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Last week, Dragon Ball Daima virtually broke the internet by canonizing one of Goku’s long-forgotten transformations, Super Saiyan 4. Although fans didn’t get a lot of time to gawk at Goku flaunt his ape muscles all over before villain King Gomah negated his transformation, the latest episode in Always‘s final stretch circled the block once more and delivered the transformations fans have been dying to see.
As mentioned, the surprise twist reveal in Daima’s 18th episode gagged fans two-fold. The series punctuated its premise by rehashing the setup of Dragon Ball GT and bringing back its most memorable moment, and it also threw a curveball into where Always (and by proxy GT) should be situated in the series canon. Always‘s 19th episode—seemingly predicting folks lamenting the show’s transforming of Goku and crew into kids to level the playing field, with its villains’ premise yucking the yum of folks seeing a full-grown SSJ4 Goku—fulfilled that promise by doing precisely that, and then some.
In the episode aptly titled “Betrayal,” henchman Glorio betrays big bad King Gomah by summoning Shenron and turning the Z-fighters back into adults. Despite Gomah wishing Goku and crew into being children so he can fulfill his evil schemes uninhibited in the first episode, he still postures that they’ll be no match for him in his discount Jiren buff guy get-up. Predictably, Goku and crew don’t take him seriously and commit to their bit to swap Goku out for Vegeta, since he’d already gotten his turn mollywhopping King Gomah in the previous episode.
Because this is Dragon Ball we’re talking about, and Vegeta seemingly can’t one-up Goku despite never losing to him in a fight and achieving SSJ3 in Alwaysthe battle inevitably turns back to Goku fighting Gomah. Vegeta stands, but the audience doesn’t leave the episode empty-handed, because Toei Animation gives them a glorious consolation prize for witnessing his adult SSJ3 form and beefs up the final flash before Always returns to the Goku power hour. And return it does.
After Bulma hilariously throws down an ultimatum that she’ll never bathe with Vegeta again if he prevents others from fighting alongside him, Vegeta puts his pride aside and tags Goku and Piccolo into the battle. Unlike in GTwhich saw Goku ass-pull the transformation by having his tail yanked out of his body, Goku simply powers up and does the damn thing. However, this time, he does so with gusto, giving Gomah a grand tour of all of Goku’s super saiyan transformations before ripping off his shirt from the lapel and bursting into SSJ4. Fans got a good long look at SSJ4 Goku before the episode rolled to the credits.
As we mentioned in our previous Always article, Goku’s new SSJ4 form comes with the distinction that it was designed by the late creator Akira Toriyama. In past interviews, the anime’s producer has reiterated that, unlike other post-Z projects, Toriyama was very much involved with the production of Alwaysdesigning various vehicles, monsters, and characters for the series and story beats. While we still prefer the look of GT‘s SSJ4 Goku, created by Toei animator Katsuyoshi Nakatsuru, it is clear Toriyama didn’t see much worth changing in his version of SSJ4 aside from Goku’s hair color. As far as final gifts to a worldwide fandom go, Toriyama’s inadvertent farewell in the Dragon Ball Super manga and his work on Always is as good as posthumous goodbyes can get.
Given that Always is billed to be 20 episodes, there’s likely no chance the show can outdo its already astounding fanservice achievements with SSJ3 Vegeta and SSJ4 Goku—things folks have spent decades believing would never happen (or happen again, in SSJ4’s case). But if its previous run of episodes is anything to go on, Always is nothing if not a hotbed of surprises laying in wait for long-time fans, so that we won’t rule more surprises out for the show’s finale.
You can watch Dragon Ball Daima on Crunchyroll, Hulu, and Netflix.
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