Episode 6 of Dragon Ball Z, first aired in Japan on June 7, 1989 as Even Yama-sama is Surprised – The Fight Continues in the Next World, opens the long year of waiting before the Saiyans arrive. Father and son go separate ways: Goku, now dead, is escorted into the afterlife to train with a god of the cosmos, while Gohan ends up in Piccolo's hands.
Summary
On the battlefield, Goku's friends try to regroup. Bulma salvages Raditz's scouter, sure she can repair it and use it to track down Yamcha and Tien, while Krillin is already thinking about gathering the Dragon Balls. Then Piccolo regrows his missing arm, to everyone's horror, and announces that he is taking Gohan: the boy has enormous power, and he means to draw it out before the other two Saiyans arrive. Nobody dares to object. That leaves the question of how to tell Chi-Chi, and Roshi hands the unenviable job to Krillin.
In the afterlife, meanwhile, Goku finds himself with a halo over his head in front of a gigantic desk. Behind it sits King Yemma, judge of the dead, who decides who goes to Heaven and who goes to Hell; Raditz, Goku learns, was sent to Hell. Kami asks that Goku be trained by King Kai, a deity who stands at the top of the universe, and when he whispers that King Kai is even stronger than Yemma, he nearly gets overheard by the man himself. In the end, permission is granted.
A small demon escorts Goku to the start of Snake Way, a serpent-shaped road a million kilometers long that leads to King Kai's planet. Below the clouds lies Hell, and falling means never coming back. According to the guide, the only one ever to have walked its full length is Yemma himself. Goku sets off flying but soon realizes it would wear him out, so he starts running.
On Earth, Piccolo wakes Gohan by dropping him into a pond. The boy cries and wants his mother, but his new teacher has no patience for it: to show him what he has inside, he hurls him at a mountain, and Gohan, terrified, obliterates it with a burst of energy. Piccolo then explains that this hidden power only surfaces when the boy is overwhelmed, and that he will have to learn to control it.
Our take
After four episodes of fighting, the series catches its breath and changes tone. The Dragon Ball afterlife is one of Akira Toriyama's finest touches: a bureaucratic place, with souls lining up as if at a service counter, a ledger of good deeds and a judge who takes offense when someone suggests there is anyone stronger than him. It is humor that punctures the solemnity of death without making it weightless.
The episode adapts chapters 205 and 206 of the manga. The most important part, though, is the start of the relationship between Piccolo and Gohan. Piccolo treats the boy harshly and sees him as a tool, but the viewer can already sense that this training will change them both. The mountain throw is brutal and revealing at once: Gohan is incredibly strong and has no idea.
Snake Way, finally, is a perfect storytelling device for a weekly anime: an endless road that lets the show depict Goku traveling for months. Over the next episodes the series will take full advantage of it, sometimes too much.
Trivia
- In Japan the episode drew a 16.8% ratings share. It was written by Keiji Terui and directed by Mitsuo Hashimoto.
- The Funimation subtitles have the guide claim that Yemma was the only one to cross Snake Way "in the last billion years"; Dragon Ball Kai corrected the line to a hundred million years.
- The 1996 English dub merged this episode with the previous one as Goku's Unusual Journey; the 2005 redub called it No Time Like the Present.
- The Italian dub titled the episode "Father and Son Train".
Did you know? A million kilometers, the length of Snake Way, is more than two and a half times the distance between Earth and the Moon. Goku will cover almost all of it on foot.