Match-Up

Mon*Star is fed up with Hardware and Windhammer, whose freighter robberies keep going wrong, and he will not hear their excuse that the SilverHawks are everywhere. He sends them after an armoured space vehicle carrying a million Limbo bucks to the National Treasury of Bedlama. Windhammer whips up a tornado that strips the shipment out of Flight 404, whose crew calls a Mayday. Condor, out of armour and nearby, answers the call and tails the pair while Stargazer sends Moon Stryker to back him up.

The two SilverHawks close in. Windhammer turns a cyclone on them, then freezes Condor with an instant snowstorm and ice crystals, but both SilverHawks break free and bring the Mob car down. Hardware, who has been to the penal planet once and has no wish to go back, leaves his partner behind. Windhammer is handed to Warden Lock-Up on Penal Planet 10, and Condor stays on to study the prison databanks while Moon Stryker reports back to Stargazer.

In his cell Windhammer finds the Bounty Hunter and recruits him: he will talk the warden into a prison boxing match between the Bounty Hunter and the robot Smiley, and create a diversion during the fight. The warden, a sports fan, agrees and referees. Smiley turns a heat ray and then a crushing squeeze on the Bounty Hunter, and in the uproar Windhammer, who has been working a remote control at ringside, breaks for it, telling the Bounty Hunter that he and Smiley are leaving alone. Condor corners him in the corridors, but Windhammer gets away.

Condor comforts the warden, hands him the device to reprogram Smiley back to normal, and puts out an all-points bulletin. At Hawk Haven the treasury money is safe on Bedlama, the team welcomes Moon Stryker as one of their own, and Stargazer teases Condor that he may end up flying a desk.

The Mob uses a tornado to rob a space freighter, but when Windhammer is captured he must face the robot Smiley in the boxing ring.

Condor: "Relax, Gaze. I've been at this as long as you have."

Smiley: "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee, you'll see a knockout, or my name's not Smiley."

"He's not a greenhorn anymore. He's one of us."

What does a veteran owe the rookie he has been sent? Bruce Smith's script asks it through a heist, a jailbreak and a boxing match. Condor, flying without his armour in a white shirt and a headset, answers a robbed freighter's Mayday and calls Hawk Haven for backup; when Stargazer tells him to be careful, he waves it off with "Relax, Gaze. I've been at this as long as you have."[1] The backup is Moon Stryker, the newest face on the team, and the first half of the episode is the two of them working a case.

Only one side of the law keeps faith with its partners. The Mob's partnerships come apart the moment anybody squeezes them. Hardware, when the SilverHawks bring the car down, looks at Windhammer, remembers the penal planet and bolts with "You're on your own, Windy." Windhammer learns nothing from it. In his cell he recruits the Bounty Hunter for a breakout, feeds him to Smiley as the diversion, and walks out on him with "Smiley and I are getting out of here alone!" The SilverHawks go the other way. Condor sends his partner home as "kiddo" and stays behind to read the prison databanks, since now that he is back on the team the files might come in handy.[2]

The first half belongs to Windhammer. He gets more range here than in most of his outings, from the tornado that empties the freighter to a snowstorm on demand, and the animators give him a lovely shot riding the nose of the Mob car with his hair streaming and the tuning fork raised like a lance. Condor answers on his flight-pack wings, bursting out of his block of ice in a spray of blue shards. It is a proper chase, and Condor, in his white shirt, looks and moves like nobody else on the team!

The standout comes ringside. Before anyone says a word about sabotage,[3] the camera finds Windhammer on the prisoners' bench with a small remote tucked against his chest, thumbing it while the crowd around him screams at the fight, and that one shot tells us the fight is fixed. Smiley does his part with gusto, rhyming "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee, you'll see a knockout, or my name's not Smiley," and the Bounty Hunter, pinned in the robot's squeeze, is left shouting for someone to stop the fight.[4]

The weakness is how little of the title bout we get, and what the script needs from the warden to get it at all. He agrees to a match proposed by his newest prisoner, because he is a sports fan and sport might be good for the inmates, and the fight is over almost as soon as it starts. Windhammer then gets away in a stretch carried mostly by grunts, and Moon Stryker, praised at the finish, sits out the prison story. The likely cause is the slot: the heist and the chase take the first half of a twenty-two minute episode, and the match got what was left.

The last scene makes up for it. Condor forgives the warden, who blames himself for the phony match, with "Everybody makes mistakes, Warden," and back in Stargazer's office the verdict on the rookie is "He's not a greenhorn anymore. He's one of us." Condor reminds everyone that Moon Stryker was working with an old pro, and Stargazer warns him the talk could land him behind a desk. Windhammer gets out of jail, but Hardware walked out on him and he walked out on the Bounty Hunter, while the SilverHawks, though their prisoner is gone, have made Moon Stryker one of them. They got the better deal.

1 ^ "Gaze" is Condor's name for Stargazer throughout; nobody else on the team uses it in this episode.

2 ^ Condor's "Now that I'm back with the SilverHawks" follows Battle Cruiser, where Stargazer takes on him and Moon Stryker.

3 ^ The episode opens, unusually, with a narrator summarising the whole plot before the titles, the jailbreak included, so the diversion is no surprise to anyone who was listening.

4 ^ Smiley, the robot boxer of Smiley, is back with his heat attack. The only confirmation that Windhammer's remote turned him is Condor handing the warden a device afterwards and telling him to "reprogram Smiley back to normal".

1. The episode opens with a narrator summarising the entire plot over the first half-minute, from the money shipment to Windhammer's escape, before the title card.
2. Condor and Moon Stryker work their first case in Limbo together; Condor's line 'Now that I'm back with the SilverHawks' follows their arrival in Battle Cruiser.
3. Condor calls Stargazer 'Gaze' and tells him he has been at this as long as Stargazer has; Stargazer answers in the last scene that Condor might end up flying a desk like him.
4. Windhammer's weather in this episode runs from a tornado to a cyclone, an instant snowstorm and ice crystals, all worked through the tuning fork.
5. Smiley returns from Smiley, with his heat attack intact and a warm-up rhyme borrowed from a boxing boast: 'Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee'.
6. Warden Lock-Up tells Windhammer that Penal Planet 10 has been holding a cell for him a long time, and the Bounty Hunter is already inside when he arrives.
7. Windhammer is still at large at the end, under an all-points bulletin, and the million Limbo bucks reach the treasury on Bedlama.
8. The closing quiz is about the Northern Lights, aurora borealis and solar flares, and the Copper Kidd finishes on thirteen points.

One name enters the series in this episode.

• Armored Space Vehicle/Flight 404

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.