Member-only story
Dragon Ball Z: Saiyan Training Arc Review
Following the shocking conclusion of the first run of episodes (well, shocking if you’ve dodged the last 30 years of Dragon Ball), it’s time to get down to training. We fall into an unfortunate DBZ trap: Very little happens in these episodes, but it still takes like 15 episodes for that nothing to happen. There’s some interesting stuff, for sure, but not that interesting. I know I could do Kai, but I think from what I’ve heard that it might remove the episodes that make this whole thing more interesting, which is also bad. Let’s dig in.
Piccolo is off training Gohan, who, I will stress not for the last time, is four. Piccolo is still evil, I guess, but wants to beat the Saiyans because if they destroy all the humans, he can’t do it. In true evil guy fashion, he leaves Gohan in the wilderness for six months, because if Gohan is too weak to make it by himself as a toddler, he’ll never be able to beat the Saiyans. He is four. Because he is four, Gohan spends a long time crying before, horribly, cutting the tail off of a T Rex slice by slice, literally every day. Piccolo seems to neither approve or disapprove of this.
Goku is dead and does not appear in these episodes.
Just kidding, he does, but mostly he runs for like two minutes. Goku ends up in the underworld, in what might end up being the show’s last great Journey to the…