There's No Place Like Springfield, Part 2

After a recap of part one, Shipwreck is back in a town he is told is his home, tormented by nightmares and a family he cannot remember. His wife Mara and daughter Althea get him into a hospital, where Doc and the Crimson Twins try to pull Professor Mulaney's secret out of his head. Cadet Deming runs the chamber, the Twins order full power, and Cobra Commander learns that the code word is known only to Lady Jaye.

Shipwreck sees his gray beard wash out, works out that the town, the hospital and Mara are fakes, and escapes with Polly. They find that Springfield is Temple Alpha, an island base where synthoids are grown from pseudoplasm, and Shipwreck finds the formula and strikes a match. The Flagg's SkyStrikers arrive, Mara and Althea prove to be synthoids, and Shipwreck rejoins the Joes.

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

"Ah, ah, ah. Don't touch that dial." -- The Crimson Twins

"Cadet Deming, increase power to factor 7." -- The Crimson Twins

"Hardly, Commander. All we lack is the code word." -- The Crimson Twins

"The computer is reciting the entire contents of the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary." -- The Crimson Twins

"What in the name of Nimitz? It's black again." -- Shipwreck

"It's all a fakeroo." -- Shipwreck

"The sign says, "Car wash," but if you ask me, it's a brainwash." -- Shipwreck

"Son of a bilge rat. Springfield is Temple Alpha. We're on an island. See?" -- Shipwreck

"Nah. Nothing important. Just a dream or two." -- Shipwreck

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 cleverest weapon in this episode is not the chamber with the red lasers. It is Shipwreck's own biography. The interrogation opens by reciting his life back to him: he grew up in Chula Vista, in the shadow of the San Diego navy yards, and joined the Navy at sixteen after lying about his age. He saw river pirates in Southeast Asia and smugglers off Florida, and he met Professor Mulaney on a tiny island in the South Pacific. Each detail is one more thing the man on the table can agree to. Cobra's trap holds because it is built from a man's real life, and the cruelty of Steve Gerber's script is that what it builds with that life is a family.

This is the spine of the episode, and it lifts what could have been a conventional brainwashing story. After a recap that runs until the title card [1], Shipwreck screams in a sunlit field outside a house, a wife and small daughter rushing to him. Then the Crimson Twins take the story over, finishing one another's sentences with the unnerving politeness of a pair of undertakers. "Cadet Deming, increase power to factor 7." "Cadet Deming, full power." When the doctor objects that full power could drive Cadet Deming mad and damage the patient, the Twins tell him he has developed opinions of his own, declare him defective, and leave a melted purple figure to be scooped up for reconstitution [2]. Nothing else in the episode is as cold.

The standout scene is the one that turns the Twins' competence into a joke. Having failed to extract the code word, they set the computer to recite the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary, on the theory that the word must be in there somewhere. It begins with aerostat, aerostatics, aerothermodynamics, aerugo, aery, and the reply is a flat "Why, we'll have the answer in six or seven years." It is the best dry comedy in the episode: the villains have a first-class laboratory and no way to get what they want out of it.

What breaks the hoax is a sink. Shipwreck rubs his beard with wet fingers, the gray runs off, and what he says is "What in the name of Nimitz? It's black again." From there the episode lets him think aloud while Polly squawks "You're warm," then "You're hotter," as he pieces together that the hospital, the town and Mara are all a "fakeroo". It is a pleasure to watch him be the one who works it out. His gag on the way to the lab is better: the sign says car wash, "but if you ask me, it's a brainwash."

The weakness is the code word. The interrogation depends on a phrase known only to Lady Jaye, and then Polly squawks "Code word frogs in winter" and the secret pours out of Shipwreck on cue, with no explanation in this half of how a parrot came to know it. The Cobra defeat that follows is just as brisk: a match over a drain, a bluff that turns out not to be one, and then a cut to the carrier while the leaders are still in the lab. A twenty-two minute second part has to finish somewhere, but the resolution takes a good deal of tension out of machinery that has been so carefully scary.

What remains is the quiet ending. A burning house, a rifle in Mara's hands and a puddle of goo explain what the family was, and Shipwreck's "Synthoids? They were synthoids!" is him understanding it. Then, back among the Joes, someone asks whether there was anything important in that house. "Nah. Nothing important. Just a dream or two." After so much engineered feeling, it is the one answer in the story that costs its speaker something, and he decides not to say so.

1 ^ The recap runs from about 1:06 to 3:31, and the title card at 3:36 spells the title as "There's No Place Like Spring Field Part 2," which is how it appears on screen.

2 ^ Mara calls Shipwreck Hector, and the nurse and the doctor call him Mr. Delgado, so Cobra has given him a full alias for the hoax.

1. Shipwreck's wife here shares a name with the blue-skinned woman of [Memories of Mara](/cartoons/1985/episodes/memories-of-mara/). The Joe wiki says she "technically" reappears, and TV Tropes calls her a restored Mara. In the episode she and Althea are exposed as synthoids, and a late frame shows Mara holding a rifle beside a puddle of goo.
2. The synthoids are an upgrade on the ones from [Synthoid Conspiracy, Part II](/cartoons/1985/episodes/synthoid-conspiracy-part-ii/), where a neutralizer dissolved the fake Duke. A voice in the Cobra lab explains that a meltdown "formerly meant destruction for the synthoid" but now the organism "can be reconstituted," and that the material is called pseudoplasm.
3. The name Springfield gives Shipwreck, Hector, is not made up: a computer screen in [Captives of Cobra, Part I](/cartoons/1985/episodes/captives-of-cobra-part-i/) gives his real name as Hector X. Delgado. The interrogation here recites his bio, from Chula Vista in the shadow of the San Diego navy yards to joining the Navy at 17, which he corrects to 16 because he lied about his age.
4. The giveaway that no time has passed is a beard. Shipwreck's graying whiskers wash out in a hospital sink and come up black again, which sets him thinking that Lady Jaye may be alive too and that the town is a fake.
5. Cobra's code-word hunt is played for laughs: the computer recites the Oxford English Dictionary from "aerostat" onward, and a Cobra voice remarks they will have the answer "in six or seven years." The word turns out to be "frogs in winter," which Polly supplies.
6. JoeGuide lists the "Hi, Daddy" scene among four edits in the USA Network print, along with the elevator ride, the interrogation and a Polly quip. All four scenes are present in the copy used for this guide, including Mara welcoming Shipwreck "home, to stay."
7. JoeGuide notes that Cobra Commander wears his hood, then his dome helmet, then his hood again within a single stretch of scenes. The frames show it: he is helmeted at his console and hooded moments later.
8. As episode 65 this is the last entry on the first-season list, broadcast the day after part 1 (December 12 to 13, 1985). Shipwreck's last line is "Just a dream or two." The JoeGuide reviewer wishes the upbeat music had given way to a final shot of him walking alone toward the moon, mirroring the end of Memories of Mara.