Haul Down the Heavens

A U.N. science team is escorted to the Arctic by Flint, Lady Jaye and Snow Job after the aurora behaves strangely and the polar ice begins to melt. Along the way a Snow Cat runs wild and the party's geologist, Dr. Entwhistle, calls it an accident, until she is revealed as the Baroness in disguise. Cobra captures Flint and Lady Jaye and tranquilizes Snow Job, while Firefly sabotages the Joes' fuel so that their jets burn. Rip Cord flies the one undamaged SkyStriker north, finds Snow Job, and the freed Joes overload Cobra's Ion Attractor, which sinks Cobra's ice fortress.

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

"Depends on how you define "good."" -- Lady Jaye

"I'm amazed you barbarous thugs can do anything constructive." -- Dr. Entwhistle

"Not a bad guess... for a G.I. Joe." -- Dr. Entwhistle

"No, not crazy. Merely your enemy!" -- The Baroness

"We don't get our kicks from mass destruction, Destro." -- Flint

"Consider it a form of hygiene. We're giving the world a much-needed bath." -- Destro

"I bet you'd take first prize at the science fair." -- Lady Jaye

"Destro always uses the same basic design layouts."

"Hovercraft don't sink!"

"I have a policy about 10-foot bears." -- Duke

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.

The best disguise on offer in Haul Down the Heavens is a personality nobody wants to examine. Dr. Entwhistle, the expedition's geologist, arrives at the Joe airfield already complaining: she is amazed that "barbarous thugs" can do anything constructive, the military hardware is "unnecessary and, frankly, unwelcome," and Lady Jaye is irritated enough that Flint has to tell her to stand at ease. When the Baroness drops the act with "Not a bad guess... for a G.I. Joe," the writer has built the cover out of the Joes' own prejudice about difficult scientists.

Buzz Dixon deserves credit for not making the Joes stupid in order to make this work. A crane swings loose with nobody in the cab, and the Joes say out loud that it might be sabotage. A Snow Cat comes to life and chases the party across the ice, and Flint says plainly that somebody is trying to kill them. The person with a tidy answer is the geologist: ionization from the aurora started the motor, and the machine simply ran wild. The reply, "I bet," is the best deadpan in the episode. Every time the Joes reach the right conclusion, the person standing next to them explains it away. [1]

That makes the story a trust problem with a disguise attached. The Baroness spends the first third talking the party out of its suspicions, and she is good at it until a polar bear interrupts a stakeout. The chase that follows runs into a glowing blue sphere above an icy canyon, and the mask comes off. After that the Joes split three ways. Flint and Lady Jaye are marched away and chained together at the wrist. Snow Job takes a tranquilizer dart and is carried to a village. Back at the airfield, Firefly pumps acid into the fuel lines, and the line we like best is the rueful summary afterwards: "And we pumped the fuel into our jets and turned our own planes into fire bombs." It is the cleverest bit of plotting in the hour: Cobra defeats the cavalry before it takes off by exploiting the most ordinary habit there is, refuelling before you fly! Lady Jaye's plane "never got a taste of Firefly's hot sauce," so Rip Cord flies it north on the last clean fuel and jumps into the dark over the ice.

The middle third is where the episode idles. Snow Job, delirious in a bed in the Taganuk village, mutters a radio call sign, and the villager who relays it can only report "message unclear" and a patient who keeps mumbling about snakes and the aurora, which the Joes at the base had already worked out. The scene exists to move a man from one place to another, and it takes its time doing so.

The finale makes up for it. Cobra's plan, as Destro explains it to his prisoners, is to pull down the aurora and melt the ice until the sea rises eighty feet, and the Joes' answer is to use the machine's premise against the fortress sitting on the water. The captives work out the attractor's controls because "Destro always uses the same basic design layouts," and Destro, who is listening, says he will remember that in the future. Then somebody sets it to full power, the ice under Cobra's base starts to go, and the Joes get their exit line with "Hovercraft don't sink!" [2] The picture of Cobra's lit fortress rising on a spike of ice beneath a swirling aurora is the best piece of design in the episode, and the script has the sense to sink it.

The closing gag, in which Duke declines to wake a ten foot bear, is the right size for an ending. As a mid-run adventure it is brisk, funny and tightly plotted, and the disguise is a better trick than the premise needed.

1 ^ A cutaway at 5:06 shows a bound figure in a blue parka, shouting through a gag, and Duke's "It's okay, Entwhistle. Don't blame yourself" at 12:21 suggests that the real geologist is free and back among the Joes by then. The dialogue never says how she got there.

2 ^ The eighty feet is Destro's figure at 10:55, and the word he attaches to it is "eventually." The Joes treat the threat as immediate for the rest of the hour, which is the correct instinct and not what the sentence says.

1. Destro gets a joke at his own expense. While the captive Joes figure out how one of his machines works, one of them says, "Destro always uses the same basic design layouts," and Destro, listening in, mutters, "I'll remember that in the future." The Joe fan wiki flags the same gag.
2. Dr. Entwhistle, the sour geologist who sneers at "barbarous thugs" in the first few minutes, turns out to be the Baroness at about 6:25. She is not the last woman in the series to pass as someone else: in [Where the Reptiles Roam](/cartoons/1985/episodes/where-the-reptiles-roam/) she plays Mary Belle at a Texas dude ranch, and in [Eau De Cobra](/cartoons/1985/episodes/eau-de-cobra/) she turns up as a duchess decoy.
3. Cobra's own plan has a hole in it, as fans on the Joe wiki note: the Ion Attractor is meant to melt the polar ice and raise the sea 80 feet, yet Cobra's base sits on the ice. The finale makes the point itself, with a Joe shouting, "The ice is melting! Their whole base is going under!"
4. The Joe wiki points out that Cobra's Arctic troops are called "polar troopers" in the dialogue, yet the troopers on screen look like ordinary Snow Serpents, and the Cobra agents beside Destro switch between arctic gear and standard uniforms from shot to shot.
5. The tranquilizer-dart logic is shaky, say the fans. The polar bear drops after a single dart, yet Snow Job takes several in the shoulder and still staggers off to find help, and the same bear later has the strength to chew through the chain holding Flint and Lady Jaye. The dialogue explains that Cobra Commander wants the Joes taken alive.
6. Firefly is the saboteur here, pumping acid into the Joes' fuel lines so the SkyStrikers burn on the airfield, and the line afterward is that Lady Jaye's plane "never got a taste of Firefly's hot sauce." He is the mummy-wrapped thief of [Eau De Cobra](/cartoons/1985/episodes/eau-de-cobra/) later in the run.
7. When Snow Job is carried to the Taganuk Indian Village he keeps mumbling "Call J-O-E... seven niner," and the villager who works the radio sends out "This is J-O-E seven niner. Repeat, message unclear!"
8. The episode opens with Lady Jaye flying in to land at the base. A Joe fan site says it echoes a similar flyover by Scarlett in the original mini-series.
9. Two captive Joes sing a verse of "From the halls of Montezuma" in the middle of the Arctic escape, then bark a "Yo-o-o, Joe!" The finale ends on a polar bear napping beside the hovercraft, and Duke's answer to the suggestion that he let it sleep there is, "I have a policy about 10-foot bears."