I Watched Dragon Ball Super so You Don’t Have to.

As a 90’s kid growing up without cable, reruns of Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z were the pinnacle of entertainment available to me. When I saw another installment streaming on Netflix, I knew that I had found my next quarantine binge. After days spent in a miasma of battle transformations triggered by yelling, new heights of power for our goldfish-brained hero Goku, and trying to puzzle out what foods some of the characters were named after (Cabba=cabbage, Kahseral=Casserole, etc), I have thoughts that demand written exploration.

First, this show is unabashed fan service. If you ever wanted to see what it would be like for Frieza, Majin Buu, and Master Roshi to be fighting on the same team, this show is for you. If you don’t know what that means, then it probably isn’t. I wish I could say that the themes explored in the show make it accessible for all audiences, but after observing my girlfriend endure hours of Dragon Ball Super in the background, I must acknowledge that the emotions raised in the uninitiated by DGS range from polite bemusement to active distaste.

The show is a mixture of classic Dragon Ball Z endless power-up and martial arts battle episodes and more prosaic depictions of Goku‘s family and their daily life. These family moments were, for me, the strongest aspect of the series. In one episode, baby Pan (the infant child of Gohan and Videl) goes on a solo adventure while Goku is supposed to be watching her. Using her nascent Saiyan powers, Pan flies from her crib, is “kidnapped” by the hapless Emperor Pilaf, explodes his space ship with her powers, and ultimately flies back to her crib without her parents any the wiser.

This benign negligence from Pans’ guardians showcases what I think is the strongest aspect of the show compared to the rest of the Dragon Ball canon; the characters’ flaws are much more apparent in this show than in previous offerings. While Dragon Ball Z featured countless examples of Goku, Gohan, and Vegeta reaching new heights of power and saving the world again and again, Dragon Ball Super shows more of the human side of our alien heroes.

Son Goku comes off as a happy-go-lucky but dim-witted and pretty irresponsible figure. His selfish desire to fight the strongest opponents in the multiverse leads him to arrange a martial arts tournament with preposterously genocidal stakes. In this tournament, the Omni-Kings of the universes set twelve universes’ greatest fighters against each other and completely obliterate the losing universes. This places the viewer in the uncomfortable position of realizing that our hero Goku is responsible for wiping out trillions of lives across the cosmos in search of a good scrap. Of course, in true Dragon Ball fashion, Goku is thankfully bailed out by his compatriots when a wish on the Super Dragon Balls restores the other universes into existence. Things return to normal and boy is the music great.

Still, unlike in previous Dragon Ball series where Goku’s power is the world’s best hope, in the world of Dragon Ball Super it’s not as useful anymore. His wife Chi Chi constantly berates him for his complete lack of marketable skills and tries to keep him from being a bad influence on his son Gohan. Dragon Ball Super hints at the trade-offs Goku had to make to become such a strong fighter, pointing out his failings as a grandfather, husband, and father. By continuing his career as a martial artist and gaining god-like power, he makes his planet and his family a target in the classic super-heroic mode. He continues to defeat the foes who challenge him of course, but the show highlights the costs of Goku’s relentless pursuit of power. For the first time, the viewer is invited to consider that Goku’s kindness and purity of heart are not enough to keep him from creating evil. In Dragon Ball Super, his reckless desire for worthy competition shows us a Goku whose work to defend the universe is a side-effect of his overriding desire to become stronger for its own sake. Maybe Vegeta fans had a point all this time.