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.