The Worms of Death

Cobra recovers the radioactive crystals from the Arctic mine and leaves Snake Eyes for dead, and he is found and nursed by a blind hermit who treats his radiation sickness with leaves and herbs, returns his mask without asking about it, and gives a name to the wolf that has followed him: Timber. The second catalytic element, heavy water, lies at the bottom of an ocean trench, and Torpedo leads a dive team down into a field of giant tube worms to reach it. The Baroness arrives by submersible, fights the worms alongside the Joes for as long as it suits her, and then demands their share of the heavy water. At headquarters, Breaker and Short-Fuze build a killer satellite out of spare parts to knock the relay star out of orbit, and it fails. Snake Eyes walks back into headquarters with the crystals and a wolf.

"And knowing is half the battle." Every Sunbow episode closed on a public-service spot delivered to camera by a Joe, addressing children on a real-world hazard. The ethic underneath the writing, across the whole run, is that Cobra acts out of fear and the Joes act out of responsibility.

Voice talents, as credited on this episode's closing titles. The Sunbow credit crawl lists the company of voice actors for the miniseries and does not assign roles, so no role attributions are given here.

Liz Aubrey Jackson Beck Michael Bell Arthur Burghardt Peter Cullen Pat Fraley Marla Frumkin Scott Buster Jones Christopher Latta Morgan Lofting Rob Paulsen John Stephenson B.J. Ward Frank Welker Michael Yama

"Looks like a pretty bad neighborhood. / Oh, I wouldn't say that. See? No graffiti." -- Two divers on the trench floor

"I cannot see, so I do not know why you cover your face, lad. But whatever terrible disfigurement is there, I can see into your heart. And that is sound and true. You can't deny it, lad." -- The blind hermit, to Snake Eyes

"Your loyal wolf friend here, he needs a name. How about Timber? Yes, tis a perfect moniker." -- The blind hermit

"So we built this here doohickey with Clutch's help. It's a killer satellite. It's all mounted in a portable launch gantry and everything." -- The Joe who built it

"Crude, roughly constructed, but magnificent. It just might do the job." -- Dr. Vandermeer

"Snake, you're alive! I knew you were too tough to be finished off by some dumb old crystals." -- Scarlett

"Hey, who's your friend?" -- The only line anyone gives Timber

Dialogue transcribed for gijoe.army from the episode audio, 2026-09-14. The Sunbow prints carry no subtitle track, so every line here was transcribed and then cross-checked against a second pass; where a speaker could not be established beyond doubt, the line is left unattributed. Corrections are welcome on the forum.

"I cannot see, so I do not know why you cover your face, lad. But whatever terrible disfigurement is there, I can see into your heart. And that is sound and true."

An old man in furs says this in a hut somewhere above the Arctic Circle, to a soldier who has just been dug out of a radioactive mine and who will not answer him, because he cannot. It is the best scene in the miniseries and one of the best in the Sunbow run, and the remarkable thing about it is the arrangement. The one character in this show who never speaks is finally read correctly by the one character who cannot look at him.

Everybody else in five episodes has treated Snake Eyes as an asset, a very good one, deployed wherever the mission wants somebody silent and quick. So have we, if we are straight about how we watched it. The hermit treats him as a person, draws the contamination out of him with leaves and herbs, hands him back his uniform and mask off the wall without comment, and then gets on with the ordinary business of naming the wolf that followed him home. Timber gets his name here, from a blind man, in about four seconds! [1]

The sequence works because Toei lets it be still. Snake Eyes has no dialogue to cut to and no reaction shots that would carry a line, so the scene is built out of small physical things instead: the dressing, the mask on the wall, the wolf, the old man's hands. Set against the underwater material that surrounds it, all churn and bubbles and monsters, the hut is almost silent. Nothing else would have let a scene with a mute lead hold the screen this long.

The rest of the episode is a fine adventure serial that knows it is one. The heavy water lies at the bottom of an ocean trench, and the trench turns out to be full of giant tube worms. Half-remembered science-magazine facts were the sort of thing this show loved to build a set piece around. [2] Torpedo runs the dive, the Joes go down in pressure suits, the worms get loose, and the Baroness turns up in a submersible and does the one thing in the sequence worth watching twice. She fights alongside the Joes while it suits her, then asks for their share of the heavy water the moment it stops suiting her. Told that they had a deal, she is delighted by the suggestion that a deal with Cobra was ever going to mean anything.

Back at headquarters the episode finds its second good idea, this one comic. Breaker and Short-Fuze, with Clutch's help, have gone off and built their own killer satellite on a portable launch gantry out of spare parts, and Breaker cannot get the story out because Short-Fuze insists on telling it his way. Vandermeer calls it crude, roughly constructed, but magnificent, and he could be describing part three. It does not work, and it should not; the miniseries has a shape to keep to, and part four needs the Joes still losing.

What the episode never does is let the hermit's scene curdle into a lesson. Nobody comes back to explain what it meant and Snake Eyes does not remove the mask. When he walks into headquarters with the crystals and a wolf, the wolf gets four words, "Hey, who's your friend?", and then the room is straight back to the crystals and the plan. Any number of shows would have added a speech here. This one adds a dog and moves on.

The miniseries spent five afternoons on teleporting armies and stolen satellites; the scene between Snake Eyes and the hermit is the one still worth coming back for.

1 ^ The hermit offers the name and then answers his own question before Snake Eyes can react to it: "Your loyal wolf friend here, he needs a name. How about Timber? Yes, tis a perfect moniker." It sticks, and Timber is beside him for the rest of the miniseries.

2 ^ Riftia tube worms had been found at the Galapagos vents only a few years before this script was written, and the episode's columns are recognisably drawn from them, scaled up until they are large enough to swallow a diver.

Written by the gijoe.army desk

1. M.A.S.S. Device five-part miniseries, September 1983. Marvel Productions, Sunbow Productions and Toei Doga, distributed by Claster TV Productions, a division of Hasbro Industries. Copyright 1983 Sunbow Productions, Inc.
2. Written by: Ron Friedman
3. Produced by: Don Jurwich
4. Executive Producers: Joe Bacal, David H. DePatie, Tom Griffin
5. Executive in Charge of Production: Lee Gunther
6. Supervising Director: Dan Thompson
7. Sequence Directors: Gerry Chiniquy, Nelson Shin, John Gibbs, Art Vitello, Sid Marcus, Sam Weiss, Tom Ray, Arnie Wong
8. Storyboard Directors: Rick Hoberg, Sherman Labby, Larry Houston, Lonnie Lloyd, Bob Kline, Don Shepard, Hank Tucker
9. Model Design: Russ Heath
10. Voice Directors: Don Jurwich, Wally Burr
11. Supervising Editor: Robert T. Gillis
12. Music Editor: Joe Siracusa
13. Sound Effects Editors: Richard Gannon, Jim Blodgett
14. Production Manager: Kathy Conte
15. Checking Supervisor: Barbara Donatelli
16. Creative Consultant: Jay Bacal
17. Title Song by: Spencer Michlin and Ford Kinder
18. Music by: Johnny Douglas
19. Production code: 4007
20. Originally aired: September 14, 1983 in afternoon syndication.