Dragon Ball GT - Episodes 11-14 [Luud Arc]
Wow. Wow. The Para Para mini-arc was bad in a nauseous way, but this little mini-arc really feels shit, huh? And a good chunk of it is thanks to how utterly inept both the writing team is, as well as how inept the characters end up feeling. Nevermind the fact that Goku and Trunks completely forgot about Super Saiyan until after fighting for a requisite five minutes. Nevermind the fact that we, the audience, have already been treated to excruciatingly boring exposition about the generic cult so Pan re-discovering them is quite literally just repetition. Nevermind that the villains have less personality than a sock. Nevermind the fact that episode 11 literally spends three whole minutes with Pan and Giru repeating the same tired one-liner over and over again.
So much of this stretch of Dragon Ball GT is just so... so utterly dull. Nobody is allowed to grow. None of the action scenes are cool. All of the designs are weird for weirdness's sake, and the show never does anything interesting with anything. It's not even like Super where while the power-scaling and animation are iffy at times, they genuinely try to at least simulate a character arc or try to create powerful anime moments. No, this feels just like an anime going through the motions. Goku, Trunks and Pan are less characters and more walking designs to root for by default, with none of them showing any real personality beyond the generic "Goku is hungry, yuk yuk yuk" or "Trunks isn't as good as Goku, yuk yuk yuk" and "Pan is a girl yuk yuk yuk" and "oh look at Giru repeating Danger Danger Danger such an interesting marketable character".
Episode 11 just has the cast re-discover the Cult of Luud, which, by the way, is probably the logistically dumbest cult out there. The whole point of the Cult is that it's a sham created to bring in silly sheeple to be sacrificed to the gigantic Luud statue, who's actually a... "robot mutant"? Whatever that means. I'm not trying to get into the logistics of how a robot and a mutant even makes sense together. But this Lord Luud is just a fancy robot, and the cult seems to just want to use the manpower to find the dragon balls. If so then... why not send out the cultists alongside the Para Para Brothers to scour the galaxy for the dragon balls instead of them chanting "enyakayakayaka" in that room like morons? Or just feed them all to Luud? Nothing here really makes sense logistically beyond "hey, we need a cult scene!"
Episode 11 basically ends with this Cardinal Mutchy Mutchy, a generic alien cult leader, turning Pan and the Para Para Brothers into dolls, feeding the Para Paras into Luud, while spending way too much time fighting non-SSJ Goku and Trunks. Mutchi Mutchi and his pet lion alien get beaten up by Goku... and then the whip he's been using turns out to be a shapeshifting, telekinetic alien called Mutchi! And... Mutchi (meaning literally 'whip' in Japanese) isn't the worst design out there. It's stereotypically anime, but it's at least memorable. I mean, he's got whips for hands that telekinetically controls objects, and that alone makes him somewhat cool in that he gives us some neat visuals -- the only ones in this entire mini-arc -- but Mutchi is a thug, and like a thug he goes down.
No, the seeming big bad of this cult is Dolltaki (not Dothraki), who is... some dude with an ugly bowl-cut, who, in the words of Pan, is a doll otaku, and creeps all over Pan knowing full well that the doll's an actual person, and we're subjected to scenes of Dolltaki agonizing over which dolly clothes to dress Pan in, and Pan is clearly distressed as this weird manchild with a dick-chin tries to undress her while in doll form. This is so wrong on so many levels that there's not even a "oh, silly Japanese, making pervert jokes" feel to it. There's something significantly different from the traditional pervert joke that, say, Master Roshi does to Dolltaki intending to strip an underage girl and have her live with him forever and ever, all the while Pan is clearly distressed.
Dolltaki then activates Lord Luud before he's fully ready, and Luud is... a giant robot baby who really looks like Mosco from Dragon Ball Super. The narrator called Luud "God of Destruction Luud", so it's likely that Mosco's a reference to Luud, huh? Luud's ultimately a generic fighty-fight villain with no personality either, beyond being really big and really primitive, but of course he's not at his full power.
Oh, and Dolltaki feeds his cult to Luud. Is there any real reason for him not to do this earlier, and then use Luud to go around the galaxy's lesser planets and suck them dry? Nope! And then Dolltaki, the secret leader behind the secret leader behind the leader, reports to the for-reals secret leader, Luud's creator, a fancy-ass alien hipster scientist with a ginger mustache and space sunglasses, Doctor Myu, probably the only one out of this gaggle of villains to really have a pleasant design instead of being weird-for-weird's sake. Myu chastises Dolltaki for activating Luud before Luud's fully charged with the life energies of enough people, even though Myu's the same idiot who thinks the most efficient way to charge Luud up is to set up a fake cult under the supervision of Dolltaki. So... yeah.
Pan gets eaten and absorbed by Luud (totally not dead!) and Luud powers up and by god it's so hard to care for any of this. In a better show, Myu's revelation should be absolutely shocking, like, here's the real big bad. Here's the Aizen to the Hollows, here's the Akatsuki to Orochimaru, here's Freeza to the Saiyan invaders, here's the Phantom Troupe to Hisoka... but nope. None of the villains in this arc -- not the Para Paras, not generic Jafar clone Mutchi Mutchi or his whip Mutchi, not the literal robot Luud and not the creepy one-note doll-otaku Dolltaki have any sort of personality beyond a single line or two. Dolltaki's just creepy, Para Paras are dumb and Mutchi is sadistic. That's it. None of them are written with any sort of depth or real attempt at being memorable. Throw in the fact that nobody's evil plan really makes sense here, and you get the recipe for a clusterfuck of an arc.
Let's get into the final episode of this mess, episode 14, where we immediately cut the tension that Pan's dead and/or in trouble, because apparently Luud's inside is actually just... a floating void of nothingness. We spend a literal half of the episode with the powered-up Luud doing nothing but stand and shoot the odd eye-beam and knock Trunks (a.k.a. The Job-Master) out of the sky. Like there's a whole sequence where Luud just stands there and shoot eye-beams for Goku to dodge comically. The entire episode is just an inanely stretched-out nonsense of Pan and Dolltaki having a shouting contest, and then the Para Para Brothers shows up and by god when Luud and Dolltaki make the Para Para Brothers look good, you know something's seriously wrong with this arc.
The Para Para Brothers do this whole gag where their telepathy involves them trying to sing in falsetto or some shit, and that somehow Luud is built so that the only way to defeat him is to shoot his core from both outside and inside. Somehow, the dolls that empower Luud is able to move around inside it. Yeah, nothing here makes any sense, the gag with Goku not being able to count because he's dumb went for too long, and I cheer when Luud falls because this stupid plot arc is finally over. Sadly, Dolltaki doesn't die, and escapes to presumably menace our heroes in the future, because he's such a great villain.
Let's get into the final episode of this mess, episode 14, where we immediately cut the tension that Pan's dead and/or in trouble, because apparently Luud's inside is actually just... a floating void of nothingness. We spend a literal half of the episode with the powered-up Luud doing nothing but stand and shoot the odd eye-beam and knock Trunks (a.k.a. The Job-Master) out of the sky. Like there's a whole sequence where Luud just stands there and shoot eye-beams for Goku to dodge comically. The entire episode is just an inanely stretched-out nonsense of Pan and Dolltaki having a shouting contest, and then the Para Para Brothers shows up and by god when Luud and Dolltaki make the Para Para Brothers look good, you know something's seriously wrong with this arc.
The Para Para Brothers do this whole gag where their telepathy involves them trying to sing in falsetto or some shit, and that somehow Luud is built so that the only way to defeat him is to shoot his core from both outside and inside. Somehow, the dolls that empower Luud is able to move around inside it. Yeah, nothing here makes any sense, the gag with Goku not being able to count because he's dumb went for too long, and I cheer when Luud falls because this stupid plot arc is finally over. Sadly, Dolltaki doesn't die, and escapes to presumably menace our heroes in the future, because he's such a great villain.
Oh, and while Goku and Trunks not really developing or having any real personality is a problem, what's up with their treatment of Pan, huh? She's not allowed to do anything, she'll never reach Super Saiyan as far as I know, and she ends up spending two entire episodes stuck as an immobile doll put in embarrassing and uncomfortable positions and manhandled by a creepy doll maniac. Yeah, GT's not kind to Pan, yeah? I mean, she's grating, but nowhere as grating as her treatment. Or as Giru. Fuck Giru. He adds literally nothing to the plot or the cartoon other than to be one extra toy for them to make money out of.
Overall, a pretty sorry excuse of an anime arc. Yeah, we're 14 episodes in, and we've not had anything that's really great or exciting, and our protagonists are pretty boring. No wonder GT has the reputation that it did.
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