Episode 75 of Dragon Ball Z, first broadcast in Japan on January 23, 1991 and titled Password is Porunga in Funimation's dub, is the moment the whole Namek arc has been building toward: seven Dragon Balls gathered, the password finally revealed and the arrival of Porunga, the Namekian dragon. But as the sky goes dark, Frieza realizes he has been played.
Summary
Krillin leaves the ship to ask Grand Elder Guru for the password. Gohan, left guarding the Dragon Balls, admires his new armor in a nearby lake until an irritated Vegeta orders him to keep watch and goes off to sleep. Inside the ship, staggering with fatigue, he sets a half-hour timer next to the pod where Goku is healing and dozes off, certain that this time the wish for immortality will be his.
Dende, meanwhile, is searching for the Earthlings. On the way he finds two bodies and for a moment fears they are his friends, but they are Burter and Guldo. Near the ship, Captain Ginyu, still stuck in the frog's body, tries to make off with a Dragon Ball and gets stuck; Gohan chases him away, and a female frog takes a keen interest in him.
Krillin and Dende meet up and rejoin Gohan. Hearing that Vegeta is asleep, Krillin suggests moving the balls and summoning the dragon right away, before the prince can wish for immortality.
Far away, Nail collapses. Before Frieza can finish him, he reveals that the entire fight was a ruse to buy time for Dende to deliver the password. Frieza remembers the little Namekian he passed outside Guru's home and flies off in a rage, leaving Nail to die. He tries to contact the Ginyu Force, but nobody answers: they have all been defeated.
At the ship, Dende speaks the words. The secret was simple: you had to speak in the Namekian language. The sky turns black and Porunga rises, huge and muscular, announcing that he can grant three wishes. From a distance, Ginyu watches bitterly.
Our take
After a long run of fights, the episode shifts gears and becomes almost a story about waiting. The password reveal is an elegant idea: not a secret phrase but the Namekian language itself, something no conqueror could know. It is also why Frieza, after wiping out village after village, ended up with seven useless Dragon Balls.
The real hero of the episode is Nail. His laughter in Frieza's face as he admits he was stalling on purpose is the small victory of a slaughtered people. And Porunga, imposing and menacing, is a very different dragon from Shenron: another culture, another idea of what a miracle looks like.
Several scenes are anime-only: Gohan posing in his armor, Dende finding the bodies, frog-Ginyu and his admirer. In the Japanese version Krillin also remembers Nail mentioning three wishes, fixing a small slip in the manga, where the boys react as if it were news.
Trivia
- Written by Katsuyuki Sumisawa, directed by Mitsuo Hashimoto, with animation direction by Yukio Ebisawa. It adapts parts of chapters 291 and 292, with a 21.2% ratings share, the lowest among episodes 60-83.
- It opens season 3 as divided on Wikipedia, the second part of the Frieza Saga.
- It is the last episode in which Grand Elder Guru is voiced in Japanese by Junpei Takiguchi.
- In the remastered dub, Dale Kelly's performance as Porunga was kept even though he was replaced as Ginyu and the narrator.
Did you know? In the manga Vegeta falls asleep by one of the ship's landing legs; the anime moves him inside, right next to Goku's Medical Machine.