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.
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