Synopsis: Goku finds meditating to be difficult and isn't sure that he believes it's a good training method, but Mr. Popo assures him that it will help him achieve his new training goals. Popo tells Goku that he must become like a stone, quiet and unyielding to external forces, and Goku tries, but is unable to get the hang of it initially. Meanwhile, back at Kame House, life has returned to a relative normality – Yamcha, Tenshinhan, and Kuririn all spar with each other, while Bulma attempts to sunbathe only to get perved on by the likes of both Oolong and Roshi, and Lunch shoots at them for acting up. Goku finally starts to find some success in meditation, discovering that he can sense so many other things while he's motionless. As his mind starts to wander towards his friends however, a watching Mr. Popo flicks a walnut at him, catching Goku in the side of the head. Goku is annoyed, but realizes that stones aren't supposed to think either. He starts meditating again, and this time when Popo flings a walnut, Goku is able to instinctively dodge it by sensing it coming. Some time later, Popo praises Goku for having made great progress in his training, only to find that Goku has fallen asleep instead. For the next phase of Goku's training, Mr. Popo begins to quickly spin a staff above his head, and due to it's speed, it begins to look like it's moving closer and closer to Goku whom Popo has instructed not to move. Goku begins to dodge the perceived blows, and when Popo asks him why he moved, Goku says the staff seemed to be getting longer just like his nyoibo. Popo insists that the staff is an ordinary pole however, and upon inspecting it, Goku agrees but can't figure out why it seemed to be getting closer to him. Popo tells Goku that his mistake was trying to keep up with it with his eyes. Mr. Popo then hands Goku a blindfold and tells him to put it on, setting Goku's next task as catching a cat with a bell tied to it's tail. Goku thinks it'll be easy, but as Goku follows the sound of the bell right to the cat, he suddenly hears the bell coming from a different direction – Popo has a bell as well, and is shaking it as well, confusing Goku as to where the cat really is, and causing him to crash head-first into a tree. Goku accuses Popo of using a dirty trick, but Popo chastises the boy for once again relying on only one sense, this time hearing, as it too can be deceived. He tells Goku again that if he can learn to clear his mind, he'll be able to see through such deception, and Goku confesses that he's still not very good at it yet. Goku remembers that Popo said he went through training similar to this as well, and asks to go through exactly what Popo did. Popo warns Goku that the training will be extremely grueling, but Goku insists on going through it anyway, so Popo leads him inside Kami's temple. Seeing that Goku is wanting to try Popo's own training, Kami warns Goku that it might be even crueler than death, as Popo assigns Goku his new task – bring back the Holy Crown that rests at the top of Mt. Thunder. Goku thinks that will be easy if he can just find where that is, and Popo uses a device in the corner to set a teleportation device to send Goku to Mt. Thunder. Goku is surprised to find himself outside again, and when a young girl chasing a bird comes running towards him, he asks her where Mt. Thunder is. The girl points to a tall mountain in the distance, and Goku rushes off to get the crown, but not before thanking the girl who laughs cryptically as he leaves. Climbing up the mountain proves to be difficult, and Goku can't shake the sense that there's some dangerous monster at the top. Kami-sama and Mr. Popo watch his progress from the sanctuary, and Kami smirks as Goku gets to the top and finds the crown. Goku takes it off a pedestal and places it on his head, surprised by how easy it all was after all. However, he soon finds that he can't get the crown off, and as the pedestal it was on sinks into the ground, a beam of light shoots up into the clouds above, changing them into storm clouds. Lightning rains down and strikes the crown, electrocuting Goku who realizes he's going to have to get out of there fast if he doesn't want to die. As another bolt strikes him, Goku realizes that he'll have to dodge the lightning bolts, a feat that quickly proves impossible, as a third bolt strikes him and sends him flying from the mountain top as the crown is knocked from his head. Down below, the girl is looking for her bird, Pippi, along with her mother when they end up stumbling across an unconscious Goku. Carrying them back to their home, Goku soon awakens in the girl's bed and thanks her for saving him. The girl is introduced as Chu-li, and her concern over the missing Pippi is expressed. Goku promises to help Chu-li find Pippi as soon as he's finished with his task, but when Goku explains what he's up to, Chu-li and her mother are surprised, as local legend says that whoever gets the crown from Mt. Thunder will become the strongest person in the world. That night, Goku stares out at the mountain and mulls over what to do – if he's going to get that crown safely, he's going to have to figure out some way to move quicker than lightning. But how? The next morning, Goku is awakened by the sound of Chu-li's mother screaming as she finds Chu-li on top of their roof, barely able to hang on. Goku climbs up and helps her down, and when asked why she climbed up there, Chu-li says she thought maybe Pippi would come back if the bird could see her. Chu-li's mother scolds her for doing something so dangerous without reason, but Chu-li insists that she could hear Pippi somewhere close by. Chu-li sits up suddenly and runs outside, claiming to have heard Pippi again, and sure enough, the bird soon flies back down to her. Goku is surprised that Chu-li could recognize the sound of one bird out of all the other noises outside, and when Goku asks her how she did it, Chu-li says she could just feel Pippi's presence somehow. Thinking on it, Goku realizes that's the trick he needed, and rushes off back towards Mt. Thunder. Scaling the mountain quickly again, Goku grabs the crown and puts it on his head again, once again causing lightning to rain down on him. This time however, Goku stands as still as can be with his eyes closed, and senses the approaching lightning bolt by feeling the disturbance in the air. In doing so, Goku proves able to dodge the lightning – however, he celebrates too soon, and is soon struck by a second bolt, knocking him out cold and sending the crown flying from his head once more. As the boy lays there unconscious, it seems unclear how much further he'll have to go to truly master the ability to move 'quicker than lightning'. Review: This is one of those episodes that both seems to have a lot in it, while also not having that much at all. That's far from a bad thing in this case however, as it makes this episode rather tight and focused on it's goal, or rather Goku's goal – to become quicker than lightning. Of course, at the start of the episode, Goku's trying to learn to do the exact opposite of that actually, as he tries to learn to be as 'still as a stone'. Despite seemingly having opposite goals however, the lessons Popo tries to teach Goku in this episode are all tied at the hip, as the ultimate goal is for Goku to learn to stop relying on his default senses, like sight and hearing, and instead start paying attention to the world around him in new ways, ways that can't be as easily deceived like his other senses. Popo first tries to teach Goku this by getting him used to sensing the walnuts he'll toss at him while he's meditating, but while Goku has one success with that, it seems to have been a fluke more than anything else. Popo's next test for Goku – telling him not to move as he spins a staff near him – is another test designed to see how Goku's coming along towards focusing his non-basic senses. Goku fails this test because he relies on his eyes, which fall victim to an optical illusion and make him think that Popo's staff is coming closer to him when it's not. If Goku had instead sensed the movement of the air off of the staff, as Popo wants him to, he would have been able to tell that the staff wasn't coming any closer to him than it had been at the start. The following test with the cat and the two bells is much the same – Popo wants Goku to figure out where the cat is based on the disturbance in the air when it moves rather than the sound of the bell, which Popo is muddling further by jingling a bell of his own. Goku relies on his hearing however, and thus is unable to find where the cat is. These lessons all ultimately culminate in Goku taking on the ultimate test of what Popo's trying to teach him, in the form of the 'Holy Crown' and Mt. Thunder. Man, first we had 'Holy Water' that was actually poison, now we've got a 'Holy Crown' that's actually a lightning rod. Couple all of this with Kami dumping Piccolo onto humanity, and it's looking pretty certain that God really is trying to kill everyone, huh? It's also pretty funny to realize just how far we've come since the days when delivering milk was considered intense training. Oh yeah, and speaking of Kami's unique nature, anyone else really want to know how or why the sanctuary has a technologically based teleportation device? At least when Karin moved Goku somewhere instantly, it was something mystical, like a weird jar. Here Popo puts on a light show and then Goku's transported instantly. It's...really weird. Though I guess it's no weirder than a hermit living on an island and watching porn all day long... Jokes aside, Goku is just as ill-equipped for this latest challenge the first time he tries it as he was for Popo's earlier attempts to teach it to him. He keeps relying on things like his eyes and his ears to try to dodge the lightning, which quickly proves to be as ineffective as it would be in real life. That's where the episodic characters of Chu-li and her bird Pippi come in. Character wise, they're about as stock as they come, with Chu-li and her mother both bringing to mind Suno from the Muscle Tower storyline earlier in the series, at least in how they rescue Goku after finding him unconscious outside. With no real threat to them to help flesh them out further however, they never really become any more than they are when you first set eyes on them, but in a weird way? It's hard to really get mad at them for that, because you can sort of tell they were never meant to be in the first place. Chu-li and Pippi are simply ways for Goku to come about realizing what it is he's lacking, and in that regard, they accomplish their job well. Beyond that though, it's pretty easy to see why they're not super well remembered characters. Once Goku realizes his mistake and starts trying to 'feel' where the lightning is going to strike by the changes in the air around him, he manages to dodge lightning quite readily, as the truth of the matter is, he's already more than fast enough to do so, he just needs to know WHEN to dodge to pull it off. This is part of what makes this training, and later training we're in the midst of in modern Dragon Ball, somewhat more interesting than a lot of what we see during the Z portion of the franchise, as the training isn't outright about becoming stronger in a numerical sense – it's about becoming better at utilizing the power they already have, and thus becoming a more effective fighter, and thus stronger, in that way instead. Of course, Goku's still got a way's to go before he'll truly be able to consider this training mastered, even for the time being, as the end of the episode shows. I mentioned before that this episode was rather tight, and it really is – almost the entirety of it's runtime is focused on seeing Goku fail and try again at learning the lesson Mr. Popo is trying to teach him. There's actually only one cut-away scene unrelated to that plot in this entire episode, in the form of the brief cutaway to Kame House, and I'm fairly certain this scene was probably only added because the script was just a minute or two shorter than what they needed for the runtime. It doesn't really add anything that we didn't already know was happening (though it is a little surprising to see Tenshinhan training alongside the Turtle students rather than Chaozu), and it doesn't delay the rest of the episode in any way whatsoever either. It's like the very definition of filler for the filler, basically. But hey, it almost shows Bulma topless again, so that's something...right? Until next time! Favorite Scene: Popo screwing with Goku while trying to teach him is pretty fun for everything in the first half of the episode, but if I had to pick one, it's definitely the part with the bell and the cat. Next Time: I am never going to remember the names of all of these children, holy crap.
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About the AuthorAspiring author and big anime/manga fan, just trying to do my best in the world. For more details, go to About Me. Archives
September 2022
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