Memories of Mara

Aboard the USS Trogon, Duke and Lady Jaye are hunting for the missing submarine USS Nerka when they find a Cobra sub instead, commanded by Destro with Cobra Commander and the Crimson Twins. Shipwreck dives overboard after a drowning woman and discovers that she has blue skin and gills. She is Mara, an escaped Cobra experiment who was meant to be the first of a squadron of amphibious commandos, and Cobra wants her back.

Doc rigs an air helmet so that she can walk on land, and Shipwreck takes her to the island of Conatonga, where they fall for each other and she deceives Buzzer long enough to get away. She then guides the Joes into Cobra's undersea base, frees Commander Jordan and the Nerka crew, while Destro's sub escapes. The change cannot be reversed, and she chooses to stay in the sea.

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

"All hands to battle stations." -- Captain Hunt

"That, Duke, is putting it mildly." -- Lady Jaye

"Polly want to see some action." -- Shipwreck

"I was to be the first of a squadron of amphibious commandos..." -- Mara

"There are no friends in Cobra, Buzzer, only convenient alliances." -- Mara

"I learned that nobody was nice to you, except for their own reasons." -- Mara

"I am a moron." -- Shipwreck

"I belong to the sea." -- Mara

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.

Mara has one rule of life, and she states it on a beach: nobody was ever nice to her except for their own reasons. The episode is a test of that sentence, and Shipwreck fails it in the most honest way he can: he admits that he wants something too.

Sharman Di Vono opens at battle stations, with the Trogon searching for the missing Nerka and finding a Cobra submarine where the Nerka should be. Duke asks Lady Jaye whether this is not the submarine they were looking for, and she tells him that is putting it mildly. Then comes the first good beat. Shipwreck snaps at his parrot, spots a woman drowning in the water and goes over the side himself, and only then does Polly start squawking that there is a man overboard! The parrot is also how the bridge works out who is in the water [1]. Back on the deck, a medic works through standard rescue procedure while she suffocates, and it is Shipwreck, who ignores the book, who realises she has gills and drags her back into the sea.

Cobra's interest in Mara is the same thing she is talking about. Cobra Commander will not leave without the girl, because in Joe hands she might reveal where the undersea laboratory is; Destro's side talks of the Nerka's weapons secrets as worth billions, and the twins report the damage in unison [2].

Her own account is the strongest writing in the episode. She was to be the first of a squadron of amphibious commandos, the doctors promised to reverse the change and lied, and she escaped to look for help. The cruelty in it is that the change left her stranded between two worlds. She can stay on land only a few minutes, so a love story is being built around a person who cannot leave the one place she needs. When Buzzer turns up on Conatonga and calls her a deserter, her reply is the episode's best line of dialogue, that there are no friends in Cobra, only convenient alliances. She then plays up her weakness to draw him in, and Shipwreck puts him on the sand.

The beach is where the episode turns. There, Shipwreck says she is just not the type to work for Cobra, and she asks how he knows, then tells him what her neighbourhood taught her: everybody wants something, and Cobra just wanted more than they let on. Shipwreck calls himself a moron. She asks whether the secret base is what he wants, and he says yes, he would not mind getting the Nerka back and saving her crew, and then he offers her an out. She kisses him and remarks that she is attracted to morons.

The ending refuses the easy turn. Mara admits she thinks she knew all along that the change was irreversible, and in the last scene she tells Shipwreck not to say it, that Conatonga is a beautiful place, and that she belongs to the sea. He says goodbye. A cartoon with a lot of toys to sell lets its romance end in a loss.

The weakness is the rescue that was supposed to justify the story. The Nerka and her crew are a macguffin. Destro asks Commander Jordan for an access code, Jordan says never, and the crew are freed in a hurry while Mara carries a rock to a wall panel and the Joes split up in the corridors. Jordan's explanation afterwards, that a blue-skinned woman helped them, is delivered as a report, so the rescue the plot was built around is the least dramatised thing in the half hour. The likely reason is that the script has spent its time on the pair on the island.

We would call it a small, odd, rather tender episode, funny until it needs not to be.

1 ^ Polly's "man overboard" cries run at 2:21, 2:23, 2:41 and 3:31; the last is followed at 3:36 by the line "Duke, it must be Shipwreck," which the captions do not attribute to a speaker.

2 ^ From 6:22 to 6:27 the captions run in paired fragments with a repeat of "That's the bottom line!", which fits the two speaking in unison.

1. Mara comes back, in a way. The Joe wiki points out that Shipwreck's wife in [There's No Place Like Springfield, Part 2](/cartoons/1985/episodes/theres-no-place-like-springfield-part-2/) is also named Mara, and TV Tropes lists the Springfield Mara as a continuity nod to this one. In that episode she and their daughter turn out to be synthoids.
2. The fairy-tale jokes pile up. Someone asks, "How do you rescue a mermaid?", a Joe tells Shipwreck to "kiss the princess again, swabbie" because "she's still a frog," Buzzer calls her "frog princess," and Shipwreck's own punchline is that he has a thing for mermaids.
3. Cobra Eels are the frogmen who snatch Mara from the water. They come back in [The Pit of Vipers](/cartoons/1985/episodes/the-pit-of-vipers/), where a Joe greets them with "Cobra Eels, huh?", and they appear in no other episode of the season. The Joe wiki adds that Cobra later perfected genetically modified undersea soldiers as the Hydro-Vipers.
4. Polly's repeated shouts of "Man overboard!" come before anyone on the Joe side identifies who is in the water, and soon a voice says, "Duke, it must be Shipwreck."
5. Fans on the Joe wiki note that the ships are named for animals: the U.S.S. Nerka after a kind of salmon and the U.S.S. Trogon after a bird.
6. The Joe wiki also hears a goof near the end: Mara's labored breathing from the previous scene carries over onto the soundtrack when the Nerka sailor reports the Cobra sub escaping.
7. Fans on the Joe wiki trace the sound effect of the Cobra Firebats in flight to the TIE fighter noise from Star Wars.
8. Tomax and Xamot, who often speak in unison, say "That's the bottom line!" at the same instant when the sub is falling apart. A JoeGuide reviewer likens it to a pro wrestler's catchphrase.