Dragon Ball Super 031
When Jaco and Bulma team up, anything could happen! (Narrator: Nothing happened.)
Let’s try to go over Bulma’s plan here. The upcoming Destroyer Invitational Tournament will decide who gets control over the Super Dragon Balls. If Champa wins, he plans to wish for the Earth of Universe 7 to switch places with the dead Earth of Universe 6. If Beerus wins... who knows? But Bulma doesn’t want to find out. Since Champa is the God of Destruction from U6, Bulma believes that there’s a second set of Super Dragon Balls in Universe 7. So she aims to track them down and use them to undo any destructive wishes Beerus or Champa might have in mind.
To do this, she needs a radar powerful enough to detect the Super Dragon Balls, and she also needs to take it to the center of the universe, where she can use the radar’s range will be as effective as possible. So she calls in Jaco to take her there. Except Jaco works for the Galactic Patrol. Their ships aren’t designed to cover the vast distances from one galaxy to another. They only operate inside of the one galaxy they’re in.
Okay, a couple things. First, I like that this detail is acknowledged in the story. A lot of sci-fi/space fantasy franchises fail to recognize just how big space is. Well, specifically, I’m thinking of DC and Marvel Comics. The Green Lantern Corps divided the universe into 3600 sectors, then assigned a handful of GL’s to patrol each one, and somehow seven or eight of them always wind up sticking close to one planet in one galaxy in one sector. If I remember right, their headquarters is located at the center of the universe, and Hal Jordan just zips back and forth like it’s no big deal. He also constantly runs into colleagues from other sectors, but, again, space is huge. Aside from staff meetings on Oa, you would expect him to live out his entire lifespan without ever seeing a Green Lantern from another space sector. Meanwhile, all of Marvel’s big intergalactic powers rule over entire galaxies. The Skrulls have the Andromeda Galaxy, and the Kree have theirs and the Shi’ar have theirs. I’ve lost track of all that lore, so maybe Marvel introduced some shitty new aliens called the Dipshittors to build on that concept, but the point is that the Avengers and Fantastic Four will just fly out to fight those guys whenever it’s convenient.
Star Trek and Star Wars get it right, because those stories take place in one galaxy. There’s like one episode where the Enterprise went to another galaxy and it was this insane thing that happened. Maybe the new shows play with that idea more, but fuck the new Trek shows. Scott Bakula’s dog can kiss my ass. The point is that because those shows are confined to one galaxy, they don’t spent a lot of time talking about how impractical it is to go to a different galaxy. It just never gets brought up.
But that leads me to my second thing I want to talk about: Jaco seems to imply that Universe 7 is a lot bigger than we’ve heard in the past. Maybe it’s just the dub, and I’m in no mood to go back and check the subtitles, but he talks about the multitudes of other galaxies in the universe, and how unbelievably far away it all is, and I feel like that conflicts with the cozy four-galaxy scenario introduced in Dragon Ball Z. Earth is in the North Galaxy, overseen by the King Kai of the North, while the East, South, and West Galaxies are overseen by their own King Kais.
Then again, I’m not sure how that was all established. It comes up in the original Broly movie, which is mostly set in the South Galaxy, which all of the characters are able to reach without much trouble. It also comes up in the Otherworld Tournament arc, because they have to explain who the other three Kais are.
But I don’t know that it gets much play in the original manga. Like, South Kai appears in the manga, and the Grand Kai is mentioned, and Kid Buu’s origin story refers to other Supreme Kais who used to work alongside Shin. But I’d have to check to see if there’s any mention of just four galaxies. Maybe it’s a Toei invention.
Anyway, Jaco suggests an alternative: Visit the world of Master Zuno and ask him about the Super Dragon Balls. I don’t see how that solves anything, though. Zuno’s gimmick is that he knows everything, and he certainly seems to know everything, but even if he tells Bulma exactly where the Super Dragon Balls are, they could still lie far beyond the North Galaxy, and so they’re completely out of her reach. Also, the SBD’s are the size of planets. How was she planning to gather them all together?
Now, most of this episode is Jaco making cracks about Bulma’s age, and Bulma beating the absolute shit out of him for it. Also, he tries to turn the tables on her by accelerating his ship really fast, but he winds up making himself nauseous as well. They seem to utterly despise one another, and it’s not much fun watching them interact.
I mean, for all intents and purposes, this episode is a direct sequel to the Jaco manga. There’s even a flashback to the chapter where Jaco met Bulma, and she repaired his ship and flew it around Professor Omori’s island.
But the Jaco in that story was a lot more calm and collected, more of a detached observer of humanity. We see him here freaking out about Tights’ little sister joyriding in his ship, but I’m pretty sure he was only mildly irritated about it in the manga. The most upset Jaco ever got in the manga was whenever that police sketch came up.
But now, in Dragon Ball Super, he’s become this cowardly little twerp. At the beginning of this episode, he vents his frustrations with a little target practice, and accidentally destroys a space monument, which he tries to pin on a wanted fugitive in the area. And that seems authentic for Jaco, but when he gets to Earth, all he does is try to find some excuse to leave, and when that doesn’t work he trades barbs with Bulma and lets her whoop his ass.
Which is a shame, because there was something much more humanist about the original Jaco story. It was about how the characters grew after working together and helping one another. Jaco’s kind of a dick, and Omori was kind of a bitter misanthrope, but they still cared about one another because their better nature overcame their anti-social tendencies.
This episode might have tried to hearken back to that theme, but it just doesn’t happen. When they get to Zuno’s planet, Bulma and Jaco discover there’s a seven year waiting list just to ask Zuno a question. Then they see this red frog dude show up for his appointment, and Jaco recognizes him as the crook he heard about earlier.
So Jaco has a choice to make. If he arrests this guy, he can open a spot on Zuno’s schedule and skip to the front of the line. However, bringing in this frog guy might expose his lie about the destruction of that space monument. On the other hand, the frog dude recognizes Jaco as a space cop, but he’s waited seven years for this appointment, and he decides to just play it cool and hope Jaco doesn’t recognize him.
And Jaco... lets him go. The frog dude was wanted for dine-and-dash crimes, so it’s not like he’s a violent offender or anything. In fact, the reason he came to this planet was to ask Zuno how to dine-and-dash without getting caught. That’s how into dine-and-dash this guy is. For all his bluster, Jaco isn’t a model patrolman, and besides, this is his day off. And Bulma’s mission is her problem, not his, so he doesn’t want to risk getting in trouble with his superiors over this.
But then Bulma tells him they’ll just have to go home and take their chances on Beerus’ wish, and that spurs him into action.
Frog dude tries to take a hostage, but Jaco defeats him with ease, and Zuno’s attendants give him an immediate audience with Zuno out of gratitude. This s basically the climax of the episode, and it’s presented like some character developing moment for Jaco, except... it really doesn’t work. Maybe he took action because he didn’t like the idea of letting Bulma down, or he couldn’t stand the thought of failing a mission, or something like that. But it looks more like he was more frightened of Beerus using the Super Dragon Balls than he was of getting in trouble at work. And that’s not much of a conflict to build your story around.
As for Zuno, well, he’s another alien like his attendants, only he has an even bigger head. You have to kiss him before he’ll answer your questions. Since Jaco’s a man, Zuno only gives him one question. Jaco wastes it on a pointless demonstration. He asks Zuno what Bulma’s bust size is, and he not only gives and answer, but extrapolates what Bulma’s bust size used to be before she got older. He should have asked why the animators keep drawing Bulma’s blue jeans so weird in every episode.
As for Bulma, she gets three questions, because she’s a lady, and Zuno is horny, I guess. So this is just the same gag they used thirty years ago with Master Roshi. Bulma wastes a question asking if Zuno will answer her questions. Then she asks him to tell her about the Super Dragon Balls, and when he’s finished, she summarizes it all and asks if she got it right, and Zuno counts that as her third question. Bulma offers to kiss him some more, but her time is up.
So the only useful information that came out of the whole trip was this: There’s only one set of Super Dragon Balls, which are scattered across Universes 6 and 7. So Bulma’s plan was doomed from the start, because Champa already has most of the one set secured, and there’s no other SDB’s out there to use. This also means that Champa must have been trespassing into Universe 7 to collect the SDB’s, since at least some of them must have been there. But that hardly matters, since we already knew Champa had been lurking around behind the scenes. We saw him destroy a planet, and then Beerus ran into him during the Golden Frieza battle. Also, Beerus doesn’t care, since he plans to win the Super Dragon Balls in this tournament anyway.
So this was all a pointless aside. I guess this shot of Goku copping a squat with Jaco is kind of neat. They didn’t interact much during the Res F stuff, so this is the first indication that they’ve met.
Also, Bulma gives Jaco some dairy products for the road, so I guess they don’t hate each other that much.
Oh, and this is the episode where Goku and Vegeta talk about how they like their feisty, feisty wives, and Vegeta says it’s because Saiyans are genetically predisposed to this. And Piccolo’s astonished to hear this, and I really don’t know why he, of all people, would care.