Episode 54 of Dragon Ball Z, first broadcast in Japan on July 4, 1990, belongs to Grand Elder Guru. Known as Guru's Gift in Funimation's uncut dub and The Eldest Namek in the Ocean/Saban version, it has Namek's patriarch test Krillin, entrust him with a Dragon Ball and unlock his potential. On the other side of the planet, Frieza runs out of patience and calls for reinforcements.
Summary
In his house atop a rock, Guru explains that for Namekians the Dragon Balls stand for wisdom, while for Frieza they are only a tool for greed. Krillin says he came to revive his friends and that Earth's Dragon Balls were made by Kami, a Namekian. The elder places a hand on his head and reads his memories. He learns that Kami, in order to become Earth's guardian, cast the evil out of himself and gave birth to King Piccolo, halving his own power in the process. Satisfied that Krillin's heart is pure, Guru gives him the Dragon Ball he keeps, warning that he has only a few days left: if he dies before the wish is made, the Dragon Balls will vanish with him. Then he touches Krillin's head again and awakens the power sleeping inside him. Stunned, Krillin decides to fetch Gohan so he can receive the same gift.
Meanwhile Orlen, one of Frieza's soldiers, finds the village Vegeta wiped out. A surviving Namekian tells him a Saiyan took the Dragon Ball, and Orlen kills him on the spot. Aboard the ship, Zarbon reports that he beat Vegeta and saw him sink into a lake, but never checked whether he was dead. Frieza scolds him: the Saiyan may have hidden a Dragon Ball. When Orlen arrives to report, the tyrant burns him alive with an eye beam for killing the only witness and warns Zarbon that carelessness will be punished the same way. Then he orders Appule to summon the Ginyu Force, with scouters, within five days.
Zarbon is taken aback that such help is needed. Frieza explains that he destroyed the Saiyans' planet because one day they would have become a threat, and events seem to be proving him right. Alone, he muses that it would be a problem if one of them became a Super Saiyan; the scene fades to Goku asleep in his spaceship. Zarbon finds the unconscious Vegeta, flies him back and places him in a Medical Machine so he can be questioned. At the cave, Gohan spots the Dragon Ball Vegeta hid on Bulma's radar and sets off to retrieve it.
Our take
It is a transitional episode, but full of seeds. Guru is a new kind of figure for the series: not a fighter or a teacher but a dying patriarch who judges people by reading their memories. Krillin's power-up is a simple, strong idea, because it finally gives the little Earthling a way to matter on a planet where everyone outclasses him.
Frieza, meanwhile, becomes more unsettling with every scene. Orlen's execution is an anime addition, there to show how little his underlings' lives are worth. But the line that really counts is the one about the Super Saiyan, muttered to himself and cut against Goku sleeping: in Japanese it is the first real hint of how the saga will end.
Trivia
- Written by Keiji Terui, directed by Minoru Okazaki, with animation supervision by Tomekichi Takeuchi. Ratings share: 18.9%.
- It adapts parts of chapters 264 and 265, rearranged in a different order from the manga.
- The flashbacks of Kami arriving on Earth and splitting from King Piccolo were added by the anime.
- Orlen does not exist in the manga: there, Appule is the one who discovers the ruined village, and Frieza does not kill him. In the Saban dub, Orlen's death was rewritten as punishment for cowardice; Funimation's redub restored the original reason.
Did you know? As Dende explained shortly before, he is Guru's 108th child: the elder single-handedly repopulated Namek after the disaster that nearly wiped out his people.