Worlds Without End, Part I

Zartan steals the blueprints and a matter transmuter for Cobra, and the Joes chase him through the forest while Steeler and another Joe grumble about the job. The Joes escort the researcher Dr. Renault, and General Wagstaff in a disguised mobile lab, but Cobra seizes the train. During a fight on a trestle, the transmuter explodes.

The Joes wake in a ruined, altered landscape with a dead radio. Riding off on motorcycles from a shop where a retina scanner checks every customer, they learn that G.I. Joe was defeated and went underground. The old headquarters is closed by order of Cobra Commander, and the duty roster lists almost every Joe as missing in action. Dreadnoks work as police, Cobra's face is on the memorials, and the date on a newspaper matches the day they left. Lady Jaye concludes that the blast opened a gateway into a parallel world, just as Cobra Rattlers close in.

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'm telling you, Lady Jaye, being a G.I. Joe is ruining my life." -- Steeler

"Nothing ever changes. Cobra hits us, we hit them, over and over."

"If the battle's never gonna be won by either side, why bother fighting it?"

"Transaction approved. Subject's retinal scan matches no known dissident, subversive, or enemy of state on file. Have a nice day." -- A Cobra retinal scanner

"This money ain't no good! It's U.S. dollars, absolutely worthless!" -- A shopkeeper

"Permanently closed by order of Cobra Commander." -- Read from a plaque outside the old headquarters

"I guess law enforcement ain't what it used to be."

"I don't even think we're on the Earth we know." -- Lady Jaye

"It blasted open a gateway into a parallel world and hurled us into it." -- Lady Jaye

"Mistress, it's him, the one you called Steeler. I'm positive."

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.

Somebody has to ask what difference any of it makes, and Martin Pasko hands the question to a Joe who has had a bad day. In the hovercraft heading for the rendezvous, a soldier announces he is quitting G.I. Joe: "Nothing ever changes. Cobra hits us, we hit them, over and over." A colleague half agrees, observing that sometimes there seems to be "nary an end in sight," and the first man pushes on: "If the battle's never gonna be won by either side, why bother fighting it?" Worlds Without End, Part I spends the rest of its running time arranging for the team to find out.

The spine of the episode is set up with care. Steeler gets the first complaint, in the forest, telling Lady Jaye that being a Joe is ruining his life: no time for anything else, no girlfriend since she tired of worrying about him. It is a funny, grouchy speech, and it pays off. The man who spent the first act moaning about the cost of the job is the one who hides his face when Clutch reads out the roster of the missing.

The alternate world is built from small, mean details, and we think that is the right way to do it. The Joes buy motorcycles at a country shop, where a retina scanner on a robot arm checks each customer and announces, "Transaction approved. Subject's retinal scan matches no known dissident, subversive, or enemy of state on file. Have a nice day." The old couple are friendly, the wife willing to tell the strangers about the resistance and the husband telling her she talks too much. Then the shopkeeper declares their money worthless as soon as they turn to leave. The Dreadnoks are the police now, and a Joe's aside that "law enforcement ain't what it used to be" is the right size of joke for the horror it sits next to. Pasko does not tell us the world has been conquered; he shows us a shop where nobody can buy a motorcycle without being scanned.

The Joes' method of finding out is a pleasure in its own right. Grunt guesses that they were out for years, and at the sealed headquarters someone concludes that they did a Rip Van Winkle. The date on a newspaper later knocks that down, and Lady Jaye is left with the idea that "it blasted open a gateway into a parallel world and hurled us into it" [1]. Clutch's trick of tapping a weather satellite to show the Lincoln Memorial turned into a Cobra Commander memorial is a quick way to show how far things have gone. It is a weaker one than the shop, since it tells us the world has changed from the safety of a monitor.

The episode's real weakness is a loose thread. Dr. Renault and General Wagstaff are kidnapped from the train, a Joe is sent back to look for them, and then the transmuter goes off and they are never mentioned again in this half. Part II may pick them up, but a kidnapping is a strange thing to abandon when there is time to spare for a retina-scan shop and a long roster scene. The Zartan chase at the top is also a long way from the heart of things, a competent run of aircraft and rockets that is mostly motion.

What redeems both is the roster. Clutch reads the names off the dusty computer, real names attached, "Hauser, Conrad S. Code name: Duke," and the quiet is worth more than anything in the action around it [2]. The last beat is a hook of the right kind: a voice calls for "Mistress," says "it's him, the one you called Steeler," and is answered with "Excellent." Somebody in this world already knows one of our Joes by name. The Cobra Rattlers on an intercept course are the cliffhanger the episode ends on, but the better one is that voice!

1 ^ The Rip Van Winkle passage runs from 13:10 to 14:00; the newspaper date that settles it is spotted at 19:41.

2 ^ The roster count does not close: the line before it says that of the six remaining Joes three were lost, and Clutch then reads four names (Blowtorch, Duke, Bazooka, Breaker). There is no subtitle line between 15:47 and 16:11, so a name or a number may have dropped out of the caption track.

1. A continuity callback tips off the Joes that something is off. When a shopkeeper lists the government's weapons tests as "everything from new strains of bacteria to the Weather Dominator," a Joe starts to repeat the name and trails off, and later Grunt reminds the others that "Uncle Sam doesn't have a Weather Dominator, remember? That's one of Destro's inventions." That gadget drove [The Vines of Evil](/cartoons/1985/episodes/the-vines-of-evil/) and [Battle on the Roof of the World](/cartoons/1985/episodes/battle-on-the-roof-of-the-world/).
2. Clutch reads a casualty list off the abandoned headquarters computer: Hanrahan, Timothy P., code name Blowtorch; Hauser, Conrad S., code name Duke; Katzenbogen, David L., code name Bazooka; Kibbey, Albert L., code name Breaker. Those are the real names behind the code names, and Blowtorch and Duke both appear alive in [The Vines of Evil](/cartoons/1985/episodes/the-vines-of-evil/).
3. The Joe Guide notes that the alien-weapon sound effects were lifted from the 1950s Paramount film The War of the Worlds.
4. Steeler grumbles that "being a G.I. Joe is ruining my life" and blames the job for his lack of a girlfriend, while another Joe announces he is quitting because "nothing ever changes." Both complaints come before the transmuter goes off.
5. The alternate Washington is full of visual jokes. Dreadnoks work as the police ("The Dreadnoks have become cops?" asks one Joe), Buzzer yells "The bleeders!", the Lincoln Memorial has become a Cobra Commander memorial, and a banner reads "Cobra Leadership Or Else." A newspaper headline promises the Commander's State of the Empire address tonight.
6. The Joes decide they have slept through the fall of G.I. Joe, and one of them says, "Somehow we did a Rip Van Winkle." The date on a Cobra newspaper then convinces them that no time has passed, and Lady Jaye concludes the transmuter "blasted open a gateway into a parallel world."
7. The episode ends with the card "To be continued on tomorrow's G.I. Joe." Per the Joe Guide, it was released on Kid Rhino VHS volume one together with Part II, and the USA Network print opens with a Sgt. Slaughter introduction that was not part of the original.