David Wise

Gwen Wetzler

Teela and Adam accidentally stumble upon the hidden city of Arcadia, where women rule on the glittering surface while men toil as slaves in the underground mines. Can our more enlightened heroes teach the Arcadians a valuable lesson about gender equality before their society literally crumbles beneath their feet?

Teela, Prince Adam (He-Man), Orko

N/A

Arcadian guards (women), Queen Sumana, Ananda, Arcadian miners (men), Mistress Alanz

Attak Trak, Arcadian flying vehicle

He-Man is running around and dodging and deflecting projectiles with a cool shield that materializes when he pushes a button on his bracer! Turns out he is testing out Man-at-Arms's new "electric force shield," to be added to the regular equipment of the Eternian army. Duncan reminds He-Man that Prince Adam is meant to accompany Captain Teela on a visit to the lowland villages. Sure enough, in the following scene Adam and Teela are rolling along in the Attak Trak, well into their journey. Teela tells Adam that she was just speaking with his mother the queen about her experiences back on Earth, and how Marlena was one of Earth's first female astronauts due to lingering sexism on the planet. Adam, Teela, and Attak Trak all discuss how silly that is: clearly men and women are equals, and (according to Trak) machines are superior to both.

Their discussion is cut short when Attak Trak abruptly halts, having encountered an invisible obstruction. Adam and Teela get out and go in opposite directions to try to find the edges of the barrier. Each of them separately encounters a pair of aggressive female guards. Adam gets trapped in a cage that one guard zaps into being from her wrist gun, but Teela is quick enough to dodge all the attempts to snare her. The impressed guards decide to invite her back to meet their queen, so Teela accepts. On the flight in, Teela learns the ladies come from Arcadia, a city hidden behind an impenetrable force dome, ruled over by Queen Sumana. The guards find the idea of a king such as Randor laughable, because men are believed to be useless except as physical labor. In the throne room, Queen Sumana greets Teela kindly and gives her a tour of the beautiful city, telling her that their force dome is powered by a substance known as arcolyte, which is mined beneath the city by the entire male population.

At the same time, Prince Adam is getting a taste of what it's like to be a member of the male population, as the rude guards toss him down a shaft into the mine. He is met by the foreman, Ananda, who tells him about the arcolyte and adds that they are behind quota, so he'd better get digging. Adam at first refuses, smashing the digging device he's handed and saying some nonsense about equality and freedom; but he must have eventually been persuaded to help, since Ananda later comes to visit the queen (and Teela), bringing complaints from the other miners and Adam about the instability of the mine. Adam is sure the shafts have been overworked, and the shoring girders could go at any minute, causing a collapse that would bring the whole city down. The queen dismisses the danger, sure that her handsome favorite Ananda can take care of things.

Teela believes she has seen enough of Arcadian society to tell the queen that it's an awful place and she should give up her whole form of government. The queen, deciding that Teela has seen too much and can never leave the city, tries to trap her, but Teela again proves herself too wily to be captured. She runs off to find Adam; having remembered that the queen said "something about mining," she heads for the nearest grate and goes underground. Meanwhile, Ananda has decided that an Eternian prince might be able to convince the queen of the danger to the city better than he ever could, and so points Adam to a ventilation shaft that will lead him to the surface. Thus it is that Teela and Adam literally run into one another and head back to the throne room.

Predictably, the stubborn Sumana refuses to heed the warnings of the pink-vested Eternian stranger with the stupid set of chromosomes, and puts him back in one of her automatic cages. It's a good thing that the city chooses this moment to begin collapsing. With the aid of the apocalyptic tremors, Teela is able to convince the queen that the only way out of their troubles is to work together, so Sumana frees both Eternians and gives the order for women and men to begin a co-ed rescue mission. Adam runs off to retrieve his power sword, which he dropped at the beginning of the episode and which he learned from Ananda has been taken to the foundry to be melted down as scrap metal. Fortunately for him, the slow-moving Mistress Alanz is in charge at the foundry, and the power sword refuses to melt in the fire into which she's just dropped it when he shows up. He retrieves his weapon with the handy use of his electric shield. A quick dousing with a bucket of water makes the sword safe to hold aloft, and Adam speaks those magic words we all know and love.

The women and men of Arcadia are having a grand time in the basement, working together to prop up the columns of the mine. But they need big-brained He-Man to come in and smash open the ground, bringing in a torrent of (presumably quick-cooling) lava that fills the mine and forestalls the collapse of the city.

Having learned an important lesson in equality from the more enlightened and frankly just better Eternians, Queen Sumana announces to her people that men and women are now going to be equals, and to prove it she's going to marry Ananda and declare him king. They no longer have the ability to mine the arcolyte anyway, since He-Man plugged up their lodes. Their protective dome will come down soon if it hasn't already, so male and female Arcadians are going to have to work together to fight back Eternian encroachers - er, I mean, make a peaceful city for everyone. Since Teela and Adam have now taught these people the right way to live their lives, the pair can safely return to the Attak Trak and, we assume, resume their long-delayed visit to the lowlands.

End with a Joke: It turns out Orko was asleep in the backseat of the Attak Trak for the entire episode. "Hope I didn't miss anything exciting!" he comments.

• Attak Trak: It is obvious that men and women are equals. Machines, on the other hand, are quite superior.
• Teela (to Arcadian woman): Well, a queen should have, uh... someone. / Arcadian woman: A man? Living with Queen Sumana? (laughs very awkwardly) ... Men are uh, are uh... oh, never mind!
• Teela: A perfect utopia: no conflict, no problems - and no love, either.
• Queen Sumana (in response to Adam's warnings): But you're a man; you don't know what you're talking about. Take him away.
• Teela (to the queen): If you don't change your thinking about men, you may have no city.
• Random Arcadian Female: You know something, I think I like working with men.

• A look through widespread legs: Used multiple times throughout the episode, both with He-Man and Teela; and once in reverse for He-Man, to show him jumping away from approaching lava
• He-Man from above, runs to mid-screen and pauses, battle-ready: In the opening scene with his shield, and again in the mine near the end of the episode
• Adam smiles close-up, looking at the viewer: Talking to Ananda
• Adam from above, runs to mid-screen and pauses, battle-ready: While in search of his power sword
• He-Man punches the viewer: To get at some lava

One partial (missing Cringer/Battle Cat sequence)

Brought to you by Teela and He-Man
Teela and He-Man connect the events of today's story to the Magna Carta, an important Earth document establishing the equality of all people that they should logically know very little about. I'd rather hear about how ancient Eternian citizens freed themselves from the inhibiting yoke of handed-down kingship and despotism... oh. Oh wait.

Skeletor-less episodes in Season 1

• Like earlier episodes MU002 and MU005, this story throws us into the action right away with He-Man's training session, testing the (sure to prove itself useful later in the episode) electric force shield. We also get to see He-Man's leaned-over, flat-out run, which he sometimes has occasion to resort to.
• Unusually, the Attak Trak in this episode is always shown with its "top down," or rather the front part of its roof and sides slid back. Possibly this is an attempt to retain the animated design while bringing it closer to the look of the toy? Not sure.
• In a step up from Duncan's porta-prison, the Arcadians have wrist zappers that just conjure giant metal cages or nets. Their imprisonment technology is far beyond ours!
• It's interesting that, though to my eyes Adam looks no different than any other man in Arcadia, Ananda immediately spots that he's "not from Arcadia." What was the clue that tipped him off? The pink vest? It wasn't Adam's blonde hair, since there's another miner with a yellow mop seen at work in a later shot.
• There's a distinction made in this episode that brings up an odd geographical confusion in the series. Adam says he's from "Eternia," which is meant to differentiate him from the Arcadians. But aren't they all on the planet Eternia? It would probably have been more accurate to say he's from "Eternos," which appears to be the capital city containing the royal palace. But the specifics have always been unclear there.
• I guess Adam feels less of a need to pretend he's an air-brained, fun-loving prince when he's deep in the mines of Arcadia: he can safely use fancy terms such as "shoring girders" when he's talking to Ananda.
• Ananda definitely tells two different stories depending on who he's talking to. With Queen Sumana it's all "the men are complaining again" and "Adam says we're over-mining." With Adam he's all like, "I've tried to warn her (the queen) dozens of times, but she won't listen to me!"
• There are similarities to be found in the behavior of the citizens of the city of Targa in MU031's "A Tale of Two Cities" and the Arcadians. Both are very insular and suspicious of strangers, immediately labeling our heroes as spies. Both also have little to no knowledge of He-Man. The Targans believe him to be a legend; when Queen Sumana meets him, she doesn't seem to be familiar with the name at all, and asks Teela whether this big guy is worth listening to.

• The prospect of a show named "He-Man" having any fair-minded or insightful things to say on the subject of gender is admittedly far-fetched. While David Wise at least went the safe, ethically unobjectionable route of putting men and women on a level, issues of gender and equality are irreparably oversimplified in the process of sanitizing them for a young audience. Any question of just what Teela's stated "little difference" is between the sexes is paved over, and (naturally) any suggestion of the existence of people of non-binary gender or even of non-heterosexual proclivities is enitrely ignored. I suppose most of this goes without saying, but I felt it should be acknowledged.
• What I also found grating while watching this episode was the idea that it takes the Eternians coming in from outside to teach the Arcadians that their civilization is wrong and their mining practices are untenable. The implication is that the Arcadians are, in general, just dumber than Teela and Adam - which evinces just the type of discrimination that the story purports to repudiate.
• The hidden Arcadia reminds me of other hidden cities in the comics, such as Gorilla City in the DC universe or Wakanda in Marvel. The actual look of the city is more reminiscent of futuristic cities in even older, classic sci-fi comic strips, like Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon.
• It does seem rather odd, given that the city's impenetrable force dome is right in the way between Eternos and the lowland villages, that no Eternian seems to have stumbled on it before...
• I feel like the instructions to the voice actor(s) doing all the women guards in Arcadia was, "Just yell every single line at the top of your lungs." Particularly hilarious is a scene where we cut to a guard who has just approached Queen Sumana. "I'M WORRIED!" she hollers.
• The guard talking to Teela in the airship pauses or stumbles over every repetition of the phrase "force... dome," as though she's unsure of the term.
• The Arcadian airship flies around with its landing legs extended, which just seems like poor design. They should import their aircraft and stick to portable prison building!
• This episode clearly strained the limits of Filmation's stock of female voice actors, giving us very unprofessionally delivered lines such as "What should we do with his (confused pause) sword?"
• Adam's sudden enraged smashing of the digging device that Ananda hands him seems very out-of-character. He also does it without earning any punishment or reproof from Ananda, so it seems to be a very laid-back system of slavery they have going!
• Mr. Wise could rest assured that no child viewing this episode would ever raise the awkward question, but one has to wonder where all the kids are in Arcadia, and how they ever get made! Are there conjugal visits allowed down in the mines?
• I find it very hard to believe that Queen Sumana's simple announcement that "men and women are now equal" would not have been followed by at least a little bloody revolution. You have a whole population of enslaved men, and none of them is going to feel the least bit vindictive about having been forced to live in a dark mine all their lives? Am I asking for too much to have just a little bit of anarchy and bloodshed in my 80s children's cartoon?
• I think somebody should be checking up on Mistress Alanz; she clearly needs more direct supervision. She takes all episode to get around to melting down that power sword!
• Note that Teela spends zero time wondering how He-Man managed to find out something was wrong in Arcadia and then make his way through the impenetrable force dome to help.
• Speaking of oversimplifying: I love how there is seemingly one column that holds up the entire city of Arcadia. The city is shown sinking when the column collapses, and rising up again when He-Man hefts it back in place.
• Should we discuss the logic behind He-Man's successful plan to end the mine collapse by filling the entire mine with molten hot, liquid lava? No, I don't think we need to, actually. It checks out.
• Teela asks Adam if he agrees that there is a "little difference" between women and men. We then cut to Adam, who is sitting in the Attak Trak with his legs splayed wide apart, giving us the perfect view of that "little difference."