English Dub Review: Sand Land “Flying Fortress Garam”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Muniel and Bred power up the ancient superweapon Flying Fortress Garam to begin their conquest of both Sand Land and Forest Land. After recovering from the capture of Lucifer and the destruction of the demon town, Beelzebub, Thief, Ann, and Rao rally the forces of Sand Land and the Forest Land Resistance to infiltrate Garam, successfully landing a tank inside it.

OUR TAKE

We enter the final act of the arc and the series with Muniel and Bred essentially getting their own Death Star (hence the Star Wars reference in the subheader), but we also see this is where Muniel and Bred’s priorities and ethics start to diverge. Bred, being a military man, has plans to rule Forest Land and its people and doesn’t want to just destroy places with reckless abandon before he can properly take power. Meanwhile, Muniel, as we’ve seen these past few episodes, is someone with a big chip on his shoulder and one to hold a grudge. He already dreamed of being a powerful and influential angel, hence why he tried a big gamble by going after Lucifer in the first place…and got rightfully swatted like a fly. And he clearly took that personally, so after bottling up both the guy who humiliated him and his daughter, he’s going to take out all of his insecurity out on everyone, but with a giant ancient nuclear laser. So, I think it’s safe to say that he’s one out of the two of them that’s the bigger threat. We’ll probably see Bred show a change of heart in the next two episodes, but Muniel is very likely to become a much bigger threat.

As for the good guys, this isn’t quite a “dark night of the soul” moment, but it is the point in the story that they lick their wounds and start getting ready to confront the big flying fortress. The last arc didn’t really have a build up to its final battle like this, which I speculate is partially because late 90’s/early 00’s Toriyama just wanted a short easy going story he didn’t have to invest very much time in and finish on a high note. This was only a few years after the original Dragon Ball manga and Z anime had wrapped and he was just doing a bunch of brief one volume manga around this time (which will probably never get anime like this). Anyway, it’s nice to see General Are and the Swimmers show up again along with Ann’s resistance friends to show that Beelz, Thief, and Rao have made a bunch of friends to help them out in the past ten episodes, and now they get to all fight against a big boss monster that would be cool to fight in a video game (just like the Sand Land game you can pick up right now!) Next time, we see part of that boss fight! I look forward to seeing how one of Toriyama’s last creative works comes to an end.