Countdown for Zartan

At a Cobra training ground, Buzzer teaches trainees to use explosives and Storm Shadow drills them in balance. In the control room, a Cobra Commander who prefers Zartan to Destro turns out to be Zartan himself. The real Commander sends him to plant a bomb in the Worldwide Defense Center, where scientists wait for Dr. Mettier of France. Zartan takes the doctor's identity and a ninja fight with Spirit follows. Exposed by the Joes, he boasts that nobody will find the bomb in time, and Gung-Ho takes him to a cell while the others search. Zartan breaks when his watch seems to run out, gives up the location, and the Joes learn that the bomb's own timer had two minutes in hand. Zartan slips his cell and ambushes the Joes, Cobra attacks the building, and the Joes drive them off before sitting down to Gung-Ho's gumbo.

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

"Anyone can use a weapon, but the ninja is a weapon." -- Storm Shadow

"Who plays the fool now, Destro?" -- Zartan

"Last year you said you'd never wear a digital watch, and I said you would." -- A colleague of Dr. Mettier

"I'll tell! I'll tell! G.I. Joes, get me out of here!" -- Zartan

"The backup control room! Third panel from the left! Hurry!" -- Zartan

"I just set Zartan's watch two minutes ahead. I figured his nerve would give out before ours."

"Destroy the foundation, and the rest comes tumbling down." -- Torch

"I hate the sunlight! I hate it!" -- Zartan

"Well, it's certainly given you a cast-iron stomach." -- Doc

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.

Zartan lives by looking like someone else, and Christy Marx's script spends its first act showing how good he is at it. He plays the Cobra Commander so well that Destro is arguing his case to a forgery before the real Commander walks in with a dry "Very convincing, Zartan." A few minutes on, he has stopped a French scientist's car in the road and announced that he wants the man's identity. Then he passes through the Worldwide Defense Center's hand scanner as Dr. Mettier. Nobody doubts the disguises; the question is whether a man who can fool a security system can survive a bluff aimed at himself.

The answer is no, and a watch carries the argument from end to end. It betrays him first. A colleague greets the false Mettier with a teasing remark about the digital watch the real man swore he would never wear, and Zartan stammers that he had forgotten; Spirit, who has been watching with his eagle, tells Freedom that something is strange about the doctor. Once the Joes have him, it is the watch again that draws their eye, and when someone asks what is so interesting about it, the dial turns out to be a countdown tied to the bomb he has planted. [1] Zartan thinks of the timer as his leverage. The episode thinks of it as his weak point.

The cell is the best sequence in the half hour, largely because we are not shown it. Gung-Ho is told to take Zartan away, and Zartan insists that the Joes are weaklings who will not let him die; a Joe at the cell door, urged to give up, asks for a few seconds because he is "expectin' something." Zartan cracks and shrieks the location of the backup control room. The method stays hidden until Recondo reaches for a wire, a colleague says "wrong wire," and somebody notices that the bomb's timer lags two minutes behind the watch. "I just set Zartan's watch two minutes ahead," comes the explanation. "I figured his nerve would give out before ours." It is a fair-play twist, with the clue planted in the dialogue and the answer held back until the audience has had a chance to wonder. It also turns the villain's own craft against him: the master of the false front breaks because somebody handed him a false clock.

The rest is looser but pleasant. The episode opens at a Cobra training ground where Buzzer teaches that you "destroy the foundation, and the rest comes tumbling down," and Torch hands the line back in the middle of the closing firefight, a small setup and payoff. Storm Shadow supplies a thread of his own, a ninja who keeps taking offence at how Cobra does business. He resents Zartan butting into his fight with Spirit, and he orders the Dreadnoks away from Spirit's cell, where they have been pumping in laughing gas in the belief that their prisoners will laugh themselves to death, with a speech about the treatment of noble enemies. It is funny, and the nearest the Cobra side gets to a character who minds.

The weak joint is Zartan's own cell. He is locked up, Cobra Commander declines to send a rescue because Zartan is so clever he can let himself out, and some scenes later he is loose in the dark, ambushing Joes and knocking Lady Jaye to the floor. The script treats his cleverness as an explanation, which is the one thing it refuses to do everywhere else; the Joes' trick has a mechanism, the disguises have mechanisms, and the escape has none. Another disguise or another bluff would have kept faith with the rest of the story.

Plenty of episodes end with the Joes outshooting Cobra, and this one turns on them out-lying a liar, which we like a lot better! Even the last gag, Gung-Ho finally making the Cajun gumbo the team has been dreading since the middle of the episode, is paid off with care. [2] A small, tidy thriller with a good idea at its centre.

1 ^ The bomb's red timer under the Cobra emblem reads 34:55 at 7:57, which matches Zartan's claim of thirty-five minutes a few seconds earlier; the watch itself is next shown at 15:13, reading 00:09, and the bomb is still being worked on after that. 2 ^ The gumbo is set up at about 8:53, where Stalker complains that Gung-Ho will make everyone eat his homemade Cajun gumbo and someone adds that last time it fueled the SkyStrikers, and the gag then sits untouched until the final minute.

1. The Cobra Commander who gushes about Zartan and the Dreadnoks and runs Destro down in the opening control-room scene is Zartan himself under the blue hood. He greets Destro with "Greetings, Destro," and Destro answers "Very convincing, Zartan." Zartan's gift for wearing other people's faces gets a workout again in [The Funhouse](/cartoons/1985/episodes/the-funhouse/) and [Battle for the Train of Gold](/cartoons/1985/episodes/battle-for-the-train-of-gold/).
2. The fake Dr. Mettier is undone by a wristwatch. His old friend teases that last year Mettier said he would never wear a digital watch, and the "scientist" can only stammer that he had forgotten. That same watch turns out to be the bomb's countdown, and Gung-Ho wins the day by setting it two minutes ahead: "I figured his nerve would give out before ours."
3. The Cajun gumbo gag bookends the episode. Early on, someone groans that Gung-Ho will make them eat his homemade Cajun gumbo, and another adds that last time they used it to fuel the SkyStrikers. In the closing scene the rescued Dr. Mettier calls it "a true American delicacy."
4. A neat little loop inside the Cobra camp: in the training scene Buzzer teaches "Destroy the foundation, and the rest comes tumbling down," and in the final fight Torch repeats it. The Dreadnoks, it seems, were listening.
5. Storm Shadow is more honorable than the company he keeps. Storm Shadow tells Zartan he had no right to interfere in the duel with Spirit, and later someone says "noble enemies should not be treated in this fashion" as the Dreadnoks are thrown out of the cell block. His "We shall meet again" to Spirit at the end echoes the uneasy partnership the two had in [Battle on the Roof of the World](/cartoons/1985/episodes/battle-on-the-roof-of-the-world/).
6. Fans on the G.I. Joe wiki have collected the small slips. The bomb's beep switches to a different sound after the first commercial break, the switch for the auxiliary power is misspelled on screen, and Stalker is colored to look like Flint when Lady Jaye's team first enters the defense center.
7. The same wiki notes some gear details: Lady Jaye's two javelins are a flare and a vaulting pole, and Spirit keeps a small throwing dagger tucked under his headband.
8. This is the first story to air after the five-part Pyramid of Darkness run that ended with [Knotting Cobra's Coils](/cartoons/1985/episodes/knotting-cobras-coils/). It shows in the format: no recap at all, and it opens on a Cobra training ground.