Episode 24 of Dragon Ball GT, first broadcast in Japan on September 4, 1996 and titled Discovering the Truth in Funimation's dub, is where Baby first shows how his most dangerous weapon works: the power to slip into other people's bodies. At the hospital where Goku, Pan and Trunks brought the boy from the wreck, the parasite hops from host to host and ends up taking over Trunks himself.
Summary
Goku pulls the boy and the doctor out of the smoke, convinced the explosion was an accident. Once alone, the young patient flashes a sinister grin: Baby is inside him, and he decides to split up the three Saiyans and take them one at a time. The next day the opportunity practically presents itself. Goku hides up a tree rather than set foot in the hospital, terrified of getting a shot, and goes fishing with Trunks, only for the fish to taste awful. Pan, meanwhile, explores the hospital grounds and befriends a fawn.
The boy creeps up behind her and is about to strike when the other two show up. Soon after, the doctor arrives to take his patient back to bed, and Baby seizes the chance to switch bodies. Posing as the doctor, he reassures Goku, who finally agrees to go in and eat, and offers tech-obsessed Trunks a tour of the labs. The last stop is a giant microscope that can show the electrons floating in the air.
While Trunks is distracted, Baby bursts out of the doctor and attacks him, but Goku and Pan step in at once: they had sensed his energy on the planet and had been on guard the whole time. The fight is short. Baby cuts Trunks, slips into the wound and takes control; using the young man's body, he lines up a point-blank energy blast at Goku. At the last second Trunks fights back, turns Super Saiyan and, taking advantage of the parasite's weakened state, forces him out.
Baby vanishes into a crowd waiting to board spaceships and enters a woman's body, and from that moment Goku can no longer sense him. The trio has no choice but to resume the Dragon Ball hunt. Aboard a passenger ship, meanwhile, Baby drains the energy of every traveler and changes course: he is headed for Earth.
Our take
It is a small episode, set almost entirely in a hospital, but it lays down the rules that will hold up the entire saga. Baby enters through a wound, can jump from one host to another and, while he is weak, cannot dominate a Saiyan who pushes back with everything he has. When we later see cuts on Goten, Gohan and Vegeta, we will already know what they mean.
The game of suspicion works well too. We know who is hiding inside the boy and the heroes do not, or so it seems: the reveal that Goku and Pan had smelled danger all along flips the scene and gives them some of the shrewdness the space voyage did not always show. The gags about hospital food and Goku's fear of needles lighten a mood that would otherwise be rather grim.
The ending changes the show's direction. Up to now GT had been a Dragon Ball hunt hopping from planet to planet; with Baby on his way to Earth, the adventure turns into a race against time, and the audience knows it before the heroes do.
Trivia
- Written by Atsushi Maekawa and directed by Kazuhito Kikuchi, with Takeo Ide as animation director.
- Funimation's dub premiered in the United States on January 2, 2004.
- In Japan, the next episode did not air until October 16, 1996, six weeks later. In between, on September 13, Funimation's Dragon Ball Z dub made its American syndication debut.
- Trunks can resist because Baby is still weak, but the egg the parasite leaves inside him here will come back to haunt him.
Characters
- Goku, Pan, Trunks and Giru
- Baby
- The alien boy, the doctor and the hospital staff
- The possessed woman and the passengers of the ship bound for Earth