The Planet Eater

A space freighter meets an unidentified object on a collision course, and its crew abandons ship as the object swallows it. The object is the Sky Chomper, which reports home to Brim*Star that it has eaten another freighter, while Mon*Star insists on being addressed by his new title. The SilverHawks scramble, and Stargazer has the Mirage follow the object instead of making contact. Windhammer throws a galactic whirlwind at them, Bluegrass loses directional control, and Stargazer calls the Mirage home rather than risk it, sending Tally-Hawk on photo surveillance instead.

At Hawk Haven the count stands at ten ships eaten this month, and nobody knows why. Interference from Mon*Star's defence shield blocks Tally-Hawk's cameras. When the Copper Kidd misses the Mirage debriefing, Stargazer counts him down and grounds him, and moments later the Kidd flies off to Brim*Star on his own. He drops through the star-shaped crater, plugs into Buzz-Saw's robot code and takes control of him, but a snag missile brings him down. Mon*Star shows his captive what the Sky Chomper has been feeding: a living force under a pile of dead rockets. The Kidd sends the pictures back through Tally-Hawk, and Hawk Haven realises Mon*Star has the power to eat them alive.

The SilverHawks jump over Brim*Star, link hands to ride out another whirlwind and keep diving. Mon*Star transforms and comes at them with Sky-Runner, and one SilverHawk stays to face him while Steelheart and Steelwill go for the Kidd with explosive charges. Bluegrass stops waiting and joins the fight. With the charges set and forty-five seconds on the clock, one of the Mob deep-spaces the Kidd, to his boss's fury. The Mirage finds him drifting, and Bluegrass eases in close enough to pick him up.

The Silverhawks must stop the Mon*Star group from using their terrifying Sky Chomper, a ship which eats other ships whole.

"He must think that if he finds out what Mon*Star is up to, he can straighten things out with you."

Commander Stargazer: "Blasted kid, I grounded him."

Commander Stargazer has a rule about recruits who skip meetings, and William Overgard gives him a scene to enforce it: everyone is to be at the Mirage debriefing, the Copper Kidd is in the machine shop instead, and Stargazer counts him down aloud before grounding him.[1] Moments later the Kidd is gone anyway, and Stargazer's verdict is "Blasted kid, I grounded him."

When Stargazer asks whether the Kidd ever does anything he is told, the answer he gets is "He's unpredictable, Commander." The Kidd breaks the rules, and the Kidd is the only one who finds out what Mon*Star is building. Overgard leaves it open whether that disobedience makes him a liability or the most useful member of the team, and he keeps putting the question to the adults around him rather than to the Kidd. One of the team explains him to Stargazer in the kindest line of the script: "He must think that if he finds out what Mon*Star is up to, he can straighten things out with you."

The Kidd's solo mission has the most invention in the episode. He comes down through Brim*Star's star-shaped crater as a streak of gold light,[2] plugs himself into Buzz-Saw's robot code and takes control of the Mob's own heavy, and when the snag missile catches him he turns captivity into a spy mission by sending Mon*Star's big reveal home through Tally-Hawk. Under a pile of dead rockets sits a living force, fed by the Sky Chomper, and the image of wrecked hulls bursting outward against a red sky is the strangest picture we get all episode.

The standout set piece belongs to the squad. Diving on Brim*Star through Windhammer's second whirlwind, three SilverHawks lock hands in a ring, wings out, against a wall of orange fire, and hold the dive while the Mob shouts that they are still coming. We would watch a whole episode of that! Windhammer himself gets a nicely grubby design moment beforehand, standing at his machine in a torn brown tunic with the tuning fork in one fist. And the Mob's panic at the end is the funniest beat, when one of them boasts of deep-spacing the Kidd and is told, in horror, "He was all we had."

The weakness is that the argument is never settled. Stargazer grounds the Kidd, the Kidd disobeys, and the Kidd saves the day, but nothing in the last scene tells us whether the grounding stands or whether Stargazer has changed his mind; the rescue ends on "Great flying cowboy." and a closing quiz. The likely reason is the clock: the rescue and the demolition fill the last act of a twenty-two minute episode, so the conversation the first act set up has nowhere to happen, and the Kidd never argues his own case.

The Kidd wins the argument anyway, by being right. "The Planet Eater" is fond enough of its rule-breaker that it forgets to punish him.

1 ^ At the debriefing the team is out of armour: Steelwill wears a red-and-white sweatshirt with the SilverHawks emblem, and Quicksilver and Bluegrass are in white. Steelheart gets a long white coat of her own in Save The Sun.

2 ^ The preview before the titles borrows this shot, so we see him drop in before we know he has gone.

1. First appearance of the Sky Chomper, the Mob ship that eats other ships whole; Hawk Haven counts the space freighter as the tenth ship it has eaten this month.
2. Tally-Hawk's photo surveillance cannot see through the interference around Brim*Star, which Hawk Haven identifies as part of Mon*Star's defence shield.
3. The Copper Kidd takes control of Buzz-Saw by plugging into his robot code.
4. The Mob's snag missile catches the Kidd and is launched a second time at the diving SilverHawks.
5. The Kidd relays Mon*Star's reveal to Hawk Haven through Tally-Hawk, and Hawk Haven reads the device under the rocket pile as a breeder reactor.
6. At the Mirage debriefing the team is out of armour, and Steelwill wears a red-and-white sweatshirt with the SilverHawks emblem.
7. Bluegrass's closing quiz takes the Kidd out past Mars to Jupiter, and he names both for a perfect score on the day.

5 names enter the series in this episode.

• Space Freighter Crew
• The Planet Eater
• Space Freighter
• The Sky-Chomper
• The Space Racer

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.