Dragon Ball GT 54
✨GT Stands For Gravest Threat✨
So I kept thinking that things would pick up a bit once we got past the first four Shadow Dragons. But no, I had completely forgotten that this episode features Goku’s mightest enemy: A slowly turning ventilation fan.
✨"Good" "Ideas", Poorly Executed✨
Here’s the big idea for this episode. This is Nuova Shenron, the Four-Star Dragon. His gimmick is that he makes thing very hot.
And this is Eis Shenron, the Three-Star Dragon. His gimmick is that he makes things very cold.
Now, you may want to sit down for this part, but here’s the neat little thing they worked into this. So Nuova’s kind of honorable, as Shadow Dragons go. He takes out Pan early, but doesn’t harm her. He just wants to knock her out so she won’t be in the way while he and Goku have a cool fight. So Nuova’s not a total dick like the other Shadow Dragons.
But Eis, on the other hand, is a total dick. He takes out Giru and captures Pan even though she’s unconscious and no threat to anyone. Wotta twist.
Another “good” idea this show has is to start a romance subplot between Gil and Pan. Ten episodes before it goes off the air. Fuck GT forever.
✨Positivity Page✨
I dunno, this episode is pretty terrible. I suppose the one thing I like is how Pan tries to attack Nuova right off the bat. It doesn’t work, but only because Nuova’s a more formidable opponent than the ones they’ve faced before. If Pan and Goku had adopted this strategy before, they would have crushed the first four Dragons in a matter of seconds. So for Pan to try it here, against the fifth Dragon, shows that at least one of them has managed to learn something over the last several episodes. It’s too little, too late, but there you go.
Also, any episode where GT Pan gets knocked out early can’t be all bad, right?
✨Is This Episode Worse than "The Roaming Lake"?✨
Yes, this episode is the drizzling shits. The Roaming Lake looks like a Miyazaki film festival compared to this nonsense.
So it seems to start out okay, and I guess the setup is what stood out in my memory, which is why I forgot how bad this one was. Nuova shows up and makes it plain that he wants an epic showdown with Goku. No granddaughters, no goofy tricks, no bullshit of any kind. They’re in another deserted city, and Nuova shoots a gargoyle off a building and says they’ll start fighting when it hits the ground, which is a really cool way to start this thing.
Then they zip around the battlefield really quickly, like they would do all the time in DBZ, so we’re off to a promising start. And Nuova punches through a chunk of debris, because he can make his whole body insanely hot, and just melt through solid objects. So he’s got an interesting power that should make this battle unusual.
But then things go very wrong, very quickly. Goku can’t even touch Nuova because of the extreme heat of his body. Nuova claims that he can briefly become as hot as the surface of the sun, which... how does Goku still have a hand, then?
From here, it just turns into this weird cat-and-mouse game, where Goku hides inside a casino resort and Nuova stalks him through the building. Why is this happening? Nuova could destroy the entire town if he wanted to, and Goku quickly determines that he’ll need to use ki blasts to fight him, so why is he sneaking around, using as little ki as possible?
There’s a part where Goku runs up and down the stairwells trying to get away from Nuova, and Nuova keeps cutting him off, and just sort of standing there while Goku runs off in the opposite direction. Why? It doesn’t make any sense. Why is Goku even trying to hide from this guy? And why isn’t Nuova bothering to chase him?
Eventually, Goku manages to get the drop on him and land some ki blasts, but they don’t seem to do much damage. So I guess Goku was just trying to snipe Nuova from a distance, but he couldn’t get far enough away without getting spotted?
As I recall, the dub kept emphasizing how weak Goku was in this episode, becase at the beginning he complains that he’s hungry. The subbed version doesn’t do this. I mean, he’s hungry either way, but the original script never follows up on this. I think the dub only harped on it because they felt like they needed to do something to explain why Goku kept running away.
So Goku uses the sewers to get the drop on Nuova, but then Nuova just follows him down there, and they go on a merry chase down there, as opposed to the merry chase they had in the hotel. And then Goku runs out of places to hide because...
VENTILATION FAN.
This fan is special. For one thing, it’s in a sewer, which is pretty dumb, since I’m fairly certain that there’s no point in providing ventilation down there. It’s a common trope in fiction to depict sewers as these cool underground tunnels where you can have secret bases and secret passages and secret whatever else you want. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles probably cemented the idea in pop culture, but I suspect it originates with the Morlocks from the X-Men comics. In point of fact, the Morlocks lived in underground bomb shelters, not the sewers, but the two can get conflated pretty easily, and by the time Eastman and Laird made their parody of ninja and mutant comics with TMNT, it was set in these cavernous sewer tunnels that looked more like the halls of an old castle than a place designed to carry away human excrement.
That’s where the sewer trope falls apart. People see manholes an thing there’s a whole awesome world down there, but the reality is that you can’t just stroll through tunnels wading through six-inch-deep green water. The tunnels are pipes, and the pipes are too small for a human to walk through, becuase they’re not for humans, they’re for poo water. Even if you could walk through one of those things, the fumes would kill you long before you could get anywhere.
And yet, this one in GT has a ventilation fan, as if someone designed this sewage system to make it more habitable for any superheroes who ended up down here. I don’t know, maybe there’s a legitimate purpose for a thing like this, but I do find it pretty ridiculous.
But what’s truly ridiculous is that Goku looks at this fan like it’s somehow blocking him from escaping the tunnels. He’s like “Oh no! A dead end!” I’ve lost count of how many walls this guy has smashed through over the years. He’s trained at 100 times normal gravity, and fought battles beyond comprehension, but this ventilation fan has him stymied.
It’s not even moving that fast. I could make a gif and try to calculate its exact speed, but fuck that. I’m not humoring this this bullshit anymore. It’s not an adamantium fan reinforced with Norse magic. It looks flimsy as hell. Goku could just grab it with his hands and bend the blades around to jam the mechanism. Hell, I think I could do that.
Instead, he steels himself like he’s about to do something desperate, and he jumps through the space between the fan blades, like this is some incredible feat of daring. Then Nuova finally walks up to the fan and just sort of stares at it like “Wow, I never expected him to do that. What a guy.”
Then Nuova just burns his way through to follow Goku to whatever reservoir this is. See, this is GT Logic in it’s purest form. Nuova is constantly using his super powers to brute force his way through all obstacles. Goku has immense super powers of his own, but for some reason he refuses to use any of them. And even though he’s acting weak and helpless, Nuova never turns up the pressure to capitalize on this. This is a fight, and no one’s trying to win. They’re just Doing Things for no obvious reason.
So then Nuova generates some sort of lens to focus his power into lasers or something, and Goku scouts it and uses the Solar Flare to turn it against Nuova. That’s kind of clever, except Goku could just shoot him with a Kamehameha to achieve the same result. These guys keep fighting like they’ve been fighting for several episodes already, but it’s only the first round. They don’t need to improvise, they’re fresh.
So finally, Nuova transforms. He covered himself in some sort of film to contain his awesome heat powers, and now he’s removing it. His face still looks dumb.
And Goku turns Super Saiyan 4, claiming that the intense heat won’t bother him much while he’s in this form. THEN WHY DIDN’T YOU USE IT BEFORE?! FUCK!
Sometimes it feels like the people making this show had never even seen Dragon Ball Z, which is weird, because a lot of them had worked on DBZ before this. It’s like they were making Z and just paid zero attention to how any of the fights worked. It’s like they understood you needed to start off small and build up to the heavier offense later on, but why would Goku run around dodging heat rays for fifteen minutes when he could just turn into his ultimate form and fight on more even footing? And why is Nuova toying with Goku like this? He wants him dead, doesn’t he? Or maybe he just wants to push Goku into using his full power, but then why doesn’t he get more aggressive and leave Goku with no other option?
Once again, the answer is that if they do it this way, then they can make the Nuova Shenron fight last longer, with pads out the series. And hoo-boy do they pad the crap out of this one...
✨The Blade Braxton Memorial Haiku*✨
Ventilation Fan
Its power is maximum
Its speed: minumum.
