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?