All right, so The Luud Cult stole the gang’s Dragon Ball, and they’ve come to Planet Luud to get it back, but in a desperate play, Doltaki, the founder of Luudism, has turned all of his followers into dolls and fed them to the big idol of Luud in their temple.  See, Luud’s not a god at all, but a powerful machine, one that runs on the most potent energy source of all: aliens that have been magically turned into dolls.  Doltaki was trying to gather enough victims to awaken Luud at full power, but he’s willing to settle for a sub-optimal launch if it means Luud can kill Goku and Trunks.

The problem with this episode is that it seems to hype a pretty major-league threat, and yet as Luud activates, he transforms from this four-armed bat-winged demon monster....

To this.   Goku openly laughs at how funny this thing looks.  Luud’s name is just “doll” backwards, so it probably shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that he looks like a mutant Kewpie, but I can’t help but feel like there are more bad ass dolls out there that they could have used.  Hell, I’d even take a Barbie over this.  Can you imaging a fifty-foot mint-green Barbie doll stomping around this place, smacking Goku and Trunks around?  The kitsch value alone would make it worth the watch. 

Anyway, Luud is just one more entry in a long chain of disappointing GT villains.   They spent four episodes hyping this guy up, and he’s just another big dumb monster who says his own name and not much else.  

While Luud fights the heroes, Doltaki withdraws to his chambers to continue playing with Pan, who was turned into a doll back in Episode 11.  Doltaki normally tosses doll-ified victims into Luud’s energy supply, but he can’t bear to let Pan go, and he play-talks with her about their new life together.  I fuckin’ can’t stand this guy and this is his second episode of doing this stupid schtick. 

✨Is This Episode Worse than “The Roaming Lake”?✨

 For all that was wrong with Dragon Ball Episode 29, at least Episode 30 was not “The Roaming Lake Part 2.” Toei hit rock bottom with Dragon Ball GT Episode 12 and for Episode 13 they started digging. 

✨Positivity Page✨

Mercifully, Doltaki gets a summons from a mysterious voice, so he has to go into a secret room and take a video call in a room that looks suspiciously like something from out of Star Wars.  And now we meet Doltaki’s boss, the real secret final boss of the Luud Cult.  As long as he distracts Doltaki from his creepy playtime session, then I’m all for it.

✨ “Good” “Ideas”, Poorly Executed.✨

Let’s go over the Goku/Trunks vs. Luud fight: It sucks.  Luud is pretty damn slow, but he’s agile enough to keep Goku and Trunks from chasing after Doltaki.  At first, it looks like Goku has a plan to distract Luud by goading Luud into attacking him.   Except Trunks never head off to go find Pan, so they just end up getting their asses kicked.  Was that not what Goku had in mind?  Because it seems like that would have been a good plan, and yet they never spell it out, and Trunks completely botches it. 

Instead, Luud knocks them around some more, and steps on them for good measure.  Then Goku and Trunks turn Super Saiyan to knock Luud off his feet.

And yet, they immediately change back as soon as Luud has fallen over.  They press their advantage and get in some good hits, but they do it all in normal base mode.

And this is what I want to talk about, because we’re 13 episodes into this show, and we’ve only seen Super Saiyan used on three occasions, and very briefly.  In Episode 5, Goku transformed to quickly overwhelm Ledgic.  In Episode 12, Goku and Trunks transformed to overcome Mutchy’s powers, and now this.  The weird thing here is that the fight is far from over, but they’re only using Super Saiyan long enough to get out of a pinch.

So I think this is a deliberate choice by the GT showrunners.   They wanted to throttle back on Super Saiyan transformations, either to make GT stand out from Z, or maybe because they wanted to make it feel more special.  Or maybe this is all some sort of unintentional thing, and they just didn’t notice that they were using it less.  The story goes that the reason Toriyama made Goku’s Super Saiyan hair yellow was because it would save time inking his hair on every page of the manga.  So maybe he used Super Saiyan more than he needed to just to make the deadlines easier.  But GT has no manga, and coloring Goku’s hair yellow on an animation cel is probably no easier than making it black.  So that might be all it is. 

All I’m saying is that, as a fan of this stuff, it feels cheap to alter the premise with no explanation.  In DBZ, the characters could maintain the Super Saiyan form for several minutes at a time, at least.  It’s hard to get a sense of how long their fights actually last, but we’ve seen characters just stay transformed throughout an entire battle.  Majin Vegeta fought Goku, then went to fight Buu and he never powered down, for example.   So when the characters don’t do stuff like that in GT, it seems odd. 

It’s not that it can’t make sense.  In GT’s continuity, we haven’t seen Trunks or Goku use Super Saiyan since the Kid Buu fight, which was fifteen years before GT began.  So maybe Trunks has gotten rusty and he can’t do it as easily without wearing himself out, and Goku’s kid body can’t handle the strain as long as he could as an adult.  Or maybe they’re much stronger than they were in the Buu arc, and the Super Saiyan form doesn’t provide the same boost as it used to.  Maybe it’s only good in short bursts now.

My point is that there’s plenty of ways to spin this, but GT refuses to explain it at all.  The message here seems to be: “Hey, did you like Super Saiyans? Well, fuck you, because we’re going to make it as unsatisfying as possible.”

Anyway, Dr. Mu is seeing all of this tom-foolery, and he doesn’t like it one bit.  He called Doltaki to ask for a status update on the Dragon Ball hunt, and Doltaki reports that he has two of them, but he had to activate Luud to stop Goku and Trunks from taking them back.  Mu’s like “Oh, did you get enough power to activate him at Level 3?” and Doltaki’s like “No, but Level 2 should be enough to handle them.”  Except it’s not, and Mu is worried that Doltaki has jeopardized the Dragon Balls and Luud.

And you might well argue that GT doesn’t have time to give dull explanations for things like why Super Saiyan is used so sparingly, but you’d be wrong, because GT found plenty of time to have Doltaki indulge in his creepy doll fetish.  And they still had time left over to have Mu explain his entire relationship with Doltaki.  Mu created Luud and considers him one of his finest “mutants”, and he recruited Doltaki because he had the charm necessary to bring unsuspecting victims to fuel Luud’s powers.  So the entire Luudism faith was just a front for Mu’s experiment in making a giant ugly robot that breaks stuff. 

But Mu also tasked the cult with finding the Black Star Dragon Balls, in order to wish for galactic domination, or something like that.  So in other words, this whole stupid cult gimmick they’ve been setting up for the past four episodes has been a waste of time, because it all comes back to this Dr. Mu guy, who’s an evil scientist guy instead of a cult leader guy.

Mu notices the doll that Doltaki is carrying around, and deduces that she must have a lot of power, since she was associated with Goku and Trunks.  So he orders Doltaki to feed her to Luud, since that might give Luud enough of a boost to reach full power and win.  But Doltaki refuses, because Pan is “the girl I’m going to live together with forever.”  Fuuuuuuuuuuuck this. 

Mu decides that if Doltaki won’t cooperate, then he can just be fed to Luud along with Pan.  So wait, Mu has the same turn-you-into-a-doll power as Mutchy, Doltaki, and Luud?  He even has the means to send both dolls into Luud, remotely.   So what the hell did he even need Doltaki for in the first place?  He’s been running this cult for twenty years, but why?  If Mu has the power to do this at a distance, then he could just doll-ify hundreds of people on distant planets and send henchmen to bring the dolls back to Luud. It might take a while, but I bet it wouldn’t take twenty years.

Okay, so Luud absorbs Pan, and now he’s invincible?  Why?  Pan was weaker than Goku or Trunks, but now she has the power to make Luud stronger than both of them combined?  What’s stupid is that this won’t even be the last time GT tries to use this trick.

✨The Blade Braxton Memorial Haiku*✨

Luud is a mutant?

A god? A machine? Who cares?