So we left off with Goku laying in pain in on the beach and Raditz has given him the deadline of destroying 100 humans by this time tomorrow to get Gohan back. Raditz it doesn’t matter anyways because they have a current job and after that Earth will be the next target. Goku is in so much pain he can’t even stand, so he is basically groveling at Radits’s feet until he shrugs him and fly’s away with the wailing Gohan. After Raditz is gone Goku can at least sit up but the rest of the crew had to hemp him to sit on Master Roshi’s stairs. Goku figures out quickly that if you grab his tail that will be his weakness because it was his back when he had one. He decides he needs some help and Master Roshi offers his and Krillin’s services. Krillin is obviously reluctant, and since in the dragon ball series they were already brought back with the dragon balls once before Goku decides they cant participate because if they die this time it is for keeps. Bulma comes up with the idea that they ask the dragon to save the planet buy Master Roshi says that we cant gather them all in one day. Luckily, this all leads to the dragon radar. Gohan had the four star on his hat so we have a full on GPS tracking system for finding Gohan.
Then we get to see Piccolo again. Missed him last episode. I never fully understood Piccolo being a bad guy because I didn’t watch much of the dragon ball series but the tension between him and the rest of the crew. Piccolo offers the idea of a team up to defeat Raditz. Piccolo says he can care less what happens to Gohan but he doesn’t want Raditz to take over earth because he wants to. Oh how the times changed Piccolo, he was always a bad assin the series but he never had any more grand delusions of worl domination. Goku didn’t take much convincing and accepted the team up. Then they race to Gohan’s location with some jokes about how Piccolo is faster and considers the nimbus cloud a toy. The flying nimbus really wore out its use in this show as the power levels of everyone grew but I always thought it was cool.
Next, we see chi chi clamoring about where her son and husband have gone but it was just an interlude as now Raditz is intimidating Gohan for seemingly no reason other than shutting him up. He gets sick of Gohans crying and puts him in his space capsule, so he didn’t have to listen to him anymore. Then boom, the scouter goes off and we get a new power level reading, 710. Raditz doesn’t know where its coming from but we all know its Gohan. This was the start of the idea for True Gohan. Now another reading goes off on the scouter and we see that Goku is 330 and Piccolo is 320. Raditz immediately realizes that his scouter must be working correctly and Gohan does have a power level of 710. Apparently its impossible for a child to have this much power but we all know Gohan is awesome.
Goku and Piccolo remove their weighted clothing and their power level foes up. Piccolo goes up to power level 400 but they didn’t tell us what Goku went up to. Goku removed 90 pounds of clothing though, I would assume he went up to 410, which would be in line with Piccolo’s increase. Raditz still says he is ten times stronger then them though. Seems a little odd because he was worried about Gohan at 710 though. They went on to attack Raditz as a team but they dint even come close to hitting him. Nothing else really happened after that.
There was a couple of lasting things about this episode though
- Gohan having a higher power level than Goku was the start of us seeing how powerful Gohan really was. This would go on over several seasons and sagas of Dragon Ball Z until this came to fruition.
- The weighted clothing. His was on going joke between me and my friends for the longest time. One of my friends was constantly wearing small ankle weights so that he could take them off and his power level would go up. Heck, even this past Christmas, my father got this ridiculously heavy leather jacket and the first thing I thought when I tried it on was “oh yeah your power level definitely goes up when you take this off”
