Episode 119 of Dragon Ball Z, first broadcast in Japan on December 4, 1991 and titled The Mysterious Youth in Funimation's dub, brings Frieza and his father King Cold to Earth. The heroes gather without Goku, convinced they are walking toward the end, while the anime finally shows how the tyrant survived Namek. The mysterious youth of the title, meanwhile, keeps everyone waiting until the last few seconds.
Summary
Gohan flies toward the landing site and is joined by Krillin, who has not forgotten dying at Frieza's hands. Aboard the ship, King Cold sips wine and admires Earth while his impatient son crackles with rage. Vegeta and Yamcha, Tien and Chiaotzu converge on the area, and Bulma flies in with Puar, determined to see Frieza at least once, since she never met him on Namek.
Tien confronts Vegeta: he has not forgiven the Saiyan attack in which he and Chiaotzu lost their lives. Yamcha steps in, and Vegeta orders everyone to hide their energy, since Frieza's men will have scouters. Piccolo is already there, his energy masked. The ship lands beyond a rocky ridge; Gohan tells Piccolo he will fight, Yamcha despairs, and Vegeta declares that Earth is finished. The group creeps closer on foot, climbing over the rocks.
Stepping off the ship, Frieza hallucinates Goku as a Super Saiyan staring at him from a crag. He clenches his fists until they bleed and remembers everything: the defeat, Namek's explosion, his halved body drifting through the debris. King Cold, who refused to believe him dead, had him found and recovered; on a distant planet Frieza was healed in a regeneration tank and completed with mechanical parts. When he woke, he asked for one thing only: to go to Earth.
Back in the present, King Cold explains that he wants the Super Saiyan dead because he will not tolerate anyone in the universe stronger than his clan. Goku will arrive within three hours, and Frieza decides to greet him by killing every Earthling. Three soldiers take off, but a blade slices them apart in an instant. A lavender-haired young man lands before the two tyrants, sheathes his sword and announces he has come to kill them.
Our take
There is little manga here: chapter 330 and the first two pages of 331, essentially the landing, the gathering and the stranger's arrival. The rest is anime, and part of it earns its place. Toriyama never explained how Frieza was rescued and rebuilt; he simply showed him with a partly mechanical body. Toei fills the gap with a grim flashback that, in the Japanese version, is almost silent apart from the tyrant's furious thoughts.
The padded gathering works less well. In the manga the heroes stay where they landed; here they climb toward the ship to fill minutes. In exchange, the episode gives room to the group's tensions: Tien distrusting Vegeta, Yamcha resigned to dying again so soon after being revived, and Bulma showing up out of sheer curiosity and earning Vegeta's silent respect.
The Japanese title is a small tease: it promises a boy set on defeating Frieza, but he only shows up in the final half minute. We will learn his name soon enough. He is Trunks, and his entrance changes the tone of the whole series.
Trivia
- It adapts chapter 330 and pages 1-2 of chapter 331. Written by Aya Matsui and directed by Yoshihiro Ueda, with animation direction by Kazuya Hisada, it drew a 21.0% share.
- In Japanese, Trunks is voiced by Takeshi Kusao.
- In the manga, the soldiers never get to leave before the youth stops them. In the anime they take off and are cut down in midair.
- The edited TV version cut Frieza's bleeding fist and the soldiers' falling body parts. Funimation's original dub also ended right after Trunks named Frieza; the remastered dub added narration.
Did you know? In the flashback, King Cold is so furious at a soldier who declares Frieza dead that the ship's window shatters and the unlucky man is sucked out into space.