The Blue Door

On Brim*Star, Mon*Star tells the Mob he is going to take out Commander Stargazer for good. Mo-Lec-U-Lar will disguise himself as Mon*Star and lead the rest of the Mob out on Sky-Runner and in the space limos, as if on the biggest raid ever on Dollare. The SilverHawks will follow, Stargazer will be left alone, and Mon*Star and Hardware will find the power room and blow Hawk Haven up.

Sly-Bird's routine surveillance shows the Mob leaving Brim*Star, apparently for Dollare, and Stargazer sends the team after them. At Hawk Haven, Hardware gets through solid rock with a gun modified to shoot acid gas. Out in space the Steel twins suspect a draw play, but the chase goes on. The Mirage is shot up, the pods are ordered to release, and the Mob boasts of having crashed the Mirage. The Copper Kidd tries an idea the others call pretty dangerous, the tables turn, and the Mon*Star they have been chasing turns out to be Mo-Lec-U-Lar.

With engines and communications damaged and the twins promising another hour of repairs, the team realise they were lured away and that Stargazer is a sitting duck. Inside the station, Mon*Star and Hardware, who have never been there before, spot the old man and chase him through the corridors. Deciding he will go down with his ship anyway, they follow the signs to a door marked Power Room, strictly no entry.

When the team gets home, Stargazer explains. The Mob was after the power room and meant to blow Hawk Haven clear across Limbo with him in it, so he switched all the signs around and fixed the power room sign onto one of the escape hatches. The team tell him he is something special, and he answers that he only did what he had to.

When the SilverHawks race to stop Mon*star from raiding the bank, they fall for the distraction as the real Mon*star makes a bid to infiltrate and destroy HawkHaven.

Commander Stargazer: "They thought they could blow Hawk Haven clear across Limbo and me with it."

Hardware: "I've never been in this blasted place before."

"It's been a pleasure to break your cookies."

In a show built around flying cyborgs, this episode is won by a man carrying a sign down a corridor. Cy Young's script opens on Mon*Star deciding that the SilverHawks' weak point is their commander. "I mean, I'm going to take out Commander Stargazer for good!" he announces, and the plan is sound: Mo-Lec-U-Lar wears Mon*Star's shape and leads the Mob out on a fake raid on Dollare, the team gives chase, and the real Mon*Star and Hardware break into Hawk Haven[1] to blow up the power room with the commander still inside.

The Mob never calls Stargazer anything but the old man. Stargazer beats the two intruders on his own because he knows Hawk Haven and they do not. The send-off to the departing Mirage is "I hope you said bye-bye to the old man," and once the pair are inside the station, the jokes are about his age. Spotting him in a corridor, one of them decides he is falling to pieces, and the answer comes back, "Yeah, and probably got metal fatigue." It is a cheap gag about a man with a metal eye and a metal neck, but the villains believe it, and they stop taking him seriously!

The best stretch is Mon*Star and Hardware lost inside Hawk Haven. Neither of them has been inside before, and when Mon*Star asks whether this is the right way, Hardware answers "Course I'm not sure, boss." and then "I've never been in this blasted place before." The backgrounds help: the corridors are long blue tubes lit by panels overhead, alike in every direction. So when Mon*Star finally finds a plate reading Power Room with an arrow under it, he trusts it. The debrief supplies the answer: "So I switched all the signs around." The animation sets it up: a few minutes earlier we see Stargazer walking a corridor alone with a flat panel tucked under his arm.[2]

The weakness is the chase. We know the Dollare raid is a decoy from the first scene, so it carries no suspense, and the Steel twins even say out loud that it smells like a draw play before the Mirage is shot up anyway.[3] After that the team spends much of the back half sitting in a damaged ship while the twins promise another hour of repairs. The premise requires it: the script has to get the team out of the building before Stargazer can be alone in it, and a twenty-two minute slot leaves no room to give them anything to do once they are gone. The same squeeze means the payoff is told to us afterwards, at a desk, rather than shown as it happens.

The Mob assumes Stargazer is no threat. They decide they need not waste a shot on him, since he will go up with the station anyway, and one of them is pleased with the thought: "It's been a pleasure to break your cookies." They say goodbye to him before they have beaten him!

When the team gets home and tells him he is something special, Stargazer shrugs it off: "Oh, I only did what I had to, Hawks." What he had to do was switch the signs. The old man wins this one.

1 ^ Hardware gets them in with a gun he says he modified to shoot acid gas, and his boss, for once, admits he never thought of that.

2 ^ The panel under his arm at 14:06 is never identified, but it is the only hint the pictures give of the trick before Stargazer explains it. The title is never spoken, and the published frames do not show the escape hatch, so whether the blue door of the title is that hatch is left to the viewer.

3 ^ The Copper Kidd's rescue of the stranded team is waved through with "Sounds pretty dangerous to me, kid" and never explained; the next thing we learn is that the Mon*Star they were chasing was Mo-Lec-U-Lar.

1. Mon*Star's plan uses Mo-Lec-U-Lar to impersonate Mon*Star himself, leading the Mob out on Sky-Runner and in the space limos on a pretend raid on Dollare.
2. Sly-Bird's routine surveillance is what shows Hawk Haven the whole Mob leaving Brim*Star.
3. Hardware breaks into Hawk Haven with a gun he says he modified to shoot acid gas; a ricocheting rocket is also named during the chase through the station.
4. The decoy is called a draw play twice, first by the Steel twins in the Mirage and then by a teammate quoting them.
5. Stargazer beats Mon*Star by switching the station's signs round and fixing the power room sign onto one of the escape hatches; he is seen carrying a flat panel through a corridor at 14:06.
6. In the debrief shot at 18:50, Stargazer's head is outlined in a red glow that no one else in the room shares.
7. The closing quiz asks what a meteoroid is called once it enters the Earth's atmosphere (a meteor) and what people call meteors (shooting stars); the Copper Kidd finishes on ten points.

One name enters the series in this episode.

• Rocket

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.