Dragonball Z Episode 55 Review – “Piccolo vs. Everyone”

 “They just keep underestimating the true powers of a Saiyan!” --Vegeta

  This is perhaps Vegeta’s most spectacular moment in the show up to this point, and one of his greatest efforts as a villain. We don’t get to see the entire thing this episode, but we do get to watch where it begins. It is a triumph not dissimilar to Andy Dufresne literally digging himself out of prison with a spoon, only Vegeta has a fucking bulldozer, and he steals everybody’s fucking money before he leaves. If Frieza was underestimating Vegeta before, he sure as shit isn’t now.

  The show puts a bit of a scare into us at first, with Appule saying Vegeta may never regain consciousness. Another conspicuous example of a cohort of Frieza’s grossly underestimating Vegeta. I guess it’s hard to blame them—up until this point, they’ve never gone up against Vegeta, beyond just fucking with him as an ally of theirs. It’s not like Frieza went with Vegeta to Earth—if he had, the Saiyan saga would have been the last saga of the show, unless they named the show to “Frieza Gets the DragonballZ.”

  The fact that Vegeta was able to so easily find the dragon balls underscores Frieza’s ultimate folly of arrogance. Not pride—there’s a key difference, though they manifest themselves so similarly. It was something Trunks picked up on with Vegeta after spending a year with him in the Hyperbolic Time Chamber. Vegeta believes himself to be stronger than everybody else. Frieza believes everybody else to be weaker than him. Those things sound exactly the same, sure, but there’s a big gap in how those two sentences make a person act.

  Zarbon is getting increasingly in Frieza’s doghouse because of the events of the last two episodes, and that’s going to color his behavior for the remainder of his time in the series. If there’s one thing you don’t want to do, it’s piss off your manager with repeated failures, and when it comes to your manager being Frieza, let’s just say he can revoke your life insurance and health benefits in the blink of an eyelash. When it comes to fucking around, Frieza is not a man with whom you do it. So Zarbon is eager to finish off Vegeta, to actually do what he believed he did when he left Vegeta at the bottom of that river.

  “What’s the only kind of dog in the world that doesn’t bark? A hot dog!” –King Kai

  Obviously, due to the title of this episode, we need to talk about what kind of training shenanigans and general tomfoolery are taking place on the King Kai planet. The boys get past the Bubbles training stage, move very quickly past the Gregory stuff (except Piccolo, it isn’t worth his time), and by the end of the episode, Tien, Yamcha and Chiaotzu are having a sparring match against Piccolo. At first, the fighters are told to split into two groups of, well, two, but Piccolo thinks he can take the other three on by himself. So he does, and to his surprise, the training that he thought was a load of bullshit turns out to have actually made his three opponents a lot stronger, so he actually gets some blows dealt to him. Piccolo falls probably more toward the arrogance end of the pride/arrogance scale. He may be a good guy at this point in the show, but he is by no means a nice guy.

  And really, that’s the hallmark of a great action show, or hell, any kind of good show. You want a slightly more complicated moral universe than just “good” and “evil.” There’s a lot of in-between going on. You have Piccolo, who is only just recently a heroic character who still has some lingering stubbornness and discomfort with being around the goody-goody, still considering himself superior as most villains are wont to do. You have someone like Vegeta, who is no doubt evil, but in his opposition to Frieza and his minions may also be key in throwing those very people off of the scent of our real heroes. You have Gohan with his inexperience in the battlefield, Krillin with his pragmatic cowardice, Goku with his pure and gentle nature but also a willingness to let a good fight go even if they’re dangerous in the future. This isn’t the Care Bears, sometimes our heroes can be selfish and our villains can be noble, and while it’s not so morally grey that you’d ever find yourself rooting for Frieza and believing he’s the real good guy (it’s okay to root for villains, btw, as long as it doesn’t extend itself into real life), it’s grey enough on the side of the good guys that you can sometimes cast a leery eye on somebody’s intentions.

  That somebody is almost always Vegeta, but we’ll get to that when he’s no longer outwardly a villain.

  We spend pretty much no time with Goku in this episode, which is a little dire because he’s the one who is supposed to be coming to Namek as its savior. On the other hand, we never would have known that Yamcha, Tien and Chiaotzu are stronger than a cricket if we had to spend too much time with Goku, so maybe it’s for the best. Honestly, I don’t understand why we spend so much time in Other World this particular season, because it’s not like Yamcha, Tien and Chiaotzu are going to be able to influence the outcome of this particular saga, being that they’re waiting for their revival. Notice how I left someone out of that? Hopefully not, oh god lets move on

  I’m not sure if it’s because I took bad notes for this particular episode, but I don’t have any read on what Krillin, Dende, Bulma and Gohan are doing for these 22 minutes. We know Bulma and Gohan are just straight chillin’ at Bulma’s house, we know Krillin and Dende are on their way back from Guru’s house, but we don’t know if they have any thoughts on the current situation. We can surmise, sure, but I’m just saying, it would have been nice if we could have gotten commentary from them. Maybe it was so dull I didn’t notate it. Who knows?

  Anyway, pretty good episode, if it were nothing but the Vegeta/Zarbon/Frieza subplot, I’d probably give it a five. But, understandably, we as viewers need to see what’s going on with (almost) everybody else, and since anyone who isn’t in those first three people is doing some pretty boring shit, it’s hard to stay interested the entire time. Nevertheless, it is always a pleasure to watch Vegeta pretty much outwit his opponents like Bugs Bunny twirling Elmer Fudd in a circle and sending him off a cliff. And, no, you aren’t the only one who just pictured Elmer Fudd’s voice coming out of Frieza’s mouth, or vice versa. Trust me, you can’t out-weird me. But what you can do is out-analyze me. What do you think about the fact that Vegeta owns and is good? Don’t be shy about putting your opinions in the comments section of this YouTu-I mean, this blog post.

(4/5)

A Few Final Thoughts:

--“Damn… monkey…”

-- Piccolo starts to grab King Kai by the shirt and threaten him, but feels… I guess that he’s really strong?

-- King Kai asks what Piccolo is in such a hurry for, wondering out loud if he’s going back on his promise not to fight Frieza.

-- Yamcha: “Now that I’m full, you’re in big trouble, ape-face!” King Kai: “Hey! Don’t call me ape-face!”

Dragonball Z Episode 54 Review – “Guru’s Gift”

  We get to see the hubris of a DBZ villain manifest itself in a couple of unexpected ways this episode. Zarbon choosing to leave Vegeta alive is going to haunt him for the (very short) remainder of his life. Until you are ABSOLUTELY SURE, you never just leave the battlefield when you haven’t seen your opponent’s corpse, haven’t checked to see if they’re still breathing—haven’t checked to see if they’re still in the same HOLE you left them in! It’s just common sense, this is not the kind of situation where you want to go off the fucking smell test!

  Now, we need to take a moment to speculate on what the fuck Zarbon was thinking when he decided to leave Vegeta behind, knowing Frieza could murder him with a single wave of his hand if he found out Zarbon fucked up. What kind of sheer laziness and apathy could propel you to not at least, I dunno, find a corpse and decapitate it just to be absolutely safe? We’re not talking about a normal human being here, someone who would easily die from being pile-drived into the ground at a starting point of miles above the ground. We’re talking about Vegeta. The most durable man in the history of this show, with the possible exceptions of Cell and Majin Buu, and that’s only from cheating. Well, okay, Garlic Jr. too, but we’ll get to that when that good old filler saga comes up.

  Much of the main meat of this episode is from Krillin interacting with the Eldest Namek, a.k.a Guru, a.k.a Super Kami Guru. I’m sorry, folks, but after TFS, it’s a fucking miracle if I can take Guru seriously for a second. I’m not even someone that obsesses over the TFS version all that much, but goddamn, did they knock it outta the park with Super Kami Guru.

  I’m sorry, I’m getting way off track.

  Guru has the ability to awaken the hidden powers of any warrior who comes within contact of his hand. Unless, of course, they have no latent hidden powers, but this is DBZ and both of our heroes do, because if they didn’t, they wouldn’t be able to keep up with Vegeta’s ridiculous Zenkai powers, not to mention Frieza being basically a mortal god. But before that, Guru reads Krillin’s mind and deduces that the Ultimate Namek, the one who was once Kami and Piccolo together, must’ve split apart, and that was the only reason they were able to be killed. He literally says, “one who could have defeated a Namek like Kami must’ve been a Super Saiyan,” before he reads Krillin’s mind and finds out that they split, so you know we’re talking about some serious power here. Foreshadowing?

  Krillin wants to know if Guru can do the same for his friend Gohan, which just makes me laugh my ass off, because imagine if Guru is actually able to unlock Gohan’s full potential.

*SPOILERS FOR A SORTA 30 YEAR OLD SHOW*

  Imagine Gohan at the level he’s in during the near-end of the Buu saga, where he’s just tearing through Super Buu like he were tinfoil, not even hitting him with any energy attacks, but still just chopping his ass up one punch and kick at a time. Frieza would basically explode in one punch like in the Janemba movie. It would be so ridiculously anti-climactic, you’d demand your money back, even if you’re watching the show as a grade-school child, for free, and your parents are trying to get the phone away from you because you’re creating so much more trouble than you’re worth. The point is, Gohan’s potential is talked about in this show on a very consistent basis, and nobody seems to be able to agree on how deep it runs. There are at least one or two times in this show where someone swears to holy God that Gohan has hit the roof of his potential, only for some other asshole to come along and be like, “no, wait a minute, there’s a little more residue here at the bottom to take advantage of.”

  Bulma seems to have found herself a ball. She goes for it and we have to wonder what the fuck she must be thinking to want to go on a suicide mission like this one. This is where we remember, oh yeah, Bulma has always been like this. She would have been dead so many times over if it weren’t for supers like Goku and Vegeta pulling her nice ass out of the fire. I guess it’s only fair to acknowledge that Bulma’s insatiable quest to collect all the dragon balls has stopped worse people, such as Emperor Pilaf and Commander Red, from getting to them first. Her invention of the dragon radar by itself has gotten the world out of more fixes than it cares to count. Still, let’s be honest, Bulma doesn’t have the world’s most finely calibrated moral compass.

  There’s not much left to say about this episode. Going into it, I was a bit more enthusiastic than I wound up being for this episode. Like a lot of episodes in the original Z, it’s a whole lot of setting up for more exciting stuff that’s going to come later. Vegeta turns out to be alive and Zarbon has the audacity to say he’s going to torture information out of Vegeta about the whereabouts of the next ball(s) from him. It’s like he hasn’t even read the Saiyan Compendium ™ yet. But don’t worry. Zarbon’s going to find out very quickly that he’s fucked right in the down under.

 (3/5)

A Few Final Thoughts:

--Frieza tells Appule to send for the Ginyu Force. It’s about to really go down.

--“Clear your mind so that I may feel your past.”

--Vegeta left one Namekian villager alive. One of Frieza’s men happens across the villager and before the dude can even explain beyond Vegeta being the one who took the ball, Frieza’s idiot henchman killed him. Guess what Frieza does to the idiot henchman afterwards.

Dragonball Z Episode 53 Review – “Zarbon’s Surprise”

 We knew it wouldn’t be easy.

  I mean, let’s be honest, whether you’re coming into this blind or whether you know every facet of this show, you knew this wasn’t going to be easy when Vegeta started picking off Frieza’s men and going around his back to gather dragon balls. Vegeta knew it wasn’t going to be easy, either, and that was why he snuck in the first place. He was well aware of how dangerous Frieza was when he started to openly defy him and murder his most important men, all in a quest to basically kill Frieza AND deny him what he wants before doing so.

  What I don’t think Vegeta anticipated was that Frieza didn’t pick all of his men out of a garbage chute. Dodoria had no chance because he was just a second-string bruiser. Vegeta is dealing with the first of Frieza’s men who are capable of masking their true strength. Before this, it seemed like Vegeta was under the assumption that all of Frieza’s men—maybe even Frieza himself—had no access to the ability to mask their power levels, not just from scouters, but from “normal” methods of detection. But he’s now been rudely introduced to a power that, spoiler alert, is not getting old any time soon: transformation.

  (By the way, yeah, Oozaru is a transformation too, but it’s a very conditional one that relies on you having a tail and then having a full moon available. Right now, Vegeta has neither, and he can’t just will himself to turn into a giant monkey.)

  Zarbon does a “Beauty and the Beast” metaphor here, which implies that someone either wrote the same story somewhere else in space, or somebody came to Earth, took the story and brought it to the rest of the universe. Or, maybe I’m not being fair—maybe some English-speaking space alien just happened to write a different story that just happens to share that title with the one we know on Earth. Statistically, it’s pretty damn likely, because every other alien species has already invented English.

  Anyway, I got side-tracked. Zarbon’s not fucking around with that beast part. When he transforms, he basically balloons into this Shrek-like monster man without a nose whose fighting style immediately turns into that of a brute, and the rest of the fight is just him fucking pummeling Vegeta. If you wanted to see Vegeta meet some kind of karmic retribution for what he did to the Namekians a few episodes ago, here it is. Zarbon uses his joints a lot, you’ll notice. He elbows, he knees, he at one point grabs Vegeta’s head and starts just headbutting the fuck out of Vegeta’s face over and over again. There’s no real grace or style, it’s just pure aggro carnage, and it’s definitely not the kind of thing you usually see DBZ characters doing. It’s more like a World Star fight, where one guy gets the jump on the other right away and just starts kicking the shit out of them when they’re already down.

  Not that Vegeta doesn’t put up a valiant effort, but he obviously just can’t keep up. There are a few times where he and Zarbon are basically trading blows at super-fast speed, you can probably picture what I’m talking about because of how often it happens in the show, and you can visibly see Vegeta just struggling to maintain a pace with Zarbon. Again, this is definitely the place you want to be if you want to see Vegeta get some comeuppance for slaughtering a village full of innocent Namekians, because by the time the fight is over, Vegeta has been seemingly laid to rest in a watery grave, while Zarbon regresses back into the state Vegeta was kicking his ass in—that almost feels like an insult itself—and flies off to joyfully tell Frieza how he totally merc’d that fucking Saiyan.

  In other news, Krillin and Dende meet up with Guru this episode. Guru, as it turns out, is an enormous and morbidly obese lump in a chair who is on the verge of death for reasons that the show seems to be stating are from age, but actually, I think it’s because Guru is hiding Namek’s only burger joint under his big-ass chair. Seriously, I just go back to that bit from TFS where Frieza shows up to Guru’s house and is like, “Namekians just drink water, how the hell are you so fat?!” TFS doesn’t give a satisfactory answer to that question, and I don’t have one either, so I’m just going to settle on my burger-joint theory.

  We also get to meet NAAAAAAIL this episode, and I actually quite like the original Nail AND the TFS version of Nail, so I’m pretty hyped about his introduction to this series. Nail is the strongest of the Namekians, pretty much full-stop. Without spoiling too much, at this point he’s definitely stronger than Vegeta or Zarbon right now, and as for Frieza, well, we’re going to get to that one in several episodes. Nail is here to guard Guru from any threats, and obviously he’s keeping a close watch on Guru now that the Frieza clan is out here causing chaos, so he intimidates Krillin initially with his stoic and no-bullshit nature. Krillin can’t help but note how Nail looks like Piccolo, and it’s like, no shit, Sherlock, all of these people look like Piccolo, that’s the whole idea. They’re a RACE.

  The training up at King Kai’s place is still going along at a brisk pace, except I find it a little funny because they’re chasing Bubbles with the mallet they’re supposed to use on Gregory. I have no idea if that was King Kai’s idea or theirs, but even if it was theirs, somebody had to have given them the mallet, so I’m going to say this is all King Kai’s fault. Bastard. Anyway, to be specific, Yamcha, Tien and Chiaotzu are still chasing around the damn monkey, and at one point Bubbles hops on King Kai’s table as he’s eating a steak, and Tien—not to be deterred—slams the mallet right down on King Kai’s steak, knocking everything up in the air for a second and just narrowly missing a hit on Bubbles. King Kai ponders this for a moment, and then says “Guess that steak’s been… TIEN-derized!”

  …Okay, I’ll give King Kai that one, it was pretty clever. Guess the guy does have a somewhat-calibrated sense of humor after all.

  So, the Vegeta/Zarbon fight alone makes this a good episode, but getting to meet the Eldest Namek and Nail adds a nice little sweetener to the deal. I’m still shy on giving this one a perfect five because not much actually happens to advance the plot beyond Vegeta being momentarily out of the equation. Sure, Krillin gets to meet Guru, but that’s right at the end of the episode, and it’s not exactly the most exciting cliffhanger in the entire world. Still, the pieces are being put in place for some exciting confrontations in the future. We all know it’s a matter of time before another direct confrontation happens between the Bulma gang and the Frieza gang. It’s just a matter of when.

(4/5)

A Few Final Thoughts:

--It’s great how conspicuous Guru’s house is. The house sitting on the giant narrow pillar, no, nobody’s gonna notice that if they happen to pass by it. Come on.

--Vegeta pulls some baby dragon thingie down into the drink at the end of the episode as he’s getting himself back on land, swearing revenge on Zarbon. Somewhere out there, a father dragon swears revenge on Vegeta in turn.

--Dende tells Krillin about the fact that Namek has three suns, which explains why it’s never night-time. Krillin says, “no wonder you’re green!” I still don’t have a fucking clue what that’s supposed to mean. Maybe because plants are green, and plants would thrive in that kind of environment? Except they wouldn’t, because I feel like constant daytime would make for a poor ecosystem.

Dragonball Z Episode 52 Review – “The Past and Future”

Now here we go, this is what I’m talking about. We get King Kai’s warning to Goku about Frieza this episode, we get the start of King Kai’s training of Piccolo and the boys this episode (and this, crucially, includes the “making King Kai laugh” challenge), we get the start of the Vegeta/Zarbon fight this episode, it’s a real treat to see an episode this briskly paced after last week’s episode proved a bit of a snoozer.

Let’s start with Goku’s conversation with King Kai and his old, dead friends. Goku’s conversation with Yamcha goes pretty chill until he mentions that Krillin, Gohan and Bulma are on Namek with Vegeta, and there’s another, even stronger group on Planet Namek that he’ll have to deal with when he gets there. King Kai quickly does a scan of Planet Namek with his antennae, because he’s a weird, blue cockroach man, and discovers that Frieza is on the planet, resulting in him having a near-nervous breakdown, insisting that Goku stay the fuck away from Frieza at all costs, and making Piccolo and the boys swear they won’t fuck with Frieza either, or he won’t train them. “ABSOLUTELY NOOOOOT!” King Kai screams at the top of his lungs when Goku gives him pushback on not dealing with the tyrant.

I don’t remember, because it’s been a while since I watched this show front-to-back, but I wonder if King Kai knows the full extent of Frieza’s power or just has a surface-level reading of it, not even being aware of his transformation abilities. Either way, Frieza easily outclasses any other fighter in the show at this point, with his power level in his current form maxing out at a ludicrous 530,000(!), but that’s not even the beginning of Frieza’s actual maximum power level. We’ll get into this a lot more when Frieza gets on the battlefield himself, but it cannot be understated how much Frieza broke the power scaling of this show. Before Frieza showed up, things were growing quickly but still pretty reasonably, not going extremely higher than the way things were left at the end of Dragonball. Frieza and his monster of a fucking power level changed that for good, and necessitated increasingly ridiculous power-ups and transformations in order to keep the tension going.

But enough about that, it’s time we move on to the important stuff, the real meat of this episode. I am, of course, referring to King Kai’s Joke Test, a grand event of significant proportions that requires puns almost as ridiculous as Frieza’s power level in and of itself. Yamcha and Chiaotzu manage to skate by pretty easily, we are told, but Tien and Piccolo do not, for reasons we can immediately infer if we’re even a little familiar with them. You have to feel bad for poor Tien, he’s really wanting to get this thing done, unlike Piccolo, who’s just like, “nah.” It’s a testament to how great this show is that I totally relate to and laugh at these characters’ reactions to King Kai’s weird little test, even though they’re both approaching this with the exact opposite intensity. Tien’s studiousness and Piccolo’s sheer apathy are equally funny for two totally different reasons, and they both make perfect sense for the characters.

Tien finally does get a joke off—granted, Yamcha gave it to him, but I guess King Kai’s pretty liberal about the rules of this challenge---and when Tien tells that joke, my friends, he pulls off the multiform, the Tri-Beam, he goes all-out and goddamn if it doesn’t work. This is the kind of high-quality, premium content that filler should be made of. If you’re going to put filler in your show, at least make it fun, don’t do some tedious shit like have two fighters stand around and size each other up in some grotesque parody of a Mexican stand-off, only without Mexicans, or guns. Well, maybe some guns—Android 17 does carry a pistol around, for some ungodly reason.

By the way, the joke Tien tells: “You can tune a piano, but you can’t tune a fish.” Get it? Like “tunafish”? YA GET IT?

(I haven’t had tunafish in a while, I should get on that. None of that canned shit, either, I want the fresh kind.)

The boys are then introduced to Bubbles, and are told to catch him. Everyone who isn’t named Piccolo struggles with the challenge, but Piccolo catches Bubbles immediately, and with such speed that it embarrasses the shit out of King Kai. However, Piccolo inadvertently passes the “Make Me Laugh” challenge when he refers to catching Bubbles as “monkey business.” This just proves the fundamental adage of DBZ: if you’re better than Goku/Vegeta/Gohan/Piccolo at something, you won’t be for very damn long. It’s depressing to see play out in real time, too, folks. Yamcha doesn’t even try to keep up after the Cell saga, and Tien takes Chiaotzu and bolts for some part of the Earth where there are least likely to be Saiyans. Piccolo, of course, will face his fate much later than these tortured souls, but it will be no less bitter to see him become Gotenks’ babysitter. Hey, that kinda rhymed!

We need to talk about the fight between Vegeta and Zarbon. Krillin tells Dende that Vegeta is hot on their trail, and at first he is… but then he senses Zarbon and decides that fucking up another one of Frieza’s boys is more important than messing with some other random power levels. So off he goes. You have to love his commitment to the bit—the man is absolutely determined to kill off Frieza’s men one-by-one as soon as they leave Frieza’s orbit, like baby birds dumped from the nest after a failed attempt to learn flight. As viewers, we expect Zarbon to get merc’d in the same exact way Dodoria did. After all, we get no indication from the show that Zarbon’s considerably stronger than Dodoria, and our expectations are fully proven when Vegeta easily counters and kicks Zarbon face-first into the Namekian dirt, making him eat dirt in the most satisfying way. Even though, y’know, both of these men are equally evil. Vegeta’s a more fun kind of evil.

Yet… something’s off. Zarbon starts to laugh at the end of the episode. Dodoria was begging for his life when Vegeta got him in an armlock a few episodes ago, but Vegeta manages to easily best Zarbon in a round of battle and… Zarbon laughs? That’s when you know, even the young’uns out there, that even though Vegeta won the first round, Zarbon is in complete control of this situation. This is early DBZ, mind you, when transformations had happened before but were mostly confined to Saiyans transforming into giant apes. We were still new to the concept that a fighter could change their shape mid-battle and alter the course of the fight, so we have no idea when this episode closes out what kind of shit Zarbon has up his sleeves, which by the way are not connected to his actual under-armor and that really bugs me because what, does he have some fucking sensitivity to the cold, why is he doing that?

Anyway, few shows knew how to end on a cliffhanger better than DBZ. In fact, that should be a Top 10 video if it isn’t already—“Best DBZ Cliffhangers.” If you aren’t wondering what the fuck Zarbon’s going to do after this episode ends, you are a stronger individual than I.

(4/5)

A Few Final Thoughts:

--I don’t know why, but whoever art-directed this episode decided to put these weird color patterns over Vegeta and Zarbon while they talk tough at each other. Someone just bored at the editing station?

--Goku decides it’s time to pump it up to 50g. Even if he hasn’t said it out loud, he knows it’s going to end up with him alone on the battlefield with Frieza.

--“I’ve never felt pressure like this!” –Tien, on the subject of telling King Kai a bad pun.

Dragonball Z Episode 51 Review – “Vegeta Has a Ball”

In which Vegeta obtains and then has a ball, all the while creating terrible tragedy for the already put-upon Namekian people.

Vegeta’s brutality in this episode does two things: first, it establishes to the audience that Vegeta may be fighting against Frieza’s cohorts, but that by no means makes him a remotely sympathetic character. When it comes to his tactics against the innocent Namekians, he is equally as brutal as Dodoria and Zarbon, murdering every living thing in the entire village to get what he wants, and nothing he wants is for the betterment of Namekians, or his own race, or any race in the universe. He wants that ball because he wants to kill Frieza, and he wants to kill Frieza because he wants revenge. He is a villain protagonist in the purest sense of the term, and as the enemy of Krillin, Gohan and Bulma’s enemy, he is not their friend. Not by a longshot.

Second, Vegeta’s destruction of the Namekian village solidifies how doomed the Namekian race is. Between Vegeta, who can track them with his own power and not the use of a scouter, and Frieza, who is still several orders of magnitude stronger than Vegeta, the Namekians have no hope of altering their fate. We know as viewers that it took the combined strength of Krillin, Gohan, Yajirobe, and Goku to take down Vegeta, and by just barely. Now: Goku isn’t going to be around for a week, it’s only Krillin and Gohan, and not only is Vegeta skulking around, but if Frieza catches a whiff of anyone trying to take away his dragon balls, it’s curtains. There just doesn’t seem to be any hope in the near future for the Namekians, and with Vegeta hot on the trail of anyone with a ball, the near future may not be soon enough.

Besides Vegeta destroying the shit out of a Namekian village and getting a dragon ball for himself—which he promptly hides in a Namekian lake at a random location—nothing much happens here. We get a spot of cool news, though, even if it’s something that’s not going to matter for a long time: Yamcha, Tien, Chiaotzu and Piccolo have made it to King Kai’s planet and are undergoing a little training with the man himself! We’re going to have periodic visits to King Kai’s planet for the rest of the saga as Piccolo and the gang work on getting stronger, and for the most part, it’s filler. Sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it's dull as shit, and sometimes it just serves as an opportunity for us to get reactions from other people regarding what’s going on with the Namek situation. It’s a pretty epic reveal, too, happening right at the end of the episode when King Kai telepathically communicates with Goku as he’s training. Everyone’s trying to get stronger, knowing the dangers lying ahead.

We get to see Bulma come up with the same idea as her future lover: all they need to do is take one ball and hide it! After all, the balls are useless unless you have all seven! Crucially, however, Gohan points out that Frieza and Vegeta will just become even more genocidal trying to find that last ball. To be fair, however, Frieza and Vegeta are already being ridiculously genocidal in their methods. I don’t think there’s such a thing as being mildly genocidal. You’re either murdering the entire population of a planet, or you aren’t. I guess the argument is that if the Namekians are killed more slowly, it gives time for Goku to show up and start kicking some ass, but I’m pretty sure most of the Namekians are dead anyway, with how many dragon balls Frieza has.

It's in this episode where Krillin and Dende decide to go visit the Eldest Namek, who should technically be called the Eldest Namekian, but I’m being pedantic. Gohan stays behind with Bulma, which is smart. Gohan can protect Bulma, and Krillin can protect Dende! Or, at least, Krillin can protect Dende in-between bouts of crying to himself about the fact that he’s going to die having never had a girlfriend before. You already died without a girlfriend once, my man, this should be standard fare for you by now. I will say, Krillin is at least trying. He’s whining the entire time, but he’s not shirking his responsibilities. He's absolutely going to keep trying to get those dragon balls.

What else is there? Oh, well, there’s Frieza and Zarbon callously brushing off the death of Dodoria before Zarbon goes out with Appule to hunt down the last two dragon balls blind. Good luck with that. I guess between the two of them it’s possible they could find a village in the next few days, but my impression of Namek is that it’s similarly-sized to Earth, and it also has a handful of villages in it. It’s not like all of the Namekian enclaves are metropolis-sized megacities with fucking McDonald’s or McDende’s at every other block—it’s all tiny farming villages with populations of not much greater than 20. So, the Frieza gang has their work cut out for them. They should consider getting the shit beaten out of them by Gohan, Goku, Krillin and Yajirobe. It seemed to work out pretty well for Vegeta, I don’t know why it wouldn’t work for Zarbon, Appule or Frieza. Y’all are fucking amateurs.

(3/5)

A Few Final Thoughts:

--The village elder tells Vegeta he’ll never find their dragon ball. He immediately finds it, in one of the five or six houses comprising the village. Something tells me the Namekians are not hide-and-seek champions.

-- Bulma: “Sounds like you guys had a rough time out there!” She is way too used to shit like this by now.

--If you and about 50 of your friends have a guy—say, Vegeta—surrounded, and he just starts laughing at you, you should probably just run. He’s either superpowered or he has a bomb strapped to his chest.

Dragonball Z Episode 50 Review – “Unexpected Problem”

  It’s kind of a shame that the show’s 50^th episode, which is normally a major milestone for a television show, is rather uneventful. The last couple of episodes have been much more tense, but here the show slows its pace, takes a breather, and gets into a little bit of boring filler shit.

  Not to say that it’s a bad episode, or that nothing of value happens in it. The rest of the heroes other than Bulma learn that Goku is going to be on Namek in a few days. Krillin, who was on the verge of giving up on the whole venture, can finally have something to be happy about, as can Gohan. Poor Dende, of course, has no idea what the hell is going on, generally.

 Imagine being in this kid’s shoes. Not literally, because his feet are small and his shoes look uncomfortable with how they come to a sharp point. But imagine your entire town gets murdered, your childhood friend killed right in front of you, and you scrape by only because some strangers swept in at the very last second and saved you. Next thing you know, you’re taken to this house that seemingly came out of nowhere and introduced to this alien who has a gender you’ve never even seen before, and then they all burst out into effusive celebration like a group of cultists when it’s revealed that GOKU is going to be coming to Namek soon to kill Frieza! Goku’s lucky he kicks so much ass, otherwise this would come off as very, very creepy.

  Speaking of creepy, we have Vegeta just a-creep, creep, creepin’ on our heroes, nearly catching them just by sniffing out their power levels, only to be sidetracked by a huge sea-beast which he assumes is the source of the power level. Vegeta is not having it, he is going to seek and destroy anything that isn’t Frieza or near Frieza, and to be honest, he’s turning into sort of the second protagonist of the show for me. A little naughty to say, I know, because he does such awful shit while he’s on Namek, but you root for him in the same way you might root for Seto Kaiba or Sesshomaru, just to name some other anime examples. He’s often a thorn in the real protagonists’ side, but what makes him interesting is his existence as a spanner in the works and his own private motivations as opposed to the benevolent OR malevolent intentions of other cast members.

  I could go on and on about how cool Vegeta is in this saga, so I guess we might as well talk about the most despicable thing he does on Planet Namek by a longshot, since… well, it gets started in this episode, and gets worse in the next. Vegeta manages to scout out a Namekian village that Frieza and his men haven’t touched. Up to this point, we’ve only seen Vegeta pay evil unto evil, dishing out some vigilante justice/vengeance on Frieza’s gang, and even the people who’ve never seen this show are probably getting the sense that Vegeta’s going to join the good side sooner or later, even if just out of necessity. Well, if you thought Vegeta was going to be any gentler with the Namekian innocents than Frieza’s crew… let’s just say I have a bridge I want to talk to you about, next review.

  Meanwhile, Goku deals with some bullshit on his ship, I dunno.

  Anyway, this was a pretty decent episode, nothing great, and I…

  *sigh* Okay, fine, let’s talk about the Goku subplot.

  Goku’s ship veers off course, sending it careening toward a nearby star, and Goku has to avoid his spaceship being immolated in a terribly fiery tragedy by going out onto the surface of his ship and re-plot it with the remote help of Dr. Briefs. Now, let’s just get this straight: shit like this in the middle of other, more dire stuff happening is just a pointless distraction. Everybody knows Goku is not going to train in 20g for three straight episodes only to be randomly murdered in the vacuum of space by faulty technology. It’s ridiculous from a narrative standpoint and it would piss off everyone you can imagine if the creators of the show actually went in that direction. It would be the poster child for anti-climaxes, the one to end them all.

  But, okay, let’s be a little more fair and look at this in a vacuum: a man has to go out onto the surface of his spaceship and divert its course before he flies directly into the sun. When you put it that way, hell yeah, that’s a thrilling premise, and if it weren’t happening in the middle of the Frieza arc in DRAGON BALL FUCKING Z, it may even be justifiably the premise for two or three full episodes. But here, it isn’t, and furthermore, a lot of what drives the drama of this segment is Goku’s stupidity. He glues himself to his own goddamn ship by his boots, he has to shoot a Kamehameha at a LITERAL SUN to divert his course, and when it’s all said and done, he’s still going to hit Namek in about six days. Whatever. I’ve never seen the movie Armageddon with Bruce Willis, but I’m aware it takes place in space and has a lot of action. I wish Goku could be the protagonist in all of the Bruce Willis films.

  (3/5)

A Few Final Thoughts:

-- Vegeta: “I should have figured out how to sense power levels a long time ago.”

--The nametag on Goku’s suit says “Gokuh,” so I guess that’s what we need to call him from now ohahaha I’m not fucking doing that.

-- Even Vegeta is surprised at how easily he defeated Dodoria.

Dragonball Z Episode 49 Review – “The Prince Fights Back”

  Finally, just when we were starting to go through some withdrawals, we get some prime Vegeta action.

  Vegeta humiliates Dodoria this episode. To call it a fight would be an insult to fights, in or out of this story. It’s a humiliation. It’s bullying. Vegeta might as well be fighting an armless man, with how little Dodoria can challenge him this episode. Dodoria should have never left Frieza’s side, because the only place Vegeta would not utterly murder Dodoria is within Frieza’s eyesight—that is, if Frieza even cared enough to intervene on Dodoria’s behalf (he doesn’t).

  Dodoria tries to bargain with Vegeta after a brief scuffle where it becomes clear that Dodoria can’t touch Vegeta, and to his credit Dodoria does tell him the truth about what happened to the Saiyan and to Planet Vegeta, when he could have easily spun a web of bullshit to protect his boss. Then again, his boss doesn’t really need protection, at all, in any way, unless you’re Majin Buu or Beerus or some other ridiculously overpowered villain. Dabura, maybe? Whatever, anyway, I’m getting off track: Dodoria tells Vegeta that Frieza killed all the Saiyans, including his father, and it wasn’t some meteorite like he and Raditz and Nappa had been told.

  Dodoria also shares Frieza’s reasoning with Vegeta, which may be more important because Vegeta probably already suspected that Frieza murdered the entire Saiyan race. Frieza was afraid of how strong the Saiyans could get in a short amount of time—a fear that will be well-justified later in the series—and while they were useful for a little while, Frieza ultimately concluded that destroying them was the practical option. You have to hand it to Frieza, he’s displaying a lot of smarts compared to other DBZ villains who think they’re untouchable. Granted, he does think he’s untouchable for the most part, but he recognizes a potential problem when he sees it, and a race of battle-obsessed aliens enslaved by a tyrant isn’t a very good proposition when YOU’RE the tyrant.

  Now, Dodoria’s reasoning is maybe not the best here. He thinks that by telling Vegeta that Frieza—the man Dodoria is literally working for and who Vegeta has been working for up to this point—murdered his family and friends, Vegeta is going to spare his life. If someone told me they’d known for years about the person who murdered my family, and had worked for them this whole time, I wouldn’t exactly be inclined to let them skate by. Unfortunately for Dodoria, his gamble doesn’t pay off, and it probably never would have, because Vegeta always was going to kill Dodoria. Dodoria’s little hail mary just bought him a few extra minutes of life, and he spent them pissing off his would-be murderer even more.

  Now, the reason Dodoria wound up encountering Vegeta in the first place is because he did the thing a lot of DBZ characters—hero and villain alike—do: he attacked his enemy with one or more energy beams and then smugly left, confident that they had secured a victory. Of course, he hadn’t, and if he weren’t over-reliant on the scouter, he’d have known that. Actually, even characters who can sense energy levels make the mistake of thinking they killed their opponent, but we’ll get into that as it happens. For now, Krillin, Gohan and Dende are alive and are now safe from Dodoria, even though he did catch sight of them and fire their way.

  At Bulma’s capsule cabin on Namek, she learns from her father that Goku is headed to Namek, which causes her to drop her transmitting device she was talking to him on in the bathtub. And yeah, this show and the preceding one both are pretty fond of showing Bulma lounging in underwear or submerged in a warm bath. What kills me is how absolutely casual Dr. Briefs is about the fact that his daughter is trapped on an alien world with no further means of escaping. I swear, that dude must be a sociopath, because I don’t think I’ve seen him ever express concern for his daughter’s safety, in spite of the insanely dangerous shit she’s always mixed-up in. He was more concerned about the fucking cappuccino machine in the gravity chamber than he was when Bulma told him she was stranded in space with Vegeta and Frieza.

  We learn that Dende can sort of fly this episode, so that’s a thing. He must not be very good at it, because when they were tearing ass trying to get away from Dodoria, they had to carry Dende by the hand the whole time. I guess you can argue they were in the heat of the moment and didn’t bother to ask Dende if he could fly, but something tells me the Namekians who were raising him didn’t train him to fly very fast. It’s not like they were anticipating a horrible alien planet-broker to show up and start demanding eternal life. Or, actually, I think they did, I think they have some kind of prescience. Oh, well. Didn’t seem to help them at all.

  Goku’s not up to much in space, he’s just continuing to do push-ups and sit-ups and drink plenty of juice in the gravity chamber while the gravity is still up to 20g. He mentions at the end of the episode that he’s going to turn it up a notch after another session of 10,000 fucking push-ups, Jesus Christ, but for now, he’s keeping it down to a sensible 20. Good for him.

  Speaking of Goku, I was really captured by Vegeta’s line at the end of the episode, a line which I think perfectly encapsulates the stakes as far as Vegeta is concerned. Yes, Vegeta wants eternal life for many similar, selfish reasons Frieza wants it, but the key difference is Vegeta is fighting to avenge many, many people who died unjustly beneath Frieza’s terrible reign. Vegeta says “I promise you this, Frieza: your downfall will be at the hands of a Saiyan.” Now that is some powerful, prophetic shit right there, and it’s going to pay off in spades when we get to the end of Frieza’s story in Z itself. I haven’t watched any of the Super stuff, so I don’t know how prophetic it’s going to continue being, but probably still strong. I don’t think any of the human characters in the show make it to Frieza level in terms of power. Spoiler, I guess.

  So with one of Frieza’s two most reliable henchmen dead, and with all of his organization’s scouters destroyed, it would seem like Vegeta is succeeding so far. Frieza and his cohorts are flying blind while Vegeta can scan power levels with his mind and make sound judgments based on what he knows about his own power compared to Frieza’s men. Guys like Zarbon and the rest of Frieza’s motley crew, on the other hand, wouldn’t know if Vegeta was as strong as, well, Vegeta, or as strong as the Supreme Kai or something equally crazy. And with Krillin’s group in the mix, it would seem as if things are going to get a little buck-wild on this little planet we call Namek. I sure hope Goku lands soon, said everyone ever.

(4/5)

A Few Final Thoughts:

--“These Earthlings did me a favor when they almost killed me!”

--“It’s amazing what a coward you can become when you aren’t hiding behind your master!”

--“How will you and Zarbon ever find Frieza’s backside to stick your noses in it?!”

--Dodoria: “Shooting people in the back always was your style!” Oh, Dodoria, trust me; he got the jump on you for fun, not because he needed to.

--Yeah, I could pretty much have written this entire review with nothing but Vegeta and Vegeta-related quotes, what of it?