English Dub Review: Dragon Ball Super “The Miraculous Conclusion! Farewell, Goku! Until the Day We Meet Again!”

Overview (Spoilers Below)

With Goku down, Frieza and Android 17 face off against Jiren. Frieza takes the lead in the attack but then works in tandem with 17 as the two manage to injure Jiren who collapses from exhaustion. As Frieza is about to eliminate Jiren, whom at first he accepts defeat, that is until Toppo calls out to Jiren and inspires him to keep fighting despite his injuries. Jiren then powers up into his limit-breaking state again and fires a massive blast at both Frieza and 17, but they both counter it with an energy barrier to shield themselves, but Frieza is running low on energy and drops out of his Gold form. Before Jiren can overpower them, Goku manages to get back up and rejoins the others by adding his strength to the barrier, which enables them to cancel out Jiren’s blast.

As Goku and Frieza take on Jiren together, 17 provides cover fire, but the fight itself does a good job conveying a sense of urgency while also showing how really synced their teamwork has gotten despite Goku and 17 begrudgingly working with a despicable shitbag like Frieza. As Goku and Frieza tackle Jiren out of the ring, it manages to eliminate all three of them from the tournament in the process. With all of their fighters defeated, Universe Eleven is erased. As the only fighter remaining on the fighting stage, Android 17 is declared the winner of the Tournament of Power, and he is given the privilege of getting his wish granted from the Super Dragon Balls. After some consideration, Android 17 wishes to restore all of the universes that had been erased as if they were, which brings all their inhabitants back to life as if nothing happened. As all the erased universes & people are now restored, the Grand Minister in charge of the tournament reveals that the Zenō-twins had foreseen the outcome of a virtuous individual that would wish for all the other universes along with their inhabitants to be wished back. The Zenō Twins priorly decided that that was the only wish that’d be allowed to be granted, and in case the victor turned out to be a douche and wished for something selfish, The twins would’ve wiped their ass out along with their universe as well.

As a reward for doing well in the tournament, Beerus in a shocking twist asks Whis to uphold their end of the bargain and restore Frieza to life (Keep in mind that he is the Dragonball universe, most souls are capable of being non-corporeal for a certain period of time which explains the physical combat Frieza endured during the tournament’s proceedings to a point). When we cut to Universe 11, Jiren begins to establish a genuine friendship with Toppo and hopes to have a rematch with Goku someday. This then leads to a short-epilogue of sorts as the Universe 7 Team returns home with Frieza leaving Earth to resume the leadership of his empire whom long after his 2nd death in “Resurrection F” has alien troops who still devote themselves to his rule, though Goku remains vigilant towards anything Frieza could possibly do next which is a storyline that is later touched upon in the most recent DB Super film “Broly”. Both the episode and the entire series ends with Goku and Vegeta then meeting for a sparring match at the mountains where they first fought in DBZ, as they enter their SS Blue forms. Goku reveals that this “Ultra Instinct” is something he can’t control at will, and believes that he obtained it by accident during the tournament. Goku and Vegeta then declare that they will keep finding new levels of strength, and they race towards each other to fight.

Our Take

This was possibly the longest journey of a show we’ve ever explored. Not as long as “One Piece” or Naruto so to speak which had story lines that dragged to the point that they could easily discourage people from following them, but ever since the creation of DB Super, nobody would suspect it would go on as long as it did. The first 26 episodes were mostly re-tellings of two decently written & animated (and weirdly enough funded by the Japanese government) Dragonball-Z Movies “Battle of the Gods” and “Resurrection F” but the series found ways to expand both films with added details here and there and even gave low-tier characters awesome moments who would otherwise be overlooked their moment to shine due to the running time of those films. (Even Krillin has a great character moment which shockingly brought a tear to my eye.)

After those altered anime-film re-tellings, The show gave itself a chance to stretch its creative muscles with a storyline that was creative and interesting, yet the ending arguably divided fans such as the “Future-Trunks” Arc which not only involved a newly established set of time travel rules, but also the introduction of “Goku Black” and Zamasu who was voiced by David Gray (which I later found out was an Alias for the Buffy & Angel actor James Marsters) but the themes & storytelling in that one was the closest thing ever Dragonball had to a philosophical debate about humanity’s worth, reclaiming a sense of purpose, and the seduction of evil.

And finally, We’re here. This entire arc had its share of unique twists & turns. Even the Intro and promotional material threw people off before it later changed when the Tournament was announced as Buu was originally meant to be part of Universe 7’s team but due to a mishap in Buu’s efforts to get muscular for the battle, Frieza from the afterlife was recruited which had an interesting dynamic as all the heroes within the Universe 7 team were forced to begrudgingly put their aside their past issues and focus on the bigger picture knowing that all existence was at stake with Frieza’s primary motivation being rewarded for his efforts if they win (which I’m sure is going to come back to bite them in the ass in “Broly”) Aside from some upcoming video games published by Bandai Namco, it remains uncertain what the future of Dragonball will be. While it wasn’t perfect, It kinda feels symbolic for me to review the final episode as I was also the one who covered the first episode when the dub began in January of 2017.

As a whole, the show had some epic and beautiful fight scenes,and sometimes dragged with the filler episodes but thankfully not long enough that they didn’t overstay their welcome and established not only fun character moments but also new pieces of information along with special guest appearances such as the characters of Akira Toriyama’s other Manga creation “Dr. Slump”.