The Traitor, Part 2

Dusty, apparently a traitor, is welcomed into the Cobra Temple and made to prove himself in the Arena of Death against Lieutenant Claymore, with rocket nunchakus and flooding piranha. Cobra Commander uses Dusty's knowledge of the Joes' attack formation to ambush them on their way to a chemical plant and seizes the chemicals for his mind-control gas. The Joes are trapped, and Cobra Commander orders Dusty to gas them personally. Instead the gas turns on Cobra, Dusty reveals that his defection was Duke's plan to feed Cobra an unstable armor treatment, and a recovering Duke reinstates him.

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

"I guess I got nowhere else to go." -- Dusty

"If you say, "walk a mile in his moccasins," I swear I'll gag." -- Shipwreck

"Do I detect a vestige of mercy?" -- Cobra Commander

"We can always use extra help on K.P." -- Cobra Commander

"As Stalin said, "Trust no one, not even yourself."" -- Cobra Commander

"It's called a trap, Shipwreck." -- Dusty

"Aw, Flint, you got to trust me." -- Dusty

"You guessed it, Chrome Dome." -- Dusty

"We'll do lunch!" -- Tomax

"I hereby reinstate Specialist Dusty Rudat to full rank and privileges in the G.I. Joe force." -- 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 episode that hands Cobra Commander the line "Trust no one, not even yourself" is also the one that rests on a single act of trust. It works only because nobody else was allowed to share it.

For most of The Traitor, Part 2 the Joes are cruel to Dusty, and the cruelty is meant. The cold open is a tabloid news programme, Hector Ramirez on "Twenty Questions" asking whether one of America's elite team is a traitor and floating his mother's medical bills as the motive, until someone at her door tells him to vamoose. It is a recap, and a smart one, since it refreshes Part 1 through the medium most likely to convict a man on rumour. [1] At the Joe base Shipwreck announces that he wants to break the traitor's neck, and when somebody begins to plead that the boy's mother is sick he cuts in with a threat to gag if anybody says "walk a mile in his moccasins." Nobody winks at the audience; the Joes believe what they have been told.

Cobra Commander, for his part, is not a fool. He tests Dusty again and again: in the Arena of Death, where Dusty fights Lieutenant Claymore with rocket nunchakus in a floor flooded with man-eating piranha; by leaving him behind when Cobra goes to raid the chemical plant [2] ("Don't you trust me anymore?" "As Stalin said, 'Trust no one, not even yourself.'"); and finally by making him gas the Joes with his own hand. His paranoia is justified, and every test he sets is one Dusty can pass. The fight in the arena is the standout, because Dusty is plainly in trouble in it, the crowd cheers, and Claymore, who demanded the fight, ends up sweeping a floor beside the Crimson twins.

The gas panel is the payoff. The red button sits under Dusty's hand, Cobra Commander stands beside him, the Joes are lined up in the arena below, and the animators give Dusty a look that is part dread and part plan. When the vents open there is coughing, the troopers double over, and the accusation that comes back is that he was a triple agent all along, which is one agent too many. Dusty's answer is "You guessed it, Chrome Dome."

The one real weakness is the price of the plan. To sell the betrayal Dusty gives Cobra the Joes' attack formation. The Joes then spend the middle of the hour driving into booby traps and a pit, with no protection beyond a trick that neither they nor the audience knew was running. Duke's explanation at the end is warm and efficient: the chemists had told the Joes their armor treatment was unstable, Dusty came to him when Cobra agents approached, and they "cooked up the whole traitor routine." What it does not account for is that the bill was paid in other people's near-deaths, and that its author could not warn them because a Cobra bomb had put him in a coma. A plan whose only safeguard is that nobody is told has a single point of failure, and the person who held it was lying in a hospital bed. The reveal works in spite of this, not because of it.

What carries the ending is the trust scene. The turn comes when Dusty says "Aw, Flint, you got to trust me," Flint says he doesn't know, and a Joe answers, "He's got a point, Flint." Nobody is persuaded by argument; they go because the alternative is Cobra's guards. Duke's last act, an order reinstating Specialist Dusty Rudat to full rank and privileges, is the right way to close a story about faith. The man who trusted Dusty from the start is the one who says so, and Mrs. Rudat gets her son back.

Dusty gets his name back, and after all that cruelty we cheer along with the base!

1 ^ Part 2 runs straight from the Twenty Questions segment into the Cobra Temple, with no separate title card; the writer credit, Buzz Dixon, comes from published episode listings.

2 ^ Cobra Commander names the target of the raid as "Leary Chemicals" at 6:04, but Flint calls it Owlsley Chemical at 9:42 and the plant on screen at 11:44 is the Owlsley plant. Nothing in the dialogue says whether these are two plants or one. The attribution of the Stalin line is the Commander's own; we have not checked it.

1. The recap is delivered as a TV news segment: Hector Ramirez, the host from [Twenty Questions](/cartoons/1985/episodes/twenty-questions/), wonders aloud what "Rudat" has told Cobra. A fan guide notes that his hair is colored gray here instead of black. It makes a change from the narrated recap in [Worlds Without End, Part II](/cartoons/1985/episodes/worlds-without-end-part-ii/).
2. The recap gives out real names. Dusty is Specialist-4 Ronald W. "Dusty" Rudat, and Duke is Conrad "Duke" Hauser, the same Conrad S. Hauser whose file turns up in [Worlds Without End, Part I](/cartoons/1985/episodes/worlds-without-end-part-i/).
3. The title of Cobra's target, Leary Chemicals, is read by one fan guide as a wink at Timothy Leary, the 1960s dropout and LSD advocate. A second plant in the story is called Owlsley Chemical, and Flint says it makes the last ingredient for Cobra's mind-control gas.
4. Cobra Commander tells Dusty "As Stalin said, 'Trust no one, not even yourself.'" The fan guide notes this predates The X-Files' catchphrase by years.
5. Dusty's fight with Lieutenant Claymore in the Arena of Death uses rocket nunchakus, which the Commander calls "a cute little toy one of our weapons engineers thought up." The ending turns on Duke's plan: he knew the armor treatment was unstable and corroded whatever it protected, and the chemicals Cobra needed could also make a formula that neutralizes it.
6. Tomax gets the best exit line of the episode, shouting "We'll do lunch!" as the Crimson Twins leave Cobra Commander behind. They are still the businessmen of Extensive Enterprises from Part 1, and they take on the Commander as a debtor in [Cold Slither](/cartoons/1985/episodes/cold-slither/). The fan guide also notes Tomax's costume should be dark blue and comes out white.
7. When the armor's weakness comes up, a Joe remembers "intense heat... fire," Blowtorch answers "Can do, Flint!" and the incendiaries send Cobra into retreat. A fan guide notes that Gung-Ho, Spirit, Stalker, Ace and several others have no speaking lines in this chapter.
8. Part 1 aired on Monday, Nov 25, after a ten-day gap in the broadcast list from [Memories of Mara](/cartoons/1985/episodes/memories-of-mara/) on Nov 15. Part 2 followed the next day, closing the story just before [The Pit of Vipers](/cartoons/1985/episodes/the-pit-of-vipers/) on Nov 27. See [The Traitor, Part 1](/cartoons/1985/episodes/the-traitor-part-1/) for how the plot begins.