The Germ

A Cobra Crimson Guard raids a hospital lab and steals a vial of bacteria "X" and a jar of experimental growth serum and crashes in a canyon while fleeing his own side. The vials break and a purple mass starts rolling downstate, swallowing everything in its path. The Joes fire missiles that do nothing, Ace tries insecticide from a crop duster and is gassed, and Flint traces the trail to a wrecked Cobra base.

Airtight flies a small plane into the germ with an explosive charge. He survives, but the blast only makes the germ divide, and one half heads for New York. A doctor who helped create the bacteria explains it is a supergerm that antibiotics strengthen. The Joes find the answer in apple seeds, steering the germ into orchards to be poisoned. The last stand is at the water, with everyone diving in and a worm left where the germ had been.

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

"Now it is just a germ, but soon it will be a conqueror of worlds." -- Destro

"No sweat, Colonel. There ain't a slimer made that we can't take out."

"He's trying to snuff the blob with insecticide." -- Dusty

"What you refer to so crudely as a blob is, in fact, a bacterium."

"I can't fly. In fact, I can hardly steer. It's like trying to drive a car in jello across a minefield." -- Airtight

"It was created as a result of the misuse of antibiotics. It's a supergerm." -- The doctor

"What we need is a candy coating."

"What you need is a transfer."

"I'm really beginning to hate this germ."

"I guess that germ found Cobra as hard to swallow as we do."

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.

Every clever idea in this episode makes the problem worse, which gives it a better structure than a monster-of-the-week story usually gets.

Roger Slifer starts with Cobra at its most ordinary: a Crimson Guard steals a vial from a lab, Destro turns up and dismisses him, and the Guard dutifully radios his own commanders that Destro has departed in anger. The commanders want the bacteria brought to Extensive Enterprises labs, where the tests can be done at half the cost. The theft is petty, the jurisdiction squabble is petty, and a jar of growth serum is grabbed on the way out because it might be useful too. Nothing that happens afterwards is anybody's grand plan. It is a small act of greed with a large purple consequence.

The thing the story is actually about is that every Joe solution turns out to be the same mistake repeated with better equipment. The missiles are duds. Ace's insecticide fails and nearly kills him; Dusty's summary, that he is trying to snuff the blob with insecticide, is the sort of line that deflates a heroic gesture the moment it is made. Airtight's antibiotic-laden charge, the biggest hypodermic in the world as the briefing calls it, causes mitosis, and the doctor's explanation that the germ was created through the misuse of antibiotics makes the earlier failures look like a pattern. The Joes keep attacking the thing with the logic that made it.

The best scene is inside the germ. Airtight, with his radio switched off on Ace, is flying through a purple cell wall in a plane that handles, as he puts it, like trying to drive a car in jello across a minefield. Cobra missiles are inside the germ with him, corrosive enzymes are devouring the lab, and the way out is to share the cockpit with a Crimson Guard: let Airtight pilot the ship, or both die. It is a tidy, absurd bit of plotting, and we love Airtight's dry reaction to Ace's chatter [1].

The solution arrives as a joke. Someone says what the germ needs is a candy coating, someone else says what that person needs is a transfer, and then the idea turns out to be right. Apple seeds hold a small dose of poison that is harmless to anyone who eats a few, and an orchard's worth is a different matter. The sequence in which Ace and Dusty herd a germ that eats whatever is in front of it toward the trees, and the second pass that follows when the dose is not big enough, is a neat piece of improvised strategy. It lands as a fair payoff: the solution grows out of the problem, a bacterium that cannot tell what it is eating.

The weakness is the ending. After a big build-up to the second germ's march on New York, the last stretch is a convoy, a bridge-layer, an apple-launching tank and a wave of water, and the defeat itself passes in a cut. The dialogue never says what finished the thing off, and the closing gag about a worm from the germ arrives before we have been told [2].

Even so, it is a lively half hour with a real idea in it.

1 ^ The cockpit scene is intercut with a surface briefing at 11:27 to 12:01 in which the doctor, who says he helped create the bacteria, appears speaking to Flint.

2 ^ The final shots at 20:48 to 21:29 show a purple wall of the mass, then water, then the Joes treading water in front of a city skyline; no line of dialogue explains the kill.

1. The wrist-screen scene gives a look at the Crimson Guard Commanders, who finish each other's sentences ("Bring the bacteria here..." "At once") and offer to run the tests in "Extensive Enterprises labs", "and at half the cost." Extensive Enterprises had already turned up in [Money to Burn](/cartoons/1985/episodes/money-to-burn/) and [Red Rocket's Glare](/cartoons/1985/episodes/red-rockets-glare/).
2. Destro orders the Crimson Guard trooper out, and the trooper replies that his orders are to "remain, observe, and report" to the Commanders. "I do not answer to them," Destro snaps, and the trooper says his own orders come from Cobra Commander himself, "in triplicate." The Joe wiki calls this the first episode to show the Guard mixing with regular Cobra troops, who regard them as snobs.
3. The germ has a glowing, pulsing nucleus and divides by mitosis, as the doctor explains. The Joe wiki points out that real bacteria have no nucleus. Airtight tells Ace that "germs don't have nerves," which is part of his case for going inside it.
4. The big weapon against the germ turns out to be apple seeds. The doctor explains they contain "a tiny amount of poison," harmless in small doses but deadly in an orchard-sized one. The Joe wiki confirms that apple seeds do contain cyanogenic compounds, though a person would need to eat a very large amount to be harmed.
5. The Joes call the germ "the blob" almost from the start. Joe Guide sees a homage to the movie The Blob and compares the story to the Star Trek episode "The Immunity Syndrome," whose giant space amoeba destroys everything in its path.
6. When Shipwreck remarks that it is "kind of romantic out here", the reply is a quick, firm brush-off, and the Joe wiki says the line is aimed at Cover Girl. Joe Guide says this scene was trimmed in the USA Network edit.
7. It is a gloriously silly climax: the Joes load up apple crates and bombard the germ, and one calls it "a good, old-fashioned, high-tech food fight."
8. The doctor who explains the germ is never named, a point the wiki notes, and his explanation is blunt: the supergerm "was created as a result of the misuse of antibiotics."