Mike Chain

Marsh Lamore

She-Ra's encounter with Hordak's new Doom Balloon leaves her blown back into Adora with her sword of protection's gem cracked. Unless the sword can be repaired, they'll have to change the name of this show to Adora: Princess of No Powers! To prevent this marketing disaster, Adora will have to talk to her mystical mentor, Light Hope, and go on a dangerous journey. Her goals: get her weapon restored, her secret identity returned, and her captured friend Bow rescued from the Fright Zone!

Bow, Princess Adora (She-Ra), Glimmer, Kowl, Light Hope

Grizzlor, Hordak, Shadow Weaver

various rebels, Sprocker the Twigget, the First Ones, Horde soldiers

Doom Balloon

It's a dark and stormy night; the perfect night to try out Hordak's new weapon: the Doom Balloon! It's a giant, zeppelin-like craft with which the Horde leader plans to burn down the Whispering Woods. Having received a positive weather forecast from Shadow Weaver, Hordak climbs aboard the new vehicle with his sorceress and a less-than-willing Grizzlor, and they fly up, up and away, towards the rebels' hiding place. The rebels, meanwhile, after briefly catching an attack of the giggles from Sprocker the Twigget's spilled giggleberry powder, are taking shelter from the wet weather, assuming there won't be any Horde attacks tonight - regardless of the fact that they've heard rumors of some new secret weapon. But Bow, Adora, and Glimmer have their expectations overturned when Kowl rushes in to give them news of the rampaging death blimp. Heading to a nearby promontory, they have a perfect view of the devastation the Doom Balloon has already wrought: rank upon rank of trees and foliage have been reduced to smoking skeletons.

And the rebels don't realize that the vehicle's fiery laser is powered by absorbed energy. That energy can be in the form of lightning, or it can take the form of Glimmer's magic beams, as the purple princess soon discovers. Bow rushes to help the downed Glimmer, temporarily distracting the crew of the balloon with a smoke arrow so he can carry her to safety. Meanwhile, Adora finds a private spot to transform herself and arrives - as She-Ra - to try her own hand at the super-weapon. Hordak fires the balloon's beam at her, and our heroine deflects it with her sword of protection. The bounced-back beam short-circuits the balloon, causing its inflatable top to disintegrate; but She-Ra is also thrown back in the resulting explosion of energy. When she comes to, she finds herself changed back to Adora. And, as it happens, she still hasn't quite defeated the Doom Balloon: though seemingly disarmed of its fiery laser, its de-ballooned control gondola can still fly around, and it sucks Bow off the ground and inside itself with a well-aimed tractor beam. When Kowl shows up to tell Adora the terrible news of her friend's capture, Adora decides to get right back on the horse (metaphorically, that is; Spirit is nowhere to be seen) and change into her alter ego again.

But she can't! After a couple of tries of speaking her magic words to no effect, Adora takes a look at her sword and discovers that the gem at the base of the blade was cracked during her struggle with the Doom Balloon. Unless her sword can be repaired, Adora will never be able to transform into She-Ra again! The princess decides that her only recourse will be to speak with her very important mentor, Light Hope (who, for what I'm sure are very good reasons, we've never heard of or seen until now, unless you count Adora's episode-opening narration). The only problem is, Light Hope lives in the Crystal Castle, and the Crystal Castle is way up at the top of Sky Dancer Mountain. It's an easy journey if you have a flying horse, but wherever Spirit is hanging out for this episode, it's in his flightless state. Adora decides she has no choice but to scale the mountain, aided by nothing but a length of rope.

The climb is treacherous and nerve-wracking, and she has several near-fatal slips. Even when she finally reaches the top, Adora accidentally drops her sword of protection, and it hurtles over the cliff, through the clouds, down toward the rocks below! Luckily her friend Kowl has been fluttering at her side during the entire ascent, giving her positive encouragements like "you'll never make it into the castle with your sword broken" and "I promise to follow you all the way down if you fall." He proves himself a true friend in this critical moment when he swoops down and fetches her sword for her.

Finally arrived safe at the peak, Adora finds that she can actually enter the Crystal Castle, even with a broken sword (and even while, for some reason, holding the sword upside-down). Inside, Light Hope appears, already fully aware of why she's come. The wise light beam explains that the only way to fix her sword will be to speak with Etheria's "First Ones," the spirits of the planet's most ancient founders. To reach them, she'll have to go on an even longer, underground journey, involving all of the following, and in this order: the Jaws of Darkness, the Neverending Maze, the Rainbow Grotto, and the Forbidden Corner. That last thing will finally take her to the Cavern of Fire, where the First Ones hang out.

Long story short, Adora travels through all these places, exhibiting various useful traits and qualities in the process. The Jaws of Darkness is really just a stairway that's been built into an entrance that looks like the mouth of a demon; but it has a spiky ball at the top that chases Adora and Kowl down. The princess has the bright idea of riding a big shield down the stairs at breakneck speed, then carefully leans at the right moment to steer the shield around a hard turn, where the spiky ball smashes itself to bits. There's also a part, either in the maze or the grotto, where she has to jump over some stuff and avoid some falling spikes. Finally reaching the Forbidden Corner, it looks like she's going to roast herself in the Cavern of Fire, but she enters anyway, and meets the First Ones without singeing a single blonde hair on her head. The First Ones (who, by the way, look like a rock band made out of fire) praise her for the bravery, wisdom, agility, but mostly bravery that she showed in getting to them - and all without super powers! This, they declare, shows that she's worthy of getting super powers.

It doesn't look like they do anything to her sword, but Adora finds that the blade has suddenly been restored, so she hefts it up and says her usual spiel. Thanks to the magic of film editing, we don't have to witness the reborn She-Ra's tedious journey out of all of those pretentiously named places she visited and all the way over to the Fright Zone, where Bow has been incarcerated all this time. Yes, our mustached friend has been stewing in a barred cage, defiantly spouting his intention to escape to a jeering Hordak, Grizzlor, and Shadow Weaver, who have all been snarkily assuring him that there's no way he can ever free himself. His cage is made out of pure Muralian scrap, and the prison itself is surrounded by an impenetrable shield. Impenetrable, you say? Strongest metal in the galaxy, you say? That's nothing to She-Ra: she pops up out of the prison floor, beats the tar out of Grizzlor and some Horde soldiers, then incapacitates Hordak with a hefty dose of giggleberry powder, giving her time to rip open Bow's cage so the pair can make their escape. And given that she's taken so long getting to this point, there's no runtime left for an epilogue, so I hope that was a satisfying ending for everyone!

• Hordak: I just love the smell of a brand-new weapon.
• Shadow Weaver: My dark magic tells me that a powerful storm will strike tonight. This is the night you've been waiting for. Lightning will streak the skies with the fires of destruction.
• Hordak: Up, up, and away, in my wicked Doom Balloon!
• Hordak: At this rate I should have Whispering Woods totally destroyed faster than you can say, "Horrible Hordak headed a herd of hideous Hordesmen!" (laughs)
• Hordak: My Doom Balloon is doomed!
• Princess Adora: Without this stone, my sword has no powers. I can't become She-Ra.
• Kowl (to Adora, who's trying to climb a huge mountain): If you should fall, I'll keep you company, all the way down.
• She-Ra (having been tied in chains and towed over to Hordak): Is this how you get girls to fall for you, Hordak?

• Grizzlor runs at the viewer, bug-height: Making a charge at She-Ra

Two partial (missing Spirit/Swift Wind sequence), two aborted
Variation - I thought the POP animators had managed to avoid this problem, sometimes seen in the He-Man transformation; but the first partial transformation isn't quite cut off before She-Ra begins to move her sword toward her missing horse.
In the aborted sequences, Adora repeats the opening phrase of her magic words twice, to no effect, before realizing her sword is jacked.

16:42 - Just when Adora and Kowl are about ready to give up hope of ever finding the Forbidden Corner, and I was about ready to give up hope of ever spotting Loo-Kee, he shows up among some drippy-looking orange and blue globs, hard by the Forbidden Corner.
Did I spot him? YES!

Loo-Kee tells us that the lesson of today's episode is the value of "stick-to-it-iveness." Wow, that's a big word! It just means that when you have a job, you should stick to it until the job is done. Like, I don't know - analyzing every single episode of two related 80s cartoon shows.

Landmark Episode: Given that this is the first episode featuring Light Hope and the Crystal Castle, and puts our heroine in danger of losing her powers, I felt obliged to tag it as a landmark.

• Check out that totally original, technically-not-legally-actionable-as-copyright-infringement episode title! Yeah. Nice one. Actually, given the subject of today's episode, the title is a clever and pertinent reversal of the Arthurian legend/Disney movie phrase.
• This is writer Mike Chain's second She-Ra script, his first being that of 67008's "The Red Knight." That first script proved a bit of a blind alley in terms of character lore, but on that score, this one does not disappoint!
• Hordak apparently has a good luck charm in the form of a Horde soldier statuette (or action figure). Well... had. In a scene which I didn't feel was worth inserting into my plot summary, the good luck charm is accidentally smashed, earning Grizzlor some ire from his boss. Interesting to note that our fearless Horde leader has his superstitions!
• Hordak transformations: Hordak fakes us and Grizzlor out today when it looks like he's changed his arm into its standard laser cannon. Instead, it turns out to be a vacuum cleaner attachment, for cleaning up his broken action figure. Okay... where does the sucked-up stuff go? Do we want to know?
• Trapdoor time! Hordak last enjoyed a good trapdoor-ing in episode 18 (67035), with the scapegoat Mantenna as subject; today, it's Grizzlor doing the honors.
• Sprocker clumsily introduces us to the pollen of the giggleberry bush. The powdery stuff has the effect you would expect on people who inhale it.
• Whoever animated Hordak's Doom Balloon breaking up surely must have used as a source the macabre footage of the Hindenberg going down in a fiery blaze.
• Interesting to note that this is not the first Horde blimp we've seen; the first appeared in 67007's "The Sea Hawk." This is the first air ship with a ray that charges with lightning.
• Is this a case for my sub-category, "Kowl avoids capture"? It's a bit of a stretch this time, but it is true that he avoids getting sucked up in the abduction beam that grabs Bow, leaving him free to inform Adora of the problem.
• We learn that Adora's sword of protection is unable to transform her into She-Ra when its gem has been cracked. Yikes! Makes you wonder about the advisability of including a jewel in your power sword. I'm just sayin': He-Man never had this problem. Do you call a blacksmith, or do you call a gemcutter? In fact, Adora calls neither: her immediate decision is to "go see Light Hope."
• That's right! For the first time outside of the show opening, and out of nowhere, Adora references the character Light Hope. As with the other people who are specifically said to know her secret, it seems that the princess has already met Light Hope and revealed her secret to that entity in some off-screen moment that we didn't get to see. (However... see next episode, 67022.)
• The first thing we learn about Light Hope is that they dwell at the top of Sky Dancer Mountain. Kowl then lets slip that the famous Crystal Castle Adora has been claiming to be the defender of all this time is Light Hope's house, way at the top of this mountain. It also turns out that Adora usually has to use her sword's power to get inside of said castle. This is all new stuff to me!
• Adora's formula for getting into the Crystal Castle is very similar to words that He-Man sometimes said to get into Castle Grayskull. He would raise his sword and say, "by the power of Grayskull, I command the Jawbridge, open!" (or thereabouts). Adora raises her sword of protection before the Crystal Castle and says, "I summon thee, Light Hope, to open the gates of the Crystal Castle."
• Some amusing trivia for you, taken from the documentary Power of Grayskull. According to She-Ra co-creator J. Michael Straczynski, he was asked by the producers (or possibly Mattel executives) to create a mentor character for She-Ra, along the lines of He-Man's Scorceress. Knowing that the only real reason for the character's existence was so that it could be made into a toy, Straczynski claims to have purposely nixed any possibility of added sales by conceiving of a character who was simply a beam of light. "Sell that, b$%&*es!" (Sadly, the MOTU Classics line appears to have eventually out-foxed Mr. Straczynski and found a way to sell Light Hope as an action figure, as an online search will reveal.)
• We are just piling on the new concepts and lore today! Light Hope tells Adora that the only way to fix her sword is to see "The First Ones," described as "the living spirits of the founders of Etheria." These guys sound a lot like Eternia's "Ancients" or "Elders," mentioned often in the expressions of MOTU characters. Except we never got to meet the Ancients!
• Light Hope is clearly very fond of giving pretentious, fantasy-style names to everything: the Jaws of Darkness, the Neverending Maze, the Rainbow Grotto, the Forbidden Corner, the Cavern of Fire - jeez, man! Just go ahead already and record your progressive rock concept album.
• Bow's prison cell - which, conveniently, is locally sourced in the Fright Zone so She-Ra won't have to travel all the way to the more typical prison on Beast Island for her rescue - has bars made of a substance Grizzlor calls "pure Muralian scrap." Reminding us of MOTU's tendency for superlatives, this stuff is touted as "the strongest metal in the galaxy." In He-Man's universe the owner of this title tended to change depending on who was writing the episode; you could argue it was photanium, but you could also claim it as eternium. We'll find some similar inconsistency over in She-Ra's universe, when we're later introduced to another contender for the "strongest" material in 67030.
• Adora and Kowl's journey underground through the "Etherian Underworld" recalls the journey He-Man, Man-at-Arms, and Orko took into Granamyr's basement to go looking for his stolen magic in MU114's "Battle of the Dragons."
• Hordak transformations: In a scene that features all the bondage of a classic Wonder Woman comic, Hordak changes his arm into a chain-firing gun with attached winch. He uses this to bind She-Ra's legs and wind her in towards him. When she arrives at his feet, She-Ra delivers a suggestive line of dialogue that ends up feeling really creepy, especially when you consider Hordak and Adora's seeming father/daughter relationship.
• I was surprised to see the Twiggets' giggleberry powder making a return in the episode's final moments. Didn't think that silly plot device would come back around!
• Another story without Adora/She-Ra's horse. Didn't think we'd start sidelining the animal sidekick so soon in the series!
• Apparently under the impression that we've seen quite enough of the Crystal Castle for one day, our animators choose (for the first time ever) to swap out the usual Crystal Castle background painting on the ending credits sequence. Instead, we get a shot of what I believe is Bright Moon Castle. This painting has been used as the title screen background for several previous episodes. Though this is the only time we'll be seeing this ending credits variation in the first season, it will become a mainstay of the second season.
• The sequence of She-Ra battling the Doom Balloon will make a surprise reappearance in 67073's "The Time Transformer."

• Grizzlor proves himself once again befitting of the title "the poor man's Beast Man" when, rather than accept Hordak's invitation to join in on the Doom Balloon's maiden voyage, he claims that he needs to stay behind because "someone's got to polish the prison bars." Bruh. Bruh.
• Animation error: In an error of layering, when Hordak is pulling the lever that will fire Glimmer's stun beam back at her, his hand and wrist appear on top of his shoulder, making it look as though his arm is somehow bent around behind him. A later and very similar scene where Hordak fires his weapon at She-Ra has the layering issue fixed.
• Animation error: In an error more common to MOTU, and as I noted in the transformations section, a freshly transformed She-Ra begins to move her sword of protection over towards an absent Spirit. Oops!
• It turns out that the control center (or, to put it in zeppelin/blimp terms, the "gondola") of Hordak's Doom Balloon can fly around without the balloon part. Huh. So.... why did you need the balloon part?
• You have to wonder what Adora told Glimmer, or if she paused to tell the rebel leader anything before running off to Sky Dancer Mountain. At least give the poor lady a heads up that you're trying to fix the problem of the captured Bow!
• It's very cool that this episode gives us so much important information, introducing us to Light Hope and letting us visit the Crystal Castle for the first time. But I wish the show had been able to include all these discoveries in a way that didn't make us feel like we missed something. Why not tell the story of how Adora encountered Light Hope for the first time, instead of just pretending they've always been buds? Will we get this backstory later? (Amazingly, I am to be satisfied on this point by the very next episode, 67022, which gives us the origin story I've been craving!)
• Animation error: As Kowl and Adora travel through the Etherian Underworld, Kowl's flap cycle includes a brief frame or two during which his usually white neck ruff is incorrectly colored the pinkish-orange of the rest of his body.
• Though the mysticism is cool and all, I'm also very bothered by the intrusion of these upstart "First Ones." Why does Adora need to talk to these shmoes to get her sword fixed, when we all know it came out of, and is powered by, Grayskull? (If it wasn't already obvious from those magic words Adora is always saying, see 67001 or MU073; either episode shows Castle Grayskull was definitely the sword of protection's home before it fell into Adora's hands.) Shouldn't Light Hope be ringing up the Sorceress on the old televiewer?
• Plot continuity aside, I did enjoy the fantasy and adventure themes of this story, the several funny lines of dialogue, and appreciated at least the attempt to add to She-Ra's lore. I'm a bit surprised, with all the momentous concepts in this script, that it was not written by one of the show's co-creators, Straczynski or DiTillio. Why leave this to (no offense) the relative newbie, Chain? (Again, with regard to this complaint, see the next episode, 67022.)