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Dragon Ball Super: Episode 21 “The Start of Vengeance! The Frieza Force’s Malice Strikes Gohan!” Review

Television

Dragon Ball Super: Episode 21 “The Start of Vengeance! The Frieza Force’s Malice Strikes Gohan!” Review

Frieza has arrived! What will our heroes do if they can’t summon Whis to let Goku and Vegeta know?

(I mean really, they can’t be involved yet because they HAVE to be stronger than Frieza and if they show up now the battle will be over in two seconds and we can’t have that happen too soon, right? It’s the Dragon Ball philosophy. Keep Goku out of the fight, however you can, for as long as you can, before you truly need him to finish it.)

Resurrection ‘F’ saga – Episode 7/13

Frieza’s ship lands and disgorges its “1,000 soldiers” in a poorly rendered example of computer aided animation. Our heroes lament the fact that they only have five of them (Gohan, Piccolo, Master Roshi, Tien, and Krillin). Turns out Buu is asleep and can’t be woken up (a theme that will reoccur continually throughout the series) and they didn’t want Goten and Trunks to enter the fray since they were too unpredictable. Jaco shows up with Bulma and agrees to help out.

Dragon Ball Super: Episode 21 “The Start of Vengeance! The Frieza Force’s Malice Strikes Gohan!” Review

Everyone starts to get chatty and the heroes learn that Frieza just wants revenge, however even without Goku there he will be content just killing his friends for now. He even recognizes Krillin, who he recalls killing way back on Namek (poor Krillin went through a lot on that arc). In order to stall for time, Frieza agrees to wait for Goku … for 10 seconds.

Dragon Ball Super: Episode 21 “The Start of Vengeance! The Frieza Force’s Malice Strikes Gohan!” Review

When he obviously didn’t show up, the Frieza Force attacks. We see here Master Roshi hulk out with massive muscles he doesn’t normally sport. He is clearly far stronger than we typically give him credit for.

Dragon Ball Super: Episode 21 “The Start of Vengeance! The Frieza Force’s Malice Strikes Gohan!” Review

During the battle Frieza realizes that Gohan is Goku’s son from when he was on Namek as well. Krillin is also scared out of his wits and unable to join the fight. Frieza sees this and offers a reward to anyone who can kill Krillin. In response Krillin gets ganged up on.

Dragon Ball Super: Episode 21 “The Start of Vengeance! The Frieza Force’s Malice Strikes Gohan!” Review

Meanwhile, on Beerus’ world, Goku and Vegeta continue their training. To speed up their training, Beerus suggests sending them to a new location to up the ante, which happens to be within Whis’ staff.

Dragon Ball Super: Episode 21 “The Start of Vengeance! The Frieza Force’s Malice Strikes Gohan!” Review

Back on Earth, Krillin is being taunted by Frieza’s warriors. However, despite the taunts, it turns out Krillin is far stronger than any of the warriors. The team starts to unleash their energy waves and quickly take out a majority of the Force’s members.

As a result of the slaughter, Sorbet sends in their most powerful warrior, Shisami. Gohan stands up to him and starts firing his blasts. Shisami easily bats them away and gets Gohan into a bear hug.

Dragon Ball Super: Episode 21 “The Start of Vengeance! The Frieza Force’s Malice Strikes Gohan!” Review

However, the bear hug doesn’t seem to be doing anything and Shisami is shot in the back by Tagoma as Gohan is powering up. The shot manages to go straight through Shisami and into Gohan, taking them both out.

Dragon Ball Super: Episode 21 “The Start of Vengeance! The Frieza Force’s Malice Strikes Gohan!” Review

Piccolo gives him an emergency “CPR” blast (really, Dragon Ball has never been known for its accurate medical depictions) so that Gohan can be given a sensu bean. It appears that Shisami was not their most powerful warrior. Tagoma, who was used as Frieza’s training dummy, ended up being the strongest warrior (besides Frieza) by far.

Dragon Ball Super: Episode 21 “The Start of Vengeance! The Frieza Force’s Malice Strikes Gohan!” Review

They state that he’s even stronger than the old “Ginyu Force”. Even though Tagoma dismisses the Ginyu Force, as a fighting force in the modern era, I doubt we have seen the last of Captain Ginyu. As Tagoma powers up, Goten and Trunks feel his energy and leave to join the fun as we are treated to one last shot of Captain Ginyu the frog, peering out from Jaco’s spaceship.

Resurrection ‘F’ Movie Link

Resurrection ‘F’ to Super Time Correlation: From ~34 minutes to ~51 minutes

The beat for beat reproduction of the movie into a TV series continues. The movie even contained the bad computer graphic warrior exodus from the ship. The main difference with Frieza’s landing though was that when he arrived he immediately blew up a city in the movie, something that he never bothered to do in the series.

There are scenes during the battle that are so spot on that I question whether they just didn’t reuse movie footage for the TV series. However, there are some major differences. We see a whole lot more of Jaco fighting and he appears to be quite a competent fighter. Typically the TV series drags things out from the movie but in this instance of the opening fighting scenes there are much, much more in the movie than the TV show ever showed. Perhaps they will get into some of this in the next few episodes, but each of the six main fighters has several minutes a piece just fighting the warriors. Also Krillin doesn’t have his paralyzing fear he had in the TV series and is able to hold his own without the added subplot.

When Shisami joins the fight, Piccolo was actually the first to fight him until Gohan steps in. Gohan immediately went Super Saiyan and knocks out Shisami in one punch. Frieza then wipes out all of his defeated warriors with one blast. To show his superiority, Frieza punches Gohan and takes him out of the fight with one punch. Gohan is given one of the last sensu beans and the warriors contemplate their fate. Within the movie, it appears Tagoma never returned from being blasted out of the ship earlier. I guess they wanted to really use his character in the TV series since they kept him around and let him be the big bad next to Frieza.

Episode Thoughts and Feelings

As the Frieza fight starts, we have the typical leveling up that Dragon Ball is so fond of. We start our heroes battling the weaker warriors and slowly work our way up until we get the ultimate bad guy–Frieza in this instance. And overall it works alright. I enjoyed the extended movie fight scenes better but I think it is a lot of fun to see Master Roshi really go at it and hulk out. I don’t recall if he ever did that before Super.

In general though, there just isn’t that much here. There are a few fighting scenes where our heroes take out hundreds of essentially worthless bad guys and Gohan gets “killed” only to be brought back almost immediately. Overall a pretty meh episode.

So, did you like Episode 21 of Dragon Ball Super? Share your thoughts below!

Dragon Ball Super: Episode 21 “The Start of Vengeance! The Frieza Force’s Malice Strikes Gohan!” Review
Episode 21 “The Start of Vengeance! The Frieza Force’s Malice Strikes Gohan!”
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