No More Mr. Nice Guy

Steelheart is given the job of escorting Bullion Ship 16 from Bedlama to Dollare with fifty million in gold aboard. The word is that Mon*Star has headaches on Fence, where bandits are starting a mob of their own. On Brim*Star, Yes-Man offers to take the bullion ship for his boss, and he has an idea: he has fixed the transformation machine to run on automatic, and if he goes into the chamber with Mon*Star he expects to come out a tough guy. He does, and he announces that from now on it is no more Mr. Nice Guy. Mon*Star gives him a job and rides Sky-Runner off to Fence, where he bullies the upstart bandits back into line.

Out in the Sprinthawk, Steelheart goes to check an unidentified craft and finds Yes-Man at the controls. The Mob ambushes the bullion ship, deals with a guard who tries to be a hero and takes the gold, and Steelheart is thrown in irons while Yes-Man sets himself up as the new boss. When Timestopper mocks him as Mon*Star's gopher and warns that Mon*Star will fix his wagon, Yes-Man threatens him back.

Mumbo Jumbo is goaded about his ugly face until he charges, and Steelheart gets loose and takes the controls of the bullion ship with the gold sacks still aboard. Yes-Man and Melodia give chase, and word reaches Mon*Star that Yes-Man is taking over the Mob. Yes-Man hands Melodia the wheel and goes after Steelheart himself, promising to destroy her, dismantle her friends and then take on Mon*Star, and in the middle of the fight his new strength runs out. Mon*Star arrives to remind Yes-Man who made him his right-hand man, and Yes-Man can only say he does not know what got into him.

Back with the team, Steelheart is congratulated on getting the gold back, and the SilverHawks wonder whether Yes-Man will worm his way out of trouble.

Frustrated at having to put down a rebellion at Sini*Star before he can rob a Bullion Ship, Mon*Star agrees to transform his sidekick Yes-Man into a superpowered tough guy.

Mon*Star: "Don't you think I know that, Yes-Man?"

Yes-Man: "I could nail it for you, boss. Oh, yes."

"No kidding? First chance he got, Yes-Man tried to be Boss Man."

Every villain in a cartoon like this keeps a toady, and sooner or later somebody has to wonder what the toady would do with the boss's power. Chris Trengove's script asks it early. Mon*Star has upstart bandits on Fence and a bullion ship full of gold he wants to nail,[1] and Yes-Man, who has spent his career saying yes, offers to do the job himself: "I could nail it for you, boss. Oh, yes." He has even been tinkering with the transformation machine so that it runs on automatic. The little sycophant has plainly been thinking about this for a while!

The chamber scene is the best sight gag in the episode, Yes-Man squeezed onto the throne beside Mon*Star while the lightning comes down, and what comes out is the same Yes-Man, only louder. Muscle does not make a boss, and Yes-Man, handed Mon*Star's power, can only spend it on being a smaller Mon*Star. The opening narration says he decides to run the Mob his own way, and his way turns out to be Mon*Star's: threats, a grand new name for himself and a SilverHawk in irons.[2] When Timestopper sneers "Yeah! You're nobody! Just Mon*Star's gopher!" his comeback is a pun, "Gopher, huh? See how you go for this?".

The episode sends Mon*Star to Fence to bully a gang of would-be mobsters back into line while his own sidekick is becoming one at home![3] Straight out of the chamber, Yes-Man still looks like the same small, hunched figure in a green cap, standing in front of a transformed Mon*Star who fills the room behind him, so the only sign of his new strength is the way he talks.

Steelheart gets the episode to herself, and her escape is the standout scene. Chained up and outmuscled, she gets free in a scene that opens with Mumbo Jumbo being needled about his face, which could apparently stop a clock at twenty paces, and ends with him curled into a ball and charging while she spins clear. It is a fine bit of staging, the orange bulk barrelling past her. Mumbo Jumbo is the strongest thing in the room, and Steelheart beats him by making him lose his temper.

The weakness is the ending. Yes-Man's power gives out in mid-boast, just after he has promised to take on Mon*Star, and he is left asking "What happened to me?" The script never answers him. The machine he rigged to run on automatic was the obvious place to plant a flaw, but nobody goes back to it, most likely because a twenty-two minute slot already carrying a coup, a bandit war and a heist has nothing left over for an explanation.

The debrief puts the moral in the team's mouths, "No kidding? First chance he got, Yes-Man tried to be Boss Man.", and then undercuts it nicely with "Don't know about that, cowboy. Yes-Man's a pretty slippery character." He is, and he has already gone back to calling Mon*Star boss. A toady with a tough guy's body is still a toady.

1 ^ The gold is described in the briefing as fifty million in gold and by the Mob, once they have it, as fifty million Limbo bucks.

2 ^ Yes-Man gives himself a new name during the raid, Super Snake, and uses it again in the chase.

3 ^ The bandits on Fence fold quickly once Mon*Star arrives, calling themselves peaceful folk who want no trouble.

1. Yes-Man goes into the transformation chamber alongside Mon*Star, having fixed the machine to run on automatic.
2. Steelheart flies escort for Bullion Ship 16 in the Sprinthawk.
3. Mon*Star rides Sky-Runner to Fence to deal with the bandits starting their own mob there.
4. Timestopper and Melodia both turn up in Yes-Man's short-lived Mob; Melodia takes the wheel when he goes after Steelheart himself.
5. Quicksilver, Bluegrass and the Copper Kidd appear only in the opening titles and the closing scene.
6. The closing quiz stays on Jupiter after One on One: the Great Red Spot, and whether it is most like a storm, a continent or an ocean. The Copper Kidd scores ten points.
7. On the quiz screen the third answer is cut off at the edge and reads OCEA.

2 names enter the series in this episode.

• Multiple arms guys
• Bullion Ship 16

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.