Series writer William Overgard arrives in ThunderCats the way an eccentric uncle arrives at a quiet family lunch: coat flapping, pockets full of improbable ideas, and ready to rearrange the furniture whether anyone asked him to or not. One must grant him this much at the outset: there were few writers that ever applied themselves to the series with such uninhibited imagination. He was capable of producing some of the programme’s most memorable material, including some of its most baffling and inferior outputs.
The difficulty and the fascination lies in the sense that Overgard’s mind ran faster than the show could comfortably accommodate. Storylines and characters seemed to tumble out of him with the cheerful excess of a magician pulling scarves from a hat, or perhaps with the assistance of a random word generator set permanently to “science-fiction nonsense.” Yet when he successfully married his private enthusiasms to the existing framework, the result could be formidable. At those moments he was nearly unbeatable as a ThunderCats writer. It is also worth remembering that he would go on to pen the final episode of the series—arguably his finest work on the show, delivered at the most crucial moment. We’ll get there. Eventually.
“Mandora – The Evil Chaser” represents something close to a perfect midpoint in the Overgard experience. The episode manages the neat trick of feeling broadly like orthodox ThunderCats while simultaneously introducing concepts that seem to have wandered in from a far more extravagant science-fiction serial. In just twenty minutes Overgard reveals that the cosmos surrounding Third Earth is much busier than a bunch of cat-human-like refugees and local tribes: spaceships glide between worlds and an interplanetary police force patrols the galaxy with the brisk efficiency of celestial traffic wardens.
The story begins with familar innocence, when Lion-O discovers what appears to be the escape pod from a crashed spacecraft. Exercising the sort of curiosity that reliably produces trouble in adventure fiction, he opens it, and in doing so releases three galactic convicts with names that sound as though they were invented during a particularly energetic round of word association: Quickpick, Burnout and Plutar. Their jailbreak promptly summons the pod’s custodian, the formidable Mandora, an interplanetary law officer known, with admirable bluntness, as the Evil Chaser. Lion-O, feeling partly responsible for the situation, as well as losing the Sword of Omens as a result, feels obliged join her in the pursuit.
The chase leads them through some of the more eccentric corners of Third Earth’s imagination. Along the way they encounter the Living Ooze, a creature that behaves exactly as its name suggests, gargly voice and all, and the subterranean Mudhogs, a race of mud-dwelling beings who appear with considerable ceremony and then vanish from the series’ history as though they had merely stepped out briefly and forgotten to return. That fleeting quality of invention is pure Overgard: a writer so busy generating ideas that he rarely had time to revisit them.
For all its eccentricities, the episode works pretty well. The interplay between Snarf and Lion-O is pleasantly handled, and Mandora herself is vividly drawn, emerging as a character both forceful and engaging. There is an air of Judge Dredd to Mandora, largely down to the fact that we never see the hard-nosed officer’s face at any stage. The central idea of Lion-O inadvertently opening a prison ship is a good one (cats and curiousity, eh?), and the pacing keeps events moving briskly enough that the stranger notions never quite derail the proceedings. Mandora would also return in later Overgard-penned episodes, giving this particular instalment a small but meaningful place in the show’s ongoing mythology. Placed within the wider run of the series, Mandora - The Evil Chased sits comfortably as part of Lion-O’s coming of age introductory phase of ThunderCats.
For all its peculiarities, “Mandora – The Evil Chaser” marks an important moment in the evolution of ThunderCats. After this point, the idea of a “typical” episode would begin to fade. The series, encouraged perhaps by Overgard’s restless imagination, would increasingly venture into stranger territory. Sometimes triumphant, occasionally bewildering, but rarely, if ever, predictable. Which, when you think about it, is exactly the sort of legacy a writer like Overgard, who sadly would leave this world just a year after the show had ended, would have relished.
Next time: “The Ghost Warrior”
