Episode 49 of Dragon Ball GT, first broadcast in Japan on June 18, 1997 and titled The Two-Star Dragon in Funimation's dub, stages the first real battle of the Shadow Dragon arc. Goku and Pan take on Haze Shenron, the two-star dragon: he looks like the weakest of the seven, but he has a trick that makes Saiyan power useless.
Summary
In a village on the shore of a lake, Haze Shenron swears he is the strongest of the Shadow Dragons. The facts say otherwise. Pan sends him crashing into a cliff and demands the Dragon Ball; he puffs himself up, Goku expects a transformation, and instead the dragon sniffs that transforming is for cowards who have been cornered. Pan uses him as a punching bag, and Goku cheerfully remarks that the gap between them is huge and that this dragon reminds him of Mr. Satan.
Something is off, though. Pan grows more and more tired, while the dragon is not even short of breath. At some point he blocks all her punches, hits her in the stomach and headbutts grandfather and granddaughter into each other. Goku tries to go Super Saiyan, but the golden aura fizzles out at once. The dragon himself reveals the trick: the negative energy he gives off has poisoned the lake and is draining the life force from the air. He has not grown stronger; they have grown weaker. All he is doing, he claims, is speeding up what humans already started.
Then comes the revelation. The dragon asks Goku whether he remembers Upa. Years earlier Mercenary Tao had killed Bora, the boy's father, and Goku gathered all seven Dragon Balls so that Upa could have him back. That wish gave birth to Haze Shenron, who mockingly thanks his "creator".
The dragon rolls Pan into Goku like a bowling ball, blasts them both from his mouth and hurls them into the poisoned lake along with Giru, who had tried to stop him with his missiles. The robot is the one who saves them: immune to the poison, he drags the two Saiyans to a spot where an underground spring keeps the water clean. There Goku and Pan recover their strength and burst back to the surface with a Kamehameha. Haze, already dreaming of a fully polluted Earth, finds them behind him; he tries to flee, but a combined Kamehameha disintegrates him. Only the two-star ball remains, and it loses its cracks, turning orange and whole again.
Our take
The episode is built like a little prank. The dragon who calls himself the strongest is a buffoon, yet his power is the sneakiest of all: he does not defeat his opponents, he wears them down. It is an idea that takes GT back to the spirit of the original series, when young Goku won by understanding his enemy rather than overpowering him, and it gives Giru, so often stuck as comic relief, a decisive moment.
The heart of the episode, though, is the flashback. Bringing Bora back was one of young Goku's purest acts, a wish used for a friend and not for himself. Learning that this very wish spawned a monster gives the saga its moral theme: even good wishes come at a cost, and sooner or later someone pays it. It is no accident that the first dragon embodies pollution, either: every wish dirtied the world a little, and Haze Shenron makes that visible.
Trivia
- Written by Toshinobu Ooi and directed by Yoshihiro Ueda, with Noboru Koizumi as animation director.
- The flashback revisits Dragon Ball Episode 78, where Upa asks Shenron to bring his father back to life.
- This is the last time in GT that Goku tries to use the original Super Saiyan form.
- The Japanese name, Ryan Shinron, follows the Chinese reading of a character used for the number two, but the name is written 二星龍, with a "two" that would be read differently in Chinese. Funimation's "Haze" plays on his polluting smog instead.
Characters
- Goku, Pan and Giru
- Haze Shenron
- The villagers
- Upa, Bora and Mercenary Tao (in flashback)