Episode 55 of Dragon Ball GT, first broadcast in Japan on August 13, 1997 and titled The Heart of the Prince in Funimation's dub, puts the duel between Goku and Nuova Shenron on hold and moves to Capsule Corporation. At its center is Vegeta, looking back on years of rivalry with Goku; beside him is Bulma, who has a plan to close the gap.
Summary
As Goku and Nuova power up for their decisive clash, Vegeta can no longer sit still at Capsule Corporation: he cannot leave everything to Kakarot, he says, and gets ready to leave. Bulma stops him. She is working on something that could change everything, and asks him to wait.
Strapped into a strange device covered in lights, Vegeta wonders when the gap between him and Goku opened up, and starts to remember. Their first fight on Earth, when he dismissed Goku as a low-class warrior only to see him hold his ground, all the way to the triple Kaio-ken against his Galick Gun. Krillin about to finish him off with a sword, and Goku asking him to let Vegeta go so he could beat him on his own one day. On Namek, Goku turning Super Saiyan in front of Frieza. Then his choice to give in to Babidi's magic for a rematch, as Majin Vegeta, and finally the battle against Kid Buu, when he admitted that Goku was number one. Since then, he concludes, he is no longer chasing Kakarot: he only wants to find out how far his own power can go.
His head cleared, Vegeta joins Bulma, who is studying recordings of the battle on the Tuffle planet on her computer. Her analysis is sharp. Goku became a Golden Great Ape by absorbing the Blutz Waves given off by Earth, which, seen from Baby's planet, did the job of a full moon; once Pan helped him regain his reason, he transformed into Super Saiyan 4. Vegeta, who keeps his mind even as a Great Ape, would only need the waves. It did not happen on the Tuffle planet because Baby was in control of him.
To recreate those conditions, Bulma has built an enhanced Blutz Wave generator, based on the same principle as the machine she made for Baby while under his control. If it works, Vegeta will finally catch up with Goku, and according to Bulma even going beyond Super Saiyan 4 is no longer a dream.
Our take
This is a recap episode and it does not pretend otherwise: most of its running time is footage from Dragon Ball Z, and it arrives at the worst possible moment, with the fight against Nuova barely underway.
Seen today, though, it serves a purpose. It is the only moment in GT when the show stops to look inside Vegeta, and his confession, that after the battle with Buu he no longer wants to surpass Goku but to discover his own limits, is a natural step on from the ending of Z. Funimation's title captures that better than the Japanese one, which focuses on Bulma's scheme.
Bulma matters here too. After the Baby arc, in which her inventions served the enemy, she is back to being the scientist who solves problems by reasoning them out, and her explanation of Super Saiyan 4 is the clearest the show ever gives. For now the plan is only announced: the machine will come into play later, at the most desperate moment of the saga.
Trivia
- Written by Atsushi Maekawa and directed by Yoshihiro Ueda, who had also directed the previous episode, with Masayuki Uchiyama as animation director.
- The Dragon Ball Z flashbacks are scored with GT's music by Akihito Tokunaga.
- The Blutz Wave generator is finally used on Vegeta in Episode 59.
- The Ocean Group dub, titled Vegeta's Thirst for Power!, cut the shot of Vegeta flying off the balcony and rewrote Goku's plea to Krillin as a speech about the Saiyan code of honor.
Did you know? By Bulma's reasoning, Vegeta could have reached Super Saiyan 4 back on the Tuffle planet, when he was turned into a Golden Great Ape: what stopped him was Baby's control.