Flashback

Far in the future, at the SilverHawk academy, Captain Flashback, an experimental SilverHawk and a time traveller, calls on an aged Commander Stargazer. Flashback asks to review history disc number 462, the story of the original SilverHawks and the events leading to their destruction, because a footnote about Lieutenant Quicksilver has caught his interest.

The disc tells the story. Mon*Star and Hardware have a combustion crystal, whose fire grows fiercer no matter what anyone does, and it has become a fireball threatening Bedlama. Quicksilver is badly hurt, and the Steel twins carry him out. He has only just recovered when Governor Zander calls: Mon*Star, with the fireball under his direct control, demands a treaty giving him absolute control of the planet, and wants the SilverHawks sent back to Earth. Quicksilver decides to blow the fireball out from the inside, though it is far hotter than a SilverHawk of his day was built to survive. He orders the others to stay behind, but they follow him, each ready to try in turn if he fails, and all of them are lost.

Flashback stops the disc and goes back in time to stop them making the mistake, not knowing how long he can survive in another time. He knocks out the power on the Mirage so that the team cannot launch, and catches Quicksilver on his way into the fireball. Quicksilver takes him for Mo-Lec-U-Lar in disguise, but Flashback takes the charge and goes in himself, through millions of degrees to the core crystal, while Mon*Star and Hardware wait in the Governor's hall. The Mob ends up facing a stretch on the penal planet.

Back in his own time, Flashback is introduced to his new commanding officer, Lieutenant Quicksilver, who asks whether they have met before. Flashback says he only arrived today, and Quicksilver puts it down to another time and another face.

Far in the future, a fledgling SilverHawk asks an aged Commander Stargazer how the SilverHawks were destroyed.

Commander Stargazer: "Then sit down and pay attention. Even a hot shot like you might learn something."

"Lieutenant Quicksilver, courageous, dedicated, talented."

Quicksilver: "Oh, must have been another time. Another face."

Captain Flashback, the experimental SilverHawk of Kimberly Morris's script, has found something in a history book that bothers him, and the first thing he does about it is go and ask. He calls on an aged Commander Stargazer, a self-described old has-been, and asks for the history disc on the original SilverHawks. One of his books, he explains, has a footnote about Lieutenant Quicksilver. "He must have been one brave fighter, sir." The old man answers like a schoolteacher: "Then sit down and pay attention. Even a hot shot like you might learn something."

Flashback is a pupil who will not accept the lesson. Most of its running time is the disc itself, and it plays as a tragedy whose ending we are told before it starts. The combustion crystal, in Stargazer's words, is "what finally destroyed all the SilverHawks." and then, after a beat, "Except me."[1] Stargazer narrates what follows as settled history. Flashback's answer, when the disc reaches its roll call of the dead, is to stop it and change it!

The framing is the smartest craft decision in the episode. Because Stargazer narrates the disc, the script can skip over Quicksilver's recovery in a sentence, and it can let an old man's grief into the voice-over in a way a straight adventure could not. The roll call is the best writing in it, opening on "Lieutenant Quicksilver, courageous, dedicated, talented." and closing on "They'll never see their like again." The design helps, too. Flashback is an olive-green figure with one bare arm in a show of chrome heroes and red villains, and when he travels he breaks into sparkles inside a ring of gold crosshairs, so that we always know which time we are in by who is on screen.

The standout scene is the handover at the edge of the fire. Quicksilver, still not at full strength, hears a voice telling him to stop and decides he is hallucinating. When the stranger asks for the charge, he takes him for Mo-Lec-U-Lar in disguise and turns him down with "But I wasn't born yesterday!" It is a good joke and a sensible reaction from a man who has met a shapeshifter, and it gives the rescue a moment of friction before Flashback goes in himself and the readout climbs into the millions of degrees.[2]

The weakness is that the rest of the original team barely exists in the present-day story. Their brave decision to follow Quicksilver into the fire is narrated rather than played, and once Flashback has knocked out their power they spend the climax in a ship whose pods will not release. The Mob fares no better, with Mon*Star and Hardware waiting in the Governor's hall in breathing masks and led away in a line. The likely reason is the premise. A twenty-two minute slot can hold a history and a rescue, but it has no room left for the team to come to terms with a stranger who has undone their deaths.

It ends back in the future, with the old Stargazer introducing Flashback to his new commanding officer, who is Lieutenant Quicksilver, alive.[3] Quicksilver asks whether they have met; Flashback says he only arrived today; and Quicksilver lets it go: "Oh, must have been another time. Another face." Quicksilver shakes his hand as his new CO, and the disc Stargazer played him no longer tells the truth. A small idea, handled well!

1 ^ The crystal's fire runs on what the script calls the theory of extrapolated combustion, which Flashback defines as "An infinitely self-perpetuating fire."

2 ^ According to the disc, SilverHawks of Quicksilver's day were tempered to resist around half a million degrees. The fireball was far hotter, and he was told that he would not last two minutes in it.

3 ^ The old Stargazer calls Quicksilver "Lieutenant" throughout, as the Governor does in A Piece of the Action.

1. Flashback is introduced as Captain Flashback, an experimental SilverHawk from the future whose time-travel abilities are top secret and, by his own account, unknown even to him.
2. Most of the episode is told as history disc number 462, played for Flashback by an aged Commander Stargazer, bald, in glasses and walking with a cane.
3. The Mob's weapon is a combustion crystal, and the fire it feeds is explained by the theory of extrapolated combustion.
4. Quicksilver, meeting Flashback at the fireball, takes him for Mo-Lec-U-Lar in disguise.
5. The Governor of Bedlama, called Governor Zander (transcript: Xander), is drawn here as a cream-coloured, beaked figure in a brown suit, with Mon*Star and Hardware in breathing masks in his hall.
6. Flashback's time travel is drawn as sparkles inside rings of gold crosshairs, both when he leaves the future and inside the fireball.
7. The closing science segment is about comets: the core is the nucleus, made of ice, dust and frozen gas, and the Kidd finishes on sixteen points for the day.

3 names enter the series in this episode.

• Flashback
• Federal Interplanetary Force Personnel
• SilverHawk Training Academy

Appearance lists compiled from the episode articles on the ThunderCats wiki, checked against this site's encyclopedia. Names we have no entry for are shown without a link rather than left out.