Magnetic Attraction

With Quicksilver, Bluegrass and the Copper Kidd busy breaking up an asteroid storm heading for Hawk Haven, Commander Stargazer gives Steelheart a job: Brigadier Brightlight has finally caught Poker-Face, who runs Mon*Star's gambling operations, on Bedlama, and she is to collect him and escort him to the penal planet. There is no transport, so Stargazer requisitions Seymour's cab, much to Seymour's disgust. Meanwhile Hardware shows off his Mark 2 Super Magnetizer, irresistible to all metal objects, SilverHawks included, fixes it to Mumbo Jumbo and works it by remote control.

On Bedlama, Poker-Face offers the Brigadier a million Limbo bucks to let him go and gets a longer charge sheet for his trouble. Steelheart takes charge of him and his lethal cane, and Seymour drives them off. The magnetizer drags the cab down, Poker-Face crows that the Mob has come for him, and Seymour runs, leaving Steelheart trapped in the magnetic field.

Back at Hawk Haven, Steelwill senses that his sister is in trouble. Tally-Hawk's scan finds her on Bedlama, and Stargazer hands Steelwill a polarity reverser, remarking that the Mob has pulled the old magnetic attraction stunt before. Steelwill turns the reverser on Mumbo Jumbo and frees Steelheart, and the twins fight the Mob hand to hand, calling their moves like a football team. Hardware catches them again with the magnetizer once they take to the air. Seymour, weighing up whether he will be in more trouble with Stargazer or with Mon*Star, finally gets involved when he is called a crummy hack. The twins recapture Poker-Face as he tries to slip away, and with no way to get him to the penal planet, they promise Seymour that Stargazer will tow them home and advance him the cost of repairing his cab.

Steelheart escorts a prisoner to the penal planet, but runs into Mon*star’s interference.

Seymour: "Huh? I mean, if I have to wait for a government requisition, I could be walking places the rest of my life. You know what I mean?"

Commander Stargazer: "This isn't the first time they pulled the old magnetic attraction stunts."

"Looks like we've fumbled, sis."

Everybody in "Magnetic Attraction" gets pulled in. Chris Trengove's script is built around Hardware's Mark 2 Super Magnetizer, "Irresistible to all metal objects", SilverHawks included, and the plot pulls its characters in much the same way. Steelheart is pulled off the bench to escort Poker-Face to the penal planet, Steelwill is pulled across space by his sister's distress, and a cab driver called Seymour is pulled into a gang war because the government has requisitioned his cab.[1] Trengove cares most about who gets drawn into a fight, and he gives his best scene to the one man who wanted no part of it.

Seymour is a wonderful creation, a squat, antennaed cabbie in a blue cap who treats every line as a complaint to the management. "I don't like this. You know what I mean?" he tells Stargazer, and when he is told it is government regulations, he points out that "those government requisitions, they take a couple of light-years to pay". The magnetizer drags his cab out of the sky, and he runs when the Mob arrives. Then, in the best scene of the episode, he stands off to the side of the fight and works out his odds aloud: trouble with old Stargazer if the Steel twins lose, trouble with Mon*Star if the Mob does, and no way for him to come out ahead.[2] What finally brings him in is an insult, when somebody calls him a crummy hack.

The twins get the other half of the episode, and Trengove writes them as a football team in a huddle. "You go wide left, I'll go wide right." "You got it, coach." When the magnetizer catches them in the air, it is "Looks like we've fumbled, sis", answered by "Let's just hope we can prevent the turnover." It is a charming register for a brother and sister who can hear each other across a planet, and it gives Steelwill, usually the muscle, a scene of his own when he crouches in the launch tunnel with the horseshoe-shaped polarity reverser and goes after her with "Ready or not, here I come!"

The weakness is what the episode does with Steelheart. The episode hands her its setup, a prisoner, a mission and a sergeant's rank, then pins her in the magnetic field for the middle of the story while her brother does the rescuing. The published frames from that stretch show the same drawing of her, one eye squeezed shut, used again,[3] and nobody speaks at all around them. It looks like a schedule choice: with Quicksilver, Bluegrass and the Copper Kidd sent off to deal with an asteroid storm, a twenty-two minute story has two heroes to share between the captivity and the rescue.

Poker-Face, meanwhile, is fun in small doses. He tries to buy the Brigadier with "a million Limbo bucks", taunts Steelheart that she and "that fat cabbie" are going to get theirs, and is last seen tucked under Steelwill's arm like a rolled-up newspaper. The Light Year Limit has not protected him this time.[4]

It ends with Seymour. The twins have their prisoner and no way to deliver him, and Seymour, who has spent the episode saying a guy's gotta make a living, asks who is going to pay for the cab. "Well, Seymour, I guess we owe you," one of them says, and they promise him an advance on the repairs. "Sure, look what you did for us." He came in because he had no choice, and he leaves as the one person on Bedlama the twins say they owe.

1 ^ Seymour is not new. Bluegrass apologises to him by name in Save The Sun.

2 ^ He is the only character in the episode who stops to consider that both sides can hurt him.

3 ^ The frames at 11:04 and 11:40 are the same pose of Steelheart in the field; the second has more lightning drawn over it.

4 ^ Poker-Face's immunity beyond the Light Year Limit was the premise of The Backroom. Here the Brigadier catches him on Bedlama, well inside the law.

1. Hardware calls his new device the Mark 2 Super Magnetizer, irresistible to all metal objects, including SilverHawks; he fixes it to Mumbo Jumbo and works it by remote control.
2. Steelheart introduces herself to Brigadier Brightlight as Sergeant Steelheart, and Stargazer also calls her brother Sergeant when he hands over the polarity reverser.
3. Stargazer has a polarity reverser ready because, he says, the Mob has pulled the old magnetic attraction stunt before.
4. Poker-Face is described as the man in charge of all Mon*Star's gambling operations; he is caught on Bedlama, well inside the law, after the Light Year Limit protected him in The Backroom.
5. Steelwill picks up his sister's distress by telepathy, as the pre-title narration puts it, but cannot tell where she is; Tally-Hawk's scan finds her on Bedlama.
6. The twins talk through their fight in football terms: go wide left, go wide right, coach, fumble and turnover.
7. The published frames at 11:04 and 11:40 show the same drawing of Steelheart in the magnetic field, with more lightning drawn over the second.
8. Bluegrass's closing quiz is about the Sun: its age of about four and a half billion years and how many Earths would fit inside it, and the Copper Kidd finishes on twelve points.

2 names enter the series in this episode.

• Brigadier Brightlight
• Bedlama City

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.