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duhragonball · 1 year

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Dragon Ball GT 42

✨GT Stands for Gero’s Teammate✨

All right, so we’ve reached the final leg of GT. The series began with the Black Star Dragon Balls and then changed course into the Baby Saga, and now both of those things are in the rear-view mirror. The big question is, where does GT go from here?

Unfortunately, the answer is “not very far.”

✨”Good” “Ideas”, Poorly Executed✨

All right, so let’s get this out of the way, since this is easily the most creatively bankrupt part of the series.

In DBZ, Dr. Gero created Android 17 as part of plot to kill Goku.

In DBGT, Dr. Gero and a second Dr. Gero create a second Android 17 as part of a plot to kill Goku.

That’s what we’re doing.

Let’s dive a little deeper here. So Dr. Mu was killed in Episode 22. As you may recall, he was the Machine Mutant scientist who thought he was the evil mastermind behind Baby, the Machine Mutant army on M2, and the Luud Cult, but then Baby revealed that he had created Mu, and not the other way around. So Mu seemed to be a clueless puppet, someone who thought he was important, but then turned out to be nothing special.

And yet, after Baby, Mu is pretty much the top bad guy in GT. I think the logic was that they needed to dip into the GT Rogues’ Gallery for the next arc, sort of like how Batman will fight the Joker in one story and the next one will have him fight Riddler or Penguin. Except GT’s “Rogues’ Gallery” sucks eggs. It’s Baby, then a bunch of idiots who worked for Baby, and then Ledgic and that one asshole who predicted earthquakes. Dr. Mu’s kind of the only choice, here, but I can’t overstate how weak this is.

Like, okay. So Mu is dead, and Dr. Gero approaches him in hell and says he says he needs his expertise in Tuffle science. That makes sense, except Mu isn’t a Tuffle. I don’t think he even knew what Tuffles were, because he seemed to have no idea what Baby’s true nature was, or that all of the science he knew was given to him by Baby. So why doesn’t Gero just go find Baby instead? He’s dead too, right? Goku blasted him into the sun. And don’t tell me Baby went to heaven.

Also, unlike Mu, Baby has a grudge against Goku. I mean, sure, Mu probably doesn’t like Goku either, but Goku didn’t kill Mu. Baby killed Mu, and Goku killed Baby. So you’d think Mu would be writing Goku a thank-you card.

Actually, while we’re at it, let’s talk about Dr. Gero. In DBZ, he wanted to kill Goku to avenge the destruction of the Red Ribbon Army. This was later retconned to a more personal grudge. Gero had a son, Gevo, who was killed during Goku’s attack on Red Ribbon HQ. And that made perfect sense in DBZ, when Gero was still alive. But now he’s dead, and it wasn’t Goku who killed him; it was Android 17. So you’d think Gero would now be more angry at 17 than Goku. But he’s not trying to get revenge on 17. No, he’s making another 17. Somehow, Dr. Gero has been in hell for 23 years and he seems to think that his fatal mistake was in not having enough Android 17′s.

Anyway, the two doctors somehow build a copy of 17. He even has all the same clothes he wore in DBZ, which is oddly specific. Somehow, this duplicate 17 is in contact with the still-living original 17 on Earth, and the two of them can produce some sort of energy that opens up a portal connecting Hell with Earth. How did Gero and Mu pull this off? We never find out, because they did all this off-screen.

Phase 2 of the plan is to send a bunch of dead bad guys through the portal to attack the Earth. So we’re not just ripping off the Androids Saga. We’re also ripping off the B-plot of Fusion Reborn.

Phase 3 will be to get the original 17 and the duplicate 17 to merge together, which will produce an invincible Super 17. Sort of like DBZ Movie 7, where Android 13 combined with parts from his comrades to become Super 13. So for those of you keeping score, this arc is now ripping off the Androids Saga and two of the DBZ movies.

So, this arc is off to a pretty weak start. Don’t get me wrong, this could work. Ripping off all these old DBZ stories is cheap, but it does make a pretty solid premise for an action-adventure story. In the hands of a great creative team, this could have turned out to be a lot of fun. But it’s Toei, and it’s GT, and by now I think we see their track record for this sort of thing.

Again, the point I’m trying to make with this segment is not that GT isn’t allowed to borrow ideas. The point is to poke holes in the idea that GT “had some good ideas”. It didn’t. There isn’t a single new idea in this whole episode. It’s just a mashup of stuff we’ve seen before. And that could still be okay, but it’s that “poor execution” that damns the series.

✨Positivity Page✨

How can combining 17 with himself make him stronger? Well, this is the one part of the plan that they bother to explain. According to Gero, he had designed 17 to be the ultimate android, or cyborg, or whatever you want to call him. He even says in this episode that 17 was meant to be even stronger than Cell turned out to be. But 17 never achieved his true potential. Gero blames this on his failure to completely erase 17′s former identity when he rebuilt him into a cyborg. I’m not sure I follow that logic, but we do know 17 was never truly loyal to Gero, so maybe what Gero is saying is that he had to leave out certain powers from 17′s design, because he couldn’t be trusted.

But the way Gero says it, it sounds like he means 17′s disloyalty made him weaker somehow. Anyway, Gero seems to have solved that problem, because the duplicate is completely under his control, and he original 17 seems to be doing what they want him to do. And the duplicate contains special upgrades and enhancements that the original lacks, so when they merge together, they’ll finally become the ultimate artificial warrior that Gero had intended from the start.

And you know, I guess that does sort of add up, now that I think about it. I’ve always balked at this explanation for Super 17, because the whole point of Cell was that he was Gero’s “ultimate weapon”, except he kind of wasn’t. Cell was a failsafe, something Gero gave up on because it was taking too long to finish.

So I guess the narrative here is that Gero planned to achieve the ultimate android in #17, but he couldn’t suppress 17′s personality, so he had to nerf 17. Then he made 18, perhaps as a second try, and she had the same problems, so he put both of them in storage, for fear that they’d turn on him. He ended up designing 19, using some different powers that weren’t included in 17 and 18, but given what we know about Super 17, it seems like the idea was to have one android with all of those powers, and some more besides.

Anyway, since 17 didn’t work out the way Gero planned, he tried to create Cell as a way to salvage the project. But Cell would only combine with 17 by literally consuming him (and 18). He’d become incredibly powerful, but not necessarily as powerful as the original Super 17 design. But Gero had to settle for that, because it was the only way to approach Super 17 power levels while also eliminating 17 as a potential threat.

But now, with Dr. Mu’s help, and 23 years in hell to consider the problem, Gero thinks he can finally build Super 17 the way he wanted from the start. And that kind of makes sense too, because it took Gero’s computer about 20 years to finish making Cell, and you have to figure that Gero could improve on that in the same amount of time, especially when he has the completed Cell available for reference.

So I don’t know, it’s not all terrible. But it is mostly terrible. Also, I like this mad scientist toast that Gero and Mu share.

✨Is this episode worse than “The Roaming Lake”?✨

This episode is pretty much focused on setting up the plot, which is a good thing in principle, but it takes a really roundabout way to get there. I just explained Gero and Mu’s scheme, but I had to jump back and forth across this episode’s runtime to do it. Let me run through these scenes in order to give you an idea of the problem here.

So we open on Goku’s house, I think? It looks like Mt. Paozu, except there’s a town around them. Anyway, the Son Family is having Bulma, Trunks, and Bulla over for dinner. Trunks is running late, and then he shows up and collapses in Pan’s arms. He says “17″, and passes out.

Then the good guys notice the giant hellhole in the sky, and King Kai contacts Goku to tell him what that is. He doesn’t know how it happened, though. Also, King Kai has a cold for some reason, and I don’t know if that’s supposed to be a plot point, or if they just wanted to do something different with his visual.

We get a lot of panicky Earthlings reacting to the Hellhole, and then we find out Mu and Gero are behind it, and they explain their plan, which I’ve already covered.

Then Trunks wakes up at Goku’s house, and he explains what happened to him. He was on his way over for dinner, when the original 17 ambushed him, beat him up, then told him about the Hellhole. Note that a lot of this information has already been explained elsewhere, but this is how Goku finds out about it. The only new detail in this scene is that 17 told Trunks to send a message to Goku, challenging him to face the bad guys in hell.

After Trunks tells his story, the gang sees a news report about all the dead villains invading, and Goku decides the only thing to do is take the fight to Hell before Cell and Frieza come to Earth. Again, we’re just sort of rehashing the basic problem. King Kai told Goku about this Hellhole problem early on, so we didn’t really need 17 and the news media explaining that dead bad guys could come through it to get revenge.

So we can finally move on to the real meat of the story, except most of the episode was spent over-explaining the situation. Goten and Trunks kill Pui-Pui, Yakon, and Android 19 while Palace watches. I guess fans of Bisexual Goten really did this shot? I don’t have much of a head for this sort of thing, but it seems like something they’d like.

And Pan wipes out just about all of the Red Ribbon Army guys. Wait, why did Staff Officer Black get to keep his robot suit? It’s weird enough that No. 19 and Sgt. Metallic are in this episode, but I can sort of buy into the idea that they had souls. But Black’s mech was just a machine. Did Gero build him a new one? Or did Black come to Earth, and then he went to an old Red Ribbon storage facility and get a new robot suit just like the one he used when he died?

As for Goku, he flies into Hell by himself, like an idiot. When he finds Gero, Mu, and the duplicate 17, they just nope out there and fly through the hole, closing it up behind them. Goku stands there like a dummy and just watches them escape. So now Goku is trapped in hell, while Gero and Mu are free to wreak havoc on Earth with no one to stop them.

Mostly, Goku’s pissed because he came here to fight Cell and Frieza, and he’s worried that it was all a lie, but then Cell and Frieza show up, and it looks like they stayed behind to keep Goku company.

And this is presented like a terriffic cliffhanger, but... it really isn’t? The idea here is that the Earth is besieged with dead villains while Goku is trapped in hell. But... we already know there’s a way out, since Gero and Mu just used one. Sure, the trick will be for Goku to find his own escape, except.... no, Goku can just turn into a Super Saiyan 4 and use Instant Transmission to leave. We’ve seen him do this before. He teleported back and forth between Earth and Otherworld during the Buu Saga. The only limitation seemed to be that he couldn’t move freely while he was dead, but he’s not dead this time.

Then there’s the dead villains. Well, they could cause all sorts of problems for our heroes, except... no, they can’t. Goten, Trunks, and Pan just took out a bunch of them already. Most of the bad guys in this arc are so outclassed that they’re not even remotely a threat. Cell and Frieza might be able to cause some trouble for the weaker heroes, but they stayed behind to fight Goku, who... Well he’s a Super Saiyan 4 now! Frieza died to a Super Saiyan 1, and Cell died to a Super Saiyan 2. Do the math.

The only real tension to any of this lies in the pair of 17′s, but they don’t really become a threat until they combine together. So this whole arc is really just a one-villain deal, but we have to wade through all of these small fry just to get to that part, which is a waste of time. And as we’ve seen, GT loves dragging things out.

So yeah, this is worse than “The Roaming Lake”, because of the way it sort of repeats the explanation of the conflict, rather than giving the audience any reason to care about it.

✨The Blade Braxton Memorial Haiku*✨

That android is toast!

Yeah, more like... burnt toast... again!

And again... and... a--

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