#cavira

The special opens with the climactic scene from Father of Goku.  Bardock’s confronting Frieza in the upper atmosphere of Planet Vegeta, and Frieza explains that he’s begun to find the Saiyans too bothersome to keep around, so he’s going to wipe them all out.  Oh, and also, he wouldn’t want to have to deal with that pesky Super Saiyan legend. 

So the planet explodes, and Bardock dies in the blast... and then he wakes up in bed?!  What the hell? 

Bardock is confused, but his benefactors have no answers for him.  Ipana (left) is the village healer, and he uses a secret ointment to heal Bardock’s injuries.  His son, Berry (right) was the one who found Bardock at the edge of the woods, and brought him back to the village for treatment.  According to Ipana, they’re on the Planet Plant.

So Bardock quickly deduces that he somehow went back in time.  He’s never seen these aliens before, but he knows that Planet Vegeta used to be called “Plant” before the Saiyans conquered it from the Tuffles.  And the scenery looks just like Planet Vegeta.  On top of that, Ipana’s “secret” ointment is identical to the fluid used in the Medical Machines by Frieza’s organization.  As impossible as it sounds, Bardock has been flung into the distant past, before the Medical Machines, before the Saiyans came to this planet, before even the Tuffles arrived on this planet.

This raises several important questions, which never get answered.

1) How did Bardock go back in time? It’s implied that Frieza’s blast did it somehow, except that’s ridiculous.  Frieza destroyed all sorts of things, including everyone else on Planet Vegeta that day.  Are we saying they all went back in time too?

2) What happened to the Plantians?  Bardock has never even heard of them before, indicating that they were long gone by the time the Saiyans settled on this planet.  I always liked this little detail, because it implies that the Tuffles wiped out the Plantians at some point, much as the Saiyans destroyed the Tuffles later on.  This neatly wraps up the moral ambiguity that surrounds Tuffle lore.  Sometimes the Tuffles are presented as innocent victims of the Saiyans, and other times they’re shown to be remorseless conquerors.  Episode of Bardock suggests that there’s an uncomfortable truth somewhere in the middle.

3) Who repaired Bardock’s uniform?  It was all shredded at the start of this short.  And then it completely disintegrated as Frieza’s attack hit him. 

But now it’s fine.  The Plantians might have fixed it, but how would they have even managed to find all the pieces?  I’m imagining Berry combing the area with a tweezers.

4) What happened to Bardock’s psychic powers?  These are never mentioned or referenced in this short, but it’s obviously a sequel to Father of Goku, where Bardock had psychic powers.

Now, I’m not necessarily complaining about any of these things.  There’s simply no way for Bardock to investigate any of these questions.  No one, past or present, knows how this happened to Bardock, so there’s no one to ask.  I have a lot of questions about the history that played out between this era and the destruction of Planer Vegeta, but Episode of Bardock isn’t long enough to answer them.  This is just A Thing That Happened, and Bardock has to deal with it.  And part of dealing with it means he has to accept that he may never understand it.  Life’s like that sometimes.

The loss of his psychic powers is kind of annoying, but then again, the way he got the psychic powers never made a lot of sense in the first place, so losing them without explanation isn’t exactly unusual here.  You can make up a bunch of timey-wimey nonsense to rationalize it.  For example, every flashback Bardock has to the events of Father of Goku is chronologically in the future, so technically he’s still having visions of things yet to come, even if they’re just his own memories now.  So maybe he still has the psychic foresight, but it’s no longer relevant.  But that’s just me spouting fan theories.  The source material is silent about this, so I’m just going to assume that Naho Oishi quietly dropped the psychic powers because he didn’t need them for his story and he didn’t think anyone would mind. 

Besides, Bardock doesn’t have time to investigate his predicament, because suddenly a pair of aliens show up in a spaceship that resembles Frieza’s.  They attack the village, claiming the entire planet for their leader, Chilled, the Space Pirate. 

Bardock kills them both with ease.  The Plantians hail him as their savior, but Bardock refuses their gratitude, telling them that he doesn’t care if they live or die.  Then he buggers off and takes shelter in a cave. 

But Berry tracks him down and brings him a basket of food.  Bardock gets angry over it, but he hasn’t eaten in like, negative 3000 years, so he’s too hungry to turn down free grub.

Over the next few days, Berry brings more food to Bardock, and gradually, Bardock warms up to the kid, eventually letting him get close enough to sit beside him, and Bardock even shares some of his food with him.  He even tells Berry his name, something Berry had asked about the day he woke up.

Meanwhile, Chilled hasn’t heard from his henchmen for ten days, so he decides to go to Planet Plant to investigate in person.

He and his crew arrive posing as the Space Police, and ask about two “evil men” that might have come to this planet.  The villagers explain that Bardock killed them already, so Chilled is very interested in “thanking” him.

But Berry suspects their intentions, and he goes to Bardock to warn him, and to ask him to save the villagers. 

Bardock tries to insist that this doesn’t concern him, but then he has flashbacks (flash-forwards?) to the time when he went to Planet Meat and found his whole crew dead at the hands of Dodoria.  And that seems to motivate him to get involved.

Sure enough, Berry was right, and Chilled starts attacking the village.  You’d think he would have waited until he found out where Bardock was, but I get the sense that Chilled is a lot more impulsive than Frieza.

So Bardock shows up to clean house, but when he sees Chilled he flips his shit and starts shouting “Frieza!” at him, because they basically look alike.  Chilled overpowers him, and says he has no idea what he’s babbling about.

And while Bardock is realizing that Chilled must be one of Frieza’s ancestors, Berry runs up to try to help, only for Chilled to blow him away with some big ki attack. 

And that’s the last straw.  It takes a full minute, but Bardock gets so frustrated over his failure to stop Frieza or Chilled, and his failure to save the Saiyans or Berry, that he flips his shit and turns Super Saiyan.

Meanwhile, Chilled has never seen or heard of this before, so he doesn’t think it means anything.  But I think we all know where this is going.

One major criticism of this special is that it just repeats the same old formula.  And to that I would respond: What did you expect?  There was a joke about “a Super Saiyan bargain sale” back in 1993.  In Dragon Ball Z.  Seriously, thirty years ago, Vegeta was griping that there were getting to be too many Super Saiyans in this show.  I mean, this is like watching an episode of Naruto and saying “They’d better not have any adolescent ninjas in this one, I’m so sick of that.”   Or turning on Spongebob and seriously getting annoyed to see the Chum Bucket.

Seriously, if you’re burned out on Super Saiyans, you need to find something else to watch.  I’ve seen too many embittered fans who think that any minute now this franchise is going to ditch the Saiyan characters and focus on Launch or Yamcha or whoever.  And I’d be up for that, honestly, but it’s not going to happen. 

I’ve also seen Bardock fans complain that this special (along with every other presentation of the character) somehow changes or diminishes Bardock.  In their eyes, the Father of Goku special got it right, and everything that folowed-- the dub of Father of Goku, Episode of Bardock, Dragon Ball Minus, and the Broly movie-- all of that made Bardock a little different, and therefore bad. 

Here’s the thing: That happens to every character who appears in more than one story.  I remember reading a fan-comic that spoofed Bardock by having all the different versions of him appear in the same space and talk to one another.  So you’d have Funimation dub Bardock talking about redemption and Minus Bardock being a loving father, etc.  And honestly, I had trouble keeping them all straight, because they’re more alike than different.  If someone made a comic like that about Batman, how many different versions of Batman do you think there would be?  Wait, I forgot, they already did one of those:

Superman: The Man of Steel #37 had tons and tons of different Batmen in it, each one based on the stylings of different writers and artists from the past.  And this comic came out in 1994.  There’s been at least seven or eight new variations of Batman since then.

And the same thing is happening with Bardock.  You don’t have to like every new Bardock story, but I think it’s kind of silly to clutch your pearls whenever they add new lore like “He loves his wife” or “He doesn’t hate everything.”

Where was I?  Oh, right.  So this special isn’t exactly doing anything novel, but I think it does make for a nice demonstration of what Super Saiyans are really all about.  The Saiyans define themselves as a warrior race, but without compassion for other, weaker beings, their pursuit of battle is hollow.  Bardock was doomed to fail in Father of Goku because he trusted that his enemies would always be weaker than himself, while Frieza would never betray him as long as he followed his orders.  Then he got “cursed” with the truth.  Frieza would betray the Saiyans in spite of their loyalty, and there was nothing Bardock could do to stop it.  In Episode of Bardock, history repeats itself, almost literally, and Bardock finally discovers that his passions can be applied to other people.  He can care about the Plantians and fight on their behalf, and by taking up their cause, he can discover new ways to rise to the occasion. 

A lot of that gets overlooked in DBZ, because for Goku, standing up for the oppressed is kind of second nature, so there’s no chance to dwell on it.  But in Episode of Bardock, we see a character who’s an anti-hero at best, and it doesn’t take much to push him into doing the right thing.  Because what else was he going to do?  Hide in that cave and wait for Chilled to leave?  To be Saiyan is to be constantly pushed toward compassion for the weak, and those who resist that push will only suffer for their resistance.  That’s the story of Bardock.

Anyway, Bardock defeats Chilled, who somehow survives long enough to escape and send a warning to his family.  “Beware of the Saiyans who turn golden.”

And that brings us full circle.  Frieza wiped out the Saiyans because of the ancient warning from his ancestor, Chilled, but by destroying the Saiyans, he accidentally sent Bardock back in time, which was what caused Chilled’s death in the first place.  So it’s a nice little predestination paradox we have here.

Back in the past, Berry looks like he’ll be okay...

... while Bardock wanders off into the sunset.  I’m not sure where he can possibly go, since I don’t think there’s any spaceships around.  Well, it’s a 20 minute special, so it’s not like they have to have all the answers.

So I think the implication here is that Bardock didn’t just get sent back to some random moment in history.  I think he wound up going back a thousand years, and becoming the same Legendary Super Saiyan that Vegeta grew up hearing about.  You know, this happy character:

Of course, Episode of Bardock was never more than a “what-if” story in the first place, so it’s not like it’s anything close to hard canon.  Hell, Father of Goku isn’t canon either, so how could Episode of Bardock be canon?   Still, I like the idea that Bardock didn’t just die with Planet Vegeta, and that he got flung back in time to become one of the heroes of Saiyan legend. 

Of course, I put a lot of time into making a Super Saiyan OC who fills that same role, so my personal canon is that Bardock went back to 3000 years before Planet Vegeta’s destruction, and he became the Legendary Super Saiyan of that millennium.  Basically, I adhere to a strict “once every thousand years” rule, and the Super Saiyan lineage goes like this:

3000 years ago: Bardock

2000 years ago: Chanisp

1000 years ago: Luffa

Present day: Goku. 

But that’s just my silly business.  The rest of you are free to interpret this special as you please.

It is also plausible that Bardock did not become a historical figure.  Maybe he lived and died in relative obscurity, and no one else heard about his adventure on Planet Plant.  I mean, Chilled asked his crew to warn his family, but we have no way of knowing if the word actually got out.  They might have turned renegade after Chilled’s death, or maybe their ship was destroyed in a space anomaly before they could contact anyone.  In this scenario, the Legendary Super Saiyans were their own thing, and Bardock was just a rando Super Saiyan who never got included into Saiyan folklore. It’s fun to think about.