Episode 17 of Dragon Ball GT, first broadcast in Japan on June 26, 1996 and titled Pan's Gambit in Funimation's dub, opens the Baby Saga and hands the spotlight entirely to Pan. With Goku and Trunks held prisoner, she infiltrates the base on planet M2 disguised as a robot, lands among the scrapped machines and takes on a member of the Sigma Force by herself.
Summary
Deep inside the base, the robots examine Goku and Trunks, asleep in two capsules, and are struck by their power, Goku's above all. General Rilldo notices that the third prisoner is missing and sends his guards after her. He then congratulates Giru, who even receives a medal, and gets from him the combat data on Goku, Trunks and Pan collected during the journey. It is loaded straight into the Sigma Force's memory.
Pan, meanwhile, has made it to the foot of the base, but a wave of robots forces her into hiding. She finds an old metal shell, climbs inside and falls in line with a row of identical machines. The disguise holds until the robots walk straight through a wall as if it were air, and she smacks right into it. Instead of unmasking her, though, they write her off as a defective unit and toss her into a room full of rejected robots, whose main flaw is that they have feelings.
Pan blasts her way out. One of the defective robots, an old model that keeps glitching mid-sentence, tells her that Dr. Myuu is behind the machines of M2 and points her toward the prisoners. When Rilldo learns she is inside the base, he sends Natt of the Sigma Force after her. The robot phases through walls, strikes from every angle and anticipates her every move thanks to Giru's data.
The thought of Giru's betrayal sends Pan into a fury, and she spots her opponent's weakness: he can only predict moves she has already used. So she improvises, mixes her own techniques with her grandfather's and destroys him. Rilldo is about to send the rest of the squad when she bursts into the room, just as the sensors go haywire: Goku is waking up and breaking out of his capsule. Pan, exhausted, is knocked out.
Our take
It is rare for a Dragon Ball episode to rest entirely on someone other than Goku, and episode 17 pulls it off with an infiltration story that plays almost like a spy caper. Pan in a robot suit is a good gag, but the best part is the room of rejects: machines thrown away because they have something human in them. That touch of melancholy gives M2 more depth than most of the planets visited so far.
The fight with Natt also sets up the theme of the next two episodes. Rilldo's robots fight with data, and the only way to beat them is to do something they have never seen. Pan figures it out first, and for once she is the one clearing the path for her grandfather. Her anger at Giru gives her the push, and the episode finally treats her as a real fighter.
There is one curious footnote. For many American viewers, GT started right here, with a young girl inside a tin costume. That was a disorienting entry point for an audience coming off the battles of Dragon Ball Z, and it may be part of why the series had such a mixed reputation in the US.
Trivia
- Written by Atsushi Maekawa and directed by Kazuhito Kikuchi, with Takeo Ide as animation director.
- It drew a 14.9% share in Japan, a recovery from 12.6% for the previous episode.
- It was the first regular episode Cartoon Network aired in the US, on November 14, 2003, one week after the recap "A Grand Problem."
- The robot Pan destroys is credited as Nut in Japanese and called Natt in the Funimation dub.
- Toei still counts this episode as part of the Black Star Dragon Ball arc, which in Japan runs until episode 22.
Characters
- Pan, Goku and Trunks
- Giru
- General Rilldo
- The Sigma Force (Natt, Commander Nezi, Ribet and Bizu)
- The defective robots and the guards of M2