English Dub Review: Dragon Ball Super “The Seal of Planet Potaufeu! Secrets of the Unleashed Superhuman Water!”

“I want that purple stuff!”

Overview (Spoilers Below)

The episode begins when Monaka comes to earth making a delivery to Bulma’s place but unbeknownst to both of them while Monaka is asked to hold a funnel for one of Bulma’s experiments, Trunks, and Goten cause some mischief and by-accident, get stuck inside the back of Monaka’s space-truck and later end up on a rocky desert planet called “Potaufeu” where the meat of this story begins. It turns out this location was also Monaka’s next stop with an old French-speaking alien friend/client named “Potage”. As the boys acclimate themselves to the planet’s climate after almost being frozen, they encounter some alien criminals who want to get their hands on this pacifier that’s around Potage’s neck revealing that it leads to a mystical power. However, Trunks and Goten stand their ground when they attempt to steal it and after the criminals retreat, a mishap occurs during their battle when the pacifier falls from Potage’s neck and is lost during the chaos. When the criminals later find it, The Alien criminal leader who calls himself “Gryll” has taken Monaka hostage and proceeds to the temple where the pacifier is revealed to be a Key that unlocks an ancient door.

In an exposition dump from Gryll, he goes into the importance of this magical water as he believes that it has the ability to increase one’s power “hundreds of times over” along with giving them other mystical powers but doesn’t go into detail what said powers are. Potage tries to warn Gryll that the story is bullshit and that it was sealed for a reason, but when Gryll opens the cannister that contains his water, what happens next is effectively scary. Meanwhile, Bulma figures out what happened to the boy’s thanks to a security camera outside her house and informs Vegeta & Jaco about her predicament. At first, Jaco turns down Bulma’s plea to rescue them not knowing that the very criminal he’s pursuing just happens to be at the destination, but finally agrees to thanks to some blackmail Bulma has on him and makes Vegeta tag along in the rescue mission. We do find out where Goku is during the proceedings but the only relevance it has to the plot is to let the audience know that enough time has passed for Goku to be healed up after his powers were unstable last episode.

When we get to the third act, Vegeta & Jaco finally get to the planet to rescue Trunks & Goten who are under attack by Gryll’s men whom we’re left to assume are “powerful” as indicated by the color of their skin changing from different shades of green to purple. After Vegeta delivers an impressive ass-kicking, he’s unaware that what’s left of Gryll’s men has melted into a sentient blob-like puddle that starts to cover Vegeta completely like the Venom Symbiote, but instead of bonding with its victim, the purple goo spits Vegeta out leaving him powerless. The episode ends one hell of a cliffhanger when the formless purple mass takes shape creating an all purple construct of Vegeta much to everyone’s horror.

Our Take

While the last two episodes worked as comedic filler, It’s great to break the monotony and get to some legit action to keep the audience entertained. The concept of ‘Superhuman Water” sounds interesting on paper but with the way the purple blob mass moves and covers people, all I could think of was the living goo-like entity from “The Blob” and Venom’s living symbiote costume from the Spider-Man franchise. It was also refreshing to see Goku recover from the instability of his powers, and since he’s blissfully unaware on what’s going on with Goten, I wonder if this will come into play next episode.

I guess we’ll have to find that out later in January.