Dragonball Z Episode 40 Review – “Held Captive”

  Okay, I can forgive this one a little more because, outside of the whole orphan plot, there are a couple pretty cool things about this filler. If I may get just a little AVGN-esque over here, sometimes you have to dig through the shit to find the kernels hidden within. You still don’t want to EAT those kernels, of course, but… uh… this metaphor isn’t working. Let’s just move on.

  The heroes eventually convince the orphans, after performing feats of selflessness such as saving a large group of the kids from some falling debris, that they aren’t working for Frieza. As I said in the last review, trauma aside, these kids are fucking idiots for just believing that these three people not wearing Saiyan armor and not flying a ship that looks like one of Frieza’s are working for Frieza, but let’s push that aside. Once the orphans start to trust our heroes, they regale them with the tale of how Frieza’s men showed up and basically murdered all of their families. Which brings me to a point: apparently Frieza sucks at finishing the job, because he habitually murders kids’ families but then leaves the kids alive. Like Goku, for instance!

  It’s unfortunate that, after our heroes save a lot of the orphans and eventually gain enough of their trust that they repair the ship for them and allow them to go their happy asses to Namek, said heroes don’t stick around long enough to listen to the lead orphan advise them about the fake version of Namek they’re going to run across if they keep going the path they’re going. A shortcut that would have saved them several days, 10 to be exact, lost to the void of space. Well, at least Bulma’s back on the ship now and can put some proper clothes on over her gray underwear. You’d think somebody as vain as Bulma would bring some undergarments that aren’t just gray bullshit, but then again, it’s not like she’s going to Namek to meet a man, and she sure as shit isn’t interested in either one of her traveling companions.

  How is Vegeta doing? Well, apparently his tiny little space pod has some kind of life support system built in. I’m just picturing a tube filled with oatmeal and Laudanum being injected directly into his body. Do Saiyans have Laudanum? Probably not, and if they did, you’d be considered a pussy by all the other Saiyans for using it. Anyway, he makes it to the Frieza planet he was headed toward, at which point Frieza’s men, thinking that Vegeta is still loyal and/or important to Frieza, immediately get him into a healing tank. Now, you may recognize the healing tank as being the frustratingly slow piece of shit that made it to where Goku couldn’t make it to the final battle with Frieza on Namek until said Frieza had already tortured Vegeta to near-death, but if you’re new to this series, hi, I hope I didn’t spoil anything for you.

  We get introduced to good ol’ Cui in this episode. You may recognize Cui as-ahahahah, sorry, I couldn’t keep a straight face on that one. The only thing anybody anywhere in the known universe will ever recognize Cui as is a fish-lipped piece of fodder with holes in his head that make it to where his stupid brains leak out of them and that’s why he’s stupid enough to immediately get killed by Vegeta the second the dude lands on Namek. We’re going to get more into Cui’s death scene later, but man is it satisfying. This guy is a toadie in the worst possible sense. A literal fucking toad would be more sympathetic than Cui.

  Goku’s fear of needles also makes an appearance this episode. Actually, it might be the first time it ever appears in the series, but since I haven’t gone back and watched old Dragonball since around 2013, I don’t remember if it appears in the prequel series. Chi-Chi totally gives him grief over it too, the bitch. Yeah, I’m still calling her a bitch, I don’t give a fuck, nobody reads these reviews anyway, and if you do, I defy you to come up with some kind of defense for her behavior over the past several episodes. No, seriously, I want your episode 5,000-word essay on why Chi-Chi is totally justified in acting like Goku is some shit smear she can flush down the toilet, and it BETTER not use her grief and trauma for Gohan’s sake as an excuse, because that’s only understanding it, not excusing it.

  So, the orphan kids are actually traveling to a planet their own former planet used to trade with. They’re hoping for a new home, even if it takes years to get there. In the meantime, I suppose they’re just going to hope by some miracle that one of Frieza’s actual goons doesn’t show up and merc them all. That tends to happen in this part of the show, since Frieza controls like half of the universe. We never see the orphans again, and that shouldn’t count as a spoiler since none of these characters have the depth necessary to justify them as new members of the permanent cast. And this is the cast of DBZ we’re talking about, not fucking Better Call Saul or something. Anyway, hopefully they made it back to their (new) home planet, but if they didn’t, well, they probably got revived by the dragon balls anyway.

(3/5)

A Few Final Thoughts:

--One of the goons who helps Vegeta into the healing tank wonders what happened to Nappa. I wonder if there’s any regulation against somebody who isn’t Frieza murdering their partner.

--Oh, and the gang makes it to Fake Namek, or whatever.

-- I’d like to know how the fuck these kids are feeding themselves. Yeah, I bet there are a lot of kids who were originally with that group who… aren’t now.

Dragonball Z Episode 39 Review – “Friends or Foes?”

   Okay. We’re deep in Filler Hell right now. Or is it purgatory?

  These next few episodes are going to be about Bulma, Krillin and Gohan—henceforth known as “the crew”—getting into some adventures in outer space. Will there be romance, intrigue, danger? Well, no, no, and yes, but not in a particularly exciting way. Truthfully, I don’t like this two-episode mini-arc. I find it to mostly be tedious exposition with bland one-off characters existing just to introduce the villain of the next main arc without giving their appearance away and spoiling the mystery.

  Bulma is basically throwing her trash hither, thither and yon while going about in her underwear, while Krillin and Gohan do “image training,” where they each create a mental doppelganger of themselves and battle it out. This way they won’t damage the ship by accident. At least, that’s what I believe to be the justification. Anyway, the crew’s ship is then stopped by another, much larger spaceship that also happens to be camouflaged and has a reflective surface that causes the crew to think that they’re about to crash into another Namekian spaceship at first.

  The rest of the episode is pretty much just the crew entering and exploring this other ship they’ve found, with cuts to a couple of other things. One of those things is Vegeta also traveling through space, still severely wounded after his battle on Earth. He’s on his way to one of the Frieza Planets, of which there are a LOT, so he can get healed up and go from there. It’s safe to say Vegeta wants revenge, but we know he also wants the dragon balls, so if he can’t get them on Earth anymore, he knows where he CAN. Neither party knows they’re on a collision course with the other, so I look forward to that in the not-too-distant future.

  Back on Earth, Goku is giving the staff at the hospital a pretty hard time. He’s healed up enough to start doing some exercises, within reason, and the nurses are all begging him to stay in his bed and relax. Goku must be insanely frustrated, because I think this is the first time he’s ever had to take his time to heal, rather than being healed with a senzu bean or something else magical. Even when Mercenary Tao and King Piccolo whooped the shit out of him, it didn’t take much time, if any at all, to recover. The beating he took from Vegeta was special, because unlike Tao and (to an extent) King Piccolo, Vegeta took his time and really enjoyed the pain he was inflicting on Goku. The villains in this show are much more sadistic in their evil, as opposed to simply functional, and Goku’s about to find out his approach of giving villains a chance to redeem themselves doesn’t always work out like it has in the past.

  So, the crew finds a bunch of orphans on that spaceship they ran into, and said orphans have their guns trained on all of them, convinced they’re members of Frieza’s army. Even though they’re not wearing Saiyan armor, act nothing like Frieza’s goons, and don’t even try to fight back seriously when threatened, these kids—who, to be fair, have gone through a great deal of trauma—won’t let them go. And with Bulma tied up by some strange rope-using drone, Krillin and Gohan can’t get to her fast enough to dispatch the guys who have guns fixed on her, even though I’m pretty sure they both can fucking travel faster than the speed of light.

  Anyway, whatever. Anyone watching this, unless this is their very first episode, knows that these guys aren’t going to be killed before they get to Namek, especially not by these randos. We’ll just let the show entertain itself while we, I don’t know, play Parcheesi? I don’t even know what that game is.

  (2/5)

A Few Final Thoughts:

--How is it that Roshi is allowed to stay in this hospital when he keeps assaulting nurses? Seriously, that one nurse he groped this episode looked fucking appalled, I actually felt bad for her. You don’t normally see Roshi’s victims have such realistic reactions. Bulma usually just bops him on the head, so does pretty much any female character, and then everyone just forgets about it, but I feel like that poor nurse is going to need to see a therapist. And no, not Roshi, his door says “The Rapist.” Big difference.

--A lot of my notes for this episode were just me documenting the crew going through a bunch of doors on the orphan’s ship. It got really tedious after a while.

--The room they wind up trapped in had a big meal on a table to lure them in. Is this Princess Snake’s ship?

Dragonball Z Episode 38 Review – “Nursing Wounds”

  I’m impressed at the speed with which the three space-travelers actually start to travel to space, and I probably shouldn’t be.

  Krillin, Gohan and Bulma become the dream-team this episode, and will remain as such for the next, oh, a million or so episodes? I’m serious, these motherfuckers are hanging out forever, especially the duo of Krillin and Gohan. Show of hands, and be honest, how many of y’all didn’t even realize Krillin was a fully grown man and Gohan was the only child in the group when you first caught the Namek saga of DBZ? Provided it was the first time you ever watched it, of course. Maybe, if this blog ever gets any readers, you can even leave a comment or two!

  Gohan makes a full recovery way before Goku does, for pretty obvious reasons. Gohan definitely did not get manhandled and tortured by a giant ape in Saiyan armor, but of course, Chi-Chi is still way more concerned with Gohan than she is with Goku. On one hand, Gohan IS a child, and way less equipped to handle battle trauma than Goku is. On the other hand, fuck you, Chi-Chi, you’re a terrible wife. There are videos of YouTube of wives and girlfriends breaking into tears at the sight of their husbands returning alive from military combat, and Goku comes back from the literal fucking dead, only for Chi-Chi to act like he’s a shit that won’t flush. Horrible human being.

  But you know what? That just makes the great scene where Gohan stands up to her and says, no, I’m fucking going to Namek, that much more satisfying. Gohan knows that he’s the reason Piccolo gave his life up, he knows that the only way that Piccolo is ever going to be brought back from Other World is through the Namekian dragon balls, and god damn it, nothing is going to stop him from going up there himself to ensure that the task gets done. There’s something incredibly noble about it, especially coming from a boy so young. He’d be completely justified in staying on Earth and letting the older, experienced fighters take care of business, but it runs so bone deep with him that perhaps even he doesn’t realize it: he owes a debt.

  It’s this debt that not just he but, perhaps, the entire planet owes to Piccolo, and Tien, Yamcha, and Chiaotzu. Even if they weren’t able to win, every second that they bought mattered in the end. Remember, when Goku finally made it to the battlefield, Nappa was a split second from beating Gohan to death. Nobody else was coming to stop the Saiyan threat except for Goku, so everyone who got in their way, even for a little bit, is owed a debt of gratitude for buying enough time. If they hadn’t, who knows, Earth may not have made it. Even though everyone remembers them now as fodder, in a situation as desperate as the latter half of the Saiyan saga, even a little fodder deserves the honor of being revived via dragon balls. I guess. I don’t know, there’s no historical precedent for it.

  There was a bit of a time-skip between this episode and the last, obviously, because the Namekian ship is now ready for flight. Bulma and her dad spent a few days, or weeks, or however long, beating it with wrenches until it was no longer covered in moss and also understood English. Now it’s about to make a new trip into space, and the irony is, the original evil Namekian who piloted the ship in the first place is, in a familial way, a big part of the reason why these Earthlings are now piloting the ship back to its home planet. See, much like all the way back in episode 5, sometimes history rhymes, and a device from someone who started as your enemy will become something you will use to bring that same enemy—now turned into a friend—back to life.

  The gang leaves at the end of the episode, and I think the scene where they leave may be one of the best scenes of the show up to this point. It’s got the perfect mix of emotional resonance and comedic relief. We have Bulma in her weird space outfit, we’ve got Gohan in his little penguin outfit and sporting that Moe Howard haircut—hell, Krillin’s wearing a baseball hat with his own fucking name printed on it! Where did he even get that?! Maybe it was a piece of merchandise after one of the World Tournaments, it would make sense since Krillin was a front-runner in each of the three that took place in Dragonball.

  Yet, when Chi-Chi begins to choke up as she watches her son board a ship to take him into space, millions upon millions of miles away from her, I realize, well, shit, Chi-Chi really gets a rough turn in DBZ, doesn’t she? Granted, her attitude never makes her sympathetic, but you can probably count the years she has both Goku AND Gohan at home on one hand over the duration of this thing. She definitely has to watch Gohan leave to a potentially terrible fate a lot more than any mother should have to do. You could make the case for her as one of the most sympathetic characters in the show, if said show didn’t also go out of its way to make her thick-headed to the point where even Vegeta seems reasonable by comparison.

  Hell, you can see how much she cares about him just by the fact that she packed… apparently everything in their entire house for him so he’ll be prepped for his trip. Which is stupid, because Chi-Chi is acquainted with Bulma, the lady of the family who invented putting very large amounts of things into very small capsules which can be thrown to the ground and activated at will. I mean, fuck, that was a whole plot point in the original show, that Bulma can just do that. How do you know a woman who can carry a fucking airplane in her pocket and not saddle up to her like, “hey, mind helping me pack?”

  On a final note, Mr. Popo is now guardian of the Earth, at least in the interim until they can get Kami revived, or until the people of Earth rebel and demand a free and fair election for the next guardian. Although, I have to be honest, maybe the people of Earth shouldn’t have the ability to democratically elect their leaders, considering the figurehead that is the President of the World is a weird blue cat-person. Am I being racist? I’m being racist, I should stop. Then again, how can I be racist if I voted for Mr. Popo? You know, there were people that actually said that about Obama, like, “I voted for Obama, I can’t possibly be racist, I have some weird anti-race card shield now!”

  Okay, this is the most off-topic I’ve ever gotten in one of these. So, to wrap up, our team of Bulma (the tech/chick), the bald dude (Krillin), and the kid (Gohan) have gone into space, leaving the surly bonds of Earth to touch the face of Frieza. Are they going to succeed? Well, if I were a betting man, I’d say one of them is probably going to die…

  Oh, and Gohan gets back in his li’l Piccolo outfit. How cute.

  (4/5)

  A Few Final Thoughts:

--“I hope he doesn’t overexert himself!” Very next shot of Gohan is him walking along a railing and then doing a super-cool jump and flip in mid-air.

-- Yajirobe? You’re Bulma’s friend? You remember what she said to you two episodes ago?

--“You mean you made yourself a spacesuit… just for takeoff?”

--Gohan respects Piccolo as much as he does his Dad. That’s both sweet and kinda sad. 

Dragonball Z Episode 37 Review – “Plans for Departure”

   In which Bulma and Mr. Popo take their first—and last—trip into Outer Space together. How romantic…?

  Bulma kind of steals the show this episode, in both good and bad ways. First off, she totally fucking boffs the commandeering of the Saiyan spaceship. Her attempts at using the remote fall completely flat as the spaceship straight up fucking EXPLODES on national television, probably killing the dudes that were working on it for the interest of a wide television audience interested in figuring out the secrets of, holy shit, motherfucking aliens. I’m being a little too vulgar so far, aren’t I? I’ll try to tone it down. I make no promises.

  The two main draws of this episode are the humor and the lore, as far as I’m concerned. There’s no action whatsoever, and there isn’t going to be any of note for a good while, so the show has to fall back on some of its lesser-acknowledged strengths. The funniest moments of the episode are just Bulma dealing with the bullshit hand she’s been dealt. She tries to get the spaceship to work, and it goddamn blows up. She tries to go with Mr. Popo to find Piccolo’s horrible old demon ship, and that time she succeeds, but not without irritating the shit out of the beleaguered Popo in the process.

  People who watch a lot of TFS probably forget that, in the original show, Popo was more of a babysitter and a care-taker than some Eldritch horror from beyond the realms of human conception. Despite his appearance, darkness holds very little value to this guy. This is about the closest I’ve ever seen to him getting legit pissed in the anime, as he has to play the aforementioned babysitting role to Bulma, who has no idea what the fuck is going on, why they’re in this cold mountainous location called Yunzabit Heights, who Mr. Popo even is in a general sense, and whether or not she’s going to die of something mysterious and genie-related.

  Just the reaction characters had to him during his first appearance at the hospital was bizarre. Hell, Krillin was happy to see him, and Roshi didn’t have a clue who he was. Mr. Popo offers whoever wants to volunteer a magic carpet ride with him to see the spaceship The Nameless Namek left behind after he made it to Earth. Bulma doesn’t volunteer so much as get volunteered. She has to climb on Mr. Popo’s magic carpet, Roshi tries to help her on by pushing her ass, she sees it coming a mile away, then… they teleport to the mountains. They don’t even fly. Honestly, that’s a subtle bit of comedy there. I didn’t even notice at first. I would assume that they did fly and it was just unbelievably fast, but I feel like that would have caused Bulma’s skin to peel off or something.

  It’s a pretty kick-ass moment when they find the ship, because Bulma actually gets to not fuck up something for once. She’s spent the entire episode being a frustrated and frustrating load, then at the end she musters up a memory of Piccolo speaking Namekian at the World Martial Arts Tournament. No, I don’t remember that happening, no, I didn’t go back and check, yes, I am not a very good source for all things DBZ-trivia related, no, that does not mean you should click away from this blog, because I like to think I at least write well enough to explain why filler sucks or whatever.

  You know what else is filler? Phrases like “or whatever.”

   Not much else to report on here. Chi-Chi’s awful, still. Gohan shows a lot of concern for his Dad as the hospital is working on him and he’s all freaking out and shit, I don’t know why, he acts like what they’re doing to him is worse than Ape-Vegeta stomping on his legs and squeezing him. Maybe it is, I haven’t experienced these things. Krillin, Gohan and Goku really don’t want to be in this hospital, and it is due to the insistence of Chi-Chi and Roshi that the lot of them are staying. They seriously have Goku in this weird iron lung-like contraption, I’m reminded of old cartoons where there’s just a guy laying in a bed looking like a mummy, hanging from a ceiling just above his bed. You have to cut them open with a saw to get them out, or something.

 I guess the end of the episode where Bulma’s so happy about getting the ship to work she starts dancing around with Mr. Popo is pretty charming, especially because Mr. Popo looks happy, too, in a bewildered kind of way. I wonder if ol’ Popo was legitimately bothered by the fact that Bulma was so standoffish to him, at first. I can’t imagine he’d give a shit, but you never know about people. Does Mr. Popo count as a “people”? For that matter, does any being in this show who isn’t fully human qualify as a ”person,” or is that human-specific terminology? These are the kinds of thoughts that literally keep me awake at night, when there’s work in about 5 hours and the crickets are a little too loud to sleep through. Okay, I think it’s time I brought this review to a close. I still think the spaceship explosion scene is pretty funny, though.

  (3/5)

  A Few Final Thoughts:

--“If the door opens, it is working!” Very scientific, Bulma.

--“It’s alien technology, so I don’t even know where to start!” Very scientific, Bulma.

--“It’s no use, it won’t work!” That one’s a little less scientific, Bulma.

--“Safety belt” apparently means “toilet” in Namekian. I had no idea Namekians even used the toilet.

-- Piccolo is the password to the ship. That means, if Piccolo ever had to ride the ship with other people, they’d need to refer to him by a nickname or the ship would fucking explode.

--I forgot something else in the review—Krillin totally owns the shit out of Yajirobe. Apparently, Krillin overheard Yajirobe’s face-to-face encounter with Vegeta and does a spot-on impression of Yajirobe begging for his life and trying to convince Vegeta he’s totally on his side.

Dragonball Z Episode 36 Review – “Picking Up the Pieces”

 

 After Vegeta has left the planet, the Z Fighters are in a shambles. Four strong warriors dead and the rest of them weakened severely by the hardest fight they’ve ever won. Nappa, Vegeta, and the one Saibaman who took out Yamcha will haunt the group’s worst nightmares until we get to the next arc, which will make this one seem downright gentle by comparison with its villain. As Bulma’s airship arrives on the scene and the crew starts to load up all the bodies, some very elegiac music plays, a very unusual but at the same time totally necessary move for this score.

  Emotions run high in this episode. Bulma viciously chastises Yajirobe for his cowardice, telling him it should have been HIM who died instead of Yamcha. I’m a little disappointed that nobody called Bulma out for saying that, because no matter what everyone’s just been through, that is WAY fucking out of line. Especially when we know that Yajirobe was a massive part of the reason the Z Fighters made it out of that fight alive. I’m pretty sure none of the people on the battlefield at that point were equipped to handle Oozaru Vegeta.

  Chi-Chi is incredibly happy to see Gohan, and after a year of him being out in the bullshit wilderness, who could blame her? Well, I can’t blame her for that, but what I absolutely can and will blame her for is how she treats Goku over the course of this episode. I’m not even going to bother sugarcoating it—she acts like a total bitch in this episode, and no amount of “OMG MISOGYNY” is going to bring me away from that statement. Her husband, the man she snubs this entire fucking episode, is the reason any of them are alive right now. Goku was the ONLY fighter anywhere on the planet who was able to match Vegeta. It was HIS Spirit Bomb that weakened Vegeta enough for Gohan to finish him off, it was HIS Kaioken that forced Vegeta into a desperate beam battle and MORE of that Kaioken that sent Vegeta momentarily reeling. Yes, Chi-Chi has a point when she insists that her boy has no business fighting the battles of adults, but if Gohan hadn’t been there, they would have been fucked. Everyone who was on the field during the Vegeta fight—Krillin, Gohan, Goku, Yajirobe—all of them played a crucial role in taking that W. Remove even one of them from the equation, and the rest of them die.

  I tried my best to understand and sympathize with Chi-Chi’s predicament this episode, she hasn’t seen her husband and son in a year, and now both of them have been hurt in a terrible battle for the fate of the world, so of course she’s stressed. But no matter how I try, I cannot justify to myself the sick way Chi-Chi handles Goku this episode. He’s beat to shit, just got back from being literally dead, and Chi-Chi acts like she wouldn’t piss on him if he were on fire. Fuck Chi-Chi.

  Yeah, when I said “emotions run high this episode,” you didn’t know I was referring to myself, did you?

  So, I’m giving this episode a mediocre score because it’s mostly set-up for the next arc. King Kai phones in from the Other World to tell the team they did a good job, they have him tell them where Namek is, Bulma says it’s impossible for them to get to Namek in a regular spaceship because it would take about 5,000 years, so that puts a bit of a kibosh on the ol’ plan there. Until Krillin reveals he stole the remote for the spacecraft Vegeta used, and they can use that to commandeer Nappa’s pod and go to Namek!

  Bulma is pretty delighted, but of course, the little pod is only going to fit one person, and I don’t know who the hell it is they plan on sending out. What I do know is that I’m running out of shit to say about this episode, so I should probably wrap it up. I think this episode does a pretty good job in the functional sense. It acts as part of the bridge that takes us from the Saiyan arc to the Namek arc, the second of four major arcs in this show. Things are going to go back to Filler Hell for a bit, but I am happy to report that the filler is not as egregious as the endless Saiyan arc filler.

  So, overall, yeah, the Saiyan arc is not one of the arcs I watched a lot when I was little, because at that time all of the tapes I had and what was airing on the TV at the time was later Frieza arc, then Cell and Buu. By the time the Buu arc completed, the show was starting to wear thin for me, and I had moved on to stuff like Yu-Gi-Oh and Inuyasha. You know, other basic bitch animes that were showing on TV at the time. I’m really glad that DBZ was my main show and the one I’m reviewing now instead of Inuyasha, because if you think DBZ is full of filler and chaff, holy fucking shit, you aren’t even READY for the amount of filler Inuyasha has. If they made a Kai version of THAT show, it’d probably be 13 episodes long.

  (3/5)

A Few Final Thoughts:

--At least Bulma and Roshi are there to give a shit about Goku when his own wife isn’t. I wonder how many people who started with the original show were surprised that Goku didn’t marry Bulma instead, since despite their massive size difference they weren’t all that far apart in age, and once Goku was old enough, he could easily have married her, but I think their relationship as partners in the never-ending hunt for dragon balls and adventure is good enough.

--A lot of this episode is made up of really depressing flashbacks, that’s something I forgot to mention in the review proper. Even this show’s filler has filler.

--A CATASTROPHIC EVENT CAUSED THE CLIMATE TO CHANGE ON NAMEK, YOU SAY? SURE GLAD WE AREN’T DEALING WITH THAT.

--This episode posits that Piccolo—the original Piccolo, that is—became evil because of the inherent evil of humanity. I’m not sure how well that jives with the way Kami tells it, because he made it sound more like he was just an ass from the get-go. In fact, I think he may have been kicked off Namek BECAUSE of that, but I could be wrong.

--Finally, here’s something that positively mystifies me: Korin is out of senzu beans. Korin, whose only purpose in the show is to supply senzu beans, ran the fuck out of senzu beans. He knew for a year this fight was coming, that two deadly Saiyans were arriving on Earth and it was going to take a miracle to beat them, and he didn’t start growing a FEW? Maybe I’m just ignorant on the growing cycles of senzu beams, but god damn.

Dragonball Z Episode 35 Review – “Mercy”

 So, here’s Gohan’s transformation into an Oozaru, and it really demonstrates, to me, how useless the form is in an actual combat situation. When you’re an Oozaru, you’re just a big, clumsy target. You don’t have the element of stealth and speed, things that are deeply important in these fights. I know everybody has the image of DBZ fights being a bunch of beam spam where one character is totally unaffected, or as just these speedy mid-air sparring sections where a few frames of animation are just repeated over and over, but take the Frieza fight for example. Goku, completely outclassed, still managed to get a couple of decent hits against Frieza just using some strategy and a little bit of speed and stealth.

  If he were the big, stupid gorilla, he might have a lot of power, but he wouldn’t be anything more than a way bigger thing for Frieza or any remotely competent opponent to aim for. Oozaru is great for destroying cities and fucking up people on the ground, but when you’re actually fighting someone who has power, skills, and is able to fly… well, imagine fighting a fucking gnat, only that gnat can blind you with energy beams and cut your tail off. Yes, you do have to be a gnat in this scenario. That’s the only way it works.

  Speaking of big targets, Yajirobe just made himself a huge one (lol cuz he fat) by slashing Vegeta in the back while he was getting ready to sever Gohan’s tail. Or maybe he was going to kill him. The memorable part of this scene for me is when Vegeta shouts out, “you cut through my armor,” before falling down for a bit. In the Ocean dub, they had him say “you almost cut through my armor!” I guess because showing Vegeta about to murder a child was okay, but it’s too violent to cut through the BACK of the potential child-murderer’s armor.

  Anyway, Yajirobe, in his complete idiocy, thinks his dinky little cut on Vegeta’s back was enough to put him down for good, when a Spirit Bomb, a Kaioken-charged Kamehameha, his tail getting sliced off, and several shots in his eyes weren’t good enough. This doesn’t last, however, as Vegeta gets right back up and Yajirobe immediately starts bullshitting him and trying to bargain for his life. Unfortunately, there is just too much ass on that boy for Vegeta to resist kicking it. He doesn’t bother to insult Yajirobe, and we know from the fight with Android 19… and Dodoria… and pretty much anybody else that he fights, that he loves taunting opponents. Then again, honestly, Yajirobe isn’t so much an opponent as he is a side of beef, only the beef is lard and okay we get it Yajirobe is fat and sucks, let’s move on.

  Hey, remember when I made a big deal about him showing heroism two or three reviews ago? Me neither.

  Vegeta is so ensconced in the act of beating the dogshit out of Yajirobe, he doesn’t even realize that Gohan just woke up and got a direct look at the fake moon Vegeta planted in the sky. This is some classic DBZ villain hubris, folks. I take that back—this is classic DBZ character hubris. Everyone loves to just stand around or get distracted until something bad happens. The idiot ball gets traded around in this show more than a goddamn Charizard card in the late ‘90s. Vegeta ineptly attempts to punch Gohan’s transforming body, trying to kill him or something I guess. But to no avail; Gohan goes full fucking ape.

  Gohan, of course, is not the trained Saiyan that Vegeta is. He has no idea how to control himself when he’s an Oozaru, which brings me to a bit of a weird question; could Nappa and Raditz control their beast forms? Particularly Raditz, because Gohan and he are about the same power level at this point in the show. Well, we don’t technically know what power level Raditz is now, in hell, but assuming he stays the same power level, he and Gohan are about equal. When Vegeta and his boyz went out on planet-razing missions, did Vegeta have to keep Nappa and Raditz under control so they didn’t fire their mouth beams at him, or were they all able to control themselves? I feel like Nappa probably was, since he also outgrew the tail weakness, but Raditz probably wasn’t, so he had to sit and sulk in the space pod until Nappa and Vegeta were finished. Or maybe he got them coffee.

  Anyway, I guess I gotta keep reviewing this episode. Goku still has telepathy, so he talks to Gohan through his mind. Even as a big ape, Gohan can comprehend the voice and message of his father. If that doesn’t show the kind of bond the two of them share, well, it shouldn’t, because Goku is really not around enough. The boy needs his father. But not as badly as Vegeta needs a friend, because he is seriously in trouble once Goku turns Gohan against him. I know I said way earlier in this review that the Oozaru is an ideal opponent for somebody like Vegeta, but that doesn’t make the notion of being chased and victimized by King Kong with Mouth Lasers any fucking better. Especially when you’re severely injured, because of earlier beams.

  And here comes the most awesome part of the entire episode for me: Vegeta showing that, even after an amount of abuse that would destroy an entire galaxy, he can still scrap well enough to take down an ape 100 times his size, or since he’s Vegeta, about 150. Because he is short, you see. Even Krillin marvels at the sheer strength of will Vegeta has—the dude absolutely REFUSES to fucking die, it’s like he was born with steel bones and… I don’t know, muscle of rubber? That just makes me think of Majin Buu. Krillin says something to the effect of, “what is this guy, immortal or something?” It’s ironic because that’s exactly what Vegeta’s looking for, an indestructible body to match his (as of now) indestructible will.

  I don’t think that’s something any of the Z Warriors encountered before, and I think that’s the thing a lot of fans of the manga and later the anime saw in this character. Vegeta is somebody who is a born survivor, a Saul Goodman-esque con artist who happens to pack a hell of a punch, who is willing to play the long game and be patient as long as he can get what he wants in the end. My Saul Goodman comparison comes from the fact that, no matter what is served to this guy, he can swallow it down and press forward, like some kind of shark. The difference is, Vegeta was born into that mindset, having been semi-adopted by Frieza since his childhood.

  Something tells me it’s going to be a while before I can justify that Saul Goodman/Vegeta comparison. Oh, well. My computer has no backspace button.

  So, people may remember this episode as the one where Goku proves he is the smartest idiot in the universe by letting Vegeta go, even as he continually expresses his intention to come back and murder the shit out of everyone. See, Vegeta eventually manages to get the jump on Gohan and cut off his tail, reducing him to his normal form… but not before his still-huge gorilla form falls right on top of Vegeta, crushing him underneath and finally rendering him too weak to fight back against all further attempts to kill him. It took two different beam-trips to the atmosphere, being slashed in the back, being beaten severely by Kaioken x3 Goku—Neko face and everything—but Vegeta has finally fallen.

  Yet, as Krillin takes Yajirobe’s sword and prepares to finish off Vegeta, Goku stops him, saying that for them to murder Vegeta as he’s trying to get away, they’d have to be just like him. Well, I don’t know, considering we already know a fully-rested and unscathed Vegeta can blow up an entire planet in the time it takes most of us to piss. If Goku were thinking about the safety of his family, he’d be all but begging Krillin to kill Vegeta… right?

  Well, no, and that’s the thing. Goku IS thinking about his family, the only hang-up is that he thinks in his screwed-up Saiyan head, “sure, I can protect my family from anything.” We’re going to explore this in more depth during later reviews, but Goku and Vegeta aren’t much different in the way they approach the fighting lifestyle. Sure, Goku is ultimately not a murderer and doesn’t bully people who can’t fight back, but that thirst for battle is really what compelled him to spare Vegeta’s life, as anyone who knows about the original translation and/or the manga can tell you. Goku is arrogant enough to think he can save his loved ones and have a good fight at the same time. Vegeta just doesn’t have any loved ones.

  (5/5)

  A Few Final Thoughts:

 --And that pretty much is the end of the Saiyan arc, at least as far as the fighting goes. I can’t believe I’ve committed to this project long enough to get this far, but on the other hand, I have way too much disposable time, being a 31-year-old man with no family and all. LOL. LMAO.

--Uh, Krillin, the Saiyans didn’t kill Yamcha. At least not directly.

-- King Kai comments on how well Goku and his friends did against the Saiyans… but there’s an even greater evil headed their way? WHAT A HOOK!

--I can’t argue much with Goku’s argument that, hey, Piccolo changed, maybe Vegeta can too. Difference is, Vegeta is an immediate threat to the planet’s very existence. Piccolo just wanted to take over the world. Big ol’ difference there, see if you can spot it.

Dragonball Z Episode 34 Review – “Krillin’s Offensive”

   Really, Krillin’s offensive? Nothing much wrong with him, unless being annoying has become a cancel-worthy offense now. Okay, seriously, I swear this is the last time I’m going to start one of these reviews out with a Dad joke.

  One thing you’ll notice right away is the art style, which is way more detailed in this episode than in your average episode. It’s something you’ll encounter frequently if you sit and watch DBZ front to back, this sort of ever-shifting approach to how the show is drawn, which is due to the fact that different teams are assigned different episodes. There’s going to be a point in roughly the middle of the Cell Saga where it becomes extremely noticeable, as the art varies from great to absolute shit from episode to episode.

  But enough about that, I’m not really qualified for art or animation criticism. This is the first of two episodes throughout the series where the Spirit Bomb is shown to be a complete, utter failure. Vegeta is hit dead-on by the thing and, sure, it slows him down a bit, but the whole idea of the Spirit Bomb is that it’s a desperation finishing attack that requires a lot of time investment and entails a huge amount of risk. After all, you have to charge the thing, exhausting the energy around you in the process, all the while figuring out how the hell to stall a very powerful enemy you can’t beat with your own strength, leaving yourself even more vulnerable to their attacks when the stalling stops working. It’s a miracle Goku even had any fucking energy left after Vegeta cucked his initial attempt to throw it, and of course, the energy wasn’t enough to do more than hurt Vegeta a bit more.

  But damn, I’ll admit, it does look effective at first. When Gohan bounces that thing back at Vegeta and it hits him, his face goes all stretchy and deformed as the thing blasts him up into the sky, seemingly into the depths of space. You really get the sense that Vegeta’s met his end, right up until his body comes crashing down to Earth. Because, c’mon, they aren’t going to bring his body back around just so it can lay there and stay dead. That’s just common sense.

  The way Krillin utterly fails to hit Vegeta initially is pretty amusing. First off, he has to concentrate to turn the energy into a ball. Don’t ask me how that works, I don’t know. Goku gives Krillin some kind of bullshit about how he’ll know exactly the right time to throw the ball, it’ll just kind of come to him. Well, apparently the time good ol’ fate picked out for Krillin wasn’t the right one, because Vegeta just leaps over the fucking thing when Krillin throws it. Gohan is now in for a direct hit from the Spirit Bomb, until his father communicates with him telepathically to bounce it back.

  Which—this is something I need to address really quickly. Goku sometimes just has telepathy. Fuck knows where he got it, my best guess is from King Kai but it could have been in late Dragonball. Whatever the case, I think it’s weak telepathy, because Goku still has to use the “touch King Kai’s back” method of communication to the mortals when he’s dead. Yeah. This show gets weird sometimes.

  So, all of that shit, and Vegeta still survives. However, let it not be said that the Spirit Bomb had no impact whatsoever. That would be more like the SECOND time it gets used in the series. No, this time, Vegeta is left still stronger than everyone else on the battlefield, but still at a fraction of his normal power. He uses a good-sized chunk of said fraction to create a huge aura burst, not dissimilar to the one he tries to use to kill Majin Buu early in that character’s saga, in a vain attempt to kill his seriously wounded opponents. When that fails, and of course it does, Vegeta resolves to kill the fighters individually.

  The big shock ending of this episode, of course, is Gohan’s tail growing back, which I honestly find to be a bit of a ridiculous plot contrivance, and I wish it didn’t happen. In fact, it’s a good part of the reason why I’m not giving this one a five, even though a lot definitely happens here. I think it would have made just as much sense to have Vegeta careen back down to Earth, alive but severely weakened, and then just skip right to the part where he attempts to escape. I feel like that would be a lot less bullshit, since there’s nothing much narratively that justifies Gohan turning into the Oozaru. Hell, he doesn’t even put up a great fight against Vegeta in THAT form—but I’m getting a little ahead of myself.

  What’s going on over at Kame House? Well, for one thing, Baba’s crystal ball fucking shatters into pieces from the strain of displaying the power of the Spirit Bomb. Eventually, Bulma decides, fuck waiting for Baba to fix her magic ball that allows us to watch the fight from a safe distance, lets go get murdered right there on-site like so many other warriors before us. Hell, half the people at Kame House aren’t even warriors. Some of them aren’t even fucking people, there’s a cat, a pig, and a turtle in that house! How are you going to ethically justify putting these innocent talking animals in danger? Because, what, you’ve got Roshi with you, a man who is like 1% as strong as Vegeta on a good day?

  Oh, whatever. Chi-Chi’s continuing to have fits because she knows Gohan isn’t strong enough to beat Vegeta, she tries to murder Baba, I think Bulma also tries to murder Baba but I don’t remember. That’s what Kame House has devolved into. I’m getting to the point where I’m ready for Launch to show back up and just shoot them all. Then Korin shows up, and now we have two speaking cats in the mix, and I can definitely no longer endorse the notion of these characters traveling together to their certain doom, because I actually kind of like Korin.

  So, overall, good episode, but just shy of perfect for me mostly because of the Kame House stuff dragging it down and the contrivance with Gohan’s tail. For me, this is the episode where Vegeta proves just what a goddamn brick wall he is, and he proves that further in the following episode, where even in his severely wounded state he is capable of defending himself against the peak of Saiyan power, at least as far as anyone else in the show is aware. Goku may be a stronger, smarter warrior than Vegeta is, but Vegeta is powered by so much sheer spite and pride that the only thing countering it would be Goku’s own righteousness. Impressive shit, really. It almost makes you wonder if there is something more to the Saiyan prince than being a spoiled brat with a dead race he doesn’t seem remotely interested in maintaining, if his callous disregard of Raditz and Nappa are any evidence…

  Nah.

  (4/5)

  A Few Final Thoughts:

--Wait, so Yajirobe really wanted to eat Vegeta in the show? I thought that was just a TFS thing. Damn. Yajirobe defines what it is to be an omnivore.

--“How does it feel knowing you had one chance to save your precious Earth and everyone on it, only to fail miserably?!” Vegeta knows how to rub it in, doesn’t he, the sadistic fuck?

-- Really Bulma? Korin fucking looks like an ordinary housecat? Is that what cats all look like in the DBZ-verse? I mean, a cat is king of the world, so maybe that answers my question.

Dragonball Z Episode 33 Review – “Hero in the Shadows”

 I love the title of this episode, because it’s a great summation of the best characters in this show. The ones who aren’t fighters who can push their bodies into the millions, the billions of trillions. No, there are also the unsung, unspoken heroes of this series, who aren’t “awesome” in any sense of the word but are nonetheless capable of doing awesome things. The ones who serve as a reminder to the world that you don’t need to be epically powerful to make a real difference. All you have to do is be brave and act, even if it isn’t always in your own self-interest.

  Yajirobe had every good reason to run away from this battlefield. As a fighter, he’s never been impactful. Even from his introduction, he’s been more of a joke and a clod than somebody you would want on your side when the going gets tough. In a world where the heroes congregate around each other, and Goku in particular, Yajirobe stays behind the curtain, often refusing to lend a hand because he’s aware of his limitations as a fighter and aware that he very much does not want to die.

  But even a man like Yajirobe can be pushed into doing great things when the lives of people he cares about are in danger, and for all of his bullshit and bluster, Yajirobe really does care about the rest of the Z-Fighters. It’s what makes him the “bean daddy” throughout the series, because he wants to make sure his friends are able to get back up after a tough fight. For better or worse, Yajirobe is a part of the good guys, and if his place wasn’t already solidified, it is now. Yajirobe does what Krillin, Gohan and Goku couldn’t do, just by virtue of employing stealth—though you may call it cowardice—over brute strength: he defeats Oozaru Vegeta. For good.

  Let us be perfectly clear here: before Yajirobe’s attack that leaves the Saiyan prince without his tail, Vegeta has won. Decisively. Krillin and Gohan can’t even hope to touch Vegeta in this form, Goku is practically a dead man breathing, and nobody else is coming to their rescue. All the other remotely useful fighters are dead, and the remaining ones are huddled around a crystal ball in Master Roshi’s living room, watching in helplessness as Vegeta crushes the universe’s greatest hope in both hands like he was just a stress ball. It’s just Vegeta, and his unmatched power, and he’s just leapt over Krillin’s own sneak attack, the Destructo Disk. Krillin, the poor bastard, hasn’t hit anybody with this technique for the entire series so far.

  And yet, just when Vegeta is ready to finish off the only other full-blooded Saiyan in the universe (to our knowledge), out of nowhere comes dumpy, cowardly Yajirobe, who is at least strong enough to cut the tail off a giant monkey when its back is turned. Yajirobe single-handedly gives the humans a fighting chance, even if it’s still slim as Vegeta proves to have a lot of power reserves remaining in his plain humanoid form. Yajirobe scurries back behind a rock as Vegeta shrinks into his old, evil self, and he wonders out loud what the hell he was thinking. He doesn’t recognize his own heroism when he performs it.

  But does this mean the fight is over? Absolutely not. In fact, we’re arguably just at the halfway point right now. Vegeta may not have his Oozaru form anymore, but he’s still individually much stronger than anyone else on the battlefield, and the other Z Fighters know it. Not only is he much stronger, they will come to find out how resilient and how fine-tuned his fighting instincts are, but we’ll get to those in a moment.

  Vegeta picks Gohan as the topper of his shit-list and goes for him, serving him a hard hit right in the gut. Krillin tries for a sneak attack, only for Vegeta to promptly sneak his boot right the fuck into Krillin’s face, resulting in a howler of a line that I remember from at least the Ocean dub but may have also been in this one, however since it’s not in my notes I don’t remember: “His bald head was bouncing like a cue-ball!” Oh, Vegeta. You’d be such a scamp if you weren’t, y’know, a maniac that wants to murder everybody, including his own partner.

  Meanwhile, we go back to Kame House to watch one of the weirdest moments in this entire saga: Chi-Chi taking complete leave of her senses and screaming at Gohan to just fight! At first, she seems to have left this realm of reality entirely, going into something of a trance. Then, I guess, whatever’s left of the fighter in her just screams to Gohan at the crystal ball to defend himself. Even Chi-Chi finally realizes at a certain point that it’s time to cut out that “my scholar, my baby boy” bullshit.

  Then again, the kid’s, what, five years old? Doesn’t exactly fit the motherly instinct to tell the boy to defend himself when he’s being accosted by a grown man, especially if that grown man is a super-powerful space warrior. Eh, anyway.

  Vegeta gets done pounding Gohan for a second and tosses his broken body next to Goku’s. Goku wakes up and tells Gohan pretty much exactly what Chi-Chi just got done screaming in the scene prior, which is that he has no choice now but to fight. Goku tells him that Piccolo gave his life to save him because he believed in him, although I would argue that it’s more because Piccolo grew to love Gohan and see him as a friend who needed to be protected rather than a warrior to be saved for future potential combat situations, but what the fuck do I know, I’m not the boy’s father.

  What makes Gohan finally get up off his ass and do something is when, right as Goku and Gohan are joining hands in solidarity, Vegeta—prick that he is—flies into Goku, kneeing him very hard in the gut. A classic sadistic Vegeta move. This character has no qualms about attacking somebody who is vulnerable and unable to fight back. “Being a good fiend is like being a photographer,” he says, “you have to wait for the right moment!” If there’s one thing we’ve already learned about Gohan, it’s this: you can beat the shit out of him all you want to, and chances are he won’t muster up much of a fight back, because it isn’t in his nature to thirst for battle the way the full-blooded Saiyans do. But God fucking help you if you attack one of his friends, or his family, or basically any innocent person who happens to be in Gohan’s line of sight. Gohan may not be the natural warrior his father is, but he inherited his father’s willingness to go to bat for someone he cares about—or even just some stranger who’s being victimized.

  So Gohan gets up and starts actually putting some effort into fighting Vegeta, and it turns out the two of them are more evenly matched than you’d think. It’s probably a combination of the aforementioned boost Gohan always gets from righteous anger and a Zenkai boost from the earlier beating he took. I’m not sure if that particular plot point has been introduced yet, but if you look at the original DB, you can see a lot of times where Goku loses a fight, then goes and gets some Sacred Water or does some kind of training to get stronger, then comes back and whoops all kinds of ass. I like to think the Zenkai boost—which Goku never knew about in the original, of course—was also playing a role in that. I find it hard to believe that Goku came back and whooped Mercenary Tao the way he did just from a little chasing of Korin. Some of that was his near-death first fight.

  Oh, and I almost forgot to even talk about this, but Krillin is entrusted with the remains of the Spirit Bomb that Goku failed to throw in the previous episode. Goku was able to hold on to some of the energy, and essentially gives him the energy, which takes the form of a white fire-y aura on Krillin’s arm. I believe this marks the only time in the show where somebody other than Goku throws a Spirit Bomb.

  Anyway, episode good. Episode definitely good. We have the epic Yajirobe tail-cutting, we have the second-to-last instance of an Oozaru in the entire series, we have the Spirit Bomb being wielded by the most unlikely of fighters, and of course, we have more Chi-Chi freaking out. It’s like I mailed Akira Toriyama a wish list and he hit every mark. Okay, maybe I’m being a little facetious, but this really is a great episode. We’re at a point in the series where the pacing is brisk and it feels like something important happens every episode. Enjoy it while it lasts.

(5/5)

A Few Final Thoughts:

--“That kid hurt me!” Vegeta’s eye just can’t catch a goddamn break.

--The last useful things Yajirobe will ever do in this series will involve bringing Senzu beans. Oh, unless you count the little bit of babysitting he did for Bulma early on in the Android saga.

--Gohan: “You’d better not hurt him!” Vegeta: “It’s a little too late for that!”

--The scene where Yajirobe starts driving away and then stops, that moment where he stops is probably just as badass as him actually cutting Vegeta’s tail. It shows that he has a conscience, however buried under cowardice it may be.

Dragonball Z Episode 32 Review – Spirit Bomb Away!

  Alright, here’s where things start to slow down a bit too much for me. This episode is all about how one severely wounded Saiyan warrior from Earth cannot stand a chance against a pretty much fully-powered Saiyan from the Planet Vegeta who knows how to use and control their powers and is able to wreck the day of anything that has a power level of less than six figures. And that’s something to keep in mind here, folks: Oozaru forms have 10 times the power of their respective Saiyans’ regular forms. So with Vegeta, he can go from a measly 18,000—already ridiculous in the canon of this universe—to an unbelievable 180,000, enough to traumatize Captain Ginyu several sagas from now.

  This is the point where Krillin and Gohan sense that their friend is in trouble and decide to go in after him. It’s rather depressing that the most powerful resources of training and war possible for both Earthlings and dead Saiyans alike are not able to win by themselves. Not to mention, the drama of Goku telling Krillin and Gohan that he has to fight Vegeta alone is extinguished by how quickly it became apparent that, no, he is going to need some help. But, it does make things more exciting after Goku is crippled, since there are at least multiple people on the battlefield to make things more chaotic and unpredictable. I always remember Krillin, Gohan and Yajirobe showing up to be the most entertaining part of the whole first Vegeta fight on Earth, but today we’re not getting any of that action.

  Because today is all about one of the most unreliable finishing moves in the entire series, the Spirit Bomb. Of the three times it’s been used, it only works a single time, and only after a lot of effort and wishes on two sets of dragon balls to make the attack even remotely viable. Goku begins to gather energy for the attack from the environment around him—because that’s how the Spirit Bomb works, you need OTHER peoples’ energy to use it—to put together something strong enough to kill an Oozaru.

  Let’s back up a bit, though, because the most fascinating character beat of this episode is Goku’s realization of what the Oozaru is. At first, he’s completely thrown by the fact that Vegeta just turned into an enormous great ape. And why wouldn’t he be? Throughout all of Dragonball and early DBZ, no matter how many times either Goku or Gohan turned into the giant ape, Goku was not at all informed of what the fuck just happened. In Gohan’s case, he was in Other World, so that’s excusable. But when you think about it, it’s really fucked up that Goku turned into the Oozaru several times over the course of the original show and nobody bothered to tell him what happened. I don’t remember what they DO tell him, but it’s definitely a line of bullshit, because it takes Goku remembering something Grandpa Gohan told him before he died to jog his noodle and make him realize, oh shit, I’m the giant monster that killed my grandfather!

  Goku has no time to feel any of the feelings that rise up from his revelation, because he has to use the Kaioken—wait, what, what the fuck? He still has enough juice in him to perform a Kaioken? I mean, it doesn’t do him any good, Vegeta just tail-smacks him away like the flea he’s become. Still, it’s either amazing or bullshit (or both) what these characters are able to pull out of their asses after thoroughly establishing that it hurts for them to even move. Goku spends the entire episode struggling to conjure any kind of defense against Vegeta when he isn’t charging the Spirit Bomb. He does a lot of eye trauma to him, which is pretty funny. Laser shots right in the eye, the Solar Flare—Vegeta’s eyes take a beating this episode between just those two things.

  Goku loses the Spirit Bomb in this episode, due to Vegeta firing a surprise mouth beam just as Goku is about to throw the goddamn thing. This is why the next two Spirit Bombs are charged way up in the sky before they’re thrown. You don’t want to have your opponent just knock the thing out of your hand like it’s a basketball. The episode ends with Goku completely at Vegeta’s mercy, all of his energy used up after running and barely defending himself. And this really makes me have a hard time understanding why Vegeta seems to have such an inferiority complex to Goku. He had Goku thoroughly beat after just a handful of episodes, if it weren’t for like three of his friends intervening he had that one in the bag. I guess you just don’t make a prince bleed.

  What’s going on over at Kame House? Well, mostly just people—specifically Bulma—knocking Baba’s crystal ball around like a toy every time they see something in it they don’t like. In Bulma’s case, she sees Yajirobe hiding behind some rocks while Goku is getting owned by Vegeta. And yeah, sure, it’s annoying to see him just hiding on the battlefield, but come on, Bulma. Crystal balls don’t grow on fucking trees. Do you want to see the action or not? Some people, I swear to God. One would think, with all of Bulma’s knowledge on the subject of technology, she’d also realize that beating the shit out of the magical crystal ball is going to damage it.

  (3/5)

  A Few Final Thoughts:

--Gohan is the one who drags Krillin back to the battlefield near the beginning of the episode. The boy’s come a long way in just one year. Krillin notes that the boy is becoming more like his father every day. Even though Krillin has only ever seen him on two separate days. I guess it’s technically true, he’s much more like his dad on that second day than he is on the first.

--We actually see Yajirobe’s cowardice start to break in this episode. Which makes it even more annoying when Bulma bitches at him on the crystal ball. Like, really Bulma? What the fuck do you expect him to do, go up to the Oozaru and slap him in the nuts? You weren’t doing any kind of hero shit when YOU were dealing with the Oozaru all those years ago.

--“How am I supposed to fight a giant ape?!”

--“This guy’s really fast!” Well, becoming hundreds of times your normal size will do that to you.