David Wise

Marsh Lamore

A heartbroken Teela, convinced that she has doomed her father by using an experimental teleportation device on him, resigns and exiles herself to the Wastelands! But Man-at-Arms is very much alive - and trapped in Snake Mountain!

Prince Adam (He-Man), Orko, Man-at-Arms, Teela, King Randor, Queen Marlena

Trap Jaw, Skeletor, Beast Man

Wastelands serpent

Attak Trak, Basher, Skeletor's latest invention

Prince Adam, Orko, Man-at-Arms, and Teela have ridden out to one of the most remote and barren regions of Eternia in order to test Duncan's latest invention - a teleporter! Duncan successfully uses the handheld device on a rock, while unbeknownst to the heroes, a very interested Trap Jaw looks on. Trap Jaw realizes all the wonderful villainous applications for a teleportation device, and decides to steal it. He waits until Duncan has teleported himself across a gorge from his friends and then strikes. To keep the invention out of the wrong hands, Man-at-Arms tosses it back across the gorge to Teela. Teela decides to try rescuing her father by teleporting him back to the palace; but something goes wrong, and Duncan simply vanishes. Trap Jaw is easily chased off by Attak Trak; but as far as our heroes know, Eternia has lost its man-at-arms!

Teela is understandably crushed by this calamitous turn of events, and makes a devastating decision: appearing before the king and queen in the throne room, she renounces her position as Captain of the Guard and sentences herself to exile in the Wastelands. Neither Randor, Marlena, nor Adam - who all think she's being too hard on herself - can convince her to change her mind. Teela departs, while a demoralized and desperate Prince Adam sits up late into the night in the communication center, listening for any signal from his old friend.

We in the audience know that there is no cause to mourn (but a little cause for concern), because Man-at-Arms was just teleported to another part of the desert region, where Trap Jaw picked him up on the Basher's 8-bit radar screen, chased him down, and took him captive. Duncan has been slapped in a cube-shaped energy field in the dungeons of Snake Mountain and ordered by Skeletor to work up the plans for a new teleporter - and maybe a whole line of evil weapons and accessories. The sky's the limit, now that Bonehead has his own weapons master! Man-at-Arms might even be able to spruce up Skeletor's heat ray, which he has been testing in a closed-off room in his basement. If only Skeletor had watched his clever prisoner a little more closely; because instead of designing a teleporter, Duncan builds a communicator, which he uses to get in contact with Prince Adam. Huzzah! Time for a rescue mission.

First, however, Adam has to go tell Teela that she didn't actually murder her father. He collects the teleporter device, thinking it might come in handy, then takes a spin into the Wastelands in his Attak Trak and finds that Teela has already gotten trapped in the coils of a giant serpent. It's He-Man time! The muscle-bound hero chases the snaky pest away and gives Teela the good news/bad news talk (Good news: dad not dead! Bad news: captured!); then the pair are off to raid Snake Mountain. At the foot of the evil fortress, He-Man has a long strategy talk with Teela about the correct approach, ending in a Leroy-Jenkins-style, smash-through-the-wall entry. As part of the so-called "plan," once inside, Teela goes in a different direction to create a distraction. Luckily, she comes upon Skeletor's heat ray, which she sets off to great effect: Trap Jaw and Beast Man have to waste time putting out the fire in the dungeon.

Meanwhile, He-Man has located Man-at-Arms and decided that the best way to get him out is - you guessed it - through teleportation. Against Teela's strenuous objections, He-Man browbeats her into regaining her confidence by using the device, which sends both her and Duncan back to the palace. There was only enough battery left to send two, so He-Man gets to take the more direct exit, walking out through the hole he made earlier. Skeletor, who was alerted to He-Man's presence both by his alarm system and his desktop spying dome, is waiting for our hero in his own latest invention: a giant tank-thing (unfortunately it doesn't have a snappy name)! It has a cute bubble cockpit, a charming grabber arm, a standard freeze ray, and is painted a fetching shade of teal.

You'd think He-Man would be impressed; but he smashes the grabber, dodges the ray, and chucks the vehicle (with Skeletor still inside it) into the top of a spiky growth of rock. He then takes off, with a parting warning to the stranded Skeletor to "watch that first step."

End with a Joke: With the royal family, Man-at-Arms, and Captain of the Guard reassembled in the garden, it's time to celebrate with a magic trick by the court jester - er, magician. Orko attempts to turn a lump of coal into a precious stone, but only ends up setting the coal on a golden ring. Teela happily reassures him that "everyone makes mistakes."

• Attak Trak: Whatever you say, Man-at-Arms. But I still. Don't. Like. It.
• Teela: Today, I committed a terrible error in judgment. Because of me, we have lost our great teacher, inventor, and warrior - and I have lost a father. ... I am not fit to be Captain of the Guard. I resign from my post.
• Man-at-Arms: And how do you intend to make me work? / Skeletor: You want to eat, don't you?
• Man-at-Arms: I managed to rig a communicator, but I can't talk long. I knew you'd be standing by, Adam.
• Skeletor (commenting on a test of his heat ray): I really must stop burning my walls like that.
• Teela (having just set off Skeletor's heat ray and started a fire): Well, father always told me not to mess with machines without finding out how they work.
• Man-at-Arms (to his daughter): You did not fail - you did what you thought was right. That isn't failure.
• He-Man (to Skeletor, who he's left perched in a vehicle atop a high spiky rock tower): Oh and, uh - watch that first step. It's a lulu.

• Man-at-Arms runs at the viewer, bug-height: Trying to escape Trap Jaw's lasers
• Skeletor shakes his fists, three-quarter view: While calmly instructing his employees
• He-Man from above, runs to mid-screen and pauses, battle-ready: The loop itself is not used, but his battle-ready pose is co-opted while he is discussing break-in strategies with Teela at the foot of Snake Mountain
• He-Man runs away from the viewer: While fighting Skeletor
• Skeletor leans in close to the viewer: Yelling threats at He-Man

One partial (missing Cringer/Battle Cat sequence)

Brought to you by Man-at-Arms
Duncan pauses from some robot repairs in the radio room to tell us that running away from your mistake, like Teela did in today's episode, is an even bigger mistake (which would require even more running, and then more running, until you'd just be tired from all that running). Try learning from them instead.

Teela does something dangerous by herself: Just when I was worried that the category had dried up, here is a strong entrant for it.
Landmark Episode: Because of the high quality of this story and the unusual and emotional circumstances surrounding Teela's mistake, this is a Landmark Episode.

• The Attak Trak is shown to have a nice bench seat along the side behind the front seat, something we haven't caught a glimpse of before. Though we don't see this consistently appearing in later episodes, it can be seen again in MU086.
• Orko reminds us that he can teleport himself without any fancy technology, just plain old home-grown magic.
• For no particular reason (other than the writers wanting to give Trap Jaw a snack), Man-at-Arms starts out the episode armed with a sword in an orange sheath. Though Duncan did use a sword to chop through some vines back in MU037, we've never seen him carry a sword like this before.
• The Basher has a small hole right in the center of its nose, which fires beams at Duncan. This is different weaponry than we've seen on it in other episodes. In MU026, Tri-Klops used a very obviously tacked-on freeze ray, and in MU042 the Basher is shown to have a rack of concealed guns that can swing out of its side.
• We revisit the palace's radio room, which is very hot right now! It's shown up in MU047 and MU049. In this episode Randor refers to it as "the communication center."
• Another "Cringer was taking a nap" episode. He is nowhere to be seen.
• The serpent that attacks Teela is very similar in design to the one that attacked Adam when he first appeared in Trolla in MU020.
• He-Man again shows his ability to whistle up a vehicle (in this case the Attak Trak), last exhibited in MU038 when he summoned the Wind Raider; though it doesn't seem so much of a feat with the Attak Trak, who after all is sentient! The vehicle later tells He-Man, "If you need me, just whistle."
• In the past, the heroes have approached Snake Mountain with varying degrees of circumspection and wariness. It has seemed like a very dangerous prospect, and one to be undertaken with care and stealth. In MU044, He-Man painstakingly scaled the mountain all the way to its peak, in order to creep in by the mouth of the eponymous snake. In this one, He-Man forgoes any tact and just smashes his way through the wall. He makes it sound like a strategy by talking it through with Teela beforehand: "I like it that way - simple and direct."
• The heroes end up "inside one of Skeletor's vaults." I have to say, as a treasure hoard it's pretty embarrassing: just a few small chests and artifacts are scattered around a vast stone floor. We will see more of Skeletor's hidden treasures in MU062.
• Skeletor does his old spying thing and checks out He-Man running through the hallways of Snake Mountain through his desktop dome.
• The teleporter controls are more complex than the usual He-Man gadgets, which typically consist of one button or lever (something I complained about in the case of MU010's "transmutator"). We see that the teleporter has crosshairs, adjusted by a side knob, and a row of buttons.
• In the ending PSA, Man-at-Arms is shown repairing the Zakton robots from MU047's "Keeper of the Ancient Ruins." The animation they reuse is the one I called out in my Commentary on that episode, because it is drawn so that Duncan appears to tower over the robots, who in the other scenes were about the same height as him.

• Over the past few episodes, Man-at-Arms's inventions have ramped up exponentially in quality and sophistication. He went from not being able to build a garden-variety freeze ray (MU049), to basically inventing the walkie-talkie (MU050), to inventing sonar (MU051), and now he's dabbling in teleportation!
• "Shall I pursue him further, Adam?" asks Attak Trak, after Trap Jaw has left in the Basher. I don't know - can you fly, too?
• So not to be a backseat teleport operator or anything, but... Teela could have made this whole episode unnecessary if she had just chosen to use the experimental device on the bad guy instead of on her father. Right? I don't think she'd feel any need to exile herself to the Wastelands for accidentally knocking off Trap Jaw.
• Caption error: I've seen the closed captioning track on my DVD provide some questionable spellings of characters before; in this episode, it labels Eternia's queen as "QUEEN ELMORA." This is an actual MOTU character, but we haven't seen her since MU005's "She-Demon of Phantos"! Hmm, maybe I shouldn't have been using this thing to get my character names...
• Duncan finds himself in a situation very similar to that of Tony Stark in his Iron Man origin story: trapped by a bone-headed enemy (pun intended) who allows him to work on a powerful weapon without adquate supervision. It is true, at least, that Skeletor sensibly requests plans of the teleportation device, rather than the device itself, to prevent forcing his prisoner to invent an escape method.
• All of Teela's friends try to tell her she's being too hard on herself, but their reasoning (as Adam notes) is based on their belief that her father is still alive. What if she actually had killed Duncan, though? Terrible as that would have been, it would still have been just a mistake. Could they have forgiven her then? We'll deal with a similar moral quandary in MU110, "The Problem with Power."
• So I have to own up to being a huge softie when it comes to fictional stories and shows. I don't show a lot of emotion in real life but I will cry at anything the least bit moving in movies or books. There hasn't been much so far in He-Man that has jerked tears out of me, but I confess there were a couple of moments in this episode that very nearly did. One was when Teela made her speech to the king and queen, resigning her post. The other was when a trapped Duncan said to Adam, "I knew you'd be standing by."
• "Heyyy," says Adam to himself, "Man-at-Arms's teleporter may come in handy." Are you serious, bro? That's the thing that caused this whole problem in the first place!! But, of course, he turns out to be right.
• Unpopular opinion: Maybe Adam is coming to rely on He-Man just a little too much. When he sees Teela being attacked by the snake in the Wastelands, his first reaction is to transform. But he's sitting in the heavily armed Attak Trak. Why not try a well-aimed zap from its top turret gun? He-Man is a crutch, Adam!
• I love the animation sequence when He-Man yanks the winding snake off of Teela, causing her to twirl to the ground. It's a lot of work to draw someone rotating, especially in the age before computer animation!
• "You did well, Trap Jaw," says Skeletor, happy that he has a kidnapped Duncan to design weapons for them. Write this down, Trap Jaw; you'll never hear him say it again!
• It's home invasion time! Duncan's kidnapping gives our heroes another excuse to sneak into Snake Mountain, something they last did in MU044 (and the villains returned the favor by teleporting into the palace in MU048). This time, Skeletor has installed a fairly sophisticated alarm. Other security systems have shown up in previous episodes (see MU015 and MU029); this one boasts a voice alert identifying the location of the intruder ("near Level One"). Based on the subsequent shot of our heroes, the alarm goes off before they've even entered the building - that's good security!
• Trap Jaw's line upon spotting the intruder - "We have you now, Teela!" - sounds absolutely nothing like him and was likely added at the last moment by a different actor.
• Skeletor's "latest invention," a big, teal, tank-like vehicle with grabby arms and a freeze ray, represents to me more than anything else a failure to communicate on the part of Mattel and Filmation. The design here seems perfect for an Evil Warrior vehicle toy, but according to my research Mattel didn't release one of those until 1984, and it looked nothing like this (it was the saucer-like "Roton," which we will have to wait until MU102 to see in animated form). This vehicle's design will be seen again, as a different invention altogether, in MU079.
• In the end, when Teela is finally convinced to use the teleporter on herself and Duncan, she does it correctly and they both arrive, safe and sound, back at the palace. We (the audience) know that; but He-Man couldn't possibly be aware of it. So it's odd that he's shown smiling happily in the dungeon of Snake Mountain, just after the pair disappear.
• David Wise gives us a strong episode with some moving scenes and some clever dialogue touches - like the repetition of the line "everyone makes mistakes" in both the opening and the ending of the show, and the fact that Attak Trak tells Teela how happy he is that her father is safe.