Cover art courtesy of YoJoe.com
Brief Summary: No cute Mayan chicks here, sorry guys.
Summary: Grunt is in Peru, flying over the Andes Mountains, looking for Cobras. The Joes are assisting the government of Peru in getting rid of Cobra.
For his troubles, Grunt gets into a dogfight with a group of Cobra fliers. He succeeds in getting shot down but not before he takes them out. He ejects and parachutes, the chute being dragged along by the wind into a tunnel that leads into a strange, lost city.
Taking a look around, Grunt discovers that the city is made almost entirely of gold! He radios back to base, but finds that he can only transmit, not receive. He tells the Joes what he’s found on the chance they can hear him even if he can’t hear them. Pathfinder figures that either Grunt has lost it completely or he’s managed to find the lost city of El Dorado. The Joes pack up and head for Peru, locking on to Grunt’s last transmission.
As he’s walking around, Grunt meets Commander Fernando Luiz Jorge Pizarro, who introduces himself as Francisco Pizarro’s older cousin. Grunt calls foul, saying that if Pizarro is who he says he is, then Grunt is Ulysses S. Grant! Pizarro tells Mr. Grant that it’s a pleasure to meet him.
Grunt mentions that it’s impossible for Pizarro to be as old as he claims, since Francisco Pizarro conquered Peru in 1519! Fernando acknowledges this and says that he himself is 475 years dead. Grunt comes to the realization that Fernando is a ghost and tells Pizarro that his name is Grunt not Grant.
“How…appropriate,” says Pizarro drolly.
“I think so too,” says Grunt, obliviously.
Grunt asks Pizarro how he came to be here. Pizarro explains that he and his men found the city and were trapped there when one of his men foolishly touched the Sacred Disk of the Sun. Doing so awakened an Incan spirit who caved in the exit tunnel. Pizarro and his men died of starvation and thirst. On the up side, they now own the city.
“What about the Incas you stole it from?” Grunt asks. Pizarro responds that the city belongs to whoever is man or ghost enough to take it. This helps set up the fact that he is not a nice guy and should not be trusted but has the advantage of doing so in a pretty subtle way.
Outside the city, Cobra Commander is bitching at his troops for failing to catch Grunt and because he has to send the BATs (Battle Android Troopers) after Grunt rather than having them look for El Dorado.
One of the BATs finds the tunnel to El Dorado and goes in looking for Grunt. Grunt tells Pizarro to step back and allow him and his advanced soldiering techniques to show off. Grunt takes the BAT out.
Overkill is sent in with a group of his BATs to go after Grunt. This time, Pizarro shows Grunt what he can do. Using his ghostly energy, he takes over Overkill’s body, then directs his fellow soldiers to do likewise with the rest of the BATs. Now, they have bodies. And weapons.
Cobra Commander arrives on the scene. He and Destro find the entrance to El Dorado. Destro figures out that the entrance to a nearby cave matches a cave entrance on the map Cobra’s been using to find El Dorado (which I’m betting they bought from one of a thousand folks in Peru who are selling “Genuine Maps to El Dorado” along with stolen art treasures and other ‘touristy’ things).
Grunt radios Duke to tell him about having some new friends, but Duke still can’t radio Grunt back.
Cobra Commander doesn’t believe Pizarro’s story. He orders his forces to take out the ‘malfunctioning’ BATs. Pizzaro and his men take Cobra to school as the Joes arrive on the scene. Cobra Commander watches as the BATs reassemble themselves. He realizes that the ghosts of conquistadors really do inhabit them.
Cobra retreats when the BATs attack for the second time. The Joes show up and are fired upon by the BATs. Grunt tries, unsuccessfully, to get the Joes to quit firing, trying to get the message across that the conquistadors are (as far as he knows right now) friends.
The Joes end up being caught by Cobra Commander, except for Grunt. Grunt tries, again without success, to tell Pizarro that Cobra Commander is the enemy. But his inner goodness is nothing against Cobra Commander’s ability to schmooze and ass-kiss.
Pizarro listens to Cobra Commander. He allows Cobra Commander in to El Dorado where he and the Commander come to an arrangement. In order to have a chance at saving his friends, Grunt radios Duke and tells him he’s pretending to go along with them. (Luckily, he doesn’t do this within earshot of the Commander or Pizarro.)
When he tells the others that he’s decided to chuck the Joes in favor of making a few quick bucks with Cobra, the Commander doesn’t buy it. Instead, he requires that Grunt prove his loyalty. He gives Grunt a laser-rifle and tells him to blow a big hole in the gorund, because that’s where the Joes are going to be tossed. Grunt agrees, but actually fakes out the Commander by shooting a tree and causing chaos. In the confusion, the Joes are freed and head for the cave, stopping only to get their weapons.
Grunt tells the BATs that Pizarro wants them, while Roadblock leaves a bomb behind and causes a cave-in to buy the Joes some time. Cobra brings in an Earthquake, which looks like some sort of combat-bulldozer.
The Cobras plow their way into the city and all seems lost until Grunt comes up with the idea of striking the sacred disk. This awakens the Inca spirit within, who remembers the obnoxious Pizarro. Cobra finally breaks into the city and attacks. The spirit, called the chief, whups their asses and dispels the ghosts of the conquistadors. Low-Light and Roadblock go after the Earthquake, taking it out. The spirit and Pizarro face off. Pizarro gets dispelled from Overkill. Cobra, once more, gets routed.
The spirit asks what’s going to happen to his city now. We fade to see that the city has been turned into a national park for the citizens of Peru. Grunt wonders if the chief would be pleased to see what’s happened to his city and Duke figures that he probably is. A statue of the chief is shown to be looking pretty pleased.
Commentary: Another fairly watchable episode. There’s nothing particularly remarkable about it. Ghosts have shown up before in GI Joe in a few episodes. In the Sunbow episode “The Phantom Brigade” and in the DIC episode “Night of the Creepers” ghosts are pivotal to the plot. There’s no cheesy, “it was Mr. Johnson, the amusement park janitor” Scooby Doo ending to this. The ghosts are always real.
I could snark at the fact that Pizarro and the chief both speak fluent, modern English but I’m not going to. Yes, Pizarro should have been speaking 16th century Spanish and the chief should have been speaking Incan, but I think it’s okay to let realism take a back seat to having the audience understand the dialogue. That and on the tapes I have, subtitles would have been a complete bitch.
The idea that a city full of gold would become an open museum is pretty far-fetched, especially in Peru where artifact theft is a big problem, but it’s also a nice nod to the idea that history should be preserved.
And I have to thank Lars Pearson and his book “Now You Know” for pointing out that Grunt appears in this episode. This is noteworthy because Grunt, along with Steeler and Clutch, disappeared from the Sunbow series after the episode “Worlds Without End” where they stayed behind on an alternate earth to help the Baroness’s good counterpart fight the good fight in a world where Cobra won. Apparently, some fans take this as a sign that Grunt and the others came back from that alternate world. Especially since Steeler and Clutch can be seen in GI Joe: The Movie. Me, I chalk it up to Hasbro and DIC really not being quite that anal about continuity. Either that or that this is a new Grunt, someone who took on the name. (‘Course, that theory’s blown to hell if the toy’s filecard has the same name and place of birth as the last but hey…)
In the Joe comics, Grunt left the Joes to study engineering. He was also, if I recall correctly, one of the original 13 Joes.
And one more thing: the chief’s features seem more African than Incan (she says like she’s all that familiar with Incan features…). This might be a nod to a theory that African traders made it across the Atlantic to trade with Mesoamerican civilizations like the Incans and the Aztecs.