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.
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