Gohan's First Date

Gohan lands on the school roof in his Great Saiyaman costume and reverts to his normal appearance, only to notice a red-haired classmate named Angela watching from nearby. Terrified that she saw his transformation, he spends the morning distracted to the point of being kicked out of class for daydreaming. Angela is sent out too, for drawing a love portrait of Gohan instead of answering the teacher's question. In the hallway, she drops her bombshell: she knows Gohan's secret, and if he does not take her on a date, she will tell everyone.

At home, Gohan nervously asks Chi-Chi for permission. She approves and reminisces about her own first date with Goku, which ended, naturally, in a sparring match. The date itself is an exercise in awkwardness. Gohan and Angela see a movie that bores him senseless. They move to a coffee shop, where Angela requests ten packets of sugar in her coffee and cheerfully credits the habit for her bubbly personality. Gohan looks like a man counting the minutes until his sentence ends.

Relief arrives in the form of a disaster. A nearby building erupts in flames, and Videl rushes to help. She locates a rooftop water tank but cannot force the handle open. Gohan transforms into the Great Saiyaman, saves Videl from a collapsing section, and punches a hole in the tank to douse the fire. As he sneaks away, Videl spots him and whispers something. Angela, watching from a distance, mistakes the close conversation for a kiss. Furious, she storms over and announces Gohan's "secret" to Videl: two days earlier, she saw his teddy bear underwear in the locker room. That is all she ever knew. When Gohan asks about the rooftop incident, Angela casually reveals she was not wearing her contact lenses at the time. She dumps Gohan on the spot, and by the next morning, she is flirting with someone else entirely.

The entire episode runs on a misunderstanding, and the brilliance is that Gohan never discovers how low the stakes actually were until the final minutes. He spends an entire day dreading exposure as the Great Saiyaman when Angela's leverage amounts to nothing more than embarrassing underwear. The structure mirrors a classic sitcom formula, but it works because of who Gohan is. A teenager who fought Cell to the death at age eleven is undone by a girl with a crush and a single piece of laundry. Chi-Chi's flashback to her date with Goku adds generational comedy. The apple did not fall far from the tree; both father and son are hopelessly out of their depth in romantic situations.

This filler episode has a unique place in Dragon Ball Z's broadcast history. Originally scheduled to air on September 19, 2001, the English dub was postponed because the climax features a tall building engulfed in flames. Airing such an image just eight days after September 11 was deemed too sensitive by Funimation. The episode finally debuted on November 27, 2001, more than two months late. The following episode, "Rescue Videl," was moved forward to fill the gap.

The United Kingdom aired the Ocean dub version about a month earlier, since the British audience was not affected by the scheduling concerns. It remains one of the few Dragon Ball Z episodes to have its air date significantly altered for real-world reasons.