Dragon Ball Daima: Episode 14 - Official Discussion Thread

[Issei189]

Neva must have been quite powerful in his youth. He once again surprised us with that magic of his. Heck even Piccolo was surprised because the most Namekians could do in the Z era was materialize objects and clothes with their magic. Anyways the Gendarmerie Force are pretty much knock offs of the Ginyu force, but they are nicer. Their interactions with Kuu and Duu was amusing.

[nineko]

Am I the only one who likes Character Interactions? Or do people just want fighting all the time?

Surprisingly enough, I don't want "just fighting all the time", in fact, some episodes of the Tournament of Power were a chore to watch, too.

I just want things to happen. I'm all for character interactions, I would have loved to see more slice-of-life episodes in Z and in Super. What I don't want to see are episodes like "Goku and Vegeta walk into a forest. Oh no, there are giant animals there, how are they going to -- nevermind, they forgot they can transform and fly, they're ok. Oh but the plane is broken again".

Why is this episode better than the previous one? Things happened. Not necessarily good things or useful things, but it wasn't boring. Neva is powerful, the majins are fun, the gendarmerie elites are idiots, the characters are near their destination. Interactions are still weird and sparse, Vegeta commented about a king who steals planes (maybe because he is royalty too and compared that king with his own father), and he was interested into Piccolo's question to Hybis about the temperature, but yeah, we have a plane full of people but barely any meaningful dialogue. I wasn't expecting them to discuss strategy like they did before the aforementioned Tournament of Power, for one because that very instance demonstrated that they can't follow strategies anyway, and also because they don't really know who or what is expecting for them. Except for Glorio, they don't even know that the first tamagami has already been defeated. For all they know, they'll have to fight against one side, but it's going to be a threesome.

And that is going to be interesting. How are the alliances going to hold up? What are wild cards like Neva going to do? The fight itself can be short like the ones happened so far, I just want to see interesting surroundings to it. I don't want to see Goku flying away from a giant dog.

[Ronin]

I do feel like episode 13 was a waste, but I'll let it slide considering how this one went. It had its flaws, but was overall good. Things that could've been improved were the Gendarmarie knockoff Ginyu group (already forgot their name lol). Should've just made it a large garrison of Gendarmarie on patrol for them instead of a group of 5. Maybe have 1 or 2 in command over them with names and leave it at that. I wouldn't be surprised if they got beaten easily anyway.

The scene where Neva opened the tunnel was badass, though Goku knocked out and falling slowly was too comical and reminded me of when Frieza was transforming into his final form while they were trying to get Dende to heal Vegeta on Namek. I also agree that Neva just feels like a deus ex machina at this point. This show is just creating blustered challenges to easily be solved right away. I think it should've come with a catch at least. Like Goku (or someone) be able to overpower it, but it knocks him out and he stays out for a while or have Neva do it the same way that he did, but say that in his old age, doing the spell will take a lot out of him and it will knock him out or they could push it further and have it actually kill him instead.


EDIT: That shot of the ship burning sums up all their ship problems too well. That should be the Daima equivalent of the Yamcha meme.

[Majin Buu]

Loved this episode.

We have what looks like our sub-boss for The First Demon World: The Gendarmerie Special Forces. Admittedly, at first I was like "we're going back to the Sentai parody well yet again?"

But they quickly grew on me.

They're yet another Sentai parody, but they provide a new take on it. Ginyu Force (to the extent that they had characterization) were arrogant weirdos and the Pride Troopers are those tropes played more straight (as they come from a world that's built around those tropes). These guys on the other hand are arrogant idiots, and I love them for that. Them causing tons of collateral damage with their reckless antics only for Gomah to charge them for the repairs afterwards was great. I also loved how Gomah tried to explain who their enemies are just for it to make no sense to these guys. And you can't even blame them for not getting it: Without context, this stuff sounds like crazy shit that doesn't make sense. Ditto on their grocery store interactions with Kuu and Duu being adorable. These idiot blowhards couldn't be bothered to pay attention to how little money they actually had, luckily Kuu and Duu didn't mind being shafted out of a larger meal.

So the group's not-so-backdoor way into the First Demon World came from Neva, not Glorio. I liked how he was all "Well, since I'm here I might as well". And turns out he was the one that sealed away passage between the Demon Worlds to begin with, because fools from the First and Third Demon Worlds were bringing chaos to the Nameks in the Second Demon World. This builds on his exposition about bad people being the reason he made the Dragon Balls harder to obtain. Between being the creator of the original Dragon Balls, the creator of the Tamagami, and the now this, it's clear Neva is being established as the Demon Realm's equivalent of a Kami-esque higher power, and a fairly pragmatic one despite having been a neutral power up till now. He also cites this dilemma as one of the things that prompted the Nameks to leave the Demon Realm, further expanding on the theme of the Nameks as a perpetually beleaguered people. Despite being diametrically opposed classes: The ruffians of the Third Demon World were causing problems for the Nameks just like the oppressive elites of the First Demon World. Interesting stuff. Like Piccolo said, Neva is indeed a legend- and is shaping up to be the show's most intriguing character.

Yet another ship gone, but they've reached The First Demon World, the stage is set for what feels like the climax of the story. Both Degasu and Arinsu have noticed that the gate is down, they're both more on the ball here than Gomah is. I agree with Zephyr: I love the irony that his impending defeat is completely self-inflicted. The show has been very explicit in establishing that Gomah is a terrible ruler. I'm wondering what his ultimate fate will be.

It won't be long before the show is over.

[MCDaveG]

I actually fell asleep watching the episode last night as I finished the 13th episode from last week. I don’t think the show is bad at all, but the excitement wore off, as i really enjoyed it a lot. I’d like to see more subplots and interesting stuff from other characters, like what’s happening on Earth with other kid characters, or villains being fun again like when Arinsu was cooking majins, than just doing shady calls with Glorio and stating the obvious for the viewer or demon king being just insanely incompetent. I aknowledge, that even tho I still enjoy lot of kids’ stuff like SW Skeleton Crew or Dragon Ball, I am too old now for fart jokes, cheap pervert jokes (damn, I am embarrased to actualy enjoy Hybis a lot ) and some of the gags, while still enjoying others… I thought that while many people didn’t, I found funny that the sickest form of revenge in demon world is to steal someone’s ship as it happened repeatedly at first with how it was portrayed.

Not really fan of giant hamsters and giant things being just there and not part of any plot, it’s like the kraken again, spaceship continually breaking over and ovee. It feels bit shallow to me in terms of engagement after that novelty adventuring in previous episodes, crap ton of lore retcons and the Tamagami being over quite fast.
I wouldn’t care that much with multiple episode show, but since we have six episodes left, it kinda put the end to the excitement with it’s finality for me, as you are expecting the content to be really tight with such a small scale.

I can only hope, that there will be some plot twist or something, as otherwise the obvious predictions are:
-of course they get to the 1st realm
-of course they fight with majin
-of course they clash with Gomah and hopefully restore themselves.

I’ll take a break and will probably wait for more episodes to release. Hopefully, the ending will be a great wrap-up for probably the best succesor to the original manga story IMHO and not as rushed as Super’s was

[PerhapsTheOtherOne]

Thanks to this episode, we can now see that the Namekians suffering at the hands of others just seems to be a constant no matter where they go.

• They get troubled by denizens of the First and Third Demon Worlds, so they leave the Demon Realm.

• They nearly all die out due to a massive drought on Planet Namek, and have to be repopulated by Super Kami Guru.

• They get hunted down by Freeza and his forces before being wished away from their exploding planet, and have to wish up another Planet Namek,

• They get accosted by the evil sorcerer Moro, with a champion made of multiple Namekians just getting killed by him.

It's not great to be a Namekian.

[Yuji]

Thanks to this episode, we can now see that the Namekians suffering at the hands of others just seems to be a constant no matter where they go.

• They get troubled by denizens of the First and Third Demon Worlds, so they leave the Demon Realm.

• They nearly all die out due to a massive drought on Planet Namek, and have to be repopulated by Super Kami Guru.

• They get hunted down by Freeza and his forces before being wished away from their exploding planet, and have to wish up another Planet Namek,

• They get accosted by the evil sorcerer Moro, with a champion made of multiple Namekians just getting killed by him.

It's not great to be a Namekian.

Don't forget the U6 Namekians all fused into two beings thinking their universe would get erased only to survive anyway. Basically extinct.

[SHINOBI-03]

Neva is slowly starting to become my favorite character in this story. He became a wild card and not easy to predict what he can do or for which side he'll stick with.

[ssj3kakarot]

Super late to the Daima threads, so apologize if this has been discussed elsewhere in detail.........however.....



We know very little, next to nothing about Zalama, the one said to have created the Universal Dragon balls. What if Neva is him (and he just supresses himself, because thats a Toriyama thing to do) or Neva turns out to be a 1st born of Zalama?

Again, if the series has answered this my bad, just a little high and started thinking!

Thoughts?

[IntangibleFancy]

Even though I am (or was) excited for the fights and have a lot of complaints towards the ones we’ve seen, I was also interested in some more lore drops, like who is/was Zalama and why Universe 7 needed extra supreme Kai’s, and not to mention where the King Kai’s are from and why they’re bug-like.

We’ve got like 5 or 6 episodes left. I hope at least one of these gets answered.

[emperior]

Last 5 episodes better be incredibly good, because the last 2 sure haven’t, and the rest of the show has been good, but not great.

120 minutes is more than a movie’s runtime so it should be enough, but I’m growing concerned. Hopefully they crammed all the spectacle, twists, and best moments there.

I can't speak on behalf of your and others' experiences.

But from my observation, there have been plenty of delicate throughlines and seeds planted throughout this series for things I expect to capstone in the climax. How it's all going to culminate is anyone's guess, and I hope it does, but because we're watching a show that was originally exclusively a web/streaming series possibly intended for binge viewing in the first place, I'd caution against making any definitive declarations about twists and complete character arcs until the end.

We'll see. I will say that for as much as I've been enjoying Daima and its sense of adventure, personality and interactions, the payoff absolutely needs to be worth all this setup.

Yes, I agree.

Plenty of stuff that can and should be resolved. I am expecting, for example:

- Glorio’s “betrayal” (but then going back to being friend)
- A black magic wish. Not guaranteed but would be cool
- The third eye to play some relevant part
- Neva to be the villain. Maybe he steals the wish?
- The bug fusion. Likely a new Goku-Vegeta fusion

And hopefully more interesting lore. The last two episodes have done some kind of world building but were light on lore reveals, which, at least for me, have kinda saved some “meh” episodes.

Although I disagree on the “binge watching” thing. I think it’s inexcusable to have episodes where basically nothing happens, especially in a 20-episodes show.

It was clearly written to be half that. 10 episodes would have been good: more than twice an average DB movie. I am not complaining as I liked some of the world building they have done and I’m glad we got twice the amount of episodes in a Dragon Ball show, especially when they are so well done like this. But I definitely think they could have handled it better.

[AliTheZombie13]

I just wanted Pansy to be a good character. Alas...

[Lord Beerus]

Well, something happened in this episode, so that already puts it above last week's total nothing episode. But with 6 episodes left, they better be bangers, because the last few episodes haven't really piqued my interest.

[Almighty Majin]

Got around to watching this episode and the previous one. They were enjoyable episodes. Episode 13 was light on the actual plot, but I found the whole Planet Mega setting pretty interesting and further showed how strange and dangerous the Demon Realm can be.

This episode we got to see more of what Neva is truly capable of. I really do wonder what will become of him by the end of this series, I am expecting him to return to his prime and be the final threat of the series. He certainly has an agenda. Also judging from Piccolo's reaction to the spell it seems like he actually might know the Namekian language and was lying to Neva just in case. Perhaps Piccolo is more aware of what Neva's actual nature is?

The Gendarmerie Force were fun to see. It is nice to see that even the Demon Realm has its own variant of the force. I mean heck, other universes have had similar warriors: Kamikaze Fireballs in U2, Catopesla in U3, Pride Troopers in U11. Seems like the Tokusatsu bug is ubiquitous among reality (yes the Fireballs are Magical Girls, but you get what I mean).

The next episode is when things will really pick up.

[Omori]

Great episode, especially like how the Demon Realm could look like the shape of an eye with Demon Realm 1 being the core.
The convenience store scene was great as well, it had something, I don't know

In terms of lore and timeline things may get a bit confusing:
- in EP3 Shin said the shield between the realms was already there as long as he can think and with Neva being the one who made it - makes Neva at least 5 Mil. years old (that's the time when Buu attacked the Kaioshin Realm).
- I can see Neva as a "Legendary Namekian" being a few million years old, but it also sounds like that the Namekians left the Demon World around a similar time, meaning Piccolo's father Katatz was also a similar age when he died almost 500 years ago? So Namekian lifespans are definitely longer than we knew.
- Also Neva's comment in EP1 doesn't help (except he got a visitor recently):

Neva states that it has been tens of thousands of years (何万年; nanman’nen) since he has seen other Namekians. The simulcast English subtitle translation simplifies this to “thousands of years”.

Generally I just hope the official timeline was considered while this extra lore was added.
Toriyama once made a quote like this, and what if Daima uses that for Shin's age reference...

Core People are neither male nor female, and their average lifespan is said to be about 75,000 years.

Apart from that, was interesting to see images from Demon Realm Namek in the old days. Seemingly some Dabura ancestors and a woman with a マ (probably also standing for 魔) on her clothes.
Looks like a Dabura flashback is coming next week, hopefully it will clear things up

[FortuneSSJ]

Tired of seeing Beerus looking like characters. The special force characters could have a different color.

[StaticMania]

It took me a while, but I suppose this is the best possible time to mention it since...6 episodes left, we're pretty much in the homestretch.
---
The main problem I have with how this series tackles conflict, is just a general flaw with Dragon Ball in general. The series as a whole does not know how to introduce an actual dilemma to the characters that doesn't involve fighting anymore.

So it relied solely on the fact that they have to use a ship to travel and carry stuff, but the writers couldn't even handle maintaining the facade of making it seem like they "need" the ship.

After leaving the 3rd world...the functional use of the ship was then only that it had Panzi's stuff in it.
After the ship got destroyed by the Kraken...they just flew around until they reached their destination.
---
Conflicts: Avoiding the Police
People stealing the Dragon Ball
Constant Plane/Ship problems
Goku being a wanted criminal

All of which are such non-issues.

The Demon Realm is supposed to be magical, why don't people make use of magic? Goku deals with sets of mooks, but they never increase in difficulty for him. Like say, by using the magic they supposedly have.

Why wasn't there a progression of sorts? Goku goes from bar mooks, to Police grunts, to Elite minions (who I'd say are introduced a bit too late)

Those 2 goons who stole the Dragon Ball that one time. Sure would've been nice if that went somewhere...Panzi even made a make-shift radar, if the episode was actually focused on that Glorio complimenting her would've been more impactful.

Any problems with their ships could've actually introduced the episode conflicts rather than that being incidental. The first plane loss could've been the most significant if say...meeting the king happened after Tamagami #3, the pit stops being because they don't have faster way of travel in the 3rd Demon World.

Goku being wanted and Panzi's collar...could've made the military police a consistent threat instead of minor annoyance up to the point where Shin removes it.

Combining these things and/or restructuring the events would make everything better, but it just feels lacking.

---

All that leads to this most blatant thing, Gomah was the warp fishes deactivated and Neva instantly removes the seals blocking travel between worlds.

And the ship gets destroyed because this might as well be the climax. Stuff like this wouldn't seem so bad if the series knew how to introduce genuine conflict and escalate from there.

Literally the only thing they needed to do was give the majin unique magical abilities and restructure the events.

Of course that's only based on what little of this show I've seen.

[AliTheZombie13]

[...]

All of which would've been issues if Toriyama allowed them to be.
It's been clearly established the Demon Realm is at the center of creation, and the giants were proven to be threats.

It would've been easy for Toriyama to just go, "Everyone in the Demon Realm is a credible threat, even to SSJ3!"
But Toriyama always seemed to be allergic against the idea of anything other than the final bad guy being a threat to Goku, ever since the original DB. So what we're left with is a bunch of padding, non-conflicts, and a fake attempt at developing lackluster characters.

I'm sorry, but the every-episode pattern of Pansy doing something randomly useful and getting a thumbs up, or Glorio talking to his boss and the camera focusing on his eyes to mean "I'm regretting my actions and I will redeem myself in the finale", is not interesting and it sure as hell ain't carrying the show for me as it seems to be carrying the show for many people here. This is all very repetitive, predictable and got old very quickly.

We're 14 episodes in, and Panzy, Glorio, Shin, Rybis (is that his name?), Piccolo and Bulma have done nothing noteworthy. Even Vegeta could've easily been swapped out by SSJ3 Goku and you wouldn't have missed anything. I fail at looking back at this show and justifying the B-Team's presence when it has contributed so little to the story, unless you count Piccolo being there during the random Namekian lore dumps to be contributing to the story. Like, damn. I knew Dragon Ball had a problem with handling its supporting cast, but this is just ridiculous.

I really wish I had better things to say about this series, being that Toriyama was very excited about it before his passing, but... I'm sorry.

[Mister_Popo]

This was an enjoyable episode. It was about time the plot finally started moving forward. While I appreciated the designs and animation of the previous episode, I felt that the world of the giants should have been introduced earlier in the story. Now, we’ve had about four episodes focused mainly on fights, with little progression in the overall plot.

Gomah’s elite fighters are truly colorful and entertaining characters. They feel like a mix between a parody of the Ginyu Force and the over-the-top arrogance of Mr. Satan. At the same time, they’ll likely be completely outmatched—otherwise, why would they need weapons? This will probably add some much-needed comic relief in the final six episodes. It’s a shame they weren’t introduced earlier in Daima. Toriyama is a master of gag storytelling, and I wished there were more vibrant characters like these to keep things from feeling too dry. Glorio, Panzy, Majin Duu, Kuu, Hybis, and Arinsu don’t really appeal to me. Either they lack personality, or they don’t have enough distinctive characterization to make them compelling.

Even though not much happened in this episode, I’m glad the plot is finally picking up steam toward the conclusion. Hopefully, we’ll now get one cohesive storyline without too many episodic detours. The visual storytelling in this episode was fantastic. There was no real action, but the introduction of the Demon Elite Guard and the moment when Neva lifted the spell to enter Demon World 1 were visually stunning.

Daima has had its highs and lows for me, but there’s still a chance for it to truly stick the landing. I don’t expect any major surprises at the end though —like a hidden plot twist that recontextualizes everything. Toriyama has never been the kind of writer who deconstructs a story only to piece everything together in the final moments. At this point, I expect a relatively straightforward path to the finish line.

[Mr Baggins]

Although I disagree on the “binge watching” thing. I think it’s inexcusable to have episodes where basically nothing happens, especially in a 20-episodes show.

It was clearly written to be half that. 10 episodes would have been good: more than twice an average DB movie. I am not complaining as I liked some of the world building they have done and I’m glad we got twice the amount of episodes in a Dragon Ball show, especially when they are so well done like this. But I definitely think they could have handled it better.

Well, I'd certainly agree it's inexcusable if I likewise thought nothing was happening from episode to episode. I'm sure you and everyone else familiar with my posts are keenly aware I have zero tolerance for stories that don't move or contribute. I just don't think that's the case here at all.

My impression of this weekly airing schedule is that it's pretty clearly impacting a part of the fandom's patience and ability to parse what the story is doing more broadly. Hell, forget about binging; if Toei combined every two episodes into longer 40 minute episodes that aired once per week, I doubt there'd be nearly as many complaints about the pacing or whatever. Outside of episode 13, I struggle to think of any episode that didn't either advance major plot points or the world and character building itself, all of which are contributing to a greater underlying narrative.

In other words, the progression has been appropriate for the kind of adventure I suspect this is telling. But I'll elaborate on that further a little more down the line, whenever the story starts to actually present these more dramatic payoff moments in the final 6 episodes.

If it fails to do so, I'll readily admit that Daima failed to stick the landing structurally.