Critical Anime Overview #1: Dragon Ball Z (The Saiyan Saga)

Dragonball Z began by retconing a lot of details for the sake of leaving room for a continuation. Gods and demons, became aliens, what used to be mystical or magic was now replaced with science and bioengineering. In practice, the original show was inspired by Journey to the West with Goku being the monkey king, while Z was inspired by the Justice League with Goku being Superman.

These retcons were not very hard to accept and enriched the setting, since the plot was no longer confined on Earth. Goku and Piccolo were no longer the only ones with such powers, but rather representatives of alien civilizations, each one having its own history and culture. Despite being the strongest on the planet, they were also nothing compared to other aliens out there.

Furthermore, for the first time since the beginning of the series, we had multiple agendas and different points of view, which was making everything multi-layered once again. Every major character had something to contribute, the interactions were meaningful, and the plot was not straightforward.
-Goku: Faced his dark side by facing his own race and dealing with the realization of killing his grandpa
-Gohan: Anti-Goku, shy and smart, forced to become violent for the sake of protecting the world, but also brought out the good side of Piccolo
-Piccolo: Left behind his quest to kill Goku and rule the world, by finding kindness through Gohan
-Bulma: Fixed the scouter and gathered the Z warriors
-Kuririn: Helped Goku to use the spirit bomb
-Yajirobi: Severed Vegeta’s tail

But it was nowhere as great as the Emperor Pilaf arc, since there were still many characters existing as background decoration at this point, who ceased having something to do. Such is the curse of constantly introducing more characters and then doing nothing with them, while also refusing to get rid of them for the sake of selling merchandise.
-Yamcha was already a loser, and now became even less of a character by no longer having a relationship with Bulma
-Tien and Chiaozu were there just because Toriyama changed his mind during their introduction, but also refused to get rid of them
-Lunch disappeared forever
-Chichi stayed in the kitchen
-Roshi became a useless pervert old man
-Raditz was forgotten the second he was defeated and was instantly replaced with other saiyans with the same personality

There were lots of other retcons that came off as cheap in the longrun. One of them was turning death into something positive instead of negative. First, the senzu beans removed the recovery time from injuries. Then the Dragonballs did the same for death. What used to be tragic and permanent, was now a temporal inconvenience. And then, the option to train in the afterlife mutated death into an opportunity to get even stronger by the time you resurrect.

It was extra silly when the show was constantly trying to make you feel sad every time a hero was dying, when in effect it was only used as means to make him return with a power up. It was even more stupid when it’s revealed Mr. Popo had a flying carpet that could teleport someone anywhere on the planet. None of the Z warriors would have been killed if he had used it to bring Goku to the battlefield. Or, I don’t know, extending his training period by a few months by teleporting him straight on Kaio’s planet, thus allowing him to master Kaio Ken. Death had become fake tension at this point.

Another thing that began to break at this point was the power scaling. It used to be easy to follow up until now and made sense in how stronger someone becomes, based on progressively harsher training. This was no longer the case, since hereon someone is as strong as the plot wants him to be.

Before:
-Training with Korin, the teacher of Roshi, could excuse why Goku could defeat Tao
-Training with Kami, the good side of Piccolo, could excuse why Goku could defeat Piccolo

Now:
-Training with Kami does not excuse the Z warriors becoming as strong as Raditz within 1 year, when Goku was a third as strong after 3 years of the same training
-Training in the wilderness for a year does not excuse Piccolo becoming stronger than Raditz, when he was doing the exact same thing for 4 year before that and had only a quarter of the power
-With what logic can Goku rival the saiyans by training with Kaio? Kaio has no connection to them for forming a scale

A few simple excuses for fixing these nonsense would be the following, even if Toriyama didn’t care and neither did the fandom:
-The Z warriors train with the spirit of Raditz instead of some nobody saiyans, thus excusing being as strong as him. This also takes away the plot hole of Mr. Popo being powerful enough to kick the crap out of Piccolo all these centuries, but didn’t.
-Piccolo’s body was still maturing after his birth. This fits well with how I had proposed for Jr. to be born at the end of the original series.
-As for Kaio’s training, he could have simply said that Goku had the proper training but not in the proper gravity as the other saiyans, thus by training him on a planet with the exact same gravity would place him on their level, and the kaio ken could be used as a temporal boost for reaching the decades of battle experience they had on different planets.

Speaking of power scaling, this was also the beginning of one of the greatest misconceptions in the franchise. Battle powers were introduced for seemingly offering a measurable way to tell how strong was someone compared to someone else. It quickly proved to be erratic and seemingly random to have a fixed number, thus it was impossible to trust the numbers of a scouter. Someone could be using a power boost ability, or could be suppressing his ki; there was nothing certain about battle power readings. Toriyama gave many instances where it was just a trick for the enemies to underestimate the heroes. The fandom had other ideas and went on trying to calculate and fought over arbitrary numbers for decades after the creator himself stopped using them, since they were, in effect, bullshit.

Something else that was always an issue but never to such a degree, was the train of thought they use for defeating the saiyans. Why would they go through all the fuss of training for a year and resurrecting Goku, instead of simply wishing from the dragon to make the saiyan space pods blow up in space? Why risk everyone’s life on Earth just to bring Goku back? It was simply not worth it. It was as if everyone had accepted their fate as cannon fodder, instead of believing they could do something without Goku being around to save the day.

So, if you put all these issues together without letting nostalgia to cloud your judgment, you can easily see why the arc was not that great despite having a very good build up and a bombastic finale. If I remove a point for every mishap (useless characters, nerfing of death, broken power scaling, and wonky train of thought), I can’t give the arc more than a 6/10.