Race Against Time

Mon*Star wants Poker-Face out of Penal Planet 10, and Yes-Man has a plan: Timestopper will get himself arrested by the SilverHawks, taken to the penal planet, and then stop time and spring Poker-Face from the inside. Timestopper points out that he cannot stop time in the dark and the guards will turn the lights out, Yes-Man promises to fix that, and the price is settled at a million limbo bucks. To bring the SilverHawks running, Timestopper starts vandalising the galaxy.

At Hawk Haven, Stargazer sends the Copper Kidd out to nail whoever is doing it. The Kidd chases Timestopper down, and the prisoner goes quietly to the penal planet, where the lights have been put out on Stargazer's warning. Then they come back on, and Timestopper freezes the guards, leaves the Kidd to a game of statues, and wakes Poker-Face in his cell. The Kidd gives chase through the prison, but the two escape with Hardware, and Stargazer tells the Kidd to get on their tail.

Mon*Star's plan is the race of the century. Windhammer will gather the biggest, meanest meteors in the universe and send them racing across the galaxy, the first to smash into the target wins, Poker-Face will line up the paying customers, and the target is Hawk Haven. When Timestopper asks for his millions, Mon*Star offers him five hundred and has Hardware throw him out.

The race goes out live, with a commentator calling the meteors like horses. The Kidd starts knocking them down while Stargazer calls in the Mirage, and then Timestopper arrives and freezes the field for one limbo minute, saying he is only doing it to get even with Mon*Star. Mon*Star transforms in a fury, Poker-Face tries to calm his customers, and the Mirage arrives to finish off the meteors. Poker-Face is lost, but Hawk Haven is still in one piece.

Mon*star breaks Poker-Face out of prison to officiate over his meteor race.

"But Big Red's increasing his lead. That's Big Red looking very good as they come into the final stretch."

Mon*Star: "For a kid like you, you can have five hundred."

"He'll stop his clock for good."

Mon*Star has never been much good at paying the people who work for him. Chris Trengove's script builds "Race Against Time" on that failing, from a jailbreak contracted for a million limbo bucks to a race run for paying customers, and it lets the money decide the result. A meteor race with Hawk Haven as the finishing line is an absurd idea, and the episode knows it, so it plays the Mob as a crooked sporting syndicate, with a bookmaker sprung from prison to run the book and a teenage specialist hired in to get him out.

The first act is a caper, and a tidy one. Yes-Man's plan to get Timestopper arrested on purpose, so that the SilverHawks will carry him into Penal Planet 10 themselves, is a clever piece of plotting, and Timestopper's objection, that the guards will just turn the lights out, is the weakness Stargazer found in his file in Stop Timestopper.[1] The jailbreak has a punchline. The Kidd is frozen with the guards, told to "Enjoy your game of statues", and Poker-Face is woken with "Wake up, Pokey!" as if he had overslept.[2]

Mon*Star cheats everybody, and in the end he is beaten by a partner he cheated. Mon*Star's answer to "what about my millions?" is "For a kid like you, you can have five hundred," and the scene plays it for a laugh before Hardware throws Timestopper out. When the meteors are closing on Hawk Haven, the help that turns up beside the Kidd is the boy Mon*Star short-changed, and the reason he gives is plain: "This is one in the eye for Mon*Star because he ripped me off."[3]

The standout is the race itself, called as a broadcast from Brim*Star with a commentator giving the meteors racehorse names: "thundering past Purple Passion, Orange Crush", and then "But Big Red's increasing his lead." It is a good joke, and it turns a field of rocks into characters the audience can follow as they bear down on the SilverHawks' home. The Copper Kidd carries most of the episode alone, and since he speaks only in whistles, the animation has to do his acting; the scene at Stargazer's desk, where the Commander sends him out and the Kidd points the way, is all gesture, and it works.

The weakness is the lights. The jailbreak rests on the penal planet's one defence against Timestopper, the dark, and Yes-Man's "I can fix that" is the last we hear of how. The lights come back on, and nothing on screen explains who switched them on. The likely reason is time: a caper, a race and a double-cross is a lot of story for twenty-two minutes, and the explanation was the part that could be spared.

It resolves in the debrief. Poker-Face is gone, but Hawk Haven is still standing, and the SilverHawks own up to a little help from Timestopper while predicting that when Mon*Star catches up with him, "He'll stop his clock for good." Mon*Star gets what he paid for!

1 ^ The same file says Timestopper can hold time for up to one limbo minute, and here the frozen meteors are "only frozen for one limbo minute".

2 ^ Poker-Face was last seen on his way to Penal Planet 10 in Magnetic Attraction; the teaser for this episode says only that the SilverHawks have captured him.

3 ^ In Stop Timestopper his price for working with the Mob was a place in it. Here he is hired for a fee, and the Mob never pays it.

1. The jailbreak turns on Timestopper's weakness from Stop Timestopper: he cannot stop time in the dark, so the penal planet's lights are put out for his arrival.
2. Timestopper's fee for springing Poker-Face is a million limbo bucks; Mon*Star offers him five hundred.
3. Poker-Face is freed from Penal Planet 10, where he was being taken at the end of Magnetic Attraction.
4. Windhammer is named as the one who gathers the meteors and sends them racing, but he does not appear in any published frame.
5. The race is broadcast live from Brim*Star, and the commentator names the meteors Purple Passion, Orange Crush and Big Red.
6. Timestopper freezes the meteors for one limbo minute, the same limit given for his power in Stop Timestopper.
7. The Copper Kidd, who never speaks, carries most of the episode on his own before the Mirage is called in.
8. Bluegrass's closing quiz asks for the name of the atmosphere and then its most plentiful gas; the Kidd picks oxygen instead of nitrogen and finishes on four points.

One name enters the series in this episode.

• Milti-armed character

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.