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.”