#doltaki

Let’s get the B-plot out of the way, since it’s pretty short.  Doltaki, who escaped in the last episode, has arrived at Planet M2, where he seeks to make a report to his boss, Dr. Mu.  His “report” is really just a bunch of spin doctoring of facts Mu already knows: The GT crew defeated Luud, which means they’re even more powerful.  Doltaki believes that his “masterful eloquence of speech” would enable him to win the GT crew to Mu’s side, and he asks to be given the assignment of dealing with them.  This is dumb, since Doltaki just got back from losing to the same guys.  Also, Pan in particular hates Doltaki’s guts for what he did to her when she was stuck in doll form.

But it turns out that Mu’s not even there.   Instead, General Rildo is sitting in Mu’s chair and tells Doltaki that the doctor is out of town, but he did ask the General to pass along a message for him: “Die”.  Then he shoots Doltaki with an energy blast and asks for new orders.

I guess Mu was listening in on the whole Doltaki exchange the whole time, so why didn’t he just give the message himself?  Anyway, Mu orders Rildo to capture the Earthlings and their Dragon Balls, but he wants them taken alive, because he believes that their special powers could prove invaluable to his research.  The word “Saiyan” is never mentioned in this scene, but I’m kind of thinking this is what Dr. Mu has noticed. 

The important thing is that Doltaki is finally dead after appearing in five episodes.  I considered complimenting this episode for being the one where he dies, but it’s really more of a push when you think about it, since he could have just died in the last episode and spared us an appearance here.  Or they could have just not written him into the series in the first place.

Also, I want to point out that this whole scene is very reminiscent of General Blue’s death at the hands of Mercenary Tao in Commander Red’s office, only it’s not nearly as awesome.  That’s par for the course with GT, where a lot of the “best” moments are just watered down repeats of classic Dragon Ball and DBZ, but with all the fun parts stripped away.

Okay, so on with the main story.  Trunks and Goku are talking about the revelation of Dr. Mu as a rival Dragon Ball hunter.  If he can create weapons like Luud and he plans to use the Dragon Balls to wish for rule over the universe, then the situation has gotten a lot more dangerous.  Trunks suggests that they return to Earth so they can drop off Pan and resume their quest with Goten taking her place.  That way they’ll have enough muscle to handle Dr. Mu if they cross paths again. 

Naturally, Pan hates this idea, and Trunks tells her that it’s for her own good, since they can’t treat this like a game anymore.  Why were they ever treating this like a game?  The Earth will explode if they don’t find all seven Black Star Dragon Balls.  Stopping Dr. Mu from making a wish is kind of redundant.

Pan asks Goku to let her stay on the crew, and Goku says, and I quote: “I don’t care either way.”  Seriously, that sums GT Goku up pretty damn well.  We’re almost a quarter of the way through this show, and so far all he’s really done is eat, fight, and announce when he’s hungry.  People complain about Goku’s portrayal in Dragon Ball Super, but at least he has opinions and things to say.

Also, how is taking Pan back to Earth even an option anyway?  They wanted to turn back in Episode 3, but she stuffed the master control key in her shirt.  Did they get the key back?  Why didn’t they just take her back to Earth at that point? 

I guess what I’m trying to say here is that it never made sense for them to allow Pan to stay on board, so discussing it now seems pretty cheap when they never actually agreed to let her stay in the first place.   There was never an episode where she convinced them to let her stay, nor was there an episode where she proved her worth to the mission.  This episode is trying to pull that off, but it’s structured like it’s a follow-up to some other non-existent episode that already did this.

So Pan demonstrates her value to the crew by throwing a fit, running off to some other part of the ship, and crying about it.  Giru tries to sympathize, but she just abuses him like always.  The only thing that cheers her up is when Giru detects another Dragon Ball, although that seems like more of a distraction than a solution.

The next Dragon Ball is located on a desert planet with like eight different suns.  Also, the planet is infested with giant ant-lion creatures.   They don’t look much like antlions, but they live in the sand and prey on anything that gets too close.  Also they spit sand, which I don’t think is an antlion trait, so I’m not sure what to call these things.  Anyway, one of them damages the ship, so Trunks has to repair it while Goku stands guard to repel any further attacks.  Pan has nothing to do and they don’t want her getting in the way, so she gets upset again and runs off.

It goes about as well as you’d expect.  Seriously, this running away from home bit would be dangerous enough on most other planets, but out here it’s a death sentence.  And this was what I was complaining about when I wrote about Pan’s lack of a character arc a while back.  She joined this mission in Episode 2 because she wanted to be taken seriously.  She had a lot to prove, and she wanted people to stop treating her like a child.  And look where we are.

I mean, I would expect something like this from Episode 4 Pan.  But this is Episode 15.  This is the seventh alien planet she’s been to.  You would think that by now she would understand how hostile these environments can be, and how dangerous it is to run off alone.  Trunks was worried about her getting hurt during a confrontation with Dr. Mu, and she goes and proves that she can get herself killed far more easily than Trunks imagined.  

Luckily for her, Giru was worried about her and tracked her through the desert.  He locates her just as one of these antlion things is about to finish her off.  And surprisingly, Giru handles himself pretty well against this thing.  It made short work of Pan, although she was so exhausted and dehydrated that it probably wasn’t a fair fight. 

Pan can only watch in shame as Giru risks life and limb to defend her, and all she ever did was “push him around” as she puts it.  No, Pan, you kicked and punched him a lot too.  Not that I feel sorry for Giru, he sucks shit, but it’s amazing how Pan can bully such an unlikable character and come across as even more unlikable.

Then Pan has this sort of vision where she thinks she’s dying, and she sees images of her friends and family.  It feels a lot like what Goku will experience when he turns Super Saiyan 4 for the first time.  And this is where I really wondered if Pan might turn Super Saiyan in this episode, because  the first time I saw this episode, it sure felt like this big breakthrough moment for the character.   I knew she couldn’t turn Super Saiyan here, because I had already seen the later episodes that followed where she never showed that ability, but still, this story really feels a lot like a Super Saiyan origin story.   It’s like Vegeta confronting his own weakness during a meteor shower, or Future Trunks discovering Future Gohan’s corpse in the rain.  

Like, just look at how thick they’re laying it on here.  She wants Giru to run away before he gets hurt, and she can’t help him because she’s completely powerless.  I mean, even if she can’t turn Super Saiyan, she should still Hulk up and clobber the antlion creature and save the day, right?

WRONG!  Pan wakes up and it turns out that Giru has not only driven off the antlion monster all by himself, but he found an oasis nearby.   Oh, and he also recovered the Dragon Ball while he was at it.

Oh, and this oasis he found also helps Trunks with the ship, since it uses water for fuel, and he needed to refill it after the fuel tanks were breached in the attack.

✨ “Good” “Ideas”, Poorly Executed✨

And this is where a semi-promising episode goes completely off the rails.  They did a Pan episode, and then suddenly veered off course and had Giru become the hero instead.  Fucking Giru, the one character who was already indispensable because he’s their only way of locating Dragon Balls.

This goes back to producer Kozo Morishita’s philosophy for writing the series.  As he said in a 2005 interview: “Pan’s role was to be strong but still lose to the enemies and then be rescued by Goku, to be a ‘heroine who makes Goku a hero’.”    As far as Morishita was concerned, this was a “pattern” that had to be followed, which is why they never even considered having Pan become a Super Saiyan.  “[I]t would break that pattern to make Pan a Super Saiyan and strong.”

And I’ve already critiqued that attitude for being formulaic and self-defeating, but we see it on full display here.  This was set up as a solo story about Pan proving to Trunks that she deserves to see the mission through, and that pretty much demands that she get some kind of big hero moment.  But if she got a hero moment, then that would “break the pattern”.  So instead, we have Giru rescuing Pan instead of Goku. 

And that doesn’t fucking work at all!  At the end of the episode, Trunks apologizes for suggesting that they swap Pan for Goten, and he praises Pan for finding the Dragon Ball and the oasis, like that proves she can handle herself.  And it would, except she didn’t find the Dragon Ball or the oasis.  Giru found them!  Pan even tells Trunks this, but he responds with some twisted logic that Giru found them because he was trying to help Pan, so in a way, Pan deserves all the credit?  No!  No, that’s how how any of this works!

There’s a real sexist overtone to that Kozo Morishita interview, and this episode kind of puts it into focus.  Morishita compares the Pan/Goku dynamic to the movie Titanic, where the heroine is rescued by a hero, and she fondly remembers it as an old woman. 

“To go off-topic a bit, even the hit movie Titanic moved women because it’s a story where the heroine (now an old woman) remembers the hero; isn’t that basic movie-making? If the hero doesn’t rescue the heroine, maybe adults will understand that life is like that too sometimes, but for children it becomes a very harsh story. Stories where the hero rescues the heroine have a sense of security.”

I don’t want to read too much into this, but it sure sounds like Morishita was suggesting that this is the only way to depict a heroine in a story.  The way he tells it, a heroine’s job is to be rescued, and the only alternative would be to have the heroine getting in trouble and not getting rescued, which would be a real letdown.   Morishita never seems to consider a heroine who rescues herself, or who rescues someone else.  In other words: a damsel in distress. 

In that narrow definition, Pan can’t become a Super Saiyan, because it would give her too much agency to fit in Morishita’s precious pattern.  Maybe it’s just as well that she didn’t transform, since she would have ended up being a Super Saiyan in name only, never getting to cut loose like the boys. 

But more importantly, it completely ruins an episode like this one, which practically demands that Pan grow as a person and make some big contribution to the team.  As it is, Pan’s character arc is limited to her learning to be grateful to the people who save her.  This episode is about her learning to appreciate crappy little robots who save her, as opposed to her childish grandpa. 

And that’s bullshit, plain and simple.  It’s not “good” and it’s not an “idea”, unless you want to call chauvinism an idea.

✨ Is this episode worse than “The Roaming Lake”?✨

I remember being somewhat pleased with this one when I first saw it, but now I realize that I only had fond memories of it because I forgot how it actually ended.  I so badly wanted it to end with Pan kicking ass that I completely forgot the true ending with Giru saving the day.  So this episode is worse.

Why?  Because I remembered GT 15 reasonably well from when I last saw it ten years ago, and yet the ending was so terrible that I somehow tricked myself into misremembering what happened.  I completely forgot that Giru saved the day at the end, which totally undermined Pan’s character arc in that episode.  

I’m finding that happens a lot with GT, where I will vaguely recall an episode being halfway decent, only to watch it fresh and discover some ridiculous nonsense that I had completely forgotten.  I’m starting to think that everyone who claims to like GT has fallen under the same spell.  They believe they enjoyed it, but that’s only because they haven’t seen it in so long that they forgot all the stupid stuff.

Also, even if I liked that outcome, how big a ripoff is it that Giru saves the day, but he does it all off-screen?  Pan wakes up and he’s already handled everything?   Much of this episode’s runtime was taken up by Pan wandering the desert and Giru following her while chattering like a jerk the whole time.  They could have cut some of that to make room for Giru’s epic victory over that antlion monster.

Wait a minute... I just thought of something.  That oasis Giru found.

Is this the Roaming Lake?  I mean, the same one from Dragon Ball Episode 29.  The whole deal was that it’s a magic oasis that appears for those in need.  Did it follow Goku into outer space?!   That’s fucking awesome!

I mean, it doesn’t redeem this episode, but it’s still a cool fan theory.  To be clear, I hate the episode featuring the Roaming Lake, but I don’t hate the Roaming Lake itself.  I think it’s pretty awesome how a cool lake will just show up and comfort weary travelers.  I just wish it appeared in better episodes.  Maybe the Roaming Lake needs a new agent.

✨ Positivity Page✨

One thing I will say about this episode is that I feel very angry about it, and this is a very familiar anger.  Because of Morishita’s lack of vision, we never got to see Pan or Bulla become Super Saiyans in GT, and for many years, Pan and Bulla were the only female Saiyans in the franchise who could have become Super Saiyans.    I mean, even if Ceripa from the Bardock special had managed to pull it off, she got killed by Dodoria before she could have gotten the chance. 

So it had to be Pan or Bulla, but GT came and went, and it never happened, even though they were older in GT than Goten and Trunks were when they transformed in DBZ.

And this led to a lot of fanboys speciously concluding that female Saiyans are simply incapable of the transformation.  And I would lurk the message boards where these conversations would come up, and it really irritated me how GT dropped the ball on this one.  That was around 2004 or so, when I started trying to think of an idea for a Dragon Ball fanfiction, and I decided that the Legendary Super Saiyan was a fertile ground for storytelling.  

As I thought about what the character should be, it dawned on me that I could make her a woman, and that was the beginning of my OC, Luffa.  I didn’t actually do much with her for the next ten years, but I remember watching this episode of GT in 2012, and playing Ultimate Tenkaichi, which had a create-a-character mode, but it only let you play as a male Super Saiyan.  And that familiar anger was there again.

So now it’s 2023, and I’m watching this shitty episode of GT again, only this time, I’ve actually written my epic tale of a woman Super Saiyan, who kicks ass and doesn’t ask permission from Kozo Morishita before doing it.  I’m a million words in, and I guess I owe a little gratitude to this shitty episode of GT for giving me the motivation to try.

✨ The Blade Braxton Memorial Haiku*✨

Doltaki is dead

Thank you, Rildo. Now please, would

Luud is at full power, which makes him bright red. Stupidly, Goku and Trunks continue to fight him in base form, despite the fact that they only really made any headway when they briefly turned Super Saiyans and attacked him together.  Now, Luud is stronger, but the good guys are holding back for no obvious reason.  Also, Trunks gets sidelined, so Goku ends up fighting alone for much of this episode.  At least, Goku’s alone on the outside.

Because on the inside, all of the victims Luud absorbed are beginning to wake up, starting with Pan.  I don’t entirely get it. At first she seems to be some sort of sleeping ghost, then a ghostly Doltaki tries to kiss her and when she slaps him he becomes solid.  Then while she smacks the shit out of him everyone else wakes up to see what’s going on. 

Practically everyone in here blames Doltaki for their predicament, so naturally they all want a piece of him, but he claims that he knows how to escape, even though he refuses to talk, since he seems to be more afraid of Mu than of being trapped inside Luud. 

Hey, did you miss the Para Brothers?  No?  Well too bad, because they’re inside Luud and they’re all over this episode.  Pan asks them to use their dance magic to force Doltaki to tell them how to defeat Luud, and it works.

✨ “Good” “Ideas”, Poorly Executed.✨

By this point, GT has introduced enough characters in one place that we’re now just sort of having them mingle together, which only compounds their individual shittyness.  So now we have the Para Brothers using their spell on Doltaki, inside Luud, in order to rescue the Luud cultists and thwart the evil scheme of Dr. Mu.  If any of these characters had been enjoyable, this might have turned out to be somewhat fun, but the Para Brothers are like one of those awful SNL sketches that uses repetition instead of humor, and Doltaki’s a sex offender, and Luud looks like a pile of tomatoes with half the charisma.  Oh, and Dr. Mu looks like a shitty knockoff of Dr. Gero.  I’ll have more to say about Mu down the line, but for now, you can rest assured that he sucks just as much as the rest of this clown show.

Doltaki points out a “cell” in Luud’s body.  When Mu created Luud, he began with that cell, which I guess is the thing he mutated to make Luud a “mutant”.  The term “machine mutant” gets used a lot in this series.  Dr. Mu, Luud, and I’m pretty sure Mutchy all called Machine Mutants, and I don’t think I’ve ever understood just what that is.  Anyway, if you take out that one cell, the rest of Luud will collapse, and everyone trapped inside will be freed. 

The catch is that you can’t just shoot it from the inside.  Pan can hit it easily enough, but that only dazes Luud for a moment.  You need someone to attack it on the outside as well, and those attacks have to happen simultaneously in order to make this work.  I’m just going to point out that this weakness never came up for any of the other Machine Mutant characters we’ll be seeing as the show progresses.

So Pan has to contact Goku on the outside and tell him what to do.  Fortunately, the Para Brothers have telepathic abilities.  Unfortunately, the Para Brothers have telepathic abilities, which means they have to set up another repetitive, unfunny gag where their power only works through song.  Then they stop singing their messages, and Pan calls them out on it, which would be satisfying except this wastes even more time.

But they do relay the message to Goku.  Luud’s weak spot is almost invisible from the outside, but Goku can sense Pan’s ki when she attacks it, so he knows where to shoot.  They tell him to look for a red thing on his body, which is maybe the most unhelpful thing ever. 

So Pan and Goku can both shoot the weak spot, but the problem is that they can’t hit it at the exact same time.  Goku apparently has difficulty with this sort of timed coordination, which is bullshit because he learned and mastered the Fusion Dance without having a partner to practice the steps.

So what’s Luud doing while all of this is going on?  Jack shit, that’s what.  This dumb monster was supposed to be the primary threat of this whole arc.  They devoted six episodes of this show to Luud and his cult, and now he’s finally at full power, but all he does is sort of stand around, occasionally flailing his arms and saying his name while he waits for Goku and Pan to kill him. 

Here’s a stupid question. Why doesn’t Goku just go Super Saiyan 2 and kill Luud by himself?  He was doing pretty well before, and he’s not fighting anywhere close to his full power.  You could argue that Luud can only be killed by attacking his weak spot, but if that were true then Mu wouldn’t have been worried about getting him up to full strength.  You could also argue that Goku might kill Pan and the others if he goes full ham on Luud, but they seem to be trapped inside Luud’s tummy, so I think that means Goku could blow Luud’s head off without hurting anyone. 

Another stupid question.  Dr. Mu waited twenty years for this?   Luud was supposed to be a doomsday weapon, but he can’t even kill one Saiyan.  Mutchy gave Goku a harder time than this, and he could actually talk and stuff. 

While “the god of destruction” swats at Goku and misses him with eye lasers, Goku talks to the Para Brothers and suggests using a chant to get their timing down, as opposed to a count of three.  It works, though I don’t see what the difference is.  Maybe this is just a “Goku likes food” joke.   Well, it works, so I can’t complain.

Man, that Machine Mutant is toast.  

Yeah, more like... burnt toast.

Once Luud falls apart, all of the people trapped inside are teleported back out, including Doltaki, who somehow slips away and takes off in a crappy little spaceship.  You know, that kind of looks like the time machines in the Xenoverse games, but not quite.

Anyway, Doltaki kind of doesn’t matter, since his sole purpose was to run the Luud cult, which is now completely destroyed.  I guess he could still be a menace if he hung onto that fleshlight that turns people into dolls, but I’m pretty sure we never see anyone use that power again from here on out. 

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

It’s got the Para Brothers and Dolltaki, so yes.  Yes, it is much worse.

✨Positivity Page✨

So, I don’t have a lot of good things to say about this episode.  I guess one bright spot is that it mostly managed to stay focused on a singular objective: defeating Luud.  Prior episodes kept getting distracted with nonsense like Giru eating the Dragon Radar, or Pan cosplaying as a bee, or Doltaki just ditching the main plot to hide in his playroom.  The final battle with Luud sucked, but at least we didn’t have to keep switching scenes to check in on some other horseshit happening someplace else.

More importantly, I think we’ve finally passed through the absolute worst of Dragon Ball GT.  I seem to remember Episode 15 being not entirely terrible, and The pre-Baby stuff is bad, but at least it’s not Zoonama-flirting-with-Trunks bad.  The Baby Saga is pretty weak, but I think most fans agree it was the high water mark for GT, so when you watch this series, you start to really look forward to Baby showing up, because the first 14 episodes are such a trash dump. 

On the other hand, it never actually gets good, and that’s sort of the trick GT plays on you.  Every time I’ve watched it, including now, I keep thinking that the episode I’m on right now is terrible, but at least the next one will be a little better.  And I keep watching and keep watching, and then I’m finally on the last episode and I realize that no, it just sort of sucked the whole way through.  That’s one reason I keep comparing each episode to “The Roaming Lake”, because I don’t have the patience to rank GT episodes from best to worst, but I still want to establish which episodes are good enough to stand alongside the original DB and DBZ. 

  ✨The Blade Braxton Memorial Haiku*✨

Search Four Planets

To find just two Dragon Balls?

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

This is the first full appearance of Dolltaki, my pick for the worst Dragon Ball character ever. “The Roaming Lake” has many problems, but one thing going for it is the absence of Dolltaki.  This episode sucks a billion rotten eggs.

✨ “Good” “Ideas”, Poorly Executed✨

The “idea” here is that Pan has been turned into a doll, and she gets scooped up by the secret leader of the Luud Cult, but instead of using her to fuel Luud like the other people who have been turned to dolls, he talks to her and puts her in a little dollhouse he made, and he seems extremely excited about undressing her and putting her in different outfits. 

It sucks and I hate it and I think it’s supposed to be a joke but it’s just really weak and sad.  This feels like when a show like “The Simpsons” uses a character like Chief Wiggum to satirize the police, or the Comic Book Guy to mock nerds, except Dolltaki is a “doll otaku”, which seems pretty niche to me.  Say what you want about Master Roshi, but his pervert act is somewhat more mainstream.   How many people watching GT would see a guy like Doltaki and go “Oh, he’s just like that one guy I know!” 

Also, Dolltaki’s whole color palette is a really great example of the shitty color scheme that makes this show so tedious to watch.  Pus yellow gloves, magenta clothes, teal eyes, it’s all here.

✨Positivity Page✨

I honestly can’t find much to say in favor of this episode, so I’ll go with Trunks turning Super Saiyan for the first time in this series. 

And you, know, the sad thing is that while I enjoy this moment, it just reminds me of how much they botched Trunks, and this episode illustrates it perfectly.  Let me explain.

Okay, so here’s a gif I made of Trunks slashing a bad guy in half with his sword.  It’s in the opening of every episode of GT, and it just might be my favorite bit of animation in the whole of GT.  Look at him go.

Now, this is obviously a callback to Future Trunks, the version of the character who traveled through time to warn Goku about the Androids.  This Trunks is not the same character, as he’s the aged up version of Kid Trunks from the Majin Buu Saga.  That Trunks never had a lot to do with swords, but hey, this is GT, and it’s a perfect chance to redesign the character.  And this opening suggests that maybe the GT version of Trunks will also be swingin’ a cool sword.

Well, fun fact: Trunks never uses a sword in all of Dragon Ball GT.  It’s this brief shot of him in the opening credits, and that’s it.  But you know who does use a sword in GT?

Fucking Goku of all people.  Explain that one.  The bad guy here throws a whole bunch of swords at Goku, and this would have been a perfect chance for Trunks to just take one with him as a souvenier for use in later adventures, but he’s not in the room, so it doesn’t happen.

All right, so let me cover this episode in order, or we’ll be here all day.  Last time, Goku defeated Mutchy Motchy, the leader of the Cult of Luud, and it was surprisingly easy.  As it turns out, Mutchy Motchy was just a servant of the real leader of the Cult of Luud.  This turns out to be the gold whip he was carrying the whole time, and when Mutchy Motchy dies, the whip transforms into a shitty looking Mega Man boss named Mutchy. 

Mutchy has the power to control objects when he touches them with the tips of the tentacles on his wrists.  So he makes a bunch of stone tiles fly around and attack Trunks, and eventually they all stack up on top of him and pin him down.   He has to turn Super Saiyan to muscle out of this predicament.

And, like I mentioned, Mutchy uses his powers to fling swords at Goku.  This shot here is especially annoying, because Goku acts like he’s in some sort of tight spot.  He’s surrounded by four swords, you guys!  What if a fifth one comes at him?  He won’t have room to dodge that!  Goku beat Frieza, but I don’t know how he can hope to survive a monster on the level of Motchy!

I wish I was kidding, but I’m not.  Goku turns Super Saiyan to fight Mutchy, but he gets his ass kicked anyway.  So Trunks shows up and blindsides Mutchy while he’s strangling Goku with his whip arms.  It took TWO Super Saiyans to kill Mutchy. 

So while all of this is going on, this asshole Doltaki is watching the fight on closed-circuit television, but he’s more interested in his shitty doll collection, and he’s mainly interested in creeping on Pan, his new favorite. He rubs her against his face, talks baby talk to her, and tries to remove her doll clothes so he can dress her up in something else. 

During all this, one of the cultists shows up in his room and informs him of the battle taking place in the main hall, and it becomes clear that Doltaki isn’t just some weird pervert who lives here.  No, he runs the whole cult.  Except, no, Mutchy was supposed to be the leader, right?  Well, I’m pretty sure Doltaki is actually in command here, but it’s hard to be sure, since the two of them never have any scenes together.

Anyway, Doltaki orders all of the cultists to assemble in the hall so he can address them. It’s a good thing Goku and Mutchy moved out to another part of the building, or that would have been awkward.

The cultists are pretty hyped for this, especially the older ones, because “Father Doltaki” hasn’t made a public appearance in 20 years.  They think he’s a miracle worker, and many of them hope that he’ll deign to heal their ailments.  So it seems pretty clear that Mutchy was the day-to-day leader of the congregation, and Doltaki is a bigger deal. 

But when Doltaki addresses them, he just zaps them with his Fleshlight and turns them all into dolls to fuel Luud.  The cultists learn, much too late, that Luud was never a god, but a sophisticated machine, one which Doltaki plans to activate in order to stop Goku and Trunks.  It’s weird how he takes his sweet time about this, though.  The fight with Mutchy is happening right now, and it doesn’t last all that long.  You’d think he’d be a little more desperate to get Luud in the game.

One (other) thing I don’t get is why Doltaki has been working on this project for twenty (!) years.  The cult is clearly just a front, and they’ve been gathering victims to turn into dolls, which somehow increases Luud’s power, I get that.  The thing is, they had a lot of followers in this episode, and that’s almost enough to bring Luud to full power.  Not quite all the way, but Doltaki thinks it’ll be enough to beat Goku and Trunks.  The point is, he’s made more progress in the past week than he has in the last two decades, so what the hell?

Also, this puts to lie the notion that Mutchy learned the location of the Black Star Dragon Balls from Luud.  If Luud were really a god, then he could plausibly hand down divine revelations about the Dragon Balls’ locations, but that’s out the window.  So was Doltaki the one supplying that information?  How would he know where the Dragon Balls are?  And why would he want the Dragon Balls?  He seems to already have everything he wants.

Anyway, Luud starts to activate just as Goku and Trunks find out that Doltaki has Pan.

This episode is a garbage fire from start to finish, let’s just get out of here.

✨The Blade Braxton Memorial Haiku*✨

Subs or dubs? Who cares?

Doltaki ruins this show