Episode 44, "A Physical War That Exceeds All Limits! Goku and Freeza and Ginyu, Again?!"
*****SPOILERS*****
Synopsis: Freeza asks Goku if he prefers to fight in the air or the land, and Goku choses the latter. Goku removes his weighted shirt. Freeza offers a "service": he will not fight with his hands. The two of them resume combat, with Freeza keeping up just as well for a while without his hands. However, eventually Goku's intensity increases, and Freeza is forced to punch to defend himself. In another part of Namek, Bulma makes friends with a frog, and creates a frog-to-human communications device. However, the frog is actually Captain Ginyu, who uses his power to switch bodies with her. Ginyu then removes the device from the Bulma frog and races off to find Freeza. Freeza claims that he has not yet used half of his power and Goku thinks he's bluffing. Freeza offers to make Goku a subordinate, but Goku turns him down. Ginyu, in Bulma's body, as well as the frog Bulma arrive on the scene and at first fool Gohan and the others. Freeza suddenly increases his speed and easily takes the advantage. Gohan and the group catch on that Bulma isn't herself.
Comments:
Clearly Goku and Freeza are messing around with each other in this episode, because they're both in pretty good humor about the fight at this point, making cracks and smiling.
We start with Freeza's offer to fight in a way Goku is the most comfortable. I remember the dub Freeza saying something like, "Whatever turns you on." Yeah, that was pretty shudder-worthy, especially considering the dub Freeza sounds like a chain-smoking tranny. I guess that's fine if you're into that thing, but this is neither the time nor the place for alien sex. Then Freeza offers to not use his hands in the fight, which Goku listens to while doing some stretches. Very sporting between the two of them, right? Goku gladly takes him up on his "service".
This leads to one of my favorite scenes in the fight. Freeza is fighting Goku using his feet, doing fairly well, but Goku is managing to dodge some attacks. Freeza wraps his tail around Goku's head, covering his mouth. Goku has difficulty breaking out, and frustrated, he bites Freeza's tail. This causes Freeza to remove his tail out of pain and blow on it. This also really pisses him off. I think it's a bit weird to have a quasi-comedic moment in the midst of this epic battle, but it's so in character for Goku to bite an opponent. I can't recall whether this was in the manga or not, though.
Unfortunately, this episode of Kai also features the filler with Bulma and the Ginyu frog. Bulma encounters a frog who is helpful to her and decides to make friends with it. When she makes a translator device so it can talk to her, it turns out to be Ginyu and he uses his body switch powers to take her body. Ginyu then speeds off in Bulma's bike to find Freeza, with Bulma (as a frog) hanging off of it. The two finally arrive where Piccolo, Kuririn, and Gohan are and manage to fool them for all of two minutes.
I don't know why they decided to keep this material in. It certainly wasn't tied in with the footage so much that it couldn't have been easily removed. I can only come up with that maybe they put it in so that they could end the episode at a certain point and start the next at a certain point. In other words, to fix the pacing somehow. It's not the worst filler ever, but it's weird that they decided to keep something that made the already notoriously long Freeza battle even longer when Kai's main feature is its faster pace.
Overall Score:
3 out of 5
