Michael Utvich

Richard Trueblood

Cowardly dragon and friend of the rebels, Sorrowful, gets captured by the Horde and taken to Beast Island! It's up to a guilt-stricken Bow and his comrades to rescue the silly guy - and, just maybe, help him find his courage once again.

Castaspella, Bow, Kowl, Princess Adora (She-Ra), Spirit (Swift Wind), Madame Razz, Broom

Rattlor, Catra, Leech, Hordak, Grizzlor

villagers, Sorrowful, various caged beasts, Horde soldiers

Horde tanks, Horde transport, butterfly ship, Horde destroyers

We begin today's story with events already afoot; it seems the Horde is about to attack the castle of Bluestone (which looks suspiciously like Blackmoor Castle, home of the Rebels' Fair from 67008's "The Red Knight"). We learn this news from the whining of Sorrowful, the cowardly "Laughing Dragon" of 67010. Castaspella has brought her less-than-courageous friend here so he can stand at the castle gates and roar at the approaching Horde forces. But in the attempt, Sorrowful proves less than successful, and the lasers of the attacking tanks send him flying for his life. Fortunately She-Ra and Swift Wind are there (having coincidentally appeared immediately after the disappearance of Adora and Spirit), and they help Bow and Castaspella to fend off the assault.

With the tanks and their directing occupants (Rattlor, Catra, and Leech) successfully swept away thanks to She-Ra's freezing sword and some unlikely physics from a twirling castle dome, the heroes have time to pause and look about themselves, and realize they have no idea where Sorrowful is. Catra (fresh out of her frozen tank and transferred to a flying Horde transport) then arrives to reveal she has captured the dragon and intends to fly him off to the terrible dungeons on Beast Island! The heroes can only stand and stare as their friend is taken away. Assembled with his comrades in the castle of Bluestone afterwards, Bow casts recriminations on his own head, since he'd promised to protect Sorrowful from harm. The rebels decide there's nothing for it: they have to make the dangerous trip to Beast Island and spring their friend from prison. Castaspella hops into her butterfly ship and the rebels add Madame Razz and Broom to their rescue party, then head off over the water.

At the island, Sorrowful has been brought to a teleconference with Hordak, working remotely in his only scene today. The villain cheerily springs a trapdoor (one of his favorite things to do - see 67010) that sends the dragon down into a dungeon with a collection of caged beasts (though Sorrowful himself remains uncaged - go figure). The plan will be to hold onto the kidnappee and spring a trap on the inevitable rescue attempt. Sure enough, when our rebel rescue team arrives at the island, they're quickly swarmed by an army of Horde soldiers. During the ensuing battle, Bow collides with a malfunctioning Horde robot and is carried away from the rest of the party, Kowl following from the air. Bow's flappy friend manages to free him from the clutches of the robot (simultaneously delivering a blow to the archer's head - thanks), and the pair find themselves at the entrance to a giant cave. Hearing Sorrowful's cries for help from within, Bow tells Kowl to go fetch the other rebels - then immediately falls down a hole, taking him to Sorrowful's prison.

The pair compare notes and guilt, and Sorrowful confesses shame at his cowardice; but Bow bucks up the prisoner, admitting that he himself is also scared. Fear is a natural and healthy response to danger, and nothing to be ashamed of. Why, all these other caged monsters must be afriad as well - of their keeper, Grizzlor. Bow urges Sorrowful to speak with the captives, and after a rather one-sided conversation (with only non-verbal growls coming from the peanut gallery), Sorrowful melts the lock to the prison's main door, then makes the questionable decision to set everyone free. The party then roam the halls of the Horde installation until they find - and scare the bejesus out of - Grizzlor, who flees for his life.

What have the other rebels been up to while this has been happening? They were keen to connect with Bow after receiving Kowl's message, but were delayed by an attack from an entire fleet of energy-web-generating Horde destroyers. She-Ra has to do some fancy swimming to take care of the battleships. Several of them get sucked down into a She-Ra-generated whirlpool, and the rest get smashed when She-Ra skips the lead ship onto the rest in another display of non-Newtonian physics. But the resilient Catra is thrown clear and reveals to our heroine that while she's been busy, a cadre of Horde soldiers has captured the other rebels - including (for once) Kowl. It seems the only option is surrender. Fortunately, it's at this moment that Bow, Sorrowful, and his monstrous new friends arrive on the scene. Sorrowful has found his courage again, which as usual takes the form of a lecture to the Horde on their general meanness. The heroes take advantage of the distracting situation to make their escape. A charge on the Horde minions from the giant former prisoners of Beast Island does the rest.

Back at Mystacor, the friends talk over the events of the day. Sorrowful facetiously requests that his friends not include him on future missions - then, admitting he was joking, professes undying loyalty to them all. He then disgusts Kowl by giving him a friendly lick.

• Sorrowful: What's a roar? / Kowl: It's like a cough, only louder.
• Catra: I'm not taking any chances leaving this operation in the hands of fools. / Grizzlor: My robots are not fools. / Catra: Maybe not; but you are!
• Bow: Being frightened is natural. And it's nothing to be ashamed of.
• Castaspella: Friends have to stick together, through good and bad. / Sorrowful: Well, uh, since we're all friends, can I ask you all a favor? / Bow: Name it, Sorrowful; anything! / Sorrowful: The next time you want to go and fight the Horde, don't call me! (Laughs) Just foolin'; honest, you're all my friends, and I'll never let you down.

• She-Ra mounts Swift Wind and flies off: Just after her first transformation, and again later as she departs Beast Island

One full

9:27 - Brave little Loo-Kee is just lounging against a multi-colored rock right in the middle of the horrifying Beast Island! Don't you know it's dangerous there, Loo-Kee?
Did I spot him? YES!

Loo-Kee identifies today's lesson as the importance of sticking by your friends and helping them when they're in trouble, just like the gang helped the kidnapped Sorrowful. Though hopefully his viewers won't have to go and fight kidnappers to help their friends.

N/A

• This episode features the return of writer Michael Utvich, who gave us the script for 67010's "The Laughing Dragon." It's not surprising, therefore, that this story also includes the laughing dragon himself, Sorrowful!
• Last time we saw Sorrowful, he had agreed to hang out with Castaspella in her kingdom of Mystacor. Casta is still with the dragon, but the castle they're standing in at the episode's start is identical to the one used as Blackmoor Castle in 67008's "The Red Knight." This time the town is named Bluestone. At the very end of the episode Sorrowful and Casta do return to Mystacor, so no worries: they haven't moved.
• Appearing for the first time in POP is the villain Rattlor; which is somewhat confusing, given that he was released as part of Mattel's wave of "Snake Men," seemingly enemies of He-Man. In fact when Rattlor eventually appears in the Christmas Special, it will be as one of Skeletor's flunkies.
• In brief succession, we discover that many of the parties engaged in the opening battle are concealing some special talents. Castaspella can use the medallion she wears to open a huge chasm in the ground; the Horde tanks prove able to stretch their treads way out across the chasm; and with a spoken command, She-Ra can transform her sword of protection into an "ice maker" - which must be very useful at parties.
• She-Ra's changing the form of her sword today is, as far as I know, the first instance in what will become a very common occurrence, and what I'll be tracking under the sub-category "Swiss army sword." The most common transformation of the weapon will be into some form of rope, but we'll see that it can change into almost anything (a shield, a staff, a chain, and so on).
• The soundtrack for this episode seems to include some fresh new incidental music, including some very 80s guitar licks that are quite rad (as we were once wont to say). Some of the music makes me think of other iconic 80s TV action shows like Miami Vice or The A-Team.
• We return to Beast Island, unsurprisingly the site of 67002's "Beast Island." When our heroes last departed this place with He-Man, the musclebound oaf's parting gesture was to knock over a tower that supposedly housed the island's prison. Here, we find that Hordak has either had some cages rebuilt, or that He-Man's vandalism failed to smash the underground dungeon cells. We also find - to my own personal satisfaction, given the disappointing dearth of them in 67002 - that there are several beasts inhabiting Beast Island, albeit ones that are locked in cages and not roaming the premises. (The introductory panning shot showing the beasts in their cages - or at least their arms - is used again later when Bow arrives on his rescue mission.) Beast Island will prove a popular location in the series, and we'll be returning there soon enough, in 67014's "Friendship."
• A couple of central characters make only brief appearances in today's episode: first we have Adora and Spirit, who only show up in the opening minute of the episode before transforming and are never seen again. Then there's Hordak, making what could be considered a cameo on Beast Island's televiewer. He says a few lines, dumps Sorrowful down a hole, and laughs himself off the screen and out of the story. The inclusion of Madame Razz and Broom, though not as brief as the others, seems oddly pointless. Razz gets a few lines of dialogue but otherwise contributes exactly nothing to the plot - not even casting any poorly remembered magic spells during the battles with the Horde. At least Kowl hit Bow on the head with a coconut!
• Turns out Castaspella travels in style, in the bubble cockpit of an orange-and-yellow butterfly ship. This ride doesn't "bug" me at all - get it?? HAHAHAHa - ugh... The ship will make a surprise reappearance, with Glimmer at the wheel, in 67045's "Huntara." This is one of those vehicles that didn't make it to toyhood - rather unsurprisingly, as it looks difficult and expensive to develop into plastic molds. The closest Mattel came to such a thing was their "Butterflyer" from 1985's Wave One, which had butterfly wings but was more of an action figure carrying case than a one-woman vehicle. We will eventually get to see the Butterflyer in glorious animated action, in the late 67089's "Hordak's Power Play."
• Amongst several returning characters and settings we find Grizzlor, who was manning the internal defenses of Beast Island the last time we visited in 67002, just as he is here. (He also showed up for 67007.)
• I've had call in previous episodes to question whether the ubiquitous and seemingly countless Horde soldiers are humanoids in armor or entirely mechanical; here, Grizzlor definitely calls them robots, and we see an injured one shedding sparks and broken springs.
• Several scenes of the Horde minions, including the opening attack on Bluestone and the conversations in the Beast Island control center, clearly place Catra near the top of the Horde's soldierly hierarchy. Rattlor and Leech defer to her, and Grizzlor has to stand and take her verbal abuse and commands.
• This episode introduces us to "Horde destroyers," another fairly unimaginative vehicle name in the same vein as "destructo tanks" or the "destructors" of 67010. The destroyers are metal boats that look very similar to Earth naval destroyers. As a cute little added touch, we find that many of them have a scaled-up facsimile of Catra's red goggles attached to the conning tower.
• She-Ra shows us she can swim fast enough to generate her own whirlpool and suck a fleet of Horde destroyers under the sea - a sequence which I (perhaps inconsistently) found far more believable than her earlier stunt with the castle turret-topper.
• I found it interesting that at the end of the episode She-Ra refers to Catra very familiarly as just "Cat." That's what He-Man used to call his pet!
• We finally get to see Beast Island's beasts after Sorrowful (with questionable advisability) decides to set them all free. The character designs for the creatures all prove very familiar. One is clearly the Talgoth from MU071's "The Rarest Gift of All." Another is a recolored version of Bakkull from way back in MU006's "Teela's Quest." A third... I admit I had to use Wiki Grayskull to help me identify. He was Modulok's monster "the Grabber," as seen in MU123's "Mistaken Identity." In one of the very last scenes on the island we see several torsos and legs of monsters chasing Catra and her confederates, but the shot is too quick and cropped to make any further identifications. (Though Wiki Grayskull makes claims of a couple of other character reuses, I didn't see them.)
• Sorrowful will return! The dragon will appear again in 67082's "The Locket."

• We thought at the end of 67010 that our friend Sorrowful had discovered his courage; but in this episode he seems to have lost it again. Though the dragon hangs in long enough to pass some threats to the attacking force at Bluestone, he quickly flees under a laser bombardment. He later requires a pep talk from Bow, along with assurances that it's OK to feel scared. At the beginning of the episode, this seeming inconsistency in the dragon's character arc struck me as a true, realistic depiction (... of the behavior of a mythical talking dragon). After all, nobody is going to permanently become a brave hero and just stay that way. People change and their reactions vary depending on the situation. By the end of the episode, however, Sorrowful's second journey from coward to chastiser of the Horde felt very much like a tired retread.
• It seems the dragon and his magical friend Castaspella are just visiting Bluestone to help the villagers there - though this conclusion is somewhat shaken by the fact that in a scene after the opening battle, we see Casta sitting on a throne inside the castle. Does she just sit on the throne of any castle she visits? Seems presumptuous! This just serves to add more confusion to the issue of how much territory Castaspella actually reigns over, something that was muddled in the plot of 67010 as well.
• One difference I'm noting between MOTU and POP centers on secret identity issues. In MOTU, the writers seemed to enjoy playing on the fact that Adam really sucked at finding excuses for getting away and raising aloft his magic sword. Teela was always standing nearby to ask what happened to the prince, and subsequently be easily satisfied by whatever lame excuse He-Man came up with (usually "He's safe"). But in this series there has so far been very little questioning at the absence of Adora, and no need for either the princess or She-Ra to explain her appearances and disappearances. I have to admit to rather missing this aspect of the story, even though (as I've argued several times in this database) there seems so little logical reason to maintain this central secret. The other thing about Adora's identity that continues to be strange is the contradictory fact, related at the beginning of every episode, that there are at least three other people who are supposed to be in on the secret, even though we've as yet had no evidence of this knowledge. (Little did I know when writing this that just the next episode, 67013, will give us the evidence I've been waiting for!)
• Castaspella specifically refers to the Horde tanks as "robots" just before causing several of them to drive straight into a yawning abyss in the ground. I guess that makes it OK that she almost definitely destroyed the occupants of said tanks! You have to conclude that all the tanks are being driven by somebody, and are not just armed Roombas, particularly since we see the three main Horde villains riding together in one of the vehicles. Similarly, in a later scene She-Ra makes a point of mentioning that the Horde's seagoing destroyer vessels are manned by "robot crew," which makes it OK that she just demolished an entire fleet of them.
• There are quite a few animation, scaling, and pure logical errors in the sequence where She-Ra uses the capping dome of a castle turret to dispose of the frozen tanks. First of all, even though our heroine is drawn very tiny as she holds the dome, it seems highly unlikely that the structure could be large enough to cover the whole battalion of tanks. It's also hard to see how she could put enough spin on the thing to turn it into a top, as she does. Further, for no discernible reason, once the dome has somehow flopped over all the vehicles, it just slides away. Magnets? Lastly, the animation of the dome sliding and receding into the distance is juxtaposed very badly onto the background painting, making it appear as if the dome is simply shrinking into the ground rather than heading over the horizon.
• In the following scene, we find that logic has still not returned to the land of Etheria; because Catra, who just a moment ago was trapped under the dome in her tank, is suddenly flying in a giant airship with the kidnapped Sorrowful. Whaaaaaa???
• Kowl scoffs at the idea of Bow trying to fight off Catra's Horde transport with his flimsy bow and arrow, and he has a point. But what about She-Ra? She's standing right there, and she just easily (and quite literally) wiped the floor with a battlion of tanks. Yet she allows Catra to just fly right off with the dragon hostage. I suppose we wouldn't have an episode to watch otherwise!
• Rather than fully animate a bunch of monsters to threaten poor Sorrowful in the dungeon, the animators settle for showing us a collection of reaching claws. Most of the giant talons groping through the bars of the cages look rather threatening - until we pan over to the last pair, which just look like the forelegs of a giant house cat. Mrowr.
• The rebels do eventually shelter themselves behind a rock under the laser bombardment of the Horde soldiers on Beast Island, but for a few seconds at the beginning of the attack, we watch as Bow stands out in the open, not bothering to even attempt dodging as he deliberately nocks and fires a few arrows. Don't go flaunting that plot armor, Mustache Boy!
• Just so my commentary doesn't end up being a litany of complaints, I wanted to point out there are some nice background paintings in this episode. I liked the mechanical gewgaws behind Catra and Grizzlor while they're discussing the rebels' capture in the Beast Island control center, and the lush jungle area where Bow finds the cave is quite lovely.
• Kowl avoids capture: At least, at first. Bow sends his large-eared friend back to inform the other rebels that he's found Sorrowful, just seconds before landing himself in the dungeon. Ya did it agin, Kowly-boy! Later, however, Kowl actually does get himself nabbed by Catra, for what seems to be the first time ever!
• Just need to give a little shout-out to my girl Castaspella for her awesome moves at the end of the episode, when she breaks free of the Horde soldiers and zaps three of them in quick succession. Daaaa-yum! You know what, you can sit on whatever throne you want, girl.
• In the ending scene where Loo-Kee reveals his hiding spot, we no longer see Swift Wind in the shot, even though the horse was visible in the corresponding scene in the episode. I suppose this is logical enough, as it would have been rather awkward for Loo-Kee to start moving and giving the PSA message with Swift Wind standing there staring at him.
• This was a fun enough story, but as you'll have gathered by my commentary above, it was riddled with logical problems and, at times, felt very much like a retelling of Sorrowful's debut plot. Still, I can't deny that I enjoyed waxing nerdy over its contradictions and inconsistencies.