Episode 89 of Dragon Ball Super, first broadcast in Japan on May 7, 2017 and titled A Mysterious Beauty Appears! The Enigma of the Tien Shin-Style Dojo? in Funimation's dub, completes Team Universe 7 with its last two names: Tien and Master Roshi. Goku finds them at Tien's new dojo just as a mysterious student, Yurin, carries out a magical revenge plot. It is also one of the series' most controversial episodes, because of the old master's harassing behavior.
Summary
Goku goes to Kame House to recruit Master Roshi, but Oolong tells him the old man is a guest of honor at the dojo Tien has opened, which is full of students. There a pretty young woman, Yurin, turns up saying she wants to learn martial arts to stay in shape. Tien tells her to go elsewhere, since his dojo is for serious fighters, but Roshi offers her private lessons, dresses her in a miniskirt uniform and ends up chasing her around.
Goku arrives and asks Tien and the master to join the team. Tien politely declines: he cannot leave his students, and he has no interest in prize money. Just then a student bangs on the door: some of his classmates are wrecking the village. They have talismans stuck on their foreheads and move like zombies, and Chiaotzu cannot remove them with his powers.
The culprit is Yurin. Years ago she trained with Tien at the Crane School and he always ignored her; since then she has trained, learned sorcery and now wants to ruin the dojo's reputation. Roshi takes her on and is clearly superior, but gets distracted when she falls and flashes her underwear: Yurin slaps a talisman on him and takes control. Tien has to fight his old master, resorts to his four arms but is hit by lightning and a Kamehameha, until Goku takes over.
Goku is impressed: Roshi must have been training in secret. But time is short, so while Chiaotzu freezes Yurin's spell gestures, the Saiyan hits his old teacher with a Kamehameha that dissolves the talisman. Defeated, Yurin vows to grow stronger, and Tien, moved by her determination, lets her train at his dojo once she apologizes to the village. Then he agrees to enter the tournament to pay for the damage with the prize money, and Roshi follows suit. In Universe 6, meanwhile, Cabba piques Caulifla's interest by showing her Super Saiyan. Eight hours remain.
Our take
The action is fun: seeing Roshi fight for real, with techniques he had not used in decades, and Tien bring out his four arms is a treat for anyone who has followed the series from the start. Yurin is a minor but well-conceived character, an old classmate who brings back a piece of Tien and Chiaotzu's past.
The problem is the rest. Roshi's harassment was a running gag in the 1980s, but here it is staged insistently and feels badly dated. The complaints that followed in Japan come as no surprise, and the episode remains an example of how some running jokes age poorly.
Trivia
- Written by Yoshifumi Fukushima and directed by Hideki Hiroshima, with Joey Calangian, Hirotaka Nii and Kōji Nashizawa as animation directors. It drew a 5.3% TV rating in Japan.
- In June 2017 the BPO, Japan's broadcasting ethics watchdog, published a viewer complaint that, according to Anime News Network, was aimed at Roshi's behavior in this episode.
- The whole dojo and Yurin storyline is an anime original.
- In the manga, Caulifla fights Cabba before agreeing, and is also swayed by learning that there are other Super Saiyans in Universe 7.
Did you know? Tien only agrees in order to repair the village with the ten-million-zeni prize, which Goku had made up.
Characters
- Goku, Tien, Chiaotzu and Master Roshi
- Yurin
- Oolong and the dojo's students
- Cabba, Caulifla and her gang