GI Joe, A Real American Hero S1E1-5: "The Pyramid of Darkness" (continued)

Episode 4 continues the trend of comically pulp-y sounding titles, being named "Chaos in the Sea of Lost Souls." I have no idea where the sea of lost souls is supposed to be, but I'll bet it has really, really nasty leopard seals in it.

And what do you know, we open on Stalker and the other guy with the moustache - Bazooka! Right, he's called Bazooka - still fighting off the seals while Cobra and their samurai allies watch and cackle from the shore. The pair of Joes are actually losing to the seals, and it's beautiful. Their lives are saved at the last moment by the arrival of this guy:

This is Quick-Kick, a Japanese American stuntman who was here in Antarctica filming an ice cream commercial only for the company to screw him out of his pay and leave him stranded on the frozen shoreline, where he's been wandering ever since. He didn't bring a shirt to his Antarctic videoshoot, but he did bring a bunch of ninja throwing stars, which he uses to singlehandedly drive off the band of Cobra fighters and rescue the pair of Joes. Also, he goes by the callsign "Quick-Kick" even though he's not military.

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This is my next RPG character. No ifs ands or buts.

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The Joes and their new friend aren't able to stop the main group of Cobra troops from activating the nearby cube, but they are able to sneak back to their position and hitch a ride on the underside of a tank. Hopefully going somewhere where they can do some damage.

Quick-Kick shares some leftover ice cream bars with the Joes and entertains them with advertising jingles as they cling on for dear life.

Also, the show somehow - I don't know how the hell they did this in 1983, but somehow they actually got away with it - managed to make Quick-Kick gay. One of his first lines of dialogue is comparing the Joes' physical attractiveness unfavorably with that of the last movie star he had to do an iceburg-related stunt with. I'd have dismissed it as just a random barb, but then when they're riding under the tank he follows it up by calling them a bunch of pet names as well, and it definitely seems like the creators are doing everything they can to say it without saying it.

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Amend that. This guy is going to be my next three or four RPG characters.

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The main body of episode four is taken up by a bit of drama-cum-power-struggle within Cobra's leadership. During the altercation with the clay golems and skeleton jedis in China, the GI Joe team led by Roadblock was able to capture one of the Twins Crimson and bring him to their aircraft carrier. And, apparently, the twins' psychic link lets them locate each other from across the world, but only if one of them takes a beating that the other one can really feel. So, the captive makes a doomed escape attempt that results in the Joes having to forcibly subdue him again, surreptitiously giving away his position and theirs to his brother back at Cobra HQ. This leads to a conflict between the twins and the rest of Cobra's leaders, over whether they can risk drawing forces away from the cube sites to mount a rescue. Let alone whether they can afford to delay the Pyramid of Darkness' activation long enough to let the brothers get away.

Oh hey, it's the Baroness! She's around in this version after all. Hi Baroness!​

The remaining Twin Crimson twists their arm by reminding them how much money he and his brother fronted for this whole plot. Apparently the Twins Crimson are like, megacorp execs, and represent a major source of Cobra funding as well as being elite field agents.

So, Cobra Commander lets him take some soldiers and go rescue his brother. And then cackles about how he's going to turn on the Pyramid ASAP, leave the two of them stranded in a technology-less world in the midst of the enemy, and cut them out of the world domination bounty. Destro and Baroness cackle too, mostly because this means their own shares of Earth will be bigger now.

The joke ultimately ends up being on them, though. You see, after sneaking aboard the aircraft character and rescuing the other Twin Crimson with the use of some poison gas-spitting butterflies, the twins spring their own plot. They not only fully expected the rest of Cobra's leaders to betray them at the first opportunity, but had already planted their own betrayal plot from the very beginning.

While they're escaping the carrier (once again, the Joes and their navy allies get *completely clowned on* by the bad guys and the rescue goes off without a hitch), the last cube is placed on the ocean floor in the ship graveyard known as the Sea of Lost Souls, and the anti-tech field goes up.

Apparently the pyramid doesn't just shut down electricity, but also diesel engines. Somehow. Ships, planes, helicopters, they all fall out of the sky except in those regions that Cobra Commander specifically decides to exclude. Cobra is extracting their men from effected regions via inflatable rafts and Viking longships.

Destro and Baroness share a romantic moment while extracting the troops from the Sea of Lost Souls site. They're dating apparently. They seem to really love each other too, it's kinda sweet.

Too bad the Baroness' personality isn't as fun as the comic version's, though. And she has this incredibly fake Russian accent that doesn't do much for me. Ah well, at least she and her cyborg bf are cute together.

But here's where things get turned around on Cobra! After escaping the aircraft carrier via inflatable raft, the twins shoot a flare gun into the air. The signal flare is apparently visible from the space station way up in orbit. And seeing the flare alerts their own agents hidden among the Cobra crew holding the station to launch their own takeover. The Fatal Fluffies don't seem to have been trained to favor one group of Cobra officers over another, so they just stand by and keep the enslaved GI Joe station crew under the lash while the Twin Crimson loyalists surprise and eliminate the Cobra Commander loyalists.

Somehow, their inflatable raft gets the Twins Crimson back to Cobra HQ in just a few minutes, where they force Cobra Commander and the others to cede the lion's share of Earth to them. Well played, rich psychic twins.

While all this is going on, we occasionally cut back to Snake-Eyes and Shipwreck with their stolen data disc being smuggled out of Cobrastan by their singer friend, Satin.

We learn a little more about Satin. It turns out that a fondness for weirdos is only part of her motivation. Apparently, her father was a Cobra officer who was framed for a crime he didn't commit as part of one of the regime's constant power struggles. She's resented Cobra ever since, and has been looking for ways to undermine them.

Honestly? This is a surprisingly good example of show-don't-tell. This very episode is largely spent showing the Cobra leaders betraying and jockeying against one another. So, when Satin tells her story in brief after it's just shown that, you just nod your head and go "Yes, that definitely fits with what we've seen. Yes, disgruntled losers of the power plays probably would be a major destabilizing element in a Cobra-ruled society. Naturally." It honest to god makes too much sense for the show that it's in.

The other thing we learn about Satin is that she has a van that can turn itself into an APC.

Meanwhile, the main force of Joes led by Hawk and Sexist Navy Man (you know, the guys who just let the Crimson Twins get away lol) get their aircraft carrier moving again by raising sails on it. We're full on Tears Of The Kingdom-ing this shit to deal with Cobra's tricks.

Also, apparently the carrier had made it to the Sea of Lost Souls and was already engaging the cube-planting team there when Cobra Commander said that they couldn't afford to attempt a rescue. And he already had low-tech extraction measures in place there that precluded the need to delay the Pyramid's activation. Hahahahaha what a dick.

The final scene of the episode bookends the first, with the tank that Stalker, Bazooka, and Quick-Kick are clinging to making its way from the Antarctic shore to Cobra's tropical island headquarters and dismounting.

If you're confused about how the tank drove them between those two locations, try looking at the diagram of the Pyramid of Darkness overlaying Earth a few screenshots ago. None of the cube locations appear to be in Antarctica in the first place. Or even near the Arctic either for that matter. Nowhere that could look even remotely like the place they had that battle in. So, yeah.

Also, this base (or "temple" as Cobra apparently calls it) was shown before in previous episodes, but since some Joes are actually going there now I'll take the opportunity to confirm that yes, Cobra is absolutely just Hydra with the serial numbers and vestigial naziism filed off:

Just pointing it out.

The final episode of the five-parter, "Knotting Cobra's Coils," suffers a bit from having to wrap up so many subplots with so many characters. It ends up feeling at once too short, and too long. Like they had to scramble to get everything resolved, but then realized they still had time to fill afterward and then had to stretch it out again afterward. These pacing issues make it the weakest link of "Pyramid of Darkness'" five-part chain, but it still makes a fine effort at compensating for that with memorable moments.

Like this one toward the beginning, when - after Cobra has lowered the anti-tech field for just a moment to broadcast the Twins Crimson issuing their ultimatum over a silently fuming Cobra Commander - Shipwreck and Snake-Eyes with their stolen data make their way back to the aircraft carrier.

Last time we saw them, Satin was letting them out of her APC at the Cobrastan barbed wire fence border. How they got from there to here is left to the audience's imagination. In any case, the trip has exhausted them, and they demand freshly squeezed milk before being debriefed. A demand that the navymen comply with.

I'm having trouble not referring to these two and their pets as "the Scooby gang." Like, it's actually taking effort to not unthinkingly type that whenever we cut back to them.

Unfortunately, with the computers off again after Cobra's ultimatum went out, they can't access the information on the disc. Fortunately though, the Crimson Twins' coup aboard the space station created an opportunity for some of the enslaved Joes to get free, steal the dog whistle that the one guy used to turn the Fatal Fluffies into their hulking, intelligent monster forms, and blow it again.

The station is liberated, with both Cobra subfactions being forced to flee via escape pods and/or garbage disposal shuttles.

Here's the first bit of awkward pacing and plot-stretching of the episode. With the space station recaptured and the nexus of the Pyramid of Darkness taken offline, it seems like the crisis should be resolved. The problem is, we still haven't had the payoff for any of the subplots besides the space one, so the crisis needs to be stretched out a bit longer. Enter the reveal that Cobra can quickly set up a "low atmosphere pyramid" by planting a backup control hub on a tall mountaintop somewhere. It's less reliable and less stable than an orbital hub, but it still keeps the battle ongoing and gives all the other Joe teams a chance to have been useful.

Kinda lame. But on the bright side, Destro and Baroness are the ones closest to the low-atmosphere control site. And when Cobra Commander hails them to give the order, it takes him 15 seconds to get them to notice he's onscreen.

Anyway, the break in the anti-tech effect gives Hawk and Co a chance to look at the data on the retrieved disc and learn about the Pyramid of Darkness' self-destruct system. Because of course the cubes have one of those, and of course they're completely indestructible by any other means. The problem is that activating the self-destruct can only be done from the Cobra Temple, and no one knows where that legendary headquarters is.

Cue Bazooka, Stalker, and new honorary GI Joe Quick-Kick. Or...wait, apparently that wasn't actually Stalker. Similar skin tone and facial hair, and our first glimpse of him in episode one had him getting into a whacky flightsuit-type device, so I assumed it was Stalker, but no! This whole time it was a different Joe, named Alpine.

So the yodeling is a trait of the specifically alpine-themed Joe. Eh, too bad, I thought that was a great addition to Stalker's toolkit. Meh.

Anyway, cue that trio crashing through the ceiling of the aircraft carrier's bridge in a stolen Cobra chopper. They had a long, whacky chase after fleeing the Cobra Temple outskirts through the flickering, unstable new anti-tech field. But they made it, and they just came from the temple, so they know where it is now. Their subplot is made relevant as well, whew!

So, Hawk and Admiral Sexism bring their carrier - half sailing it and half cruising it, as the unstable anti-tech effect permits - to near Cobra's main base. In the meanwhile, the loss of the station and deployment of his own Plan B has allowed Cobra Commander to reassert control of the organization and bully the twins back into their old place. He doesn't have them killed or imprisoned or kicked out or anything, though. He's mad at them, but like...there's a sense that they're all used to this from each other and have learned not to take it too much to heart. Lol. Anyway, by the time the GI Joe attack on the temple arrives, Cobra Commander is back in charge and ready to command the defenses.

Defenses that - just like in almost every single previous direct confrontation between the two forces - completely wreck the GI Joes. In this case, the deciding factor is this giant maser-like weapon that Cobra turns on them right when they're all clustered outside the cave entrance, paralyzing nearly all of the attackers immediately.

The solution? Alpine's yodelling. Yes, Alpine, Bazooka, Quick-Kick, and a few others who were manning the most heavily armored vehicles are shielded from the paralysis effect. Alpine's voice can normally only break snow and ice, but once the other two help him link their vehicles' voice amplifyers together and have him yodel into the microphone it's able to blast through solid rock. The maser cannon mounted in the cave entrance is damaged by falling rocks, and the Joes surge forward while Cobra is dealing with the avalanche.

For once, the GI Joes actually win a damned face-to-face battle with Cobra. All the important people in the base, including the Cobra Commander himself, are forced to flee by airplane, with GI Joe fighters hot on their tail.

There's another truly amazing moment after the Joes activate the self destruct, and we cut to Destro and Baroness on the mountaintop struggling to get the control hub to respond. Destro barks out a frustrated quip at Baroness, and Baroness glares at him and says the words "You can't just freely vent your aggression on me! We are in a relationship!" Direct quote. Then feedback from the self-destructing cubes makes the control device explode, throwing both of them off of the mountaintop.

This brings the episode to the second point at which it feels like it should have ended. And this time the plot threads all have been resolved, so the only reason I can think for it continuing is that the creators realized they miscalculated and still had time to fill. So, there's this out-of-nowhere last minute complication of Cobra Commander and the twins trying to escape in a space shuttle that they'd been hiding in their trick-office building from before.

There's a whole little escapade where the Scooby Gang and a suddenly reappearing Satin need to do an airborne boarding action of the rocket and fight Cobra Commander and the twins to distract them from taking evasive maneuvers until the GI Joe space station can get a weapons lock. It does nicely bookend the beginning of the story, with the Joes being the ones boarding a Cobra space shuttle and then using the space station's weapons to finish off the enemy's last command post. There are some decent action comedy gags during the fight too. But, it's also the only part of the episode that feels perfunctory.

Also if Cobra had their own spacecraft, why did they need to steal someone else's to mount the control hub on?

So, the Scooby Gang and Satin get off the rocket right before the space station blows it out of the sky. The day has been saved! GI Joe can begin the process of rebuilding.

The final epilogue scene shows that Cobra Commander and the twins somehow made it off the space shuttle themselves. They, along with the rest of Cobra's leadership, are seen in plainclothes disguises riding a public subway line together, miserably blaming each other for their fall from grace.

Are they in Cobrastan? Does Cobrastan still exist after the destruction of their whole military command structure? Eh, they'll rebuild in time to be a threat again for episode 6 either way.

That's "Pyramid of Darkness."


I take back what I said about wishing I could watch this high. I am high. Watching these episodes has perfectly replicated the effects of very strong hash on my brain. No actual chemical agents required.

There are far too many cartoons from the 80's and 90's where you can tell that the creators just didn't give a shit. This is different, though. For most of these toy-shilling satams, the vibe you get from them is "whatever, we don't give a shit, let's just get this over with." The vibe I get from GI Joe TAS, on the other hand, is "HAHAHAHAHAHAHA WE DON'T GIVE A SHIT! THAT MEANS WE'RE GONNA DO WHATEVER THE FUUUUUUUUUUUCK WE WANT!"

It's the same, but it's also the complete opposite. And goddamn does it pay off in this case.

Like, one thing that kept surprising me about this story is how lazy it wasn't. The nonsense isn't serving to cut corners and save effort, if anything it's doing the opposite. Like, how much extra work did they make for themselves having to animate fucking cows for that meeting scene? How many more over-the-top pieces of background art did they force themselves to draw when they shoehorned in an arctic scene, a ship graveyard scene, an underwater scene, etc, etc? This type of bullshit isn't the artists doing a copout, it's them doing a damned flex.

Also, for a show best remembered for its anvilicious public service sermons, I was surprised at the moral this 5-parter conveyed without ever saying it out loud. Cobra was consistently shown to have more resources, better technology, and smarter leadership than the GI Joes. In almost every direct confrontation, they won handily. The only reason they lost the war is because they were all out for themselves, and their betrayals of one another created holes in their otherwise flawless plan and dissidents in their otherwise loyal populace that the Joes - who all trust each other and don't have to worry about this sort of internal failure - were able to exploit. It might have done a little bit of bland moralizing with the "old-timey 19th century sexism is wrong you know," scene, but the message of the story as a whole was told in a way that respected its child audience enough to assume they'd get it without needing to have it spelled out.

I've been told that the Marvel Comics run was the best version of GI Joe. I was told wrong though. This is the best version of GI Joe.

In fact, I'll go even further than that, and say that this is the only version of GI Joe.

Remember those comics I reviewed a while ago? I was pranking you. I made that entire thing up. I drew the pictures, I made up the plots, the comic never actually existed. Forget all about it, it's a figment. GI Joe is this animated series. That is all it has ever been, and that is all it will ever be, and we should all be exceedingly grateful for that fact.