comes up, and I can think of two others off the top of my head, maybe three or even four, where it comes up again.

  There’s another thing about King Kai’s Annotated Guide to the Saiyan Race’s History that I want to talk about, and it’s a point where I think he’s either deliberately lying his ass off or he’s showing his ignorance. He claims that the reason Planet Vegeta was destroyed was because the guardian of said planet—and of course, every planet is like Earth in that it has a guardian—was so heartbroken and angry by the direction the Saiyans had gone with it, he just plum decided to blow the whole thing up with meteors. We find out in short order that this is a load of shit, and I guess it’s possible that King Kai was taking you-know-who out of the picture so that Goku wouldn’t be compelled to confront him, but it still smacks of early-installment bullshit.

  Anyway, some progress does get made story-wise in this episode. For one thing, Goku is able to dispatch Gregory over the course of one episode so that the proper training can get started. Then there is a scene at the end of the episode where Roshi asks Baba what her crystal ball tells her about the future of the planet. She reports, with great terror, that Earth HAS no future with the way things are standing. Personally, I think Baba’s ball could use some calibrating, or maybe just needs to be swapped out for a newer model, and you’ll find out why I feel that way in future episodes.

  The endgame is coming, and I couldn’t be more excited. Well, I probably could, if somebody gave me a million dollars or something. Hell, a thousand would probably get me more hype than the Saiyans landing on Earth, but you should know by now to contextualize statements like “couldn’t be more excited.” Even the Earthlings are going in an interesting direction; Tien and Yamcha are more or less equal, and they finish up with Kami’s training only for Krillin to suggest they all find someplace else to train until the Saiyans arrive. That’s cool, just to see Krillin, Tien and Yamcha actually getting involved. If I were y’all, I wouldn’t get too attached to it.

  (3/5)

  A Few Final Thoughts:

--At one point during the earthling training sequences, Yajirobe bites Krillin on the ass. Clearly he has not seen Krillin’s fight with Bacterium. He’d know that’s a danger zone.

--Only once every eight years is there a full moon on Planet Vegeta, which I guess is why it took so long for Saiyans to band together and kill the Tuffles. I’d imagine once every eight years, they’d be more inclined to destroy themselves until someone came along and said, “hey, we transform into giant monkeys every eight years, what if we used that to our advantage?”

--Gohan falls off of a cliffside and Piccolo refuses to help him get back up. At least Gohan doesn’t start crying, his tone during the whole incident is more along the lines of, “come on dude help a bro out.”

Dragonball Z Episode 19 Review – “Defying Gravity”

   Here is where we are properly introduced to the great King Kai, who turns out to be a rotund blue bug-like creature with no nose who looks like Krillin ate the Everlasting Gobstopper from Willy Wonka and got turned into a blueberry. It’s actually harder for Goku to believe that the actual King Kai is King Kai, as opposed to the monkey, which he just accepted without much questioning. Hell, he thought Princess Snake was King Kai at first, even though she isn’t even the right gender to be a king. Somehow, I feel like I offended somebody with that sentence. I’m sorry, in advance, if I did.

  Most of this episode is Goku getting started on King Kai’s training. It turns out King Kai is a respected teacher in the martial arts, but his true calling—the thing that gives him the greatest joy—is comedy, and there is no damn way King Kai is going to train Goku until the uppity Saiyan proves that he has a funny bone and he’s not afraid to use it. At first, Goku has a struggle—given the fact that he’s dead and so too will his friends and family be if he doesn’t defeat the Saiyans, it’s no wonder he isn’t sure how to deal with the ultimatum of the legendary King Kai.

  But is our hero deterred? No way! He proceeds, with King Kai’s help in terms of showing what kind of sense of humor he has, to tell some of the worst jokes imaginable! It’s shit like “one sells watches, the other watches sells!” and “you can tune a piano, but you can’t tunaFISH!” Actually, I think that last one was either from the Ocean dub or from later in the Funimation version. Point is, terrible puns are King Kai’s mileau. Honestly, that’s so much more wholesome than Master Roshi, who would have probably demanded that Goku bring him a deaf-mute attractive girl that he can finger against her will without her telling the proper authorities. Somehow, I feel like I offended somebody with that sentence. I’m sorry, in advance, if I did.

  The real first task Goku faces is, he has to catch the monkey. This monkey, which has gotten used to the 10x gravity on King Kai’s planet—which, he points out, is the same as Planet Vegeta’s gravity—is going to evade Goku easily for the very near future, even after Goku tries the task without weighted clothing, which King Kai does not let him repeat after Goku has a meal. King Kai figures Goku will get even more out of the training if he uses the weighted clothes. It’s that sort of ruthless dedication to making everything as painfully difficult as possible that turns a Saiyan like Goku into a real warrior, instead of a crumpled heap of broken bones and “oops” like we would become if we tried to wear, what, 500 pounds worth of weighted training clothes.

  The stuff with Goku trying to keep up with Bubbles is the most entertaining aspect of this episode, and that’s good because it takes up quite a bit of it. The only other thing we see in this episode is another little scene of Gohan and Piccolo training. Gohan is starting to get even with Piccolo power-wise, and instead of being proud or at least cocky that his training paid off well, he now increasingly seems to treat Gohan as a potential rival that needs to be shut down. At least, that’s how he acts in the heat of battle, and a lot of that could just be his own battle instincts. When you stop to think about it, Piccolo is actually not that much older than Gohan, maybe about 5 years.

  Of course, Gohan himself sees Piccolo as his “big green uncle,” a phrase that causes Piccolo to go all tsundere and demand that Gohan go to sleep. This is probably around the point in the show where Piccolo started to feel legitimate affection for the kid, because he really vehemently denies so by scoffing at Gohan’s little nickname for him. I don’t think Piccolo ever realized that friendship and peace was an option, sort of like the Saiyans, which we’ll get to later. It’s one thing for an individual to be born into a neutral or even good society and then become evil by choice, but Piccolo was a product of his father, he barely had a chance. Only because of the unconditional love of a peaceful, happy kid like Gohan could he even gain access to those emotions, never mind choose to feel them.

  I consider this the beginning of the end for the whole training arc. Goku’s at his destination, Gohan and Piccolo are training together, and the dragon balls have been collected. Things are finally starting to come together, and as the Saiyans enter the Solar System, the old shades of excitement from the brief but powerful Raditz arc are returning. I envy the people who are watching this for the first time, if such a group of people even exists, and have no idea who is going to be strong enough to take on the Saiyans when they finally hit Earth. If, indeed, there is anyone strong enough. In the meantime, all we can do is watch a Namekian get closer to his enemy’s child and a Saiyan get closer to a monkey.

(3/5)

A Few Final Thoughts:

--King Kai didn’t even know Goku was a Saiyan! I guess since Goku is anathema to the characteristics of most other Saiyans who ever lived, one wouldn’t assume. That, plus the whole “Planet Vegeta being destroyed” thing.

--Man, am I happy Goku was able to catch the monkey at the end of this episode. That would have been painful if they drug it out like, well, Snake Way.

--I guess Goku’s hunger really does transcend life itself, because even dead the dude just can’t stop eating.

--King Kai states Nappa and Vegeta rank among the greatest fighters in the universe. Speaking as somebody who has seen this show before: bullshit.

--“SOMEBODY STOP ME!”

Dragonball Z Episode 18 Review -- "The End of Snake Way"

   Honestly, I’m tempted to give this episode a 5 just for the title. I’ll always remember the constant running of Goku down Snake Way to be the most tedious filler imaginable. You know Goku’s the motherfucking guy, because you, like most kids who grew up with Toonami, did not watch the series from the very beginning because you just happened to catch it one day after school and now you watch it religiously. You know Goku gets stronger, his friends go to Namek for some reason, the details are vague and hard to put into words, but this Snake Way bullshit just keeps on going when you already know Goku wins!

  So when, near the episode’s end, Goku gets to the end of the path and discovers King Kai’s small planet, we are thrilled collectively. No more pointless fucking running sequences! No more falling off Snake Way and having to start over! No more weird Smurf-snake-princess-monsters to distract Goku from his journey to outclass the Saiyans! Now there is only… a gorilla. A tiny gorilla on the planet that Goku immediately assumes must be King Kai because nobody else is around at the moment. Goku asks it for help in getting some of the blue fruit growing on the nearby tree, struggles with some difficult gravity, and finally, at the very end of the episode, King Kai actually shows up and questions just who the fuck this idiot is who just showed up on his planet.

  Folks, we still have a ways to go.

  Back on Earth, we get another instance of Gohan going ape. This time, it’s courtesy of Goku’s space pod projecting a moon into the sky, a thing that has conspicuously never been a fucking problem before until this moment. I’m sorry, but with some of this filler nonsense, I have to suspend my suspension of disbelief. Does this damn show really expect me to believe that Goku’s space pod just sat there, undetected, for around twenty years until it randomly just decided to shoot a moon into the air because Gohan just happened to be nearby?

  Anyway, Piccolo has to destroy the ship, then he once again has to give Gohan some new duds. At least Gohan seemed to give Piccolo a challenge for the first time since they started to train together. Other than that, we have Bulma and Roshi’s gang hanging out and drinking beer because they gathered up the dragon balls, and quick, too! It’s a miracle they didn’t randomly have to fight some kind of horrible monster or a group of ruthless martial arts masters hell-bent on keeping the magic balls for themselves, but I guess by now the world has run out of those that aren’t firmly in the Z Fighters camp.

  So, all of this is to say, the only remotely advancing thing that occurs in this episode is that, whoopee, Goku’s finally done riding the snake. And all he has to show for it at this point is a monkey and then a blue guy laughing at him. Oh, and some fruit, but hell, he could have stayed in Hell and gotten some fruit. In fact, I wonder how this saga would have gone if, instead of making it to King Kai’s place, Goku had simply trained by himself in Hell until he was resurrected by the dragon balls. I can imagine he would not have had as much luck against the Saiyans.

  In spite of getting off Snake Way, I don’t really care much for this episode either, and it’s starting to depress me to have to give out all of these twos. I was hoping at least a few of the filler episodes would warrant a three or a four, but I can’t do it. I try to convince myself that some of these need to be a three and I just can’t. I promise, once we get to the episodes where there’s some actual fighting, we’re going to start handing out some fucking good scores. I can’t promise they’ll all be fives, but Jesus Christ, they won’t all be twos either. If you averaged out the scores of the last five episodes, you’d swear to God I hate this show, and nothing could be further from the truth.

(2/5)

A Few Final Thoughts:

--Piccolo telling his clone, “Be sure to make a note of that, wouldja?” That’s some good comedy.

--Was the Special Beam Cannon really necessary to blow up the half-destroyed space pod? At least we know now he doesn’t need nearly as long as he once did to charge that attack.

--Okay, how the fuck does Goku know who Isaac Newton is?

--Goku really commits to believing that Bubbles is, in fact, King Kai. When Bubbles starts hooting and walking around, waving his hands in the air like he just doesn’t care, Goku thinks it’s part of the training and proceeds to do the exact same thing. Even with the hooting noises. Our protagonist, ladies and gentlemen.

Dragonball Z Episode 17 Review – "Pendulum Room Peril"

   Now we get to see what the earth-gang is up to, after a decidedly Gohan/Piccolo focused couple of preceding episodes. And just what is it that we learn about our heroes of the same blood, these titans of the human race, Earth’s strongest home-grown fighters? We learn they’re fucked. We learn that they can’t even hold their own 4-to-2 against a couple of weak Saiyans. We learn, if we’re returning viewers, that the humans pretty much were never relevant from the very beginning.

  That’s not to say that they don’t fight valiantly, or that they don’t have their great moments throughout the series, but as far as main fighters go, well, to paraphrase a movie called Dodgeball, “they’re about as useful as a poopy-flavored lollipop.” I think the original line is “dick-flavored lollipop,” but the poopy one is way better. I hope that’s the last time I ever have to type that phrase. Anyway, humans, they suck. You know this because you are human, and you’ve been around other humans, and you have a TV where you can watch the worst humans being just the worst.

  The humans’ experience on Planet Vegeta—which they get to have courtesy of a magic Kami circle that transports them through time and space—is one similar to a nightmare. The kind of nightmare you can still have as an adult, where you’re in a corridor and SOMETHING is coming after you, but no matter how fast you run the SOMETHING is just a little bit faster until you wake up screaming, cold and sweating in the darkness of your room. For all of the power of these humans, able to fire energy beams and fly around, their limitations become very obvious to both them and the audience within seconds of encountering the Saiyans.

  I feel I need to point out what a shitty-looking planet Vegeta is. It’s a complete scrap-heap fucking hellhole. In fact, I don’t think any depiction of Planet Vegeta has made it look like you’d want to live there, unless you’re Oscar the Grouch. The reason for the planet’s abject shittiness will be revealed to the audience, but suffice it to say, the Saiyans know way more about destroying a planet than they do about maintaining one.

  Meanwhile, we do get to see a little bit of Gohan-Piccolo training. It goes exactly the same as every other one of their training sessions until the end of the whole training arc. Gohan gets his ass whooped, Piccolo yells at him for getting his ass whooped, there may be a point where Gohan gets one hit, but then Piccolo just hits him back harder than before. Wash, rinse, repeat. I feel like Piccolo might benefit from teaching Gohan some attacks instead of un-learning him by inflicting repeated blows on his head. Maybe that stuff happens off-screen? God knows we wouldn’t want to show any of that, not when we can cut to Goku going down Snake Way and going “wow this Snake Way sure is long” as he does so. And yeah, in case you were going to ask, that’s pretty much all we see him do this episode. If you showed the last three episodes of this show to somebody who’s never seen DBZ, they’d wonder why the fuck this guy is the lead character, since all he does is run up and down a giant snake-thing and bitch.

  I struggled to think of a reason to give this a three, I really did, because this episode does have a tense battle sequence. But it’s incredibly one-sided and ultimately amounts to, “ha, look how unprepared our heroes are for the battle ahead.” Which, no shit. As for everything else, it’s nothing we haven’t seen already or aren’t going to see more of in later episodes.

(2/5)

A Few Final Thoughts:

--Yamcha, Tien, Chiaotzu and Krillin have a collective fighting power of 1,500. So, hey, if they could all just fuse together and go back in time, they could fight Raditz to a draw! I love power creep!

--One of the Saiyans says, “My grandmother can gather energy faster than that!” And you know what? I bet she damn well could.

--Are there grandmothers on Planet Vegeta? There must be; the guy referenced them. I’m picturing just an old-ass lady in a Saiyan uniform, giving you a toothless smirk as she prepares to throw her dentures at you like an energy blast.

--I swear there’s a mistranslation halfway through this episode, because Yamcha declares that he’s going to use an attack called the Spirit Bomb. Goku hasn’t even made it to King Kai’s planet yet, and Yamcha has already learned the master’s most secret technique? Shit, maybe we’re not giving Yamcha enough credit as a fighter.

Dragonball Z Episode 16 Review – "Plight of the Children"

   Coming off the cliffhanger—or, I guess, drowner—of the last episode, we find that Gohan has washed up on a beach and two kids are poking at what they assume is his dead body. One of them—the boy—puts his ear to Gohan’s chest and tries to surmise his health condition that way. Here’s a real tip, kid: try putting your hand in front of his gaping mouth. If no air is coming out, it means he’s very likely dead. If you feel warm air, the kid is alive so stop fucking with his sword. And, of course, if the kid eats your hand when you put it too close to his mouth, he is a Saiyan and you should run away before he decides the sun looks just enough like a full moon. Gohan, thankfully, takes the middle option. Of being alive.

  This is an episode I do remember from being a kid. I think I watched the Ocean Dub version, and I’m not sure if there are significant differences. I mean, other than the fact that the orphan kids don’t say outright that their parents died in a massive tidalwave. I’m assuming that was a thing in the Ocean version anyway, God knows how many lengths they went to so they wouldn’t have to acknowledge death. To the point where it became a meme, these guys covered their ass. “Good thing that was a cargo plane!” “Maybe you won’t be such a disappointment in the next dimension!” “Too bad it was Sunday and all of the people had left the city,” even though there were CLEARLY FUCKING PEOPLE THERE.

  Ahem. Anyway. I do remember this episode, because it’s a pretty simple and relatable premise for a young kid watching the show. Group of kids seem to have their own little society going, including their own protector in the form of a teenager named Pigero. That name just makes me imagine a fusion between Piccolo and Oolong, and the fact that I can’t visualize that both relieves and disappoints me.

  So Gohan squats with these kids for a little while, fending off against these employees from an orphanage that want to kidnap them and make them live unpleasant lives or something, I forget their justification for fighting them, just pretend it’s Spongebob and the kids will be forced to read old magazines. The kids don’t want to be captured, so there. Not even the one woman with the orphanage group can convince these kids to come with them, and you know, it’s fucking probably because the guys she’s working with come out with fishing nets and baseball bats and shit, trying to beat them into submission. Jesus fucking Christ, there’s being a social worker and then being an ANTI-social worker.

  Gohan also helps the kids rob fruit stands and eventually reveals to them that he himself is not an orphan, which, they don’t give a fuck. He could have just told them from the beginning, he washed up on their island, what reason do they have to believe his parents are dead, right? They ask him what it’s like to have parents, as if this tidalwave had happened years ago and somehow they were still alive. Hell, who knows, maybe the show totally expects us to believe that. It all comes to a head when the Child Police show up again and successfully capture the children, which Pigero decides not to prevent because he suddenly remembers, oh, yeah, it takes about 10 years for these “kid” things to become adults and he doesn’t want to have to take care of them the rest of their lives. Well, his actual justification is that they need real adults to take care of them, but ehhh, I like my head-canon better.

  The shining moment that makes this episode even remotely worthwhile is when Gohan gets Pigero to give him a ride to his mom’s house. This is the chance—he can get away from the clutches of Piccolo and live in the comfort of his mother for the next few months. He starts to go toward the house, but he stops. If he goes back home, his mission to help defeat the Saiyans ends, and the likelihood of their defeat increases. So he does something that has to fucking hurt for a small child, even one with Saiyan blood: he walks away, with the knowledge that even if he survives, it’ll still be months before he ever gets to see his mom again. Gohan reunites with Piccolo in the woods, and Piccolo reminds him of his mission. Something tells me he didn’t need that.

(2/5)

A Few Final Thoughts:

--We now enter the “daily beatings” portion of Gohan’s training.

--The lady with the Home is voiced by Chi-Chi’s voice actress, and if you didn’t know that, it’s because you haven’t heard her speak because it’s literally the exact same voice. In fact, Botan from Yu Yu Hakusho is also voiced by Chi-Chi’s voice actress, and does the same voice for all three of them. That always trips me out, man.

--Chi-Chi once again is at home alone, thinking about Goku and Gohan. She apparently has absolutely nothing to do without them.

Dragonball Z Episode 15 Review – "Dueling Piccolos"

   So the reason this episode is called Dueling Piccolos is because Piccolo uses the multi-form technique to replicate himself and then they proceed to have a duel with Yu-Gi-Oh cards. Okay, that’s not actually the reason, but for all he ever gets accomplished doing this shit, that may as well be what it is. I can’t imagine the utility of training against an exact copy of yourself. Is it some kind of ancient mysticism bullshit? “You must know yourself before you know your enemy.” I fail to see what you could learn from what is basically a step above shadowboxing. I guess if you’re analyzing what your other self does, you know what your weaknesses might be as a fighter and you can create counters to them? But that doesn’t make much sense because the multi-form Piccolo seems to have the exact same brain as Piccolo, so wouldn’t he know he’s trying to outsmart himself before he tries to do it? The whole damn thing makes my head hurt.

  While Piccolo does his weird “my own worst enemy” shtick, Gohan has decided to built himself a little raft and sail across to a distant island in hopes of finding—well, he’s pretty much decided to go home now. He is accompanied by his good buddy the tiger, who more or less keeps its distance until Gohan notices it and starts fucking with it all over again. You have to admire that tiger’s gumption, it’s not like the T-Rex, which has just given up entirely. Although, the tiger may well change its tune if Gohan starts to lop off pieces of its tail and eating them. That’s almost worse than being murdered and then eaten, isn’t it? Having a piece of yourself removed and then watching someone eat it, knowing that in mere hours your body part that you’re never getting back again is going to pass through some being’s digestive system. Gives me the willies.

  If it sounds like I’m rambling to fill up space, I honestly am. There’s like no progress made whatsoever in this episode. Goku’s still on Snake Way, Gohan’s still just jackass-ing around in the wilderness with animals that want to kill him but can’t, Piccolo’s training, and… the other characters don’t even make an appearance in this episode, I don’t think.

  Oh, but wait, there is one character who returns! It’s Chi-Chi, and she’s actually really depressed and upset. I did wind up feeling really, really sorry for her in the one scene she’s in. She acts more bratty than anything to her father, but it’s clearly coming from a place of huge emotional distress. Think about it; she lost her husband and son in one day, one of them killed, the other one kidnapped by her husband’s worst enemy. For all she knows, she’s never going to see either of them again. Goku may be killed fighting the Saiyans, Gohan may die to Piccolo before the Saiyans even show up. Everyone likes to pick at Chi-Chi for being annoyingly protective of Gohan and dismissive of Goku, but it’s kind of natural for a mom to worry about the prospective of her not even five-year-old son fighting intergalactic planet pirates whose weakest ranking member murdered her husband. Just sayin’… or Saiyan, whatever.

  The episode ends on a cliffhanger, if you can even call it that since even someone who has never seen this show before in their lives probably knows that nothing’s going to happen to any main character yet. They aren’t going to build up to Gohan and Piccolo training to fight the Saiyans only for one of them to die to a dumbass hurricane. I will say, I think this is the first legitimate (sorta) cliffhanger the show has had since the Raditz mini-arc. As diminished as its effectiveness here is, I guess the showrunners had to try something, because so little happens this episode that they needed some kind of hook to keep kids watching in case this was their first ever episode of the show. God, could you even imagine?

(2/5)

A Few Final Thoughts:

--I was damned close to giving this a one, and I’m still wondering if I should. I’m not giving scores out by decimal point, but if I were, this definitely would qualify as a 1.5.

--It’s weird how Mr. Cat seems to have legitimately developed a kind of fondness for Gohan. Maybe the cat is an illustration of Piccolo’s feelings toward Gohan and the way those are developing? Nah. Probably just the English major in me trying to burble out.

--Piccolo’s refusioning of his two halves looks painful, to say the least.

--What happens when one Piccolo kills the other?

--Best part of the episode is Goku complaining that he wasted too much time at Princess Snake’s lair. Hey, the feeling is fucking mutual, friend.

Dragonball Z Episode 14 Review -- "Princess Snake"

Shit, I didn’t remember these episodes coming on one right after the other. The two famous filler pieces involving Goku on Snake Way are the Princess Snake incident—shown here—and the Goz and Mez episode right before.

The episode opens with the floor-cleaner falling into Hell. Whoops. To be fair, he was a shoddy driver. That’s something you can’t be when you’re driving on Snake Way, man. That’s like being a tight-rope walker with vertigo. Anyway, Goku ends up at what he thinks is the end of Snake Way but is actually a head that eats him and then he’s at a two-story home with some blue, I don’t know, imp-women working there, hanging laundry. This show’s fucking weird sometimes. He hopes to God, no pun intended, that this is King Kai, only to be shut down when he finds out it’s only a different blue character who shows up a few times but is otherwise barely relevant.

It's pretty obvious from the outset that Snake has some bad intentions, but she lets on as a damn sweet, hospitable lady in the meantime, giving Goku a buffet of his own, a bath in some hot springs, a bed—but that’s where he refuses. Now that he knows Snake isn’t King Kai, he’s raring to get the hell out of dodge and get to King Kai’s so he can train for the Saiyans. Snake does her best to keep hold on him, even putting drugs in his fucking soup, but eventually Goku cottons more or less to what is happening here. Next thing you know, our intrepid hero is being chased around Snake Way by—get this—a huge fucking SNAKE.

Remember when I said this show was weird sometimes? Yeah.

So while the main plot of this episode wanders off into goddamned La-La Land, we have some sparring going on at Kami’s Lookout, where Kami all but says that the humans might have a lot of spirit, but they are nowhere near ready for the shit that’s about to go down when the Saiyans arrive. And isn’t that just the sad, sad story of the humans in the DBZ franchise? I can probably count on one hand their accomplishments after the Saiyan saga. Most of the great warriors after that are Saiyan or Namekian, and the latter even falls short eventually. I guess if you count (some of) the Androids as partly human, you have a counter-argument, but guess who else eventually falls out of the power scaling? Hint: they rhyme with “mandroids.”

Remember when I said this show was weird sometimes? Yeah.

What else…? I mean, Gohan finds Piccolo doing some more psychic rock-floating out in the middle of nowhere. Honestly, a few pebbles being kicked up into the sky and shit aren’t nearly as impressive as entire pyramids being lifted from the Earth with nothing but the sheer will of one green man. I guess the point is more about Gohan happening upon him for once instead of the other way around. Gohan really knows so little about Piccolo at this point. I have to assume Goku told him nothing about his former arch rival, he’s not ready for that kind of information yet. So all Gohan’s left with is the fact that this green asshole is capable of performing seemingly impossible feats, and he didn’t stand a CHANCE against Raditz. For anyone adult-aged or, hell, even a teenager, that would be incredibly daunting. Gohan, meanwhile, probably just wants more of that delicious dinosaur tail-steak.

I have decidedly mixed feelings about this episode. Part of me almost wishes that Princess Snake wasn’t some monster in disguise, it would be a lot more interesting if she really was some weird, lonely princess out in the vast expanse Snake Way covers, managing to find love in this very rare man who seems to have the compassion and courage of his convictions not to fall for her, which only makes her even more interested in him. Up until the point where she literally does try to eat him, the episode would still be the same event-wise, but there would be more emotional weight to them. Of course, this being DBZ, a villain is not afforded such nuance—but wait, the show preceding this one had plenty of antagonistic characters who turned out to be trying to do what they thought was right! I mean, they’re usually minor one-episode characters, but they still count!

Eh, whatever. This is still a decent episode, the Princess Snake plot is fun if a little repetitive, and it’s nice to see the humans get into a little bit of their training, fruitless as it may be. These episodes evoke their own sort of nostalgia. Everyone knows DBZ as that show where the big, glowing muscle guys pound the living hell out of each other and shoot beams that inflict no damage, causing all the spectators to gape in open-mouthed shock. But the fans who were around when this show was airing in limited quantities on Toonami, in late-night anime blocks or in after-school slots, also remember it as the show where they might tune in and see a strange snake woman try to eat Goku up in Heaven, or they might see a showdown between the two most powerful warriors in the universe, or they just might see two otherwise powerful beings trying to master the seemingly mundane task of driving a car. Whatever it may be, it’s damn sure entertaining and engaging for a kid, and the nostalgia value it has for that same kid 20 years later is beyond what words can express.

(3/5)

A Few Final Thoughts:

--Even a literal snake woman is revolted by Goku’s eating habits.

--We get a nice little shot of Goku’s ass this episode. And by “nice,” I mean I never want to fucking see that again.

--I completely forgot that Goku turned out to be IN the snake the entire time. That just makes what he could have possibly eaten as Princess Snake’s big meal far more disgusting and questionable.

--They actually time-skipped like three months since the last episode. It simultaneously feels like a really long time and not even nearly enough.

--I can’t see Princess Snake without hearing the Snake voice from TFS in my head. Especially when it gets to the “bear hands” scene.

--Goku calls a woman “cute.” Somewhere on Earth, Chi-Chi feels a deep, unexplained rage in her gut, which she takes out on her dad.

 

Dragonball Z Episode 13 Review -- "Goz and Mez"

I know I’ve been bitching a whole lot about filler, and I think it’s justified. The worst filler just makes you watch characters you’ve already established in your mind dealing with contrived, silly situations that make you wonder why you’re wasting your time in the first place. This, of course, is exactly that, except for the fact that it’s very entertaining, because it introduces us to Goz and Mez. This is a perfect little filler DBZ episode because it has that sort of Three Stooges vibe that makes the wackiness inherent in the premise just worthwhile enough to carry 23 minutes of episode.

Goku is still trying to figure out where he is, and if the Hell-pfull “Hell” shirts that Goz and Mez, the two blue and red ogres (respectively), are wearing don’t solve the mystery enough, I don’t reckon anything will. Goku has to figure out a way to get out of Hell by the end of this episode, lest he risk being mired too much in Filler Hell, which is where we’re at right now but he isn’t because he’s the cause of the filler in the damn first place. In all seriousness, of course he needs to get out of Hell to get back on Snake Way before it’s too late for him to make it to King Kai and save his friends from sure destruction.

Goz is the strong one, and he challenges Goku to wrestling, which he promptly wins. The exit from Hell Goz had promised him if he won turns out to be a seesaw that catapults Goku almost high enough, but not quite. I don’t know why Goku doesn’t just fly—he already demonstrated that he could do that during his fight with Raditz, and probably sometime in DB before that. Filler plot-holes are, thankfully, the most excusable plot holes. Mez, on the other hand, is much more about that speed, so he challenges Goku to catch him. A little sneak peek into what Kai’s training is going to be like. Actually, shit, maybe this little diversion into Hell actually helped him get stronger.

It should be noted at this point that the ogres themselves are pretty great. They aren’t overtly evil so much as they are mischievous and clearly very bored. Neither of them were expecting Goku to give them this much trouble, but they were clearly expecting to give Goku some trouble themselves to begin with. It’s weird how non-malicious they are. A crueler, edgier hell would have had the demons trying to subdue and subject the hapless Saiyan to all kinds of exotic and delightful tortures, but these guys kind of just want to play sports with him. Given how many truly evil, sick characters show up later in this series, it seems unlikely that Hell would be this pleasant, but I’m willing to give up my suspension of disbelief for this particular filler episode. I guess it just means I’m in a generous mood.

What’s going on with the other characters? Well, we have Tien and the rest of his crew traversing the tower of Korin and Kami to begin their training with the latter. Launch, of course, tries to follow him up, and of course she threatens the Native American expies Bora and Upa in the process, but Bora subdues the nutty bitch long enough for her to sneeze due to a decorative feather on his outfit tickling her nose. Blue Launch returns, and then leaves, and by the grace of God we will not see her for a long time. Again, it's not even that she’s a bad character—she’s a USELESS one. The showrunners clearly have no idea what to do with her.

Gohan, meanwhile, is now fucking with (presumably) the same saber-toothed tiger that was chasing him in the very first episode. The tiger actually gives up chasing him at one point, and Gohan picks up a piece of cat-grass and starts waving it in front of the thing’s nose, pissing it off and making it chase him all over again. This has to be some of the Saiyan side of Gohan coming out—this kid is actively fucking with something he knows will make him run for his life, provided he isn’t already strong enough to kill it at this point in the show.

Goku does manage to catch Mez, only to be told that the exit to Hell is literally just some far away mountain with a big crack running down the middle of it. Goku steals a big piece of ass-shaped fruit before he leaves, eating it right in front of Goz and Mez before taking off up the stairs back to… King Yemma’s desk. He has to fucking start all over again. The mountain crack may as well have been an ass-crack preparing to shit in the viewers’ collective faces.

Overall, though, not the worst of the filler episodes, inasmuch as I suppose there COULD be good or bad filler episodes.

(3/5)

A Few Final Thoughts:

--Goku drives in this episode! Granted, it’s a go-kart instead of a proper vehicle, but it’s a taste for what’s to come FAR from now.

--I like how the ogres are basically, “we will never speak of this again” after Goku totally owns them.

--Today’s episode offers us another example of Goku failing to fly, even though he’s supposed to be able to at this point in the series.

--I forgot that Bora was voiced by Dameon Clarke. He sounds just like Younger Toguro.

--Where can I get a snazzy “HELL” shirt like those demons are wearing?