Episode 48 of Dragon Ball GT, first broadcast in Japan on June 11, 1997 and titled The Shadow Dragons in Funimation's dub, opens the series' final arc. The premise: every granted wish leaves a residue of negative energy inside the Dragon Balls, and Goku and his friends have used them far too often for that energy to fade. The balls have cracked, and instead of Shenron they release a black dragon with no interest in granting anything.
Summary
The dragon summoned at the end of the previous episode is Black Smoke Shenron. When Pan orders him to grant their wish, he laughs, calmly lights a cigar and savors everyone's fear. Then he swallows the Dragon Balls and splits into seven dragons that scatter across the planet, leaving an aurora in the sky.
King Kai makes telepathic contact with the group, but Elder Kai cuts him off and launches into a lecture about abusing the Dragon Balls. Bulma loses her patience and tells him to be quiet, and the two end up bickering. Kibito Kai restores order and explains the mechanism: every wish generates an equal amount of negative energy, which needs about a hundred years to dissipate. Bulma's Dragon Radar, however, let the gang find them quickly every time, and the energy built up until it broke them. Mr. Popo adds that a similar dragon appeared on the planet Eros, and nothing is left of the planet or of any star in its galaxy.
Cornered, Bulma blames Dende, whose people knew the risks, and then Goku, without whom she would never have started hunting for the balls. Goku does not argue: he takes full responsibility and decides to go alone. Gohan offers to come along, but his father, confident in his Super Saiyan 4 power, turns him down.
In flight, Goku follows a trail of devastation while the dragons settle into their domains: one inside a volcano, one among the ice, one in a tornado. He soon realizes there is a problem: he can sense the dragons' energy, but not the Dragon Balls. Luckily Pan has secretly followed him with Giru and his built-in radar, and her grandfather has to let her stay. Their first stop is a village buried in sludge, where the two-star dragon, Haze Shenron (Ryan Shinron in Japanese), is terrorizing a woman. Pan floors him with a kick to the face, and when a rock lands on his foot, the dragon bursts into tears.
Our take
This is one of GT's most important episodes, because it turns into plot a question fans had been asking for years: what is the price of all those wishes? For two series the Dragon Balls were a safety net for bringing friends back and undoing catastrophes. Here the net tears, and the bill lands on the protagonist himself. The montage of past wishes, from Oolong's underwear to the mass resurrections, is a treat for longtime fans, but it also reads like a list of charges. Atsushi Maekawa, who wrote the finale, has explained that he wanted the last enemy to be the Dragon Balls themselves: in the end, dreams are won through human effort.
The shift in tone works too: Elder Kai's sermon and his spat with Bulma are pure comedy, while Goku's reaction is quiet and grown-up. And the first dragon, crying over a rock on his toe, is a deliberate misdirection: the real danger, as we will soon learn, has nothing to do with his strength.
Trivia
- Written by Toshinobu Ooi and directed by Mitsuo Hashimoto, with Tadayoshi Yamamuro as animation director.
- In the Japanese version, Elder Kai explains that the dragons' appearance has cut Earth off from the rest of the universe, which is why he and Kibito Kai cannot simply come to help. The Funimation dub drops this line; it also has Elder Kai recall the kiss from Bulma he was hoping for when he trained Gohan.
- In Italy it aired on Italia 1 on November 5, 2001. After a summer break the series had restarted from episode 1, and this was the first episode never broadcast before.
Characters
- Goku, Pan and Giru
- Bulma, Gohan, Dende and Mr. Popo
- King Kai, Elder Kai and Kibito Kai
- Black Smoke Shenron
- The seven Shadow Dragons, starting with Haze Shenron