An Eye for an Eye

A Joe convoy carrying a new fighter's fusion engine is ambushed by Cobra in the mountains, and a Cobra aircraft crashes onto a family's cabin. The Fairmonts survive, but Charles Fairmont, furious at the Joes' apologies, breaks into the Joe base in a stolen uniform to find out where Cobra operates. Lady Jaye, who admits her own javelin brought the plane down, takes a SkyStriker and flies him to a Cobra munitions island, where Cobra's Power Destroyer shoots them down.

Lady Jaye is captured and tortured with a tiara while Fairmont slips in wearing a Cobra uniform. Together they find the targeting computer locked on the approaching Joe aircraft, and Polly's tip brings Flint and the others. Fairmont corners Cobra Commander at pistol point, but Flint lets the Commander go rather than risk Fairmont's life.

Voice talents, as credited on this episode's closing titles. The Sunbow credit crawl lists the company of voice actors and does not assign roles, so no role attributions are given here.

Liz Aubrey Jackson Beck Michael Bell Gregg Berger Arthur Burghardt Corey Burton Darlene Carr Francois Chau Peter Cullen Christian Czingland Pat Fraley Barbara Goodson Dave Hall Johnny Haymer Zack Hoffman Kene Holliday Michael Horton John Hostetter Buster Jones Stan Jones Jimmy Keegan Christopher Latta Hap Lawrence Pat Lentz Loren Lester Ketty Lester Mary McDonald Lewis Morgan Lofting Mona Marshall Bill Morey Rob Paulsen Bill Ratner Hal Rayle Neil Ross Dan Roth Will Ryan Marilyn Schreffler John Stephenson B.J. Ward Lee Weaver Frank Welker Michael Yama Keone Young

"Skip the lecture, soldier boy." -- Charles Fairmont

"You bring a war to my door, involve my family, cause the destruction of my home and everything I've worked for, and all you can say is you're sorry?" -- Charles Fairmont

"Mr. Fairmont, I share your pain. My javelin brought that plane down on your home." -- Lady Jaye

"Lady, you owe me." -- Charles Fairmont

"My great-grandmother shoots better than these Cobras, and she died in 1957!" -- A Joe on the truck bed

"Don't fire till you see the whites of their fangs!" -- A Joe on the truck bed

"I'll talk! I'll talk!" -- Polly

"You know I never bluff, Flint." -- Cobra Commander

"Because our job is saving lives, not helping good men throw theirs away."

Transcribed from the episode's closed-caption subtitle track and converted from capitals to sentence case. Speakers are named only where the track or the picture makes them clear.

Somebody has to say it out loud, and for most of this episode nobody on the Joe side wants to. A convoy fight on a mountain road ends with a Cobra aircraft on the roof of a family's cabin. One of the first things the script does once everyone is out alive is let the father call the team glory hounds to its face. Charles Fairmont is rude and he is also right, and Steve Mitchell and Barbara Petty leave him right for most of the running time, which is more than a cartoon about a terrorist army is obliged to do.

What gives the setup its weight is a child. Before the fire there is a kitchen, a boy asking his mother whether that was thunder, a promise of a cookie for the first one to wash up. Afterwards there is a little girl in pink pigtails, eyes squeezed shut, apologising to the Joe who is holding her because she believes she ate too many cookies and this is the price. The adults go on to argue about whose fault the fire was, and the person with the least to answer for has already confessed to it.

The episode is about what a decent man does with a grievance that has nowhere to go. The Joes' first answer, in the hospital corridor, is the institutional one: Cobra endangered his family, and G.I. Joe exists to protect civilians. It is true, and it is also what a press office would say, so Fairmont is entitled to skip the lecture. Lady Jaye's answer comes in the Joe computer centre, where she finds him in a stolen uniform among the toppled filing cabinets, and it is the good one. She tells him her own javelin brought that plane down on his house. [1] He says she owes him, she goes along, and the rest of the episode is the two of them in an unauthorised SkyStriker, which Cobra's new ray shoots out of the sky.

The ending is the best stretch of the half hour. Cobra Commander has Fairmont at the end of a pistol and tells Flint he never bluffs. Fairmont, the man who wanted blood from the first scene, tells Flint to forget him and take the villain down. Flint holds his fire, and the Commander leaves with a cheerful farewell. Asked why, a Joe says the job is saving lives, not helping good men throw theirs away. Fairmont is never made to repent. Invited to leave Cobra to the professionals, he says sure, for now, and the episode ends on someone asking what he means, with no answer, and we would not have it any other way for a man who has a point.

The Cobra half is the weak half. Dr. Filmoss's Power Destroyer, with its ebony ray, its final test and a targeting computer locked on an approaching flight of Joe aircraft, is a machine for producing a deadline. The tiara clamped on Lady Jaye in the interrogation chamber exists so that she can wince at the correct moment. [2] Filmoss is allowed to shout and then to be knocked out, and is given no reason to exist beyond that. The Joe base is no sharper: a man in a borrowed uniform floors a guard and walks into the computer centre, and nobody there seems to mind.

There is one small pleasure in the middle. Polly, who knows where the missing SkyStriker went, spends the scene at the Joe base squawking that she knows a secret, and she cracks the moment Roadblock agrees that he still has a recipe for parrot under glass. [3] It is the lightest touch in the half hour, and we will happily take it! It also sets the rescue in motion.

This is a low-key episode, but it treats the damage a battle does to people who were not in it as a plot rather than a regret, and the girl with the cookies is why it holds.

1 ^ Her throw is visible at 4:33 and the burning cabin follows at 5:40, so the viewer has the answer to Fairmont's question long before he does.

2 ^ Cobra Commander calls the downed jet a captured SkyStriker, though nothing on screen shows a capture: Lady Jaye took it herself, and back at the Joe base at 10:45 nobody yet knows she did. Filmoss also starts to say he had ordered three Rattlers for target practice when the Commander cuts him off, and the line is never finished.

3 ^ At 10:57 Polly is still holding out with "No way, Jose"; the recipe line comes at 11:01 and the confession at 11:11.

1. Charles Fairmont is a civilian whose home burns to the ground after a Cobra aircraft crashes near it during a convoy fight. The episode lets him tell the Joes, "You bring a war to my door," and then ask, "And all you can say is you're sorry?"
2. The episode plants and pays off a small cookie gag. The Fairmont kids race to wash up for a cookie, and later in the hospital the little girl sobs, "I was eating all the cookies," as if she had caused the fire. The fan wiki also notes that their mother lifts the hot cookie tray out of the oven bare-handed.
3. Polly keeps squawking "I know a secret!" after Lady Jaye goes missing in a SkyStriker, until someone asks Roadblock if he still has "that recipe for parrot under glass." Polly also turns up in [Rendezvous in the City of the Dead](/cartoons/1985/episodes/rendezvous-in-the-city-of-the-dead/), where she and a dog are passed off as Destro's animals.
4. A TV announcer in the Joe rec room promises a lucky winner and date an all-expense-paid dream vacation to the Everglades. The Joe fan wiki says that is Zartan's old swamp home, and [Cold Slither](/cartoons/1985/episodes/cold-slither/), which aired a few weeks later, shows a swamp house with Dreadnoks lounging on the porch.
5. Cobra Commander's new Power Destroyer shoots an "ebony ray" that neutralizes any power source it hits. Fans on the wiki grumble about the finale, where Fairmont wrecks it by tossing a grenade into a small vent from a long way off.
6. Fairmont's opinion of Cobra Commander's famous look: "Who's the guy in the aluminum ski mask?" Flint, for his part, calls him "tinhead."
7. The ending hints that Fairmont is not finished: he agrees to leave Cobra to the Joes, "Sure...for now." No other episode of the season features him. The fan wiki wonders whether he was meant to grow into Chuckles, who arrived in 1987.
8. USA Network's reruns removed roughly 75 seconds, including Lady Jaye's "this is where I get off" and Alpine's gag that his great-grandmother, who died in 1957, shoots better than Cobra. On home video, a fan guide says, this one was Volume Two from Kid Rhino, paired with [Twenty Questions](/cartoons/1985/episodes/twenty-questions/).