Moon*Star

Commander Stargazer has Flashback tidying his desk the traditional way, although Flashback would rather go back in time to before the papers got disorganised. Flashback finds the Tally-Hawk tape Stargazer wanted, and Stargazer explains that an eruption on the Moon*Star has given Mon*Star superpowers. The tape shows how: a chunk of the Moon*Star turns up at a diner, and Poker-Face carries it to Mon*Star and offers it to him for twelve thousand Limbo bucks. Mon*Star tries it out and gains new powers, and Stargazer sends Flashback back in time to stop the stone reaching him.

Flashback and Backlash arrive at the diner as Poker-Face picks up the stone and demand it, but Poker-Face gets away. Flashback questions Harry, is told the stone is just an ordinary piece of rock, and leaves; Poker-Face then traps Flashback in a glowing spade-shaped field. The Mob presents Mon*Star with a pair of SilverHawks, Poker-Face offers him the stone just as before, and the powered-up Mon*Star turns on Flashback. Flashback bluffs about reinforcements, Backlash strikes, and Flashback calls Hawk Haven for an emergency pickup on Brim*Star; the Copper Kidd takes the Mirage to get them.

Mon*Star, sure his new powers make him invincible, heads for Dollare to make a withdrawal. Gotbucks activates the checkpoints, but Mon*Star tears through them and Lord Cash calls the SilverHawks for help. Flashback and the Kidd answer, with the Kidd taking the Hot-Seat to surprise Mon*Star, but the Kidd is knocked down among the gold, and Mon*Star hides somewhere in the vault. Flashback decides to take them both back in time again.

This time Flashback knows every move Mon*Star is going to make, and he tells the Kidd to follow his lead. Afterwards Lord Cash marvels at how well the SilverHawks handle difficult situations, and is told that they have been there a few times before.

Mon*star gains new powers when he acquires a chunk of the Moon*star.

Commander Stargazer: "You've got to do certain things by traditional methods Flashback"

Flashback: "My name is Flashback. I'm a SilverHawk. I've come from the future."

Lord Cash: "You know Flashback, it always amazes me the way you SilverHawks know how to handle these difficult situations."

Commander Stargazer's desk is a mess, and the first joke of "Moon*Star" is that the one SilverHawk who can travel through time is the one told to tidy it by hand. Flashback asks, reasonably enough, whether it would not be easier to go back to before the papers got disorganised. Stargazer's answer is "You've got to do certain things by traditional methods Flashback". It sounds like a throwaway, but the ending bears it out, since Alice Knox and Peter Larson have Flashback beat Mon*Star only by fighting the battle on Dollare a second time.

The obvious way to write a time-travel story is the clean fix: go back, change the one thing, come home to a better present. The script refuses it! Flashback reaches the diner at the very moment Poker-Face picks up the stone, confronts him with it hanging on his belt, and still loses. Worse, he gets himself caught, so Mon*Star receives the stone with Flashback and Backlash thrown in. On his first trip back, all Flashback knows is that the stone reaches Mon*Star. He walks out of the diner, and the trap springs.

The episode repeats itself. The diner scene plays twice, first on the Tally-Hawk tape and then live, and the dialogue matches down to the price, twelve thousand Limbo bucks, "cash and carry".[1] The fight in Dollare starts over too, with the same taunts, but the second time Flashback tells the Kidd, "Follow my lead, kid, and stick close," and says he knows every move Mon*Star is going to make. Flashback wins the second pass because he lived through the first.

The design gives the Mob its best moments. Poker-Face shuts Flashback inside a great translucent spade, a shape taken from his playing cards, and the powered-up Mon*Star stands with energy crackling off his armour like a short circuit. Dollare is drawn in its usual red lattice. The shot of the Copper Kidd sprawled across a floor of gold coins comes just after Gotbucks has switched on the bank's checkpoints to no effect at all.[2]

The weakness is the ending, which arrives almost before the second loop has begun. We are told Flashback knows every move, and then we are in Lord Cash's control room hearing the SilverHawks praised; the dialogue never says what he does differently, or what becomes of the stone. It is the price of an episode that spends so much of its running time replaying itself. The repeats are the idea, but in a twenty-two minute slot they leave the payoff very little room. The first loop, with its capture and its bluff about reinforcements on the way, is better written than the second, and it should have been the other way round.

Lord Cash, marvelling at how the SilverHawks handle difficult situations, gets the reply: "let's just say we've been there a few times before." It is a joke about time travel, and Lord Cash, who has to ask what is so funny, cannot be in on it, because for him the first fight never happened.[3]

1 ^ Mon*Star's answer is heard twice as well: he will try the stone out first, and then they will see what it is worth.

2 ^ Gotbucks, Lord Cash's robot security chief from Gotbucks, is ordered to activate the checkpoints and reports them activated. He stands beside the Kidd in the closing scene, none the worse.

3 ^ In Flashback, his introduction, the time-travel ability was a closely kept secret; here Stargazer sends him back as a matter of routine, telling him that only he can rewrite history.

1. Flashback returns from Flashback with Backlash and travels back in time twice: first on Stargazer's orders, to the moment the stone reaches the diner, then on his own call during the fight on Dollare.
2. The episode opens on Flashback searching Stargazer's desk for a Tally-Hawk tape, and that tape is how Hawk Haven sees Poker-Face carry the stone to Mon*Star.
3. Poker-Face asks twelve thousand Limbo bucks for the piece of the Moon*Star, cash and carry, and Mon*Star insists on trying it out before he will talk price.
4. Poker-Face's trap for Flashback takes the shape of a translucent spade, in keeping with his card motif.
5. Gotbucks from Gotbucks activates Dollare's checkpoints when Mon*Star arrives; they do not stop him.
6. The Copper Kidd flies the Mirage to collect Flashback from Brim*Star and later takes the Hot-Seat to surprise Mon*Star on Dollare.
7. The opening narration calls the bank world something like "Golar"; the dialogue places the robbery on Dollare, and the published frames show Lord Cash's red-lattice control room.
8. The closing quiz is on the Apollo 11 landing (the command module Columbia, the lunar module Eagle, the Sea of Tranquility), and the Kidd finishes on fourteen points for the day.

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.