The Chinese Scorpion

A giant scorpion smashes into the home of the archaeologist Dr. Choi and carries him off, leaving his grandson Li with a wooden puzzle box. Matt Trakker and Bruce Sato find tread marks where claw prints should be, and a fuel analysis in Thunderhawk ties the fake monster to V.E.N.O.M. The trail ends at the Great Wall, where the scorpion buries Thunderhawk under fallen stone and leaves its crew short of air. Meanwhile Scott, T-Bob and Li discover that the box holds a map to the lost treasure of Kublai Khan. V.E.N.O.M. makes Choi open a hidden chamber in the Wall, and he warns them the treasure is guarded.

No one joyrides on the Great Wall of China, unless... it's M.A.S.K.!

A giant scorpion that leaves tread marks is a joke the episode makes at its own expense, and it makes it early. A red shell studded with rivets bursts through the wall of an old man's house, carries him off into the night, and the village runs for its life. Then Matt Trakker and Bruce Sato arrive, crouch over the ground, and find marks that look a good deal more like a vehicle than a bug. Someone suggests the monster is simply a vehicle in scorpion's clothing, which is the right instinct for a show where every car in the garage is secretly something else. The script takes the shortcut it has earned: a punctured fuel tank, a run through Thunderhawk's analyser, and a high octane compound that V.E.N.O.M. alone uses. Nobody is fooled for long, so the mystery is spent before the first break!

What is left is a smaller and better story, and it is about the old man. Dr. Choi is the one person in the cast who can read the writing that leads to the treasure, and every side treats him as a key to be turned. V.E.N.O.M. needs his translations to open the cavern; M.A.S.K. needs him back because he is missing. When he tells Miles Mayhem's crew that the writing says the treasure is guarded, one of them announces that he is a match for any guardian and tells the old man to hop to it. The episode is about what it costs to ignore the person who has read the instructions.

The writing serves that idea better than the plot around it. Scott, T-Bob and Choi's grandson Li are given a chopsticks lesson, a gag that could have been pure filler, but T-Bob's clumsiness breaks a wooden box, and the box turns out to hold the map Li's grandfather has been searching for. A slapstick accident becomes a plot point without anyone announcing it.

The animation puts its money into the scorpion. The shell is red, riveted and heavy, and it grapples Thunderhawk on the Wall, while the painted Wall itself, winding over green mountains toward a watchtower, gives the chase a setting worth looking at. Later, with the shell lying open on the ground, it is plainly just a shell, which is the joke from the first scene paid off. On the sound side, Miles gets the best line, "No one joyrides on the Great Wall of China, unless... it's M.A.S.K.!".

The standout is the buried Thunderhawk. Matt and Bruce sit in the dark beneath a pile of stone with a cracked windshield, the gauges report that the temperature is climbing and the air is running out, and the mask cannot be used. The threat is local and physical, a stone pile and a failing gauge, in place of the usual countdown to something worse, and Thunderhawk ends up dented and open against the Wall. When Matt finally says it is time to show the scorpion they have a little thunder of their own, the line lands because the previous minute has made it hard to believe.

The weakness is the ending. Choi tells M.A.S.K. he closed the wall on purpose so that the guardian would deal with the villains, M.A.S.K. drives off, and V.E.N.O.M. goes in to collect gold while dark scorpions crawl across the coins. The story ends on that image; how Mayhem's crew gets out is never shown, which leaves the real scorpions in the episode with no scene of their own.

It is a decent introduction for Bruno Sheppard and the Stinger, both debuting here, an adventure that outthinks its monster in the first reel and spends the rest on an old man being right. Choi is ignored by everyone with a weapon, and the scorpions agree with him.

1. The M.A.S.K. wiki lists this as the first appearance of both Bruno Sheppard and the Stinger, the vehicle hidden inside the scorpion shell.
2. The M.A.S.K. wiki's page for the Stinger says the vehicle was originally named Scorpion in the original color guides for its toyline.
3. The M.A.S.K. wiki credits Doug Stone with Matt Trakker, Bruce Sato, Hondo McLean, Bruno Sheppard and Dr. Choi in this episode, and Brennan Thicke with both Scott Trakker and Li.
4. The M.A.S.K. wiki's continuity notes say Thunderhawk is taken out of action here and Matt cannot use Spectrum, so after the rest of the team arrives he changes into his Rhino uniform and uses Ultra Flash.
5. The wiki's errors list points out that Hondo fires Hurricane's laser cannons with the command "Blaster, on", a phrase associated with his own mask.
6. The M.A.S.K. wiki describes the closing safety tip as T-Bob nearly being hit by a truck because he is wearing Scott's headphones and not paying attention, and Frank's He-Man Page records T-Bob's closing line about never wearing a radio again around traffic.
7. The M.A.S.K. wiki lists the Satoism "Danger has loose etiquette" for this episode.