Dragon Ball GT Episodes 23-24 Review: Of Hospitals and Babies

Dragon Ball GT, Episodes 23: Hidden Danger & Episode 24: Discovering the Truth

So these two episodes feel a bit weird, like this attempt at making a filler before the big Baby arc yet it also still wants to make Baby relevant. And... it's okay, for what it does. It's not particularly great, of course, and as always, our characters are reduced to one-note flat characters. If I took a shot every time Goku says "I am hungry" in these two episodes, I'd probably break my liver. 

Episode 23 disposes of poor Rilldo with a simple triple kamehameha from the GT squad, even though Rilldo has survived kamehamehas before. And it's really weird. I mean, Rilldo isn't the most engaging villain, but it is surprising to see him just handwaved away like last week's trash, because apparently he doesn't even die as himself -- Baby has taken over his body off-screen. Doesn't matter, though, because Rilldo dies anyway. 

Then a good chunk of episode 23 is focused on them rescuing a Dragon Ball and some random cabbage-haired alien elf from a derelict ship about to fall into the immense gravity well of a nearby star... and it really feels hilariously dumb considering early on in Dragon Ball Z the concept of gravitational multipliers essentially became meaningless. That sequence lasted way, way too long, and we even threw in a random robot fight for no real reason but padding. 

The GT crew arrives on the planet Pital, the hospital planet, to give cabbage-hair boy some medical aid, but then explosions happen! Which is where we pick up in episode 24, because apparently Baby's taken the cabbage-haired boy as a host. So that explosion that was the cliffhanger in episode 23?  It's just a cliffhanger for cliffhanger's sake. Baby tries to get close to the GT squad and befriend them, resolving to drain their Saiya-energy after splitting them up, but... but sadly the show chooses to go through this in the most hackneyed, unbelievable way. It would be cool seeing Baby's attempt to actually try to befriend the three Saiyans using the guise of someone they rescued, but no. After a half-assed attempt to try to drain Pan, Baby just ends up jumping bodies into the doctor. 

We get way, way too many jokes about how Goku is hungry, Goku hates needles and scenes of them trying to catch fish, before Doctor Baby tries to lure Trunks with the promises of seeing all those fancy alien technology medical stuff. Trunks is alone, Baby is about to strike... and then we get the revelation that, oh, the GT squad planned this all along, having detected Baby's unfamiliar ki during the brief moments that he decides to attempt to attack. Baby pulls a Kid Buu and unleashes a loud, angry scream Ki-explosion deal, cuts Trunks on the arm and then turns into goop to take over his body.  

And it's actually a well-done scene, too. Baby's personality might be flat, but at least they pull off a relatively decent sci-fi monster villain with Baby. Trunks-Baby is about to murder Goku, but Trunks goes Super Saiyan and expels Baby from his body. Baby uses Solar Flare or some shit to blind our heroes and escape, jumping into the body of a fat alien tourist lady as she's about to board a spaceship. And then the final scene of the episode is Baby gooping out of the lady, having killed everyone on board, and it's legitimately well-done as a threat-barometer scene as Baby walks up to the cockpit, about to turn the ship to Earth. It's nowhere as good as Z or Super, of course, thanks to the lack of personality on the heroes and villains, but all this Myu and Baby stuff has actually been really legitimately engaging. It's such a shame that I had to slog through quite literally everything that came before that for it to become really interesting, honestly. We'll see if the first big villain-led saga in GT actually ends up being halfway decent or not.