Stargazer's Refit

Mon*Star decides to get rid of Commander Stargazer, the brains behind the SilverHawks, with a meltdown disc that melts anything it sticks to. He sends Mo-Lec-U-Lar, who can turn invisible, to plant one. The squadron is scrambled to a freighter collision and Stargazer is left at Hawk Haven with only the new man, Moon Stryker. On his way to a citizens' meeting, he confides that he has been feeling old. An invisible attacker blasts Seymour's cab; Moon Stryker drives him off, but not before a meltdown disc comes through the window. Stargazer deflects it with his metal hand and is knocked out, the hand badly damaged.

Earth Headquarters orders Stargazer home for a refit, and assigns Condor as his bodyguard, much to the commander's annoyance. Mo-Lec-U-Lar takes the place of the freighter's captain, gasses the pair and dumps them out, and on Earth he locks up the professor and performs the refit himself. With a nurse at his side who turns out to be Stargazer's old friend Mabis, he recharges the commander, repairs his arm and plants a meltdown disc inside it, timed for twelve o'clock.

Stargazer, tired of being babysat, slips away from Condor with Mabis on a luxury liner bound for the Starship Casino, a place SilverHawks are barred from. Condor sends Moon Stryker after him, and Mon*Star, realising the disc will go off in the casino, warns Poker-Face. Told about the disc, Stargazer lets Mabis look. She finds it tied into his main power circuits, and he jumps clear to melt down in space. He learns in time that the disc was set to Earth time, and that Limbo's clock runs hours ahead of it.

Back at Hawk Haven, with the disc to be defused at leisure, the team welcomes home a commander who says the recharge put new life in his old transistors.

Outfitted with deadly meltdown discs, Mo-Lec-U-Lar is sent to destroy Commander Stargazer.

"You start thinking old, you are old."

Commander Stargazer: "No, Mabis. It's too late. I've got to jump clear and melt down in space."

Commander Stargazer: "That recharge back on Earth put new life in the old transistors."

Nobody likes being told they need a mechanic, least of all a man who is partly machine. William Overgard's script empties Hawk Haven in its first act,[1] with the squadron scrambled to a freighter collision and nobody left to answer the radio but Moon Stryker, and then puts Stargazer in a cab to a citizens' meeting on Bedlama, confessing "I've been feeling old lately." The answer he gets is blunt: "You start thinking old, you are old."

Stargazer is getting old, and he will not let anyone look after him. When an invisible Mo-Lec-U-Lar nearly melts him and Earth Headquarters orders him home for repairs, he bristles with "Now do I look like some broken-down old robot?" When Headquarters gives him a bodyguard, he snaps at Condor from the moment they board the freighter, and on landing he announces "I don't need a babysitter." Overgard makes the stubbornness funny and dangerous at once, because the Mob is using it: every protector Stargazer shakes off brings Mo-Lec-U-Lar a step closer.

A shapeshifter can walk straight past a man who keeps sending his protectors away, and the episode gives Mo-Lec-U-Lar a fine run of costumes. He turns invisible for the ambush on Seymour's cab, becomes the freighter's captain in time to gas his passengers, and then, most wickedly, becomes the doctor, locking the real professor away while Stargazer lies in a humming recharge bed with a nurse handing over the instruments.[2] The nurse is Mabis, and the scene where Stargazer comes round is the warmest the old man ever gets. "Is that you, Mabis?" he asks, and she answers "Yes, Gaze. It's me," and nothing earlier in the series tells us they know each other.[3] Condor, standing by in a white shirt, gets the dry reply: "Well, he's got better taste than I thought."

The standout is the casino. In the gaudiest room in Limbo, crowded with gamblers round the felt, Mabis prises open Stargazer's gold forearm and finds the red disc wired into his power circuits. Stargazer then does what his pride had refused all episode and admits that his body is a danger to the people around him! "No, Mabis. It's too late. I've got to jump clear and melt down in space." For a moment Stargazer is ready to die to keep everyone around him safe.

But the rescue undoes it. The disc was set to Earth time and Limbo runs ahead, so it never goes off, and Stargazer's offer to jump is never put to the test. Condor has a thin time of it too.[4] He is gassed on the freighter and later left behind at the dock, and the bodyguard the episode set up never gets to guard anybody. The likely reason is the slot and the premise: a series cannot melt its commander, and a twenty-two minute episode that has spent its middle on the Mob's earlier attempts on his life needs a quick way out of the last one.

And then he is home, in his office with the squadron, Condor and Mabis round the desk, telling them "That recharge back on Earth put new life in the old transistors." The recharge he fought all episode is what sends him home in good spirits.

1 ^ The episode opens with a narrator previewing the plot before the titles, as Match-Up does.

2 ^ The professor is never named in dialogue; the real one is heard from wherever Mo-Lec-U-Lar has put him, shouting "Let me out! Let me out at once, you hear?"

3 ^ Condor also calls Stargazer "Gaze" throughout, as he did in Match-Up.

4 ^ Condor's instructions were to be with the commander at all times; the professor turns him out with "Not in here, you won't. I'm in charge."

1. The episode opens with a narrated preview of the plot, from Mon*Star's order to Stargazer's summons to Earth, before the title card.
2. Mo-Lec-U-Lar turns invisible on request here, answering Mon*Star's 'But can you turn invisible?' by vanishing, and goes on to pose as a freighter captain and as the professor who refits Stargazer.
3. Mon*Star's meltdown discs melt anything they stick to; Stargazer survives the first one by deflecting it with his metal hand, and the hand is badly damaged.
4. Mabis turns out to be an old friend of Stargazer's and calls him 'Gaze', the nickname Condor uses; she is ordered to look after him on the trip home.
5. Condor is assigned as Stargazer's bodyguard by Earth Headquarters, following their pairing as old hands in Match-Up.
6. Condor calls the Starship Casino out of bounds for SilverHawks when he sends Moon Stryker to fetch Stargazer out of it.
7. The commander is saved by a time difference: the disc is set for twelve o'clock Earth time, and Limbo keeps its own clock.
8. The closing quiz is about Halley's Comet and the spacecraft sent to study it, and the Copper Kidd finishes on eighteen points.

One name enters the series in this episode.

• Luxury Liner

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.