Super Recaps: Dragon Ball Super Episode 5 (Showdown on King Kai’s World! Goku vs. Beerus the Destroyer!)

Dragon Ball Super and all the images you see in this recap are owned by Toei Animation and licensed by Funimation

We’re back with another episode of Everybody Fears Beerus, and while this one may not be filler… it’s not all that interesting either.  Oh sure, it’s the first big punch up we’ve gotten in the series, but we already saw it like five years ago.  Well who knows!  Maybe I’m being unfair and they’ll do something interesting with it instead of just needlessly recreate it almost scene for scene!  Toei not cheap enough to do that… right?  Okay they probably are, but maybe they’ll throw in a bit of Vegeta and Bulma to make up for it!  Let’s find out!!

The episode begins where the last one left off; namely with King Kai shitting bricks over Lord Beerus landing on his planet and hoping that Goku can keep his head down long enough for the God of Destruction to lose interest and be on his way.  That’s either a great deal of optimism on King Kai’s part or more likely a desperate prayer out of desperation that the guy can for ONCE in his life listen to someone else when they tell him to stay out of it.  Credit where it’s due; Goku DOES manage to maintain a modicum of self-control by staying out of sight, but considering that Beerus can sense power levels… yeah, it was kinda pointless to try and hide behind a brick wall.  Goku comes out and tries to be affable, but King Kai is not impressed and starts to… “correct” his behavior.

Even with Goku’s lack of refined communication skills, he does manage to answer Beerus’s questions to the best of his ability; namely that he has mastered Super Saiyan but has never heard of Super Saiyan God.  The good news is that Beerus doesn’t seem too bothered by that response and probably won’t destroy King Kai’s planet.  The bad news?  His next stop is Earth as he wishes to ask Vegeta the same question; a planet FILLED with very annoying people who could easily set him off and therefore destroy the planet.  Seriously, if Master Roshi turns out to be the harbinger of doom for planet Earth… well it wouldn’t be that much of a surprise, but I still won’t be happy about it!  Still, at least he’s leaving this planet peacefully and there’s no chance that someone here could screw that up!  NO CHANCE AT ALL!!

Yeah, there was obviously no chance that Goku was gonna let him go without a fight (or in this case a friendly sparring match) and starts to show off his Super Saiyan strength in the hopes of peaking Beerus’s interest, even though doing so could lead to King Kai’s planet getting destroyed in the process.  Then again, it’s not like that hasn’t happened already.  Wait now that I think about it, if it happened already When Cell blew it up then how is the planet still here!?  Did they remember to wish for a new Planet for King Kai but then forgot to bring him back to life!?  Anyway, the fight scene between the two of them is gonna take up the majority of this episode, so while these two are hashing it out I’ll take this opportunity to talk about something else.  Personally, I don’t mind the Super Saiyan God and Super Saiyan God Super Saiyan (as awkward as the latter title is) and one of the main reasons is that I NEVER understood Super Saiyan 2 and Super Saiyan 3 both of which Goku uses here to try and get Beerus to take him seriously.  First of all, Super Saiyan 2 is in no way visually distinct enough from Super Saiyan for it to even be classified as something else.  At most, a Super Saiyan 2’s aura is slightly more intense (at least visually) than Super Saiyan, but even with that it always felt like a Show Don’t Tell kind of transformation where we just had to take it on their word that they were ACTUALLY a whole new level of power.  You then be asking, well if the problem was that there wasn’t a significant visual change between Super Saiyan and Super Saiyan 2, then you must think Super Saiyan 3 is great because it’s such a radical transformation, right?  Well… no.  I give them props for bothering to make a new design… but the design is REALLY stupid.  I mean, I GUESS it’s to make him look more primitive as sort of a missing link between human and monkey (the more prominent Supraorbital Torus is a distinctive feature of earlier human species), but it just looks goofy and like they were trying WAY too hard to make him look THAT much more badass.  Couple that with the absurdly long hair, and he looks more like he should be fronting a Mr. Big cover band than the highest form of warrior.  In fact, as much as GT was a total mess, I think Super Saiyan 4 was an interesting design that looked a LITTLE goofy but was a much better interpretation of a Saiyan tapping into a primitive source of power than Super Saiyan 3 was.

Oh right!  There’s a fight going on, isn’t there?  If you’ve seen Battle of the Gods, you know how this one goes as Goku keeps powering up but gets nowhere against Beerus and eventually gets utterly wrecked with barely a poke from the God of Destruction.  What makes THIS version of the fight at least somewhat significant though is that it was infamous when it originally aired in Japan for having some JAW-DROOPINGLY bad animation which honestly should be expected from Toei who did the same thing with Sailor Moon Crystal, and like with THAT show they went back and cleaned up some of the more egregious stuff for the later releases.  We get the GOOD version of the animation here with the English dub, but I’d still put some quotes around “GOOD” as the animation still has the same problem that it’s had since the beginning; namely that middle distance shots are drawn like faraway shots in terms of detail and believable movement, and it takes a lot away from this fight.  The close up shots of Goku and Beerus and some of the hits do look impressive, but for the most part we’re looking at ho hum work at best.

Once the fight is over, Beerus and Whis head off to Earth while Goku is left to lick his wounds under the watchful and sarcastic eye of King Kai who needs to make sure things don’t get any worse than they already are.  We cut to Earth where we get an AWESOME scene with Bulma and Vegeta bickering on the cruise ship; proving once again that they are the best thing in the entire series.  Seriously, the dialogue in this scene is so perfect and hilarious that it’s almost like they got writers from DBZ abridged to do the translation.  Vegeta even takes a cheap shot at Yamcha!  Since when does the series ACTUALLY acknowledge that Yamcha is hilariously useless!?  Well after Bulma and Vegeta’s little argument, King Kai calls in to let the prince know that doom is heading straight for them and that he can’t pull any of his usual Vegeta shtick if he hopes to still be alive by sunset.  Now normally Vegeta would be just as headstrong as Goku when it comes to being told what to do, but learning that the ONE dude who consistently kicked his ass has been incapacitated by the God of Destruction makes just a tad bit more compliant than he normally would be.  And so the episode ends with the fate of the world on Vegeta’s shoulders which NORMALLY would spell doom for all of humanity, but I think God successfully put the fear of God into him; at least enough to not try and punch the OTHER God right in the face.

Considering I spent most of this recap talking about something other than the episode itself, you can probably assume that I didn’t much care for it.  I mean, it’s not BAD as the fighting is serviceable and there’s some solid Vegeta material at the end, but it feels so… minute.  I mean I’m sure if I went back and tried to recap Dragon Ball Z (which I’m pretty sure I was ACTUALLY doing at one point), I would run into at least a dozen episodes that focused just as much on the fighting as this one does here, though I’m pretty sure I’ll give the edge to those episodes considering the awkward animation used here.  It could also be compounded by the fact that I know where this story is going so seeing the big fight scene play out beat by beat how I remember it in the movie didn’t do much to hold my attention.  We can either do something COMPLETELY different with this story arc or we can just speed our way through the arcs that have already been covered, but the show is somewhat awkwardly right in the middle with there being a cruise party instead of the backyard bash, but then stuff like the Beerus fight being completely unchanged.  It’s not a bad episode if you haven’t seen the movie, but if you have then it’s an absolutely skippable one.  Then again, it didn’t have the freaking Pilaf gang in it, so add a point for that.