English Dub Review: Dragon Ball Super “Vegeta Disappears?! Menace of the Duplicate Vegeta!”

We’re back after Toonami’s  2-week holiday hiatus.

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Vegeta is powerless due to the purple blob-like mass cloning and absorbing his powers and it proclaims that It has all his energy & fighting skills as displayed when performing his iconic “Galick Gun”, but when Gryll orders Vegeta’s purple copy to absorb everyone else, it hesitates for a brief second while everyone escapes with Jaco causing a distraction. When they finally retreat in a different location, Potage goes into an exposition-dump that the liquid is a sentient being known as “Komeson” but “Superhuman Water” is just one of its many names known throughout the universe. Long ago, It started out as a means to defend planet Potaufeu from invaders but everything went to hell when it not only absorbed its victims, but the liquid’s personality was corrupted by the invaders it absorbed giving the blob-like creatures an extreme malevolence and a lust for power. To fix this, the remaining Potaufeu natives sacrificed their lives to seal this creature with Potage being the only survivor to make sure this liquid would never fell into the wrong hands for 100 years.

We even see what happened to Gryll and his men when they broke the seal “last episode” as it not only absorbs its victims of their powers, skills, and memories, but it slowly makes their bodies fade out of existence within “5 minutes” giving real urgency to the plot. When the Purple Gryll and Vegeta copies show up, Goten & Trunks form Gotenks through their fusion powers and attempt to stand their ground against Vegeta’s purple copy but end up having to resort using Super Saiyan 3 which spends most of the running time as the two try their damnedest to defeat the clone before that happens but it doesn’t last very long as Purple Vegeta beats him down until they diffuse to become Goten and Trunks again.

When we finally get to the third act on King Kai’s planet, Goku is now finished with his training and realizes that his powers have fully recovered, but they both begin to sense that both kids are in danger and Goku uses Instant Transmission to teleport himself directly to their location. Because of Goku’s simple-minded nature, the others explain to him that Purple Vegeta is evil while the real one is about to die and only has a few more mins left to live unless he beats the purple copy which leads to a series of twists even I didn’t expect involving the purple clone’s individuality, but the episode ends on a suspenseful cliffhanger when they both power up before battle.

Our Take

DB Super episode 45 maybe enjoyable to some, But if you know the story-patterns of how DBZ was often structured by now, It can also be predictable when Goku has to come in and save the day at the last minute. Thankfully, what made this episode the most watchable for me was Purple Vegeta being voiced by Brian Drummond (Ryuk from the Death Note Anime) who originally voiced Vegeta in the mid-late 90’s DBZ Ocean Dub and also started the “It’s Over 9000!” Meme long before Funimation took over the English Dubbing duties themselves.

Drummond’s voice alone was a welcomed piece of nostalgia for longtime DBZ fans who followed the series growing up while it was clever on Funimation’s part to further differentiate both versions of Vegeta at the same time.

Score
8/10