Fantastische Hure said:
If you were to make an Episode of Cell and I gave you a two hour time-slot. How'd you go about it?
You might want to start off with a quick explanation of what happened so far with Freeza, so you can start the story with Mecha-Freeza.
To make it more than just a cashgrab, all the events of the episode would be focused from Cell's perspective, showing his events in absorbing humans and waiting for the Cell Games, as well as getting an introspective of his thoughts. The special would start with him in Gero's lab being instructed of his purpose by the computer. After the events in which he arrives in the main timeline, there'd be some introspective into his thoughts. At this point, he'd be brainwashed entirely into thinking he was the perfect being due to years of programming.
The next few scenes would be him awakening, absorbing those in Gingertown and Nikkitown and showing his fight with Piccolo, with the exposition about his identity being cut. With the next scene of him absorbing humans, he'd question his true worth if it took this much effort to achieve perfection, before remembering the Zet-Senshi had to train far harder to achieve anywhere close to his power, thus solidifying his ideals as he gains close to his 1st form's peak power. His arrival at #17 and Piccolo's battle up until Vegeta beating Cell up would be rushed through to bring importance to Cell's psychology. Being beaten this badly by Vegeta, who'd suddenly gained far more power than the superior being that was Cell with what would seem to Cell to be less time and effort would justify Cell's outbursts by him also feeling as though Gero had lied to him about being the superior being.
Once he absorbed #18, beat Vegeta and Trunks and announced the Cell Games, the focus would be given to Cell's thoughts when waiting for the Cell Games. He'd still question whether or not he was really the perfect being with the way he lost to Vegeta before or how Trunks' raw strength surpassed his own. Given he has Freeza's "never trained in my life" DNA, I'd use the filler scene of him flying into space to train as a justification for him to have far more reserves of power than he revealed until SS2 Gohan and make it less of an asspull than him just outright lying when saying Trunks had far greater power. With these gains from a few days of training, it would further justify his insistence of being the perfect fighter in the situations to follow. After this, the fights with Goku and Gohan would occur with some minor cuts for time. The only additional content would be Cell's thoughts at the time of his self destruction being to prove to Gero he was perfect even in defeat, making sure the only being who could truly defeat him was himself. In the manner that Goku likes to test his limits and Freeza can't admit defeat, Cell would want to test and prove his superiority by taking Gohan down with him. Afterwards, the Super Perfect Cell events would take place with the manga's pacing, so about 3 or so minutes overall. At the moment of death, Cell would internally curse Gero's miscalculation in not providing him Gohan's DNA and after his last rant on perfection, his last thoughts would be how he truly had the potential to be perfect, had he not been limited in his creation by an imperfect mind like Gero's.
To summarise, the special wouldn't be a simple recap of events like the One Piece "Episode of" series. The special would be an introspective into Cell's character to provide him a little more depth than the one dimensional supervillain in the original anime/manga, taking as many ideas as I could from my thoughts in the "What would you change in a reboot about the characters?" thread without rewriting Cell's character.
