Robert White

Ed Friedman

Young Phillip of the Eternian guards is transferred to a weather station in the icy north, where he will hopefully learn a lesson about owning up to his mistakes - and not facilitate the freezing of all Eternia at the hands of Skeletor and his chilly henchman, Icer!

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

Whiplash, Skeletor, Icer

Phillip, Eternian guards, various Eternian wildlife (purple bird, blue hopping thing, deer, frog), trolls, drat, the Great Caterchiller

Ice Raider, Attak Trak

In the courtyard of the royal palace, the young Eternian guard Phillip is at his post near the Ice Raider, a vehicle designed to traverse the planet's frozen north. Phillip's shift is interrupted by the distracting Orko the Great, keen to show off his juggling skills. Busy watching the Trollan, Phillip almost misses the fact that the evil Whiplash has sneaked into the courtyard and is breaking into the Ice Raider (by not-so-stealthily prying off the top of the cockpit). On spotting the villain, Orko suggests that Phillip follow procedure and call up reinforcements; but the boy, concerned at revealing his ineptitude at allowing the infiltration, rushes to try to take care of the problem himself - and promptly trips over the Raider's removed cockpit. Orko flies off to get help and luckily encounters Prince Adam and Cringer. The scaredy cat flees before he can be made braver, so it's just He-Man who shows up to take care of Whiplash, tossing the lackey into a tent and blowing him back to his base.

At Snake Mountain, a displeased Skeletor gives Whiplash a lashing with his tongue, then watches on his spy dome as Phillip is taken before the king and queen and Teela points out the boy's shortcomings. Phillip scrambles for excuses, unwilling to admit he failed in his duties by not calling the rest of the guard to his aid. Randor, uninterested, announces that the boy will be transferred to Eternia's weather station in the icy north (a place from which the climate of all Eternia is controlled). Skeletor is overjoyed at the news, because he realizes that to get there, Phillip will have to take the Ice Raider through the station's protective screen - and getting past the screen was his main goal in trying to capture the Raider. He calls up his northern minion, Icer, and prepares the frozen foe for the impending opportunity.

Sure enough, Phillip is sent off on a solo journey to the weather station in the Ice Raider, and shuts down the protective screen just long enough for his vehicle - and Icer - to get inside. On one of his first patrols, Phillip is checking the doors and accidentally lets Icer inside the building. Their short confrontation ends with the boy locked outside the station. Back at Eternia, our heroes quickly realize something has gone wrong, as they see huge amounts of ice rapidly encroaching on the typically non-icy bits of the planet. Unable to fly in the poor weather, Teela, Adam, Orko, and Cringer hop into the Attak Trak to drive north and investigate. On the way, they encounter the wildlife of Eternia fleeing in the wake of the unfriendly cold.

Eventually forced to get out and travel on foot, the heroes encounter a party of trolls and their pet drat. The trolls are armed to the teeth and don't look friendly, so Adam decides to take Cringer and scout for a way around. An annoyed Teela, who apparently doesn't approve the prince's tactics, opts for a head-on approach. Her attempts at diplomacy with the trolls fail, however, and they attack - so it's very fortunate that, out of nowhere, He-Man and Battle Cat show up! He-Man buries the trolls under a giant snowball, assures Teela that Adam will be fine, and the party continues onto the defensive screen surrounding the weather station.

The power sword opens a gap in the screen, allowing the heroes to pass through. Just outside the station, they find Phillip, who is once again keen to explain why it's not his fault that Icer got inside and has frozen everything up. The heroes split up to find Icer and fix the problem. A stealthy Icer touches Teela from behind, then transports her now-frozen form elsewhere. Orko does some research in the frosty library and reads about a scary-sounding "Caterchiller" that could be awakened by the colder climate; he rushes off to inform He-Man but is distracted by the blonde hero having found Teela. He-Man punches Teela out of the ice block she's in, and having learned nothing from previous events, the heroes again divide their numbers. Orko, off on his own and reminded that he didn't tell anyone about the Caterchiller, meets the awakened Caterchiller and gets wrapped in a cocoon. He sends a bubble out of his hat, which transmits a "Help" message to He-Man, and our hero arrives and uses the creature's own silk to wrap it up. He tells it to take a nap and leaves with the freed Orko.

Meanwhile, Phillip found a way leading further down towards the planet's center, which is what the heroes want - but he got frozen by Icer in the process. The heroes reunite around the immobilized boy, and He-Man uses his sword (which apparently can detect these sorts of things) to discover that Icer is hiding in the walls. He unwisely leaves Orko to both stop Icer (with something called "perma powder") and free Phillip. Orko predictably screws up the job, rescuing Phillip but leaving Icer on the loose. When the Trollan and the boy meet up with the rest, Orko admits to his mistake, which astounds Phillip - his parents apparently having taught him to hide all his mistakes or he will be disliked. Orko shows him the error of his ways, because no one dislikes the magician for the many disasters he causes.

In the final battle, everyone except He-Man holds off a very angry Icer while the hairy hunk drills his way down to the hot center of the planet, bringing up some steamy air that sends the melting villain running. This leaves our heroes free to fix the whole weather problem. The only thing left to do then is head back to the palace to brag about their success to Randor and Marlena (with Adam and Cringer now present instead of He-Man and Battle Cat). In the throne room, Phillip admits that it was his fault Icer got inside the station.

End with a Joke: With Phillip's lesson safely learned and the villains confounded, things seem just about wrapped up. Now it's time for Teela to wrest an explanation from Prince Adam and Cringer on how and why they disappeared so much earlier in the episode, when they were supposedly scouting for a route around those trolls. The Eternian captain turns to confront and berate the prince but finds that he's (wisely) already skedaddled. She complains to her father that Adam is never around when she needs him, and Duncan suggests that Teela at least finds it nice when Adam is around. "Yes it is," she admits, "but don't you dare tell him I said so!" And they all laughed...

• Phillip: Who goes there? / Orko: It's Orko the Great and his trick of a thousand globes. / Phillip: How many? / Orko: Well, so it's not a thousand; you got something against seven?
• Skeletor (throwing some sick burns at Whiplash): They should call you "wimp-lash." ... Quiet, or I'll turn you into a suitcase!
• Phillip (literally to the King of Eternia, after hearing he is going to be transferred north): But that's for losers! I don't want to go.
• Phillip (to Icer): Freeze! / Icer: I'll be glad to.
• He-Man: So it's Icer we're up against. That means Skeletor is behind this. / Orko (shrugging): Well, what else is new?
• Orko (to the Caterchiller, referring to the fact that he's been wrapped in a sort of cocoon): Hey, you've got it all wrong; you're supposed to be the butterfly, not me! / He-Man (arriving to compound the bad humor): You do hang out in the strangest places, Orko.
• Phillip (to Orko, unable to understand why the Trollan admitted to mixing up his two powders): What are you telling them that for? If you let people know you made a mistake, they won't like you. / Orko: Boy, if that were true, I wouldn't have a friend in the world - and I'm a very popular fella!
• Icer: I'm going to stop He-Man - cooooooooooooooold. / Teela: That's what you think, cube face.

• He-Man spins Whiplash in a circle: And into a tent
• Skeletor leans in close to the viewer: The better to yell at Whiplash
• He-Man punches the viewer: To free Teela from the ice

One partial, one full
Variation - In the first (partial) transformation, one of the shortest in the series, Cringer runs off just before Adam raises his sword, so his transformation is missing. The actual He-Man sequence is also severely curtailed: we get the "By the power of Grayskull!" line, and the power sword begins to become energized; but then there is a hard cut and in the next scene we see He-Man already there.

Brought to you by Phillip, Teela, and Prince Adam
In a rare form of PSA that will be used again in later episodes, the scene begins more as a continuation of the story than a direct talk with the audience. It appears that Teela and Adam have just swung by the weather station to see how Phillip's guard duties are going. The discussion turns towards how taking responsibility is a necessary and important step to growing up and being a good person. We then veer quickly into a more standard PSA format, as Teela and Adam take it in turns to look into the camera and convey the message.

Wayward child learns a valuable lesson

• Things that come out of Orko: balls. And later a table tennis paddle. Still later, a bubble. Even later, a pair of powders, green and pink, that can alternately freeze people or defrost them. The freezing one is called "perma powder," but the defrosting one is unnamed.
• Orko again refers to himself by his Trollan nickname, "Orko the Great," first mentioned in MU020.
• Phillip is stationed in the oft-used courtyard location at the palace, apparently with his own blue tent, where I guess he goes on lunch break (though not after this episode's opening fight, which ends with the tent being sent off to Snake Mountain).
• Having just been introduced two episodes previously (MU074), Whiplash appears in his third consecutive episode! (It wouldn't have looked like this to viewers however, given that the episodes' air dates are quite scattered.)
• We see for the first time (and the last time) a partner vehicle to the Wind Raider: the Ice Raider. It's nose has a projection on the top very similar to one on the Wind Raider. It has skis on the bottom for travel through the snow, but we never see them get used, since the Ice Raider flies.
• He-Man has gone from almost never using his super breath to using it in almost every episode, it seems (see MU071, MU072, MU075)! He tidily blows away Whiplash and the tent the lizard man has been thrown into.
• Skeletor spies on Phillip's punishment session before the king and queen, through use of the old desktop dome.
• In his only Filmation appearance, we get introduced to Icer, the predictable name for Skeletor's goon in the frozen north. He's one of those Filmation He-Man villains who got ignored in the Mattel toy lines, until the MOTU Classics release in 2013. I suppose he has that one defining gimmick that you'd want in a toy - he's cold, and he does icy things - but it doesn't translate to an obvious physical feature or give him the instant appeal of, say, a rotating set of eyeballs. He speaks in a slow, toneless drawl which makes one think of articulate zombies or mummies - though he is prone to occasional emotional outbursts, such as his nonverbal (and very mummy-like) howling and groaning towards the end of the episode.
• The guards at the weather station have a really cool (no pun intended) holographic map of the planet Eternia projected in their control room. It's similar but not identical to the paintings we see of the planet from space in episode-opening shots; if you look at it closely you can see both the royal palace and Castle Grayskull.
• The Eternian guards at the station wield both trident weapons and "freeze rods" like the one given to Phillip.
• We once again see the animators making use of the backgrounds originally seen in Negator's maze-like base in MU054's "Game Plan" (and most recently reused in MU068). They've gotten a lot of mileage out of these!
• We see our heroes again making use of the giant TV screen which appears to be located in Duncan's workshop, and was seen for example during Mallek's tele-beam call in MU059.
• A varied sampling of Eternian wildlife is seen fleeing the encroaching glacier, including some fairly normal-looking creatures (a vulture-like purple bird with a white neck ruff, a brown deer, a frog) and one very odd four-legged blue creature which looks like it lives inside a teapot-shaped carapace, like a turtle.
• We meet a group of trolls, a creature design we've never seen before. He-Man has tangled with "ice trolls" in MU034; they didn't look anything like these trolls, though both speak a different language, which is interesting. These trolls have a pet "drat," which just looks to be a giant rat.
• He-Man has a "patented bank shot," which he uses to bury some trolls under a snowball without hitting Teela. He again has to use some finesse and avoid hurting Teela a few minutes later when he punches her out of the ice Icer has trapped her in.
• The power sword absorbs the energy of the weather station's protective screen, allowing our heroes to slip through. Later, He-Man somehow uses the power sword as a kind of dowsing rod, to detect the presence of Icer within the walls. Even later, showing off the many uses of his weapon, He-Man uses the sword as a drill to reach the volcanic center of Eternia. Though he will forgo the use of his sword, we'll see He-Man use some similar drilling techniques, in a similarly icy situation, in the series finale, MU130.
• In the recent "Fisto's Forest" (MU070), we discovered that Orko was able to send a psychic SOS to He-Man, just like the Sorceress does. In this episode, he forgoes that method in favor of sending a bubble from his hat, which finds He-Man and pops, releasing Orko's recorded voice message: "H-h-he-help!"
• Another example in the long line of MOTU insults in the form "[noun] face," as Teela refers to Icer as "cube face."

• So certainly Phillip acts like a jerk in this episode, so that he can be obviously naughty for an audience that was considered to require very strong hints, and richly deserving of the lesson that he must learn about behaving correctly; but I think we should consider the kingdom's culpability here as well. Phillip is a full guard in the Eternian defence force; but how old do you think he is? He looks to be maybe 13, 14 - certainly still a minor by any Earth measurement. What the hell is he doing in such an important position? Somebody should be checking up on the hiring statutes of Eternos; what kind of ship is Randor running over there?
• It seems highly unlikely, given the common establishing shots of the palace which show it up on a high, rocky plateau, that a fleeing Cringer would be able to so easily run into a wide open, grassy field from his starting point near the palace courtyard.
• Animation error: The animation of Whiplash being thrown into the tent shows him receding to an incredibly small size - much smaller than he should be relative to the tent.
• Wow, check out Teela totally throwing Phillip under the bus after the Whiplash incident: "And there's more. Phillip neglected to call the guard." I know she's the captain and all, and as it turns out Phillip doesn't much deserve anyone cutting him a break, but yikes.
• Wow, check out the mouth on Phillip, even when he's talking to his own king: "That's for losers!" he comments on his new posting: "I don't want to go." Well, punk, you have to: you've just done been ordered.
• According to Man-at-Arms, "The weather station is where we control the climate for all of Eternia." Wait a minute... They control the climate of the whole planet? This is a big step up from Duncan's weather-controlling satellite that goofed so thoroughly at the beginning of MU007's "Curse of the Spellstone."
• There have been a couple of times in the series where Man-at-Arms has been moved to just shake his head in response to someone else's disappointing behavior (usually Orko's), and it's always funny to watch. He does so in response to Phillip's less than stellar attentiveness to his lecture on the lowering of the protective screen.
• Animation error: in the wide shot of Adam driving the Attak Trak towards the icy region, his head is popping out of the glass cockpit.
• When Adam, Teela, Orko, and Cringer encounter the party of trolls, Adam says that he's going to "see if we can get around them." It's very obviously a ploy so that he can run off with Cringer to turn into He-Man, and Teela ignores him and heads directly at the trolls; but as it turns out, Adam's plan seems to have been much more sensible than that of the captain of the guard. Those trolls ain't friendly!
• In the interest of covering his secret identity, He-Man apparently opts to just ditch Adam in the dangerous frozen wasteland: "We'd better not wait for him," he tells Teela of the missing prince. The royal heir's ostensible bodyguard agrees with no objections.
• Orko reads a book in the frozen library that warns "the temperature in the ancient sub-levels must never drop below the blue line on the thermometer" because it might wake the Caterchiller. But why below? Does this mean they keep it warm in the sub-levels and the caterchiller only wakes up when it's very cold? That makes a kind of sense, I suppose, that a thing called a "Caterchiller" thrives in cold weather; but when Orko subsequently spots a Caterchiller, it's asleep in a block of ice, implying it will only wake up if it thaws (i.e., gets warmer).
• By the way, "Caterchiller" is hands-down one of the best names for a creature in all of He-Man.
• The odd thing about Skeletor's plan in this episode is that we never actually hear what it is. In the beginning he wants to steal the Ice Raider, as a tool for breaking into the weather station. Once Icer actually gets inside, he begins spreading ice over all Eternia. But it's a little hard to understand why Skeletor would want that. I guess he can force the king to cede power to him in return for reversing the bad weather? This is never explicitly stated however.
• On a similar subject, it's also not very clear what He-Man's plan is for counteracting the evil scheme. The heroes head deeper and deeper in the station's sub-levels, towards the hot center of Eternia, but no one explains what they're going to do until it happens. The end result, which we have to assume was the intention, is that Icer is chased off by the warmth, allowing the heroes to regain control of the weather station and Eternia's climate.
• He-Man wraps up the Caterchiller in its own silk, and announces (on seemingly very little evidence) that it's not evil or mean, just grumpy for having been awakened. He then tells it to go to sleep: "When you wake up, you'll be a gorgeous butterfly." It's unclear just how much expertise He-Man actually has in detecting the moods or understanding the life cycles of Caterchillers. If he's right about the metamorphosis, and not just kidding, that will be one very large butterfly! It makes me think of the insect man, Garth, and his strange transformation in MU055's "Eye of the Beholder."
• The fact that Phillip is the wayward character in this episode means Orko gets to take a break from his recent rash of poor behavior and act as the responsible role model. It's a big turnaround from his hijinks in MU071. We also see that he's gotten back a huge amount of confidence: in MU071, Orko was so convinced that he was no good to anyone that he was ready to abandon his home and friends. In this episode, he starts off by reminding us all that he's "Orko the Great," and later describes himself to Phillip as a "very popular fella."
• I've spoken before about the seeming lack of communication between Mattel and Filmation, and I think this episode is another pretty clear example. This show was after all created entirely as a selling tool for Mattel's toy line, which at the airing of this episode consisted of three waves of action figures, twelve of which were Evil Warriors - none of which were used as the main villain for this episode. To be fair, the relatively new Whiplash does get a look in at the episode's beginning, as a seeming sop to Mattel. And admittedly none of the twelve Evil Warriors' gimmicks fit well with the story's polar plotline - but did they have to? I don't think the writers at Filmation were all that bothered about having their stories hang together logically - as my commentaries have had call to point out. Why create new, non-toy enemies when there was already a stock of toy characters from which to choose? On the other hand, there's something to be said for the creative team at Filmation having free reign to write the stories they wanted and believed would be entertaining, without being restricted by the dictates of capitalism or merchandising.