Last time, Goku claimed he could defeat Eis Shenron in five seconds, but he failed to consider Eis’ willingness to use Pan as a shield.
He freezes Goku again, but this time Goku breaks loose, which he explains by saying that he memorizes every technique that he encounters, so because Eis got him with it in Episode 56, he’s prepared for it this time. That’s really stupid, because Eis zapped him with the freeze ray several times in Episode 56, and Goku just stood there like a goof and got zapped. Yet he has the gall to say he won’t fall for the same trick twice.
So then Eis starts pleading for mercy, which leads to this shot, which is kind of interesting. Not because of this episode or its story, though. This is just another example of Goku falling for the same trick twice, because Mercenary Tao and Frieza begged for mercy years ago, and Goku still hasn’t figured out that bad guys will feign surrender to catch him off guard.
No, it’s interesting because there was a semi-famous image going around in 2014, with Goku in some sort of Golden Super Saiyan 4 form, and Beerus was the one pleading for mercy. This looked authentic enough to seem official, and while I’m not sure how many people believed it was real, it sort of represents this last gasp of the “Dragon Ball AF Culture” in the fandom. Nowadays, it’s a lot easier to find out what’s really going on in Japan, but back in the early 2000′s there were all sorts of rumors flying around, and it was hard to know what was real and what wasn’t. So if a fan artist was talented enough to redraw an obscure scene from GT, they could conceivably convince other fans that their Goku redesign was going to appear in an upcoming work.
But back to Eis, he offers to surrender his Dragon Ball, and begs Nuova to speak on his behalf, and Nuova actually does. The thing is, I’m pretty sure Eis can’t exist without his Dragon Ball, so this offer is kind of pointless. But just as Goku agrees to let him go...
Eis slashes at Goku’s face with some sort of icicle claw attack? The effects are pretty clear. Goku is blinded for the next couple of episodes, and also that building in the background gets cut in half.
What’s less clear is what exactly Eis did to Goku’s eyes. Considering how that building turned out, you’d think Eis cut Goku up really bad, kind of like what Zorin Blitz did to Seras Victoria in Hellsing, but that’s a bit too gruesome for GT. Or maybe the ice claws just froze Goku’s corneas or something? That’s more consistent with the ice gimmick.
It doesn’t really matter, because when Eis tries to finish Goku off, Goku just punches a hole in his chest and insta-wins. I mean, duh. This episode is Goku’s 501st appearance on television. One thing we’ve learned about the guy over and over again is how sharp his senses are. He can track scents like a bloodhound, and detect objects and people by sound and the feel of subtle movements in the air. And his ki senses let him detect just about any powerful warrior in the area. Blinding Goku is practically useless, and it seems like the Shadow Dragons are the only ones who don’t understand this. The audience sure as hell knew, so I don’t know why this was presented like some suspenseful moment.
So Goku follows up with a Super Dragon Fist which killerizes Eis and removes all the ice on the city they’re in. Convenient.
Goku tries washing his eyes to clear his vision, but it doesn’t work. So did Eis like... throw dust in his eyes or something like that? Then a bottle drops into his hand, and it turns out Nuova is the one who’s giving it to him. He says it’s “medicine” that will heal Goku’s eyes. Wait, why the fuck would Nuova Shenron just have that with him? Was he expecting something like this to happen?
I think the writers just wanted to make it clear what a sporting guy Nuova was, but it’s kind of weird that he would have eye medicine handy. Also, there’s no obvious trauma to Goku’s eyes, so I really have no idea what the medicine is supposed to do. This feels more like some sort of Solar Flare deal, where Goku just saw a really bright light and he needs time to recover. And maybe that’s what Eis did to him, except why did it cut a building in half?
The bigger problem here is that this blindness angle carries on for a while longer, except it doesn’t really slow Goku down that much, and then it clears up on its own a short time later. So this whole bit just seems like a total mess. They wanted to do something to raise the stakes, but they failed to think it through or make it mean anything.
Anyway, Nuova offers to withdraw until Goku has recovered, and they can fight again later, but before he leaves, another Shadow Dragon shows up and attacks. He destroys the medicine and takes down Nuova. Then he shoots again, and Nuova knocks Goku out of the way and sacrifices himself to save him.
So this is Syn Shenron, the One-Star Dragon, and now the last one of the set. He’s also the strongest one, and apparently he had enough of Nuova’s half-assed babyface routine, and of Eis’ half-assed Memphis heel shtick. He reminds Goku that he was the one who made the Shadow Dragons possible, and this is all his fault, but that’s dumb. Most of the wishes Goku and his friends made on the Dragon Balls were for the sake of restoring the Earth from great cataclysms. I’ve never understood the Shadow Dragons’ sanctimony. They berate Goku for overusing the Dragon Balls, then threaten to destroy the world. Instead of complaining to him, they should be thanking him for giving them life and purpose. Or if they actually care about the world, they could just stay their hand and give Goku a pass. But pick one and go with it.
✨Positivity Page✨
So they fight for a bit, but Syn turns out to be in a whole other class of power. Goku suddenly finds himself running for cover, and struggling to keep up, a lot like he was doing against Oceanus and Nuova, except this time he’s doing it as a Super Saiyan 4, which makes his desperation much easier to believe.
Goku manages to lie low and ambush Syn with a 10x Kamehameha, and it doesn’t do anything. Worse, Syn replies with his own 10x Kamehameha, and completely wrecks Goku’s shit.
Pan sort of wanders around in a stupor, and when she sees Goku hanging upside down like this, she screams in abject terror. See, this is how they should have been doing it all along. They blew through six other Shadow Dragons and finally figured it out on the seventh.
See, the way these Dragon Ball arcs work, you’d have a group like the Shadow Dragons, and Goku might take on the first one, and everyone assumes he’ll be okay, but then he barely survives the fight, and it turns out that it took everything he had to beat the weakest one. That’s how it went with the Saiyans Saga, the Androids Saga, and so on. Haze should have beaten Super Saiyan 4 Goku to a pulp, and only a last-ditch maneuver would have won the day. Then Goku would return to the others and tell them how bad things really are. Yeah, he’s a a Super Saiyan 4, but just one SSJ4 isn’t enough.
And that would lead to a hurried effort to get some reinforcements onto the field. Not just SSJ4 Vegeta, but Gohan as well. Suddenly SSJ3 Gotenks sounds pretty handy, huh?
But no, GT refuses to take the focus off of Goku, so they did this stupid arc where most of the Shadow Dragons were pathetic twerps and Goku takes them all on by himself. Everyone else just sits at home and hopes he’s doing okay. But it ends up turning out the same way as what I just proposed.
Because now Pan is pleading for the rest of Dragon Team to show up and save Goku. Hey, that’s fine, but we should have skipped straight to that on the FIRST Shadow Dragon, not the LAST one. Then we could have had seven OP bad guys taking on seven good guys: Goku, Vegeta, Trunks, Gohan, Goten, Uub and Pan. And all seven of them would have to push themselves beyond their limits just to stand a chance. It’d be awesome. And we could have been doing that for the past nine episodes instead of watching Rage Shenron defeat himself, or Pan getting possessed by a giant mole.
Wait, I forgot about Bulla. Oh man, can you imagine if the good guys were getting clobbered and then Bulla just shows up and blindsides a Shadow Dragon in the head? I don’t think Bulla and Pan would dominate a conflict like this, but the point is that you could still have them jump ahead a few levels and actually put up a fight. Nuova knocked Pan in Episode 54 just to keep her out of his way. I’d much rather see him knock Pan out because he’s got SSJ4 Gohan to worry about, and he’s afraid of SSJ3 Pan shooting a ki blast at him while he’s not looking.
Well, no point crying for what should have been...
✨Is This Episode Worse than "The Roaming Lake"?✨
I give this one a lot of credit for actually having plenty of things happen. Unlike the last several episodes, this one has a lot on its to-do list. We have no fewer than three Shadow Dragons in this one, so we need to kill off two of them and introduce the third. And, mercifully, Syn Shenron is aggressive enough to just attack instead of making long-winded speeches. It fits, because he came here to find Goku, so this isn’t like when Goku finds one of the others and asks them what they’re up to.
So this is a lot like Episode 19, where it still kind of blah, but at least it’s not slow and dull. So it approaches “Roaming Lake” levels of quality, but I still think it falls short. Here’s why.
First, the Eis Shenron fight was disappointing. I get that he’s a dirty cheater, but he’s also supposed to be at least as powerful as Nuova Shenron, who’s presented as a match for SSJ4 Goku. So you would think that Eis would put up more of a fight than he did. Instead, Goku powers through Eis like he’s no big deal, and Eis really has nothing left to do but cheat. He does the fake surrender thing just like Rage and Naturon, and he uses Pan and Nuova as shields, just like Naturon. We already saw Goku defeat Rage and Naturon, and those fights sucked. Why are we doing this crap again?
Second, the death of Nuova is pretty hollow to me. We’ve only had the guy around for four episodes, and one of them was the Vegeta clip show, so he was barely in it. We’re supposed to miss this guy, but why, exactly? Because he was halfway decent towards Pan? Because he freed Goku from the ice, then gave him the medicine for his eyes?
Look, if Nuova were truly a good dude, then he could have stepped in and rescued Pan from Eis’s various efforts to use her as a hostage. He could have also stepped in and attacked Eis rather than just standing around and waiting for Goku to overcome his dirty tricks. Nuova tried to dance on either side of the battle line, and that doesn’t make him a hero or some kind of tragic figure. It just makes him a shitty villain. Goku might miss his ass, but I sure don’t.
Third, Syn’s appearance does raise the stakes, but it does it in a very formulaic way. We see him stalking Goku through this amusement park, but it’s very similar to the way the other Shadow Dragons would push Goku around in past episodes. The only difference is that in those earlier episodes, Goku was in base mode, so you knew he could always turn SSJ4 if he was really in a pinch. This time he’s already in Super Saiyan 4, and he’s still on the backfoot.
On paper, that’s fine, but in practice, it just makes this whole fight look very, very familiar. They just took the same tactics from the other episodes and translated it to a higher power level. There’s nothing new about Syn’s tactics or attitude here. Things will improve a little in the episodes to come, but for this episode, Syn vs. Goku doesn’t feel very special.
And that’s a big problem for the Shadow Dragons Saga as a whole. These episodes all tend to run together, because it’s a lot of the same visuals and character motivations, and a hero who keeps screwing around instead of tackling the villain. So even when the hero is finally forced to try harder, it still falls flat because it looks exactly like it did when he was screwing around.
Also, the music and aesthetics of these episodes is just the pits. I hate the GT score, and I hate this hazy sky always being in the background of every shot, and Syn isn’t exactly winning me over with his design.
So the Roaming Lake wins again, 58-0. This episode put up a decent fight, but it’s not ending the streak. At this point, I’m beginning to think nothing can.
