Gotbucks

Lord Cash calls Hawk Haven to introduce his new security chief, Gotbucks, a robot who has reinforced Dollare's metal skin and re-energised its checkpoints. Only Gotbucks knows the vault combination. At closing time he converts it into a zeta beam that orbits the Artificial Sun of Limbo overnight and returns to him in the morning, and only then can the bank open. Lord Cash asks Commander Stargazer to send the SilverHawks against Dollare in a practice raid, and when it is over he declares the new security measures a rousing success.

That night, after Lord Cash has taken Seymour's taxi home, the Mob arrives at the bank. Gotbucks tells them the bank is closed, so they take him instead. Brought before Mon*Star he will give only his name and serial number, so Zero the Memory Thief steals the secret out of his mind. The combination comes back at nine in the morning, and the Mob means to be there when it does. The news reaches Hawk Haven, and the SilverHawks set out to rescue Gotbucks before the zeta beam returns.

On the boss's order Yes-Man hits the Mirage with a Magna-Trap, and its magnetic forces leave most of the team in bad shape. The Copper Kidd comes through with the least damage, so Stargazer sends him to stake out Dollare alone while the others are repaired.

In the morning the zeta beam returns, the vault is opened, and the Mob decides it will not be needing Gotbucks any more. The Kidd takes them on single-handed, and the Mob leaves without the money, arguing over who has to tell Mon*Star. The backup arrives to find nothing left to do. Lord Cash, finding his bank tidy and Gotbucks wishing him a cheery good morning, calls to say that hiring the robot was the smartest thing he ever did, and the SilverHawks agree to leave him in the dark.

Gotbucks, a security robot, tests the bank's defenses but the Mob abducts the android.

"Guess we SilverHawks know when to shove off when we're not needed."

Lord Cash: "Hiring Gotbucks was the smartest thing I ever did."

"Sorry, the bank is closed. Have a nice day."

Bob Haney's script trusts the only copy of Dollare's vault combination to a robot on his first day at work. Gotbucks is a lovely piece of nonsense to look at, a blue box on a single wheel with a pink dome for a head. His security scheme is lovelier still: he fires the combination out of Dollare as a zeta beam every evening, lets it loop round the Artificial Sun of Limbo overnight, and catches it again when the bank opens.[1] Lord Cash describes all of this at length, and the episode lets him enjoy it for a scene before taking it apart.

Zero the Memory Thief, back from Zero The Memory Thief, is brought in to do one job, reading a memory, and does it without any fuss. The Mob first tries the front door, where Gotbucks turns them away with "Sorry, the bank is closed. Have a nice day."[2] Wheeled up to the foot of Mon*Star's throne, he gives nothing away, and somebody in the Mob sums up the interrogation with "That box won't even tell us the time of day!" So Zero goes in after the memory itself. The joke underneath is a good one: Gotbucks sends the combination around the Artificial Sun so that nobody can steal it, but he still has to carry it in his head at closing time and again at opening.

Once the trap is sprung, both halves of the story are about being trusted with a job on your own for the first time. Gotbucks fails his on his first day, and the Copper Kidd, sent alone because nobody else is fit to go, does his. To clear the stage for him, Haney has Yes-Man hit the Mirage with a Magna-Trap that leaves the rest of the team in pieces. The Kidd comes through with the least damage for no better reason than the one offered at Hawk Haven, that he is an alien. It is a contrivance, but the likely cause is easy to see. An episode that wants to hand its silent youngest member a solo mission has to get the adults out of the way quickly, and a twenty-two minute slot leaves no room to do it more gracefully.

The weakness is the solo mission itself. The Kidd never speaks, so his big day plays almost entirely as action, and the fight in which he routs the Mob goes by in a rush of shouts and orders.[3] We do get one striking image of him hurling a crackling blue bolt against the stars, but not much else. We learn more about his victory from the backup, who arrive expecting the biggest firefight this side of the galaxy and are told the Kidd took care of the Mob by himself. What follows makes up for a good deal of it, though. "Guess we SilverHawks know when to shove off when we're not needed" is the team admitting the Kidd did it without them, and it tells us more about his win than the fight does. So does the pat on the back that follows: "Come on, kid. You've earned your pay today."

The Mob, for its part, is in fine comic form! Yes-Man answers the order to fire the Magna-Trap by echoing it back, somebody boasts that you can't keep a secret from Zero, and somebody predicts the gang will make the six o'clock news for the job. The best of it comes at the end, when the question of who has to tell Mon*Star they came back without the money is settled by a coin toss that Zero cannot win either way.

It closes on the SilverHawks covering for the robot. Lord Cash calls to say that hiring Gotbucks was the smartest thing he ever did, and when somebody at Hawk Haven objects to keeping him in the dark, the answer is "Well, it was his first day on the job, sir. Let's give him a break." Lord Cash never finds out that it was the Kidd who saved his bank. The fight deserved better staging, but the Kidd gets the credit from his own team!

1 ^ Lord Cash has the beam orbit the Artificial Sun at super speed; Zero, reading Gotbucks's memory, puts its return at nine in the morning.

2 ^ The same "Have a nice day." is heard again as the SilverHawks leave Dollare in the morning.

3 ^ The transcript is at its thinnest across the Kidd's fight, from about 16:30 to 18:00, and very little of the dialogue there can be made out.

1. Lord Cash introduces Gotbucks as Dollare's new security chief; he has reinforced the bank's metal skin and re-energised its checkpoints.
2. The vault combination travels as a zeta beam: fired out of Dollare at closing time, it orbits the Artificial Sun of Limbo overnight and returns to Gotbucks in the morning, and the bank cannot open until it does.
3. Zero the Memory Thief returns from Zero The Memory Thief, this time working alongside Poker-Face and Yes-Man, and reads the zeta beam's schedule straight out of Gotbucks's memory.
4. The Magna-Trap, fired by Yes-Man on the boss's order, puts the Mirage and most of the team out of action; the Copper Kidd sustains the least damage, which Hawk Haven puts down to his being an alien.
5. Seymour drives Lord Cash home from the bank at closing time, on the order "Home, Seymour."
6. At Hawk Haven, Zero's account of the zeta beam is heard a second time straight after someone asks Tally-Hawk what is happening.
7. The closing quiz is on constellations: the Big Bear, the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper, and the Kidd finishes on eleven points for the day.
8. Bob Haney, credited writer here, also wrote The Saviour Stone.

One name enters the series in this episode.

• Gotbucks

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.