The first episode of Dragon Ball Super, broadcast by Fuji TV on July 5, 2015 and titled A Peacetime Reward: Who Gets the 100,000,000 Zeni?! in Funimation's dub, brought Goku and friends back to television eighteen years after Dragon Ball GT ended. There are no villains and no real fights: just a peaceful Earth, a Goku forced to work the fields and a 100 million Zeni prize changing hands. Only at the very end do we glimpse, far out in space, the god who will shatter all this calm.
Summary
After a quick recap of the battle against Majin Buu, the narrator explains that peace has returned to Earth. Goku is plowing a field, as Chi-Chi ordered, but the moment Goten turns up with lunch he hands over the tractor and starts training. The boy drives off a cliff and his father has to catch him. Goku explains that he cannot stop training: if another enemy like Buu shows up, someone has to be ready.
Meanwhile in space, an alien race serves its finest dish to a much-feared guest. The food is too greasy for his taste, so he destroys half of their planet. This is Beerus, the God of Destruction, although the episode does not name him yet.
On Earth, the press is interviewing Mr. Satan, who has just received a 100 million Zeni world peace prize. A hungry Majin Buu barges in, and the champion has to excuse himself to the restroom so he can calm Buu down with a massage and a promise of sweets. Newlyweds Gohan and Videl live in a huge house that Satan built for them; Videl buys Gohan books for his studies while Piccolo watches the couple from a distance, looking displeased.
Goten wants to give his sister-in-law a wedding present and asks Trunks for advice. Beauty products are far too expensive, so the boys head to the countryside for hot spring water, but end up filling the bottle at a river and fighting a giant snake. Videl ends up with a bottle of ordinary water, and accepts it with a smile anyway.
At sunset Mr. Satan finds Goku in the fields and offers him the prize money: Vegeta has already refused it and his family is rich. Goku says no, until Goten points out that with that much money Chi-Chi would let him train. That is exactly what happens: she only asks him to come home now and then, and he vanishes to King Kai's planet. In the Sacred World of the Kais, Kibito Kai warns the Elder Kai that another planet has been destroyed.
Our take
Opening without a single fight was a brave choice, and in 2015 a baffling one for plenty of fans. But it makes sense: after eighteen years, the show needed to remind us who these people are when nobody is threatening them. Goku training behind his wife's back, Satan living in fear of his "pupil", scholarly Gohan feeling guilty because Videl always pays: they are small portraits, but sharp ones.
The pace is slow, though, and the snake subplot feels like filler. The episode works mostly through its details and its final contrast: while Earth argues about gifts and money, someone wipes out half a planet over a greasy meal. It is the promise of Battle of Gods, told at a far more leisurely pace.
Trivia
- Written by Yoshifumi Fukushima and directed by Kōji Ogawa, with Yukihiro Kitano as animation director. It drew a 7.9% rating in Japan.
- It borrows scenes from chapter 1 of Toyotarō's manga, where the planet Beerus visits is home to insect-like aliens and is destroyed completely.
- The 10,000 Zeni bill features Robotoriyama, Akira Toriyama's self-portrait.
- It was the last episode animated by Katsuyoshi Nakatsuru, character designer for the second half of Dragon Ball Z and for GT.
- The narrator only says that "some time has passed". The Weekly Shōnen Jump preview said six months after Buu, while Toei's official timeline places the saga in Age 778, four years later.