Episode 146 of Dragon Ball Z, first broadcast in Japan on July 1, 1992 and titled Our Hero Awakes in Funimation's dub, delivers the moment fans had been waiting weeks for: Goku wakes up, cured of his heart disease. Before getting there, the episode hands Krillin a desperate, anime-only duel with Cell at an airport. It also happens to be the exact midpoint of the series.
Summary
Looking for fresh victims, Cell walks into a hangar at Basil's airport. A guard opens fire with a rifle, but the bullets bounce off and Cell drains him with his tail. Hiding behind an overturned desk are a young woman and her little brother. They bolt, the sister trips, and Cell is closing in when Krillin darts in and whisks them away.
While the siblings run for a small plane, Krillin keeps Cell busy, dodging the stinger and blinding him with the Solar Flare. The plane takes off with Krillin clinging to the landing gear, only for him to find the monster already on the roof. He strikes Cell from behind, but the bio-android gets the upper hand and slams him through the fuselage, leaving his head poking out the other side. Cell is about to finish him when he senses Piccolo and Tien approaching, so he suppresses his energy and vanishes.
Elsewhere, Trunks flies off to find his father, wondering how the timeline could have shifted so much: Androids unlike the ones he knew, and a monster who arrived in a time machine identical to his own. In the mountains near Goku's home, Androids 16, 17 and 18 drive toward his house. Fed up with the bumpy ride, 18 flattens the forest ahead with an energy wave.
At Kame House, Chi-Chi is bickering with Master Roshi when a blast shakes the building. She runs upstairs to find the bed empty. Out on the beach, Goku is practicing his Kamehameha, back to full strength. He heard everything his friends said while he lay recovering, so he already knows about the Androids and Cell. He has no intention of fighting yet, though: to win, he says, he has to go beyond Super Saiyan.
Our take
The manga gives Goku's recovery only a few pages; the anime builds an entire episode toward it. The first half is pure Toei invention, and it works better than most filler. Krillin, who has already seen Cell up close, chooses to step in knowing he cannot win, and the airplane sequence, with the monster riding the fuselage and our hero wedged in the metal, plays like a creature feature.
The other addition, the Androids' road trip, reminds us that 17 and 18 treat the hunt for Goku as a vacation. That breezy tone makes what is coming more bitter: neither of them knows yet that Cell was built to absorb them.
The real heart of the episode is Goku's closing line. "Go beyond Super Saiyan" is the goal that will drive the second half of the saga, from the Hyperbolic Time Chamber to the Cell Games, and it shifts the story from a monster hunt to a training race.
Trivia
- It adapts chapter 365 from page 12 to the end. Written by Aya Matsui and directed by Mitsuo Hashimoto, it drew an 18.3% share.
- Dragon Ball Z has 291 episodes, which makes 146 the center point, with 145 episodes on either side.
- The whole airport sequence and the Androids' drive through the Mount Paozu area are exclusive to the anime.
- Many fans read Cell looming over Krillin on the plane as a nod to a famous Twilight Zone episode with a creature on an airplane wing.
- In Italy it premiered on Italia 1 on September 18, 2000.
Did you know? In Japan, half of the next-episode preview was given over to a ticket lottery for the movie Super Android 13!, which opened on July 11, 1992. The Dragon Box release swapped it for the rerun preview.