#dbza ep41

[jacquelinemerritt]

Dragon Ball Z: Abridged Episode 41 Review

Originally posted March 12th, 2016

Small moments with the androids and heroes.

It’s tempting to say that nothing much happens in “The Trouble with Time Travel,” but that couldn’t actually be further from the truth. While the episode itself is fairly scattered, plotwise, it holds itself together using the same tool as the last episode, character motivation, but unlike “16, 17, and 18 Things I Hate About You,” instead of using character motivation to show the aftermath of a battle, it uses that motivation to give us many small scenes that expand our knowledge of the characters and their relationships.

The episode opens with the Androids, who provide the two funniest scenes in the episode. In their opening scene they nonchalantly steal a pink van from a pair of deliver drivers, and in this scene 17 and 18 play off each other like natural siblings, bickering with each other without ever taking things too far.

Simultaneously 16’s naiveté is played up, as he lifts the van to transport it and calls “shotgun” for a seat in the back, and in his next scene, where the Androids are stopped by the police, and his insistence on having “shotgun” leads to the officers attempting to threaten the trio. This is cut short, of course, when 18 decides to throw their police car into a mountain1, and she joins her brother in the joys of messing with the police.

The rest of the episode is devoted to our protagonists’ retrieval of Goku, with the exception of Chiaotzu, Tien, and Piccolo. Chiaotzu’s character admittedly isn’t developed much here, but he gets to cook pork ramen for a talking pig, so all is forgiven. Tien then arrives to pick up Chiaotzu and reaffirm his status as the only serious character in the show, and Piccolo has a grunting match with Kami, who apparently hasn’t fused with him yet for some reason, despite his insistence last episode that the earth was facing a very grave threat.

Our other protagonists actually get their first hint at this new threat when Bulma breaks the most awkward silence ever put to webseries with a fax of a mossy old time machine, and Trunks freaks out at not knowing how a time machine exactly like his own could be found in the middle of nowhere, opening his capsule inside a flying vehicle to prove his distress valid.

Rating: 4/5

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Stray Observations

1Actually, it looks more like a plateau.

“So Jones, how’s the wife and kids?” “Still dead, Chuck. Been four months.” “Oh. I am terrible at small talk.” “Yes. You are.”

Oolong: “I’m delicious…”

Krillin Owned: 31, because he was about to call Chi-Chi a bitch.

Gohan: “Where are we going?” Krillin: “Kame House.” Gohan: “Isn’t that literally the second place they’ll look?” Krillin: “Less lip, more ship!”

Tien: “I’m here for Chiaotzu. We need to train.” Chiaotzu: “But Tien! The doctor said if your shoulders get any bigger-“ Tien: “That’s why we don’t see him anymore.”

Nail: “Oh, just fuse already.”

Trunks: “How can you understand time travel?” Gohan: “I’ve been studying theoretical physics. Though I guess at this point it’s just physics.”

Krillin: “You don’t have country music in the future?” Sounds like an excellent future.