Episode 23 of Dragon Ball GT, first broadcast in Japan on August 28, 1996 and titled Hidden Danger in Funimation's dub, closes the book on planet M-2 and sends the crew back into space. Goku, Pan and Trunks dispose of General Rilldo, recover a Black Star Dragon Ball from a drifting starship and rescue an injured boy. The audience, however, knows something they do not: Baby has survived, and his trap is already set.
Summary
On M-2, Giru fires a rocket to thaw the Capsule Corp. ship out of the metal that had swallowed it, and the trio gets ready to leave. Something keeps the ship pinned to the ground, though: General Rilldo is holding it with his bare hands. Goku, Pan and Trunks answer with a combined Kamehameha that blows him apart. As the ship pulls away, Baby slips out of the general's remains. He had been pulling the strings all along.
Barely in orbit, Giru's radar picks up a Dragon Ball very close by, aboard an abandoned starship about to be swallowed by a star. The three suit up and ride space scooters over to the wreck. The ball is lodged in the engine. Pan thinks she saw something move and refuses to leave without checking: in the next room a defense robot attacks her, and she destroys it after Goku, Trunks and Giru intercept its missiles. Moments later Giru's sensors pick up a sign of life, a green-skinned alien boy who is badly hurt.
Giru has miscalculated, and their time shrinks to a matter of seconds. The group escapes the wreck just before it melts, but the scooters are caught in the star's pull. Ditching them, Giru fires a grappling hook at the ship, and Goku uses the thrust of a Kamehameha to drag everyone to safety.
Giru sends out an SOS, and the nearby planet Pital offers help. At the hospital the boy is rushed into the emergency room, while Goku hides under the waiting-room chairs to avoid getting a shot. Left alone with a nurse, the young patient lets Baby show through and blows up the room. The trio rushes over, but the smoke hides everything.
Our take
Toei's own episode list starts the Baby arc right here, and it makes sense: Rilldo's exit closes the M-2 chapter and opens the parasite's story. The direction leans entirely on dramatic irony. We have just watched Baby crawl out of the general's body, so the rescue of the boy, staged as a race against the clock, leaves a bitter aftertaste: the heroes do the right thing, and that is exactly why they walk into the trap.
The shipwreck sequence is one of the best in GT's space voyage. Spacesuits, scooters, a star dragging everything toward it and a countdown Giru got wrong: for a few minutes the show becomes a small space opera, which is the tone the staff had in mind when the project began. Pan, insisting on checking that suspicious movement, drives the whole scene.
Rilldo, on the other hand, gets a hurried send-off. The general had boasted that he could regenerate as long as there was metal around, and M-2 is full of it; the show never explains whether Baby's possession took that ability away. Goku cowering under the chairs is a small gift for anyone who remembers his old terror of needles from Dragon Ball Z.
Trivia
- Written by Junki Takegami and directed by Yoshihiro Ueda, with Masayuki Uchiyama as animation director.
- Funimation's dub, Hidden Danger, premiered in the United States on December 26, 2003.
- The Toei breakdown ends the Black Star Dragon Ball arc at episode 22, so for the studio this is the first episode of the Baby arc; the American split starts the saga at episode 17 instead.
- Pan's spacesuit has her name printed on the chest, even though the third crew member at launch was supposed to be Goten.
Characters
- Goku, Pan, Trunks and Giru
- Baby and General Rilldo
- The wreck's defense robot
- The alien boy, the doctor and the nurse at the Pital hospital