Don Heckman

Lou Kachivas

Hordak's resident evil scientist, Professor Tempus, has cooked up a time machine that can rewrite - or redraw - history, turning the Horde's past defeats into victories. Sounds like a world-threatening time travel adventure, right? Well, don't get too excited, because most of this episode is just Bow and Adora running through hallways!

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

Grizzlor, Leech, Entrapta, Catra, Hordak, Imp

various villagers, Professor Tempus, Horde soldiers, Arrow

Doom Balloon, wagon

It's a lovely day for the Great Rebellion to hold a big celebration at a charming castle. No, it's not the Rebels' Fair, and this isn't Blackmoor Castle (see 67008's "The Red Knight"); this is Valley View Castle, and the rebels and villagers are gathered to celebrate the day She-Ra saved their home from Hordak's deadly Doom Balloon! Bow and Kowl kick back next to Madame Razz's fortune-telling hut, thankful for the freedom to eat oranges that their blonde friend's heroic actions have made possible.

They don't know how fragile that freedom is! For over in the Fright Zone even now, Hordak's scientist Professor Tempus is showing off a terrible new invention. It's called the time transformer, and the professor gleefully demonstrates its usefulness for his boss and an assembly of minions composed of Grizzlor, Leech, Entrapta, a typically loud-mouthed Imp and a feisty Catra. On the machine's viewscreen, Tempus brings up video of a past venture of Hordak's that ended in defeat: it just happens to be that time the Horde commander tried to use his Doom Balloon against Valley View Castle.

Present-day Hordak watches in consternation as the time transformer reviews what happened back then: She-Ra blocking and deflecting the balloon's lightning-powered rays with her sword of protection, causing the balloon to go up in flames (as seen in 67021). But then Professor Tempus rewinds the playback, pauses, and uses a stylus with a glowing tip to draw on the screen, adding an extra ray projector to the bottom of the Doom Balloon. When he hits play again, the events of the past unfold, this time featuring a Doom Balloon with double the destructive power. And this time, She-Ra is overcome! Tempus assures a skeptical Hordak that time has now been rewritten, and Valley View Castle now belongs to the Horde; and sure enough, when Hordak places a call to the garrison, a robot soldier is there to answer.

As you can imagine, this altered present is even more confusing - and much less satisfying - for the rebels at the castle! Kowl, Madame Razz, and Broom suddenly find themselves surrounded by Horde troopers, who are manning every inch of the battlements and towers. Razz dashes off on Broom to alert her friends at the camp in the Whispering Woods. She makes her usual crash landing there and, once she's shaken it off, describes the dismaying situation for the heroes on hand (Princess Adora and Bow). Adora, demonstrating a near-psychic level of perception, thinks it sounds like history has been changed, and decides their best course of action is to infiltrate the Fright Zone - surely the source of the deviltry. Accordingly, she and Bow ride their horses over to the Horde fortress and, leaving their steeds in the front yard, sneak into the place on foot via a secret access tunnel.

The pair make it all the way to the hallway right next to the room that Hordak's in, and begin eavesdropping on the villain's excited plotting via a handy ventilation grating; but their presence is detected by a group of Horde soldiers, forcing the duo to make a run for it. Bow and Adora spend the next several minutes of the episode trying to escape from an ever-increasing number of Horde robots, fleeing back and forth and up and down through the fortress; but they're ultimately captured, handcuffed, and brought into Hordak's presence. Lucky for our heroes, the time transformer apparently requires a lot of prep time, and Tempus hasn't quite managed to rewrite any other historical events yet. But he's got one cued up now, and Hordak is happy to show off the process to his captive audience.

The battle result the villains have chosen to overturn is that one where Hordak was using an Eclipse Beam to try to destroy Castle Bright Moon. In the original sequence of events (as seen in 67028), She-Ra flew Swift Wind into space and tossed a grappling hook onto the moon, towing the celestial body back to undo the eclipse and thus weaken the power of the beam. This time, Hordak plans to draw in a meteor shower which will somehow cause the eclipse to continue. While he's distracted playing with his stylus, Bow and Adora pick the locks on their handcuffs and run off, using a cloud of sneezing powder to cover their escape. They dash all the way back out of the fortress, and at the tunnel mouth Adora urges Bow to ride to Bright Moon and warn Queen Angella that her castle might suddenly turn to rubble. Meanwhile, the princess stays behind to do by herself what the two of them already failed once to do together: stop Hordak.

As soon as the easily influenced Bow has reluctantly obeyed and ridden off on Arrow, Adora grabs Spirit and finally does a full transformation. Leaving Swift Wind again outside, She-Ra reenters the Fright Zone using a more direct route than before, diving straight through the outside wall - and then through any other interior obstructions along the way - and landing right in the middle of Hordak's lab with the time transformer. An enraged Hordak tries to zap She-Ra with his arm cannon, but she jumps and flips out of the way, eventually landing right in front of the time machine. When she again dodges his arm cannon - this time set to flamethrower - the weapon roasts the time transformer. Tempus's machine really does seem to be toast, but just to be sure, She-Ra lifts the wrecked device and hucks it out of the building.

But wait! The day isn't yet saved, for - as Hordak and Tempus tauntingly explain to She-Ra - they already finished the meteor shower and turned the machine back on before she arrived. Even if there was a way to undo the actions of the time transformer - which there wasn't - She-Ra's smashing of the thing has made any hitting of "control-Z" impossible. Our heroine, leaping out of the Fright Zone once again, decides she is left with only one desperate ploy: turning her horse into a time machine. With much positive reinforcement and cajoling, She-Ra leads Swift Wind up into space and around and around Etheria at dizzying speed, which (as Superman can attest) is a sure way to go back in time. They stop at just the right moment in the past, and spot Hordak's well-drawn meteor shower approaching the moon. She-Ra solves the problem by turning her sword into a giant baseball bat and whacking all the rocks to rubble. Then she and her horse just have to go... back to the future!

Having changed to Adora and rejoined her friends at the rebel camp in the present day, the princess has related She-Ra's saving of Bright Moon to everyone, and they all express relief at the outcome. There's just enough time left for Kowl and Broom to thoroughly insult Madame Razz's ability to tell anyone's fortune - or fly without hitting a tree. Hooray!

• Hordak: How will this machine solve my problems with the rebels? / Professor Tempus: By going back in time and changing your losing battles to winning battles! (laughs in an unhinged manner)
• Hordak: Fools! Bolt bags! Stop that sneezing! (blasts his own troopers) You metallic nincompoops! The prisoners have escaped. Catch them or you'll spend the next hundred years as a vacuum cleaner!
• She-Ra (in a line sure to satisfy all the adult collectors out there): Sorry, Professor; but you boys aren't grown up enough to play with this toy.
• Madame Razz: Now listen here, Broom: I happen to be the best fortuneteller in all Etheria. I tell the past, the present, and the future. / Kowl (with a crushing takedown): The future? You mean, like what tree you're going to crash into next? (Razz stammers; then all her friends laugh at her, ending the episode)

• Adora and Bow run away from the viewer: As they attempt to escape from some Horde soldiers

One full

7:09 - We find Loo-Kee looking down from the same vine-covered branch he was using in just the previous episode (67072), again at the top of the center of the screen. It's also an establishing shot of the Whispering Woods, but the background has changed to a section of the forest with many pink- and red-colored trees and bushes. Very likely the same hiding place was used in 67032's "Friends Are Where You Find Them."
Did I spot him? YES!

Speaking of rewriting time! Loo-Kee's lesson deals with an event in today's story that never actually happened. The elf claims that, while she was in her fortune-telling booth at the Valley View fair, Madame Razz gave a villager a good fortune: "If he worked hard, was honest, and treated others kindly, he would have a happy life." Loo-Kee advises us to do the same. But did Razz actually say that, Loo-Kee? Maybe in your version of events; but in our timeline, Madame Razz's fortune-telling just makes Broom want to go to bed.

Gotta get back in time: Say what you want about the poor use of time travel in this episode - I know I did. But at least it was actually about time travel, and inspired me to create this time travel category.

• Our writer today is Don Heckman, who - well, let's just say he's a long way from my favorite writer of POP scripts. We'll see what he delivers this time, for what will be his seventh effort on the series.
• The opening castle is identical to Blackmoor Castle, the site of the famous Rebels' Fair in 67008's "The Red Knight." However, per Kowl, it is not Blackmoor Castle, but Valley View Castle, and the celebration being held there is not the anniversary of the beginning of the Great Rebellion, as it was in 67008, but the commemoration of She-Ra's saving Valley View.
• And what was the Horde threat that She-Ra stopped? Hordak's Doom Balloon, a vehicle we saw used in 67021's "The Stone in the Sword." Our writer seems to have co-opted that battle as being in protection of Valley View Castle, though in the previous episode (and the clips used) it appeared that Hordak was just burning random forest lands.
• Oddly, the two episodes visually borrowed from for these opening scenes (67008 and 67021) were both written by Mike Chain. Since Chain only contributed to 3 episodes of the series, this represents a big percentage of his work!
• I missed this in my first viewing of the episode, but it appears that Madame Razz is running a little fortune-telling tent at the fair. You can just see the back of her head in one shot, as Kowl makes a reference to the castle getting its fortune told (a strange comment that serves to explain what's going on).
• Among the many Horde members populating the Fright Zone today are Entrapta (appearing for only the second time in the series after her debut in the season premiere, 67066's "One to Count on") and little Imp. This is the tiny spy's first appearance this season, but he gets back to his old tricks right away, taunting Catra and getting special protection from his boss when the frustrated feline foe threatens him.
• In another return performance, the bald, pointy-eared scientist showing off today's title MacGuffin uses the same character design as the Horde scientist we saw developing the shrinking powder in 67025's "Small Problems." Unlike in that episode, today he'll be given a name: Professor Tempus. The name, which is "time" in Latin, is amazingly apt to today's subject matter.
• All the other Horde minions featured in the opening scene, including Entrapta, Leech, and Grizzlor, are there just to push up the numbers for today, and get no lines of dialogue. Though Leech and Grizzlor show up in a later shot, we never see Entrapta again after her first appearance.
• Interesting that, in his reminiscing, Hordak claims the Doom Balloon as "the most beautiful ship of evil I ever had." What about the two flagships from Horde Prime that you wrecked, Hordak (the Monstron in 67048 and the Velvet Glove in 67018)? Perhaps there are too many bad memories associated with those...
• Professor Tempus's time transformer allows him to use a glowing-tipped wand to draw objects back into the past: a very... unique... use of time travel. See commentary.
• The secret tunnel entrance that Adora and Bow use to get into the Fright Zone looks to be the same one General Sunder used during his recent infiltration - see 67067's "Return of the General."
• Hordak's second journey into the past - and a past episode - involves the Eclipse Beam used to attack Bright Moon in 67028's "Bow's Farewell." This story was a Heckman script, like today's.
• Swiss army sword: Just like the last time it happened, when She-Ra goes into space (without the need for a space helmet), she turns her sword into a grappling hook and chain so she can tow the moon.
• Do robots sneeze? According to Don Heckman, they do! Bow's sneezing powder works excellently well against them. To be fair to Mr. Heckman, this is just another in a long line of instances in which our robotic troopers have betrayed absurdly human characteristics. (Bow also used sneezing powder, that time attached to an arrow and used against less robotic foes, in 67066's "One to Count on," the season premiere.)
• Hordak transformations: The old standby, his arm cannon, comes out today as a motivational tool for his men. A few minutes later he uses it again in an attempt to freeze - and then burn - She-Ra.
• Speaking of She-Ra: she makes a very late showing in today's story, with the transformation sequence delayed until around sixteen minutes in. Technically we've already seen her in earlier parts of the episode, and even before we saw Adora; but those all represented past versions of She-Ra, seen only on the screen of the time transformer. This delay in using our superpowered title character is something Heckman has toyed with in several of his previous scripts: see for instance 67057's "Jungle Fever." Or better yet, don't see it: it's an awful episode. You can just read my analysis instead. I'm not so sure you want to see this one, either. See commentary.
• She-Ra dives into the Fright Zone fortress, using the same diving animation we've seen He-Man use many times in the past. She then appears to essentially fly - in the classic Superman pose, with both fists out - through the inner walls and pipes of the complex.
• It's so funny that I happened to mention Superman just now; because the next utterly absurd thing She-Ra does today is to ask Swift Wind to go back in time. The method used - flying around the planet really fast - mimics one of the other most bizarre methods for time travel ever depicted in pop culture: that of Christopher Reeve's Superman in the character's first feature film (1978).
• Just want to point out as well, regardless of any other logical issues one might have with this sequence, that She-Ra achieves it all by flying into space without a space helmet. I'd be perfectly fine with that, were it not for the fact that she decided she needed a space helmet to breathe in space in 67018's "Horde Prime Takes a Holiday."
• Swiss army sword: To stop a Hordak-drawn meteor shower, She-Ra turns her sword into a big metal baseball bat. You might think that maybe the shape is only coincidental, and not actually meant to be a reference to the Earth sport that She-Ra should know nothing about (unless half-Terran He-Man or full-Earthling Marlena at some point schooled her on it); but in fact it definitely is meant to be a baseball bat, since Swift Wind makes a "home run" joke at the end of the sequence.
• By the way, what we should take from this episode is that the most powerful entity on Etheria is probably not She-Ra - it's Swift Wind. Not only is he the one who really towed the entire moon, he's also the one who can actually fly fast enough to travel through time. Give it up for the unicorn, people.
• Ending credits variation: We get the same alternate background painting during the credits that we've been getting in almost every previous episode of this season.

• When our characters started thinking back to old adventures, I worried that She-Ra had become so bereft of new ideas, in only the eighth episode of the new season, that they'd resorted to a clip show already. But no - that's not what's happening here. The reality is much stranger, and seems to involve rewriting history before it even gets rewritten. The story of the Doom Balloon has already been altered from what it was in 67021 before Professor Tempus even gets out his time stylus.
• This is just going to sound like I'm prejudiced against Mr. Heckman, but... his confusing and completely bizarre use of time travel is just the nonsensical type of wackiness I've come to expect from him. We're to believe, first of all, that Professor Tempus can tune into the past like he's watching it on TV. Exactly what camera is he using to bring up the Valley View battle on his screen? Also, rather than actually travel back into the past at all, Tempus... draws on it? What? I suppose we have to give Don points for originality - I can't think of too many other time machines in pop culture that have functioned this way. It's possible our writer was inspired by the computer graphics drawing tablet; a google search informs me that the first tablet model developed for home computers (the KoalaPad) was made available around 1983, not long before this episode was written, so the concept of drawing on screens probably would have seemed very modern and cool. It's also just the kind of thing someone who regularly works with animators would use in a story.
• Of course, if you can just draw things into reality, this machine has a much wider use than that being put to it. Can you draw sandwiches into being five minutes ago, and never go hungry? Can you draw a pet dog for yourself? Can you draw yourself a new house?
• Additionally, once time has been rewritten, we find that it affects the present, but somehow without giving the present-day participants any memories of that rewritten past. Kowl and the other rebels are flabbergasted to find Horde troopers occupying Valley View Castle - even though they should presumably have lived through the occupation. If the rebels are confused, how must the posted robot soldiers feel? "Uhh... how did we get in this castle?" It's a completely illogical and inconsistent result: we get only some of the consequences of the rewritten history, with others randomly left out.
• Another way in which the past seems to have affected the future? Bow is no longer at the castle. He was there with Kowl in the opening scene, but after the time shenanigans have occurred, we find the archer back at the camp in the Whispering Woods instead of by the side of his birdy buddy. Has the pair's always-contentious friendship soured even further in this alternate version of history? Or is this maybe just a continuity error?
• Soundtrack error: I noted an issue with the backing music in 67071, with speed drops resulting in sickly sounding tunes. We hear it happening occasionally in this episode as well. One example comes at around 6:40, just after Hordak confirms that his troops are actually in control of Valley View Castle.
• We've seen past examples of our heroes being able to miraculously infer what their enemies were up to with only the paltriest of clues. For instance, the rebels were very quick to conclude, with basically zero evidence, that little Prince Kevin was being manipulated by Shadow Weaver in the recent 67069's "A Lesson in Love." A great example from MOTU is in MU078's "Betrayal of Stratos," when He-Man somehow knows right away that Skeletor won't have stashed the bird people's stolen egg in Snake Mountain, even though that's the thing Bonehead would definitely have done in any other episode. These intuitive mental leaps from our heroes are shortcuts to moving the plot along when you have only twenty minutes of runtime to work with, and I understand that and can sympathize. But I still object to our heroes' highly unlikely - yet incredibly incisive - actions today. All they know is that Valley View Castle has suddenly been filled with Horde soldiers. There are millions of possible explanations for this; one that immediately jumps to mind is that Hordak has developed a teleporter and is simply beaming his troops in. Regardless, the obvious action for our rebels is to deal with the problem at hand, and try to win back the castle, right? But no: instead, Adora immediately has the insight that "it's as if history were being changed," and she and her friends travel not to Valley View, but to the Fright Zone. Which is of course the right call, since it's best to stop the time transformer ASAP; but it would be hard to convince the people of Valley View Castle of that fact. In the end, the heroes never undo the Valley View takeover, and we're forced to assume that it remains conquered by the Horde at the episode's end. I guess the fair is... cancelled?
• It's interesting to think about how else history might have changed as a result of the rewritten Doom Balloon battle. Recall that in its actual series appearance, the Doom Balloon's rays were deflected by She-Ra, but had the catastrophic side effect of shattering the gem in the sword of protection - throwing our heroine back into her human form and making the appearance of her alter ego impossible (67021). Adora had to go through a very lengthy and dangerous process without the aid of her super powers, of climbing up the side of Sky Dancer Mountain and journeying down into its depths to meet the First Ones, before she could effect repairs to her sword. But what would have been the damage to her sword with double the lightning power striking it? What if it was irreparably broken, and there was suddenly no more She-Ra? Just think how lucky Hordak would have gotten with that one change to the past!
• Right about when Adora finally makes her transformation into She-Ra and returns into the Fright Zone to take care of things, I began to realize just how much of this episode is completely pointless, there only to pad out the runtime - which is especially odd since I was just talking about writers having to take storytelling shortcuts with the limited time at their disposal. Think about it: Hordak and Tempus stand around for half the episode while the professor is supposedly "getting ready" to use the time transformer again. This allows our heroes the time to clumsily race about the Fright Zone, dodging and ultimately being caught by robot soldiers that they usually defeat with ease. A lot of their failure to escape or succeed is due to the fact that Adora has nonsensically chosen not to transform into her alter ego before going on this dangerous mission. Why wait until you've wandered all the way into the Fright Zone, then gotten captured, then run yourself all the way out again, before bringing out the big guns?
• In other stories he's written (see MU105's "No Job Too Small"), Heckman tried to point out how the title hero's non-superpowered form had its own advantages and uses, depending on the situation. Here, he seems to be arguing just the opposite: nothing productive occurs until She-Ra arrives. We saw him delaying the appearance of She-Ra to even more frustrating results in 67057's "Jungle Fever."
• Since Superman already did it, I guess it's OK that She-Ra somehow traveled into the past by flying very fast, and I'm not going to make any nerdy complaints about it. Technically it was Swift Wind who did all the heavy lifting anyway, flying at speeds greater than light while She-Ra simply provided some vocal encouragement. But keep in mind that after Swift Wind has accomplished this amazing feat, and She-Ra has smashed the past-threatening meteors, our heroine offhandedly tells her steed, "Time to go home." You mean, home to the future? Which will require Swift Wind having to perform that amazing time travel feat all over again, in reverse? Can't he get a rest and a sugar cube first?
• Continuity error: Or perhaps evidence that horses can't count very well. "That was a hit!" Swift Wind comments at She-Ra's first smashing of a meteor. She then very clearly proceeds to strike four additional meteors, after which Swift Wind inaccurately shouts, "Two more hits!"
• It would have been very interesting - and amazingly easy - to have Present She-Ra meet Past She-Ra, while Past She-Ra is in the process of holding back the eclipse. That would have made for an intriguing time travel adventure, right? So... why didn't we do that? The idea was sitting right there. And why didn't Hordak get a chance to mess with time some more? Obviously any one Horde loss-made-victory would be disastrous, which is probably why Heckman avoided having it happen; but that would have just raised the stakes of the story, and made it more impactful when She-Ra finally found a way to reverse things. Show some backbone, Don! Give us real peril!
• Indeed, all I can think of right now, having gotten to the end of the episode, are all the ways this story could have been more entertaining, and better utilized its main conceit. Usually I love a good sci-fi time travel story: I'm a huge fan of Doctor Who, the seemingly never-ending BBC series with time travel at its two hearts. I agree with most fans that Star Trek's "City on the Edge of Forever," a plot centered around Kirk and his friends being lost in the past, is the best episode of the original series. I love the Back to the Future movies (well, at least the first and third). Heck, even though I didn't understand it, I even enjoyed Tenet. But time travel is only cool when you actually do something with it. Today, we instead watched as Hordak and the professor thrillingly didn't do anything with their time machine, all while Bow and Adora didn't manage to stop them from not doing anything, leaving She-Ra to do the tiniest bit of exciting time-saving in the very closing minutes of the story. What the hell did I just watch??
• And to cap off this huge missed opportunity of an episode, we have to witness poor Madame Razz being verbally brutalized by Broom and Kowl for her poor fortune-telling and dangerously accident-prone flying skills. Yowch.
• Another thought: I have an even better time-travel solution for She-Ra than just bashing those meteors. If she had stopped the time transformer before it was ever used, none of the history-changing would have happened, and she would have saved Valley View and Bright Moon in one go. So what She-Ra needed to do was go even further back in time and kill Professor Tempus's parents before they conceived him. Then the time transformer would never have been invented! Easy peasy! It makes me wonder whether we could somehow go back in time and stop Don Heckman from ever writing this episode... In an entirely non-lethal way, of course.
• Like Kowl and Broom against Razz, I think I've loosed a little more venom at this episode than is really warranted. Though the plot makes little sense, we shouldn't really be expecting or asking for sense from our 80s cartoon shows. The central idea of the time transformer is a good one, and there is some exciting action to be had here, when the characters finally get around to acting. Also, as I've said in the past, I always like an episode that results in a long commentary section from yours truly. It has been fun picking this one apart.