The Pit of Vipers

A Cobra desert fortress seems to attack Joe headquarters, but the Joes' assault is a simulation: the fortress is Watchdog, a new Defense Department computer that Colonel Sharp and its designer, Dr. Hamler, present as the Joes' commander. Watchdog sends the Flagg to sink the Cobra yacht Cerebus, then sends the Joes on a string of fruitless missions around the world, until Shipwreck is taken out by Cobra Eels near the Cerebus.

Shipwreck discovers that Dr. Hamler is Zartan, and that Destro built Watchdog to scatter the Joes while Cobra's Pit Viper drilling machine destroys their headquarters. Shipwreck shouts a warning over an open line, the Joes regain their communications, and Flint, Lady Jaye and Heavy Metal rally against the fortress. After Breaker proposes a plan, Watchdog and the Pit Viper are both destroyed, and Cobra Commander and Destro come to blows.

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

"We're supposed to take orders from a pile of silicon chips?"

"Sounds like the dog fed himself." -- Shipwreck

"Sediment, my left barnacle." -- Shipwreck

"It's a condo for garter snakes." -- Flint

"Watchdog needs its central processing unit examined." -- Lady Jaye

"Oh, hello, Scarlett. I must have gotten the wrong number. I thought I was calling a scrapyard." -- Cobra Commander

"Maybe we don't have to stop it. Maybe we don't even want to." -- Breaker

"The real Dr. Hamler, the impeccable one, died in 1978."

"And if the brass ever want to buy us another Watchdog, Colonel, make it a cocker spaniel."

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 in this episode gets to take an order from someone they respect. The Joes are told to obey a computer called Watchdog, which the Pentagon has installed as the team's new commander, and Cobra's soldiers are told to keep obeying a man in a mirrored helmet who will not listen to the engineer who built the weapon. Flint Dille's story and James M. Ward's script build the plot on that symmetry, and it is a good deal more fun than the title promises.

The cold open is the cleverest thing in it. Breaker snores at his console, wakes with an oath, and calls a code red; the Joes scramble against a desert fortress, a fight starts, and a computer voice announces that the simulation is terminated and the defence system disengaged. The Cobra army was a hologram, the first test under fire of a machine the Defense Department built, which is why the satellites never saw it: it had not been coded as hostile. The Joes are made fools of by a piece of equipment that is on their side, and the rest of the episode is spent finding out whose side it was really on. [1]

Watchdog is a pleasant villain because it never raises its voice. It locates the Cerebus and has the Flagg sink it, reports the wreck buried in sediment, and flags it as unauthorised when Shipwreck leaves his craft to look. [2] Then it sends Flint and Gung-Ho to the Everglades to seek and destroy a Cobra unit that proves to be a rusted F.A.N.G. in a swamp. The sarcasm all comes from the Joes. Sediment, my left barnacle; sounds like the dog fed himself; a condo for garter snakes; Watchdog needs its central processing unit examined. They never refuse an order, they obey it with a running commentary, and that is the joke of the episode as much as its flaw (we laughed more than we winced!).

Cobra has the mirror image of the problem. Destro designed the machine, Zartan wears a lab coat and a dead man's name, and Cobra Commander will not be told that switching the Joe communications back on is a mistake. "Never refuse me, Destro!" he shouts, and uses the open line to tell Scarlett that he must have the wrong number, since he thought he was calling a scrapyard. Shipwreck, kept in the room to watch the show, shouts down the line that Watchdog belongs to Cobra; the Commander calls him a fool, and Destro points out that the outburst gave the Joes their communications back.

The same quarrel finishes the episode. The Joes recover by routing around the machine. Breaker decides that they need not stop the Pit Viper and might not even want to, a plan that earns Scarlett's admiration and is never spelled out. Watchdog and the Pit Viper go up together, along with half of Joe headquarters. The last Cobra image is the Commander lashing out at his own engineer in front of a cracked monitor, and shouting mutiny when he is held back. The Joes lose their authority to a machine and win it back by ignoring it; Cobra loses its own by turning on the man who built the thing.

The cost is plausibility. A force that mocks its commanding computer aloud and still goes where it points, to a swamp, a snowfield and a sea floor, is asking a good deal of the audience. Colonel Sharp is allowed to say he was against the idea from the start only after the damage is done.

It is a satire in which the villains' best weapon is a purchase order, and the sting comes in the Joes' closing advice to the brass: if they ever buy another one, make it a cocker spaniel. The cold open is the cleverer joke, but the last line is the one that lands.

1 ^ Sharp's explanation is that the Cobra troops were holograms, but Flint later says they show up on radar and are real, and Destro admits at 16:10 that the fortress has been fortified with real troops as a precaution. The script quietly retires the hologram line.

2 ^ Watchdog calls Shipwreck CPO Delgoto, spelled that way on the caption track, at 7:34 and 7:53. It may be a mishearing; it is the only time his rank and surname are given.

1. This one is full of dog jokes. The Cobra weapon is the Pit Viper, close kin to a pit bull, the computer is Watchdog and a Joe complains it keeps "barking up all the wrong trees," the Cobra yacht is the Cerebus (a nod to Cerberus, the three-headed dog of the underworld, as JoeGuide reads it), and Flint closes with "if the brass ever want to buy us another Watchdog, Colonel, make it a cocker spaniel."
2. The master of disguise strikes again. Dr. Hamler, Watchdog's designer, is Zartan, and Flint tells Colonel Sharp that "the real Dr. Hamler, the impeccable one, died in 1978." Zartan had already played Dr. Hibbentrope in [The Funhouse](/cartoons/1985/episodes/the-funhouse/), and his loyalty is as ever for sale: "As long as they keep paying me."
3. JoeGuide's Star Trek reader points out that a computer that takes over command of the team is the plot of the original series episode "The Ultimate Computer," with its M-5 unit. The wiki agrees that the two stories line up.
4. Heavy Metal speaks in only this episode, according to the wiki, and he makes the most of it with a dig at a Cobra HISS: "Got any kids, Breaker? Watchdog found 'em a dandy sandbox."
5. Cobra got to the Pentagon by a new route. In [Synthoid Conspiracy, Part II](/cartoons/1985/episodes/synthoid-conspiracy-part-ii/) it had to replace generals with synthoid duplicates, but now it simply sells the Defense Department a computer, and Destro enjoys that the U.S. government "foots part of the bill."
6. Watchdog addresses Shipwreck by rank and surname, "CPO" and then his name, which the wiki lists as a rare case of a character being called that on screen. Shipwreck's answer to the report that the Cerebus is buried in sediment is "Sediment, my left barnacle."
7. The wiki catches Ace flying the Skystriker through the whole episode without his helmet and flight mask.
8. Breaker, asleep at his console, wakes with "Holyoke, Massachusetts!" before calling a code red.
9. The episode aired on November 27, 1985, right after [The Traitor, Part 2](/cartoons/1985/episodes/the-traitor-part-2/). The two parts of that story carry production numbers 600-30 and 600-46, sixteen slots apart, so they were far from back-to-back in the making.