The allies Goku has collected throughout the Dragon Ball manga have collectively become a team of the Earth’s greatest protectors known as the Z Fighters, but Goku abandoned one important ally in his early years and it proved to be a massive mistake in Dragon Ball Super.
In Dragon Ball Super Chapter 56 by Akira Toriyama and Toyotarou, Goku is training to battle the villainous Moro who has the power to consume entire planets and use the energy he absorbs from the life forms on those worlds to turn himself into one of the most powerful fighters in the universe. In an effort to get stronger, Goku trains with the angel Merus who is helping the Saiyan unlock the angelic power of Ultra Instinct. However, in the middle of his training with Merus on a far-off location in the middle of space, Merus is called away, leaving Goku to pilot his spaceship back to Earth all by himself despite the fact that Goku has no idea how to fly a spaceship and doesn’t know where Earth is located.
In Dragon Ball Chapter 56 by Akira Toriyama, Goku finds himself in a similar predicament after he comes across the villainous forces of the Red Ribbon Army. While traveling the Earth on the back of his Flying Nimbus searching for the Dragon Balls, Goku is shot down by a member of the Red Ribbon Army as he is viewed as a threat in the evil organization’s own quest to find the Dragon Balls themselves. The attack seemingly obliterates Flying Nimbus. While Goku makes quick work of his attacker, he is still left without a mode of transportation. So, Goku goes through the Red Ribbon’s capsules hoping to find something he can use. While doing so, Goku comes across a snarky yet helpful robot who allowed Goku to take a ship and even flew it for him towards his next desired location.
After joining forces with this Red Ribbon robot, Goku quickly abandoned it by jumping out of the ship the robot was flying before the android had a chance to land. If Goku had kept the robot around by simply keeping its storage capsule in his pocket throughout his many adventures, then he would have always had a reliable pilot with him at all times. When Goku was left on that far off world in Dragon Ball Super and had to fly back to Earth himself, he gets lost along the way and wastes precious time that he and his allies simply did not have. In fact, Goku’s tardiness (due to the fact that he didn’t have a reliable pilot with him) almost doomed the Earth to a devastating fate since it took him so long to get back and fight alongside the other Z Fighters against the terrifyingly villainous Moro.
Most of Goku’s Z Fighter allies were introduced in the pages of the original Dragon Ball manga and have stuck around throughout the series, growing in power and overall usefulness to the point where the manga wouldn’t be the same without them. Unfortunately, the one ally that Goku met as a child—who he could have had with him at all times and who could have piloted him back to Earth with ease—was absentmindedly abandoned immediately following its introduction–something which nearly brought the universe of Dragon Ball Super to a terrifying end.
