Synopsis: As Bulma, Gohan, and Kuririn all travel to Namek on Kami's ship, Bulma lazes around the ship and interrupts Gohan and Kuririn's mental training to tell them to clean up the ship. Kuririn points out that it's her mess, but she claims to be too busy to clean. Back on Earth, a nurse catches Goku out of bed and trying to train despite still being in a body cast, and Roshi uses the opportunity to harass the nurse. Goku's doctor catches Goku out of bed as well and tells him that if he keeps this up he's never going to get any better, and the doctor puts Roshi to work helping the nurse get Goku back into bed. When the doctor asks where Chi Chi is, Roshi tells him she's up on the roof, as Chi Chi stares at the sky and wonders how Gohan is doing. Back in space, Bulma and Kuririn talk about where Vegeta may be after leaving Earth, as elsewhere in space, Vegeta's ship is shown flying through the stars. Suddenly, all three of them notice something flash in front of the ship. Gohan wonders if they've reached Namek already, but Bulma says it's far too soon for that to be the case. Using the ship's computer, she's able to see that something is quickly approaching them, although Gohan and Kuririn don't see anything outside the window at first. A fleet of smaller ships soon appear however and open fire on their ship, forcing Bulma to open fire in return. As the ships fly around them however, another ship that looks just like theirs appears in front of them, and although they do their best to avoid collision, the ship turns at the same time as them. As all appears lost however, rather than crashing into an identical ship, their ship is taken inside a larger camouflaged balloon-like ship. Finding themselves and their ship inside of another ship now, the trio steps out of their ship to investigate, with Bulma realizing that she forgot to put on pants first. As they explore, they go down a hallway where multiple guns poke out of the wall, which all start firing at them. Gohan, Kuririn, and Bulma (with Gohan's help) all manage to survive the attack, with Kuririn telling them both to be careful as they have no idea what other kinds of booby traps might be waiting for them. Shortly afterwards, a wall slides closed behind them, trapping them in a room. Kuririn tries at first to blast the wall away, but acid soon begins pouring into the room, forcing Gohan to grab hold of Bulma to save her from being dissolved. Kuririn blasts the wall away and the trio escape by flying over to the other side. Gohan asks if this could be a Saiyan spaceship, and Bulma admits that she has no idea. They wonder if Vegeta could suddenly appear around the corner and attack them or if he's still recovering somewhere else, as the Saiyan is shown to be doing exactly that as his pod continues to fly through space. After walking further, Kuririn starts to notice that it feels like they're going in a circle, and they haven't seen another door in ages. What appears to be a door appears on the ceiling, but as Kuririn tries to pull it open, another door slides open on a nearby wall. The trio walks through it, but a pit on the floor suddenly opens up and tries to drop them out into space. Kuririn and Gohan rescue Bulma again, and fire ki blasts to push them all back up onto the ship. Gohan and Kuririn are starting to get hungry now, and they all soon smell food in another nearby room. They rush over to indulge their appetites, but Bulma warns them that this could all be a trap. As she carefully tries grabbing a fork and a knife, another knife hurtles past her and sticks into the wall. At first Bulma gloats about not falling for such an obvious trap, but the knife in the wall has pushed in a panel that soon causes the whole ship to shake as pillars are pulled away, trapping Bulma underneath a large dome alone after Kuririn and Gohan were quick enough to dodge out of the way. As Gohan and Kuririn prepare to free Bulma, the dome disappears and a robotic arm grabs Bulma and hands her up from the ceiling. Before any of them can react, guns surround Bulma and soldiers come out of compartments that raise out of the floor to surround Gohan and Kuririn as well. The group seems to be captured, but Gohan notices something strange about their attackers – they're all children. Kuririn asks if there's any adults they can talk to, and Bulma shouts for them to forget about her and 'give those kids a spanking', but as the kids around Gohan and Kuririn react in fear when Kuririn starts to move, the kids surrounding Bulma point even more guns, prompting Bulma to change her tune. Review: A new arc means new chances for filler to expand upon things that didn't exist in the original manga, and what period does Dragon Ball Z choose to expand upon first? The trip to Namek itself! That's...actually not a bad idea in-of-itself if I'm being honest. While the last manga chapter we had blazed through the trip in the span of a chapter, it did so by also giving us all of the intel on what's going on in space that our characters are about to run into once they land on the planet. Here however, Toei has chosen to severely chop up the Vegeta plot dump, and string it out through original material following our heroes during their trip into space. It's really the only realistic way to do this, because if we'd gotten the Vegeta plot dump all at once as we had in the manga, everything would feel far more like it was stalling for time (which, it is), rather than standing any chance of feeling like a naturally occurring story. That's not to say the filler itself isn't also making use of filler of it's own to pad the runtime however. The story of this episode probably could have been resolved in one episode rather than two with some severe cuts to it's own ancillary material as well as material to come in the next episode. To get it to take two episodes however, the entirety of our heroes' material from the previous chapter is adapted into this episode, as are a few cutaways to what Vegeta's doing (spoilers: trying not to die in his space pod). There's also a cutaway to Goku's antics on the Earth and a worried Chi Chi that don't really add a lot either, but admittedly I'm a bit fonder of this bit. Goku just laying in a hospital bed really does feel unlike him, so the idea that he's sneaking out of bed to try to train makes sense. It also makes sense that Roshi would come visit him, both out of love for his student and also to sexually harass some nurses, because of course he'd do both of those things. At least this time he gets some comeuppance though, and unlike the usual payback, it's not due to him getting smacked or shot – it's the doctor and the nurse making it clear they have no time to deal with his shit. As for our heroes, they quickly run into issues of their own as they fly through space, and their trip is put on the back burner for a bit as they end up captured by a ship that camouflages and reflects everything out in space. While I'm not a huge fan of this episode overall, there are some really neat set pieces that I really enjoy with this ship, from it being essentially invisible and reflecting their own ship back at them, to all of it's various traps like the acid room and the drop pit back into space. The gun wall's pretty neat too I guess. By the time you get to the final trap however, it's extremely obvious that they shouldn't trust anything that they see around them, so you just know something is coming when they find food. I think the writers knew how obvious this all was by this point though, as they highlight it themselves with Bulma, and make her fall for the trap out of sheer arrogance rather than anything else. With all of these assaults upon them though, you really are lead to wonder just what exactly is going on on this ship, but seeing our characters get surrounded by people with guns at this point in the story really doesn't feel like much of a threat...usually. This is where they throw us a curveball though – it's less that this is a threat, and more that our characters don't know how to handle the situation they've found themselves in, because they're completely surrounded by kids wearing body armor and pointing guns at them. There's seemingly no adults around, so right away this is the most violent mob of orphans I've ever seen, that's for sure. That said, once we know it's kids piloting this ship, an uh...interesting quandary comes up. See, earlier in the episode before our heroes' ship gets captures, Bulma opens fire on some little ships that probably came from this bigger ship they're now on. She successfully guns down a good handful of them too. So that leaves the question of...were...those ships running on auto-pilot, or did Bulma just...o-ohh... … Until next time! Favorite Scene: All of the traps the ship employs against our heroes are pretty neat, but if I had to pick a personal favorite, it'd definitely be the acid room. Next Time: So, are there no like...space orphanages, or...
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