Jaga

Guardian of Lion-O

Entrusted as Lion-O’s guardian and respected by the whole of Thundera, Jaga spent much of his life as the primary aid of Claudus, the last Lord of the ThunderCats prior to Thundera’s destruction. Wielding the mystic Sword of Omens, Jaga proved to be a nemesis to the forces of evil, both those within Thunderian ranks and beyond them.

He held the Sword on Claudus’s behalf and acted briefly as Lord of the ThunderCats himself, and it is Jaga who hands out the weapons the others carry for the rest of the series. Panthro’s nunchucks and Tygra’s bolo whip are both gifts from him aboard the flagship.

The death in Exodus

The escape from Thundera costs him his life in the first episode. The flagship is crippled by the Mutants, someone has to fly it, and the suspension capsules only slow ageing rather than stopping it. Jaga refuses a capsule on the grounds that as the oldest he would not survive the voyage either way, and takes the helm alone.

He flies for years. He sets the autopilot, and he dies before the ship reaches Third Earth. Jaga never sees the world the ThunderCats spend the rest of the series defending.

The spirit

From the second episode onward he returns as a spirit, summoned by Lion-O through the Sword of Omens and drawn in blue to mark him out as no longer living. He is counsel rather than cavalry, and the show is disciplined about it: Jaga tells Lion-O what he needs to hear and then leaves him to do it.

He is not invulnerable in that state either. In The Ghost Warrior his old comrade Grune returns as a ghost of his own, and the Thundrainium in Grune’s club cripples Jaga’s spirit form. He survives only because Lion-O projects his own strength into him. It is also the one episode where every ThunderCat can see Jaga, not just Lion-O.

In The Astral Prison he is captured outright, held by Nemex for the knowledge he carries, while Mumm-Ra disguised as the Netherwitch tricks Lion-O into a one-way journey to reach him.

The sword he buried

Long before any of this, Jaga defeated the villain Ratilla and threw the Sword of Plun-Darr into Thundera’s deepest canyon, where it lodged in the planet’s molten core. The sword’s struggle to free itself is what set off the quakes that tore Thundera apart. The series waits until ThunderCubs to reveal it, and it recasts the whole opening of the show: the wisest ThunderCat of them all is the reason there was an exodus at all.