Uncle Rattler

The SilverHawks' payroll ship is overdue at Hawk Haven. Stargazer will not divert the Mirage to look for it, because the team has been away too long and will be tired, but Tally-Hawk finds it bushwhacked, its crew frozen in yellow smoke. Condor knows the smoke: it is the trademark of the Rattler, a thief he chased for almost three hundred years back on Earth. Stargazer sends him to make the arrest, warning that the Mob will be hunting the Rattler too, and Condor takes Moon Stryker as backup.

On Brim*Star, Mon*Star learns that Melodia and Buzz-Saw, sent to rob the payroll, were robbed themselves, and he orders Yes-Man to call the boys together. Yes-Man realises the thief is his own uncle and goes to find him before the Mob does. At the Sini*Star Diner, where Hardware has been trying to sell a device that makes people and things invisible, he meets Uncle Rattler, who is not frightened of Mon*Star and wants to pay him a visit. Yes-Man refuses, then gives in, just this once, and goes home to switch off Brim*Star's alarms.

Harry tells Condor the Rattler has left for Brim*Star. Condor and Moon Stryker catch up with him on the way, but the Rattler slips off into the asteroids, and Flashback has to patch Condor up; Condor turns down more help, because he has been trying to arrest the Rattler most of his working life. At the fortress Mon*Star orders his transformation to hunt the snake himself, and Yes-Man tells him the machine is out of order until Mon*Star threatens him with the Deep Space Ejector.

Transformed, Mon*Star corners the Rattler, and Condor arrives to arrest him. Yes-Man begs his boss to save his uncle, but Mon*Star lets Condor take the prisoner, because nobody rips him off. Back at Hawk Haven, the squadron congratulates Condor, who admits that Mon*Star did the hard work.

A snake-like criminal whose primary weapon is stun venom steals the SilverHawks' payroll before the Mob can get to it.

Condor: "I chased that snake for almost 300 years back on Earth."

Uncle Rattler: "I'm not frightened of Mon*Star, in fact."

Mon*Star: "He tried to rip me off! Yes-Man! I can't let anyone do that! I've got my reputation to think of!"

Blood is supposed to be thicker than water, and Beth Bornstein's script tests the saying on the one member of the Mob who agrees with Mon*Star for a living. A snake-bodied thief called the Rattler beats Melodia and Buzz-Saw to the SilverHawks' payroll ship, leaves its crew frozen in his trademark yellow smoke, and now has both the SilverHawks and the Mob after him. Condor knows that smoke on sight. He tells Stargazer he chased this snake for centuries back on Earth, and always came close without catching him.[1] Mon*Star, meanwhile, has just learned that his own robbers have been robbed, and he wants the thief's skin nailed to a wall!

Then the Rattler turns out to be Yes-Man's uncle. Yes-Man goes looking for him before the Mob can, and finds him at the Sini*Star Diner bar, where the two of them sit side by side with the same banded snake tails curled under the stools; the nephew is a smaller, greener copy of the older snake in the brown hood. It is the best scene in the episode, because Yes-Man is caught between what his uncle wants and what Mon*Star would allow! His uncle announces "I'm not frightened of Mon*Star, in fact." and asks to be taken to Brim*Star to straighten him out. Yes-Man refuses, twice, and then gives in on the condition that it happens only this once. In saying yes to his uncle, he has agreed to work against his boss.

That betrayal plays out as comedy, and the writing is at its sharpest here. Back at the fortress Mon*Star calls for his transformation so that he can hunt the snake himself, and Yes-Man tells him the machine is out of order, then fusses that the claws are out of alignment, until Mon*Star threatens to stuff him into the Deep Space Ejector. The script never says aloud that Yes-Man is stalling for his uncle, and it does not have to, since we have just watched him promise to switch off Brim*Star's alarms. Condor gets a plainer thread: a chase through the asteroids that the Rattler wins with a trick, and a patch-up from Flashback. It ends with Condor turning down Flashback's offer of help: "I've been trying to arrest the Rattler most of my working life."

The weakness is the Rattler himself once the chase is over. Condor builds him up at Hawk Haven as "something worse, bigger than the mob, more dangerous", but he never gets the visit to Brim*Star he promised his nephew. By the time he reaches the red ground outside the fortress he is down to his stun venom bombs,[2] and he is caught, first by a transformed Mon*Star and then by Condor, who reads him his rights and names the penal planet as the first stop. The likely reason is running time. The episode has to follow Condor, the Mob and Yes-Man and still fit in Mon*Star's transformation, and the Rattler's break-in at Brim*Star is what gets cut.

Yes-Man begs his boss not to let them take his uncle, and Mon*Star, who could have kept the Rattler, hands him over with "He tried to rip me off! Yes-Man! I can't let anyone do that! I've got my reputation to think of!" Yes-Man says the Rattler was family, and Mon*Star tells him the Mob is the only family he has got. Back at Hawk Haven, Condor admits to the squadron that Mon*Star did all the hard work.[3] Yes-Man chose his uncle, briefly and at some risk to himself; Mon*Star chose his reputation.

1 ^ The chase took place back on Earth, so the Rattler is one more criminal who has made his way out to Limbo; the episode does not say how, or how Condor's pursuit lasted that long.

2 ^ One trick may still be in play. Hardware's device for making people and things invisible leaves the diner with a customer who takes it without paying, and in the final confrontation a faded, see-through snake shape hangs in the air beside Yes-Man. It may be the device at work, but the dialogue never says so.

3 ^ The squadron he tells includes the five original SilverHawks, back in white dress uniforms; they sit the rest of the episode out, since Stargazer would not divert the Mirage to look for the payroll because they had been away too long and would be tired.

1. First appearance of Uncle Rattler, Yes-Man's uncle, whose trademark is a yellow smoke that freezes his victims long enough for him to make his getaway; in the last fight he also throws stun venom bombs.
2. Yes-Man and his uncle share the same banded snake tail, and the diner scene at 7:18 seats them side by side so the family likeness is plain.
3. Harry, the robot bartender at the Sini*Star Diner, is told by the Rattler to pour a drink for the kid, and later tells Condor the Rattler has left for Brim*Star.
4. Mon*Star's transformation is held up when Yes-Man claims the machine is out of order, and Mon*Star threatens him with the Deep Space Ejector.
5. Flashback repairs Condor after the asteroid chase and offers to help, which Condor declines.
6. Condor reads the Rattler his rights, promising that anything he says can be used in a Limbo court of law, and names the penal planet as the first stop.
7. The payroll ship carries the SilverHawks' own wages, as Stargazer points out when he refuses to divert the Mirage to look for it.
8. The closing quiz follows the Voyager probes past Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus, with Neptune still to come in 1989, and the Kidd finishes on 17 points.

4 names enter the series in this episode.

• Uncle Rattler
• Tailspin
• Payroll Ship
• Slug Transportation

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.