In the Cobra's Pit

The Joes escort a laser core for their cannon down a desert highway, and Cobra ambushes the convoy from the air. Duke and Snake Eyes are netted by jetpack troops, but Gung-Ho captures the Cobra Commander, and the remaining Joes send him to Blackwater Prison while they chase their captured friends.

In the swamp, Zartan's Dreadnoks bag Colonel Sharp, and Zartan takes his face and voice. At the prison, a parole-board evaluation and a gas-filled basket free the Commander, and Zartan and the Dreadnoks carry him off through the bayou. Meanwhile Destro uses his Weather Dominator to bring down the Joe jets over the Pit of Chaos, then adds the laser core to it. The Commander broadcasts his demands, Flint and others are left alive in the Pit, where Destro says he has seeded a creeper vine that wakes with a drop of water.

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.

Jackson Beck Mike Bell Gregg Berger Arthur Burghardt Dave Hall Zack Hoffman Kene Holliday Buster Jones Sally Julian Chris Latta Mary McDonald Lewis Morgan Lofting Bill Morey Rob Paulsen Bill Ratner Neil Ross Will Ryan B.J. Ward Frank Welker Michael Yama Keone Young

"Remember, a Cobra's a snake, and "snake" is "sneak" spelled sideways."

"I think he'll adore basket weaving." -- Dr. Cassals

"Parole the Cobra Commander, my mess kit." -- Gung-Ho

"You wouldn't want to deprive me of my constitutional rights, would you, muscle head?" -- Cobra Commander

"How would you like me to bench-press your face?" -- Gung-Ho

"Welcome to my domain, Colonel Sharp." -- Zartan

"While G.I. Joe and Cobra battle for the land, I, Zartan, rule the swamp." -- Zartan

"Sunlight. I hate sunlight." -- Zartan

""In good time," you say? No time in prison is good!" -- Cobra Commander

"I'm sure Flint and the world will quake with terror at the sight of a dried-up sprig of creeper vine." -- Cobra Commander

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.

Nobody blasts a way out of anything in "In the Cobra's Pit". The Cobra Commander is let out, politely, by a warden who has been persuaded that a parole board is waiting. The title promises a pit, and the pit does turn up, but the stretch worth remembering is the one before it, in which Cobra wins by looking like an institution rather than an army.

The first act is a conventional ambush, and a handsome one. The Joes are escorting a laser core for their own cannon along a desert highway. One of them reminds the others that a Cobra is a snake and "snake" is "sneak" spelled sideways, a good joke to make shortly before being out-sneaked. Cobra arrives with vehicles slung under helicopters, jetpack troops lift Duke and Snake Eyes away in a net, and the Commander himself ends up in Gung-Ho's grip inside a vehicle [1].

The Joes treat a prison as a wall, and Cobra treats it as an office. Gung-Ho, Short Fuze and Breaker are told to deliver the Commander to Blackwater, "one place nobody cracks out of," and meanwhile in the swamp the Dreadnoks Torch and Buzzer have bagged Colonel Sharp and another Joe, whom they decide look like trout. Zartan studies the Colonel's face; the Colonel says it will take more than a false face to fool his people, and Zartan thanks him and replies in the Colonel's own voice that the voice was the only thing missing. So when the warden and a Dr. Cassals announce a psychological evaluation for the parole board, and a "Colonel" turns up to overrule Gung-Ho, we are a step ahead of him. The fun is watching him lose the argument anyway [2].

His reaction is the standout. The Commander twists the knife by asking whether he would deprive him of his constitutional rights, "muscle head." Gung-Ho's reply, about bench-pressing the Commander's face, suits the character and is no use against a warden with a form to fill in. Dismissed, he leaves. The basket Dr. Cassals holds up, promising that the prisoner will adore basket weaving, turns up under Zartan's arm beside a vent marked 5 just before the guards start coughing. Out on the road Gung-Ho is still grumbling "Parole the Cobra Commander, my mess kit," when he works out that he has been had. The scheme is silly and confident, and it plays better than any of the laser fire in the half hour.

Cobra's own politics are the second pleasure. Destro is adding the laser core to the Weather Dominator. When Major Bludd asks about a rescue mission he promises to attend to it "in good time"; the Commander, who has walked in on this, answers that no time in prison is good. Someone sneers that Zartan and the Dreadnoks are money-grubbing mercenaries, and the Commander replies that he keeps standing arrangements with Zartan for just such emergencies and that Zartan is well worth the price. It is a small mean exchange between a man who builds machines and a man who hires people, and we like it better than the machine.

The weakness is on the Joe side, which is reactive throughout. They hold the convoy and lose it, capture the Commander and lose him, and send a squadron over the Pit of Chaos, where the weather takes them out of the sky. The rescue call to Duke goes nowhere [3]. The swamp chase is lasers streaking between cypress trunks. Duke is hauled across a Cobra hangar, and then the captives drop out of the story until the preview.

As the opening chapter of The Revenge of Cobra it introduces the weather device and the stakes, and the Cobra scenes close on the best joke it has left. The Commander mocks Destro's dried sprig of creeper vine, then spends a few seconds in its grip once a single drop of water reaches it. Cobra's side of the screen is better company than the Joes' this time, and the pit is a promise still to be kept.

1 ^ Scrap Iron and Firefly are called by name during the ambush ("Scrap Iron, now!", "Firefly, strike!"), but neither is shown on screen and the dialogue does not say whose side is giving the order.

2 ^ Who wears which face at the prison is not settled on screen. The swamp scene shows Zartan taking the Colonel's face and voice, and Dr. Cassals may also be a disguise, but the dialogue never says so.

3 ^ A closed-caption label reads "Lady Jane" on the line "Hang on, Duke. We're on our way," shortly before Destro orders the temple raised; going by the voice and the story, the speaker is presumably Lady Jaye.

1. This is the debut of Colonel Sharp, the Pentagon liaison, according to the fans on the G.I. Joe wiki (they also give the radio man Sparks his first appearance here), and he is hardly treated kindly. Zartan borrows the Colonel's face in the swamp and finishes the job with a voice, announcing "Your voice was the only thing missing." Zartan is back in disguise more than a year later, as Dr. Hamler, in [The Pit of Vipers](/cartoons/1985/episodes/the-pit-of-vipers/).
2. Destro and Cobra Commander team up as if nothing had happened, which the wiki's continuity section finds odd, since the previous miniseries ended with the Commander in custody and Destro walking out on him. The only friction is over hired help: Destro sneers that Zartan and the Dreadnoks are "nothing more than money-grubbing mercenaries," and the Commander replies that he has "standing arrangements with Zartan for just such emergencies."
3. Fans have noticed that the early miniseries all share one skeleton: a routine Joe mission, a Cobra sneak attack, Duke captured in the first chapter, a world-threatening gadget, and pieces or locations to chase across the map. Here the routine mission is escorting the laser core for the Joes' cannon, while the Pyramid of Darkness story that starts with "The Further Adventures of G.I. Joe" swaps in a shuttle launch.
4. The closing preview bills the story as "G.I. Joe: The Revenge of Cobra," but fan sites like JoeGuide file the run under the name of Destro's weapon, the Weather Dominator. The first four chapters aired on consecutive evenings, September 10 to 13, 1984, and JoeGuide notes the whole thing was repeated December 17 to 21.
5. Firefly's Flight Pod ("Firefly, strike!") may be modelled on a prototype of the toy, since the wiki points out it has four slim rocket engines where the finished toy has two fat ones. Firefly turns up again, wrapped as a mummy and demanding that nobody use his name, in [Eau De Cobra](/cartoons/1985/episodes/eau-de-cobra/).
6. Gung-Ho gets the best geography gag. After he shouts "Keep 'em bottled up in the bayou!", the reply is "Okay, but you better tell me what a bayou is first." The wiki credits Short-Fuze with the question, and it also keeps a tally of the episode's name-calling, including "rust breath" and "bumper face."
7. Some animation slips the wiki spotted: Cobra Commander's eyes flip from black to blue during his world broadcast and again when Destro's vine is strangling him, and Zartan's suit glows and hums like a lightsaber while the Dreadnoks capture Sharp.
8. There is no recap, so the story drops straight into the convoy ambush. The next chapter, [The Vines of Evil](/cartoons/1985/episodes/the-vines-of-evil/), spends its first minute retelling this one, and this episode's own preview promises that Flint, Roadblock and Mutt will struggle for their lives in the Pit of Chaos.