Misty Stewart

Marsh Lamore

On a field trip with Captain Teela, three children - on a dare - unadvisedly drive a Jet Crawler towards Snake Mountain, unaware that the only method of calling for help has been disabled by a clumsy Orko. It so happens that Prince Adam is busy searching for the rainbow quartz to repair the radio - deep inside Snake Mountain. They're all on a rendezvous with danger!

Man-at-Arms, Prince Adam (He-Man), Teela, Orko, Cringer (Battle Cat)

Beast Man, Skeletor, Evil-Lyn, Mer-Man, Trap Jaw, Tri-Klops

Krill, Cynda, Tager, guardian mushrooms, dangerous flower, rock creature, winged ancient tar swamp beast

Jet Crawler, Wind Raider, Evil sky sled (with attached rolling cage), Bashers

We join Prince Adam and Man-at-Arms, busy tinkering with a busted high-frequency transmitter while Orko hovers nearby, desperate to be involved. Teela stops in to let her father know that she'll be spending her day taking three children in a Jet Crawler out on a field trip to the Mystical Forest. An apprehensive Duncan suggests she delay her plans, since the only communication channel with the Crawler is the transmitter he's currently trying to fix; but Teela blithely traipses away, certain that her talented father will have the gadget fixed by the time she gets out there.

Our headstrong captain did not reckon with the Trollan god of chaos, Orko. Trying to help the heroes while brandishing his new magic wand, the clumsy magician ends up tossing a pile of spare parts - and the wand - into the guts of the transmitter, screwing it up royally. A dismayed Duncan tells Adam that the only way to repair the device is to get in a supply of rainbow quartz - and the only place that mineral can be found is in a cavern in Snake Mountain!

Out at the Mystical Forest, Teela (unaware that she is effectively incommunicado) teaches a lesson on how mushrooms and plants are devious and dangerous creatures, then wanders off to look for a picnic site, leaving her bored and foolhardy charges alone with the Jet Crawler. Krill, the obnoxious future royal guardsman, dares the other boy, Tager, to take the Crawler for a spin; not to be outdone, the girl Cynda double dares him, which obviously leaves Tager with no choice but to begin an ill-advised joyride taking them directly towards Snake Mountain. Teela spots the children from afar and, discovering that her communicator has no signal, rushes to stop them; but someone else has been watching this whole object lesson play out: Skeletor! He dispatches Evil-Lyn to capture the Eternian captain, and leaves his magnetic tractor beam on to ensure the children are sucked into his fortress.

Meanwhile, over in Plot B, Adam has taken Cringer in the Wind Raider on what he hopes will be a stealthy, undetected mission into Snake Mountain. The pair land near the evil hideout and try entering through a crack in the cliffside which turns out to lie just behind a camouflaged creature that looks like a rock (fortunately it's not all that upset at their disrupting its hiding place). On their second try, they find an underground spring through which Adam swims, dragging an unwilling Cringer with him. Their attempt gets them inside the fortress, but at this point the intruders' presence is finally detected - by Mer-Man. The fishy fiend pursues the pair out of the water, so Adam finds a private spot to transform himself and his cat into He-Man and Battle Cat. They vanquish Mer-Man by tossing him in some mud and move on.

But Mer-Man brings news of the unwelcome visitor to Skeletor, finally alerting our arch-villain to the fact that his home is just crowded with heroes at this point. Skeletor has no idea what He-Man is doing there, and doesn't want the oaf figuring out that he's successfully captured Teela; so he tracks the hero down, bringing Beast Man and Mer-Man with him. Skeletor is just bargaining with He-Man, offering the hero safe passage out once he takes the rainbow quartz he's looking for, when Evil-Lyn inconveniently hops on the Snake Mountain PA to announce to everyone that the prisoner Teela has escaped. He-Man jumps onto Battle Cat and dashes off, determined to find Teela - and the three field trip kids, who he realizes must also be around here somewhere.

Yeah, whatever happened to those three kids? Well, stranded on foot in the fortress (having for some reason ditched their Crawler), they witnessed a chained Teela being taken away. They were momentarily spooked by a pterodactyl critter, then spotted a hole high up in the ceiling which they tried to reach by climbing up one of the thorny, bony "trees" that populate Snake Mountain. They are just hanging by one of the thorns, which is about to snap under their weight, when the newly escaped Teela rushes in and rescues them by means of a grappling hook and line. Reunited, the quartet are threatened by Trap Jaw, who tricks them into running through a doorway and down a hole that neatly drops them all into a cage. (Trap Jaw deserves MVP for this episode!) Unfortunately for our star villain, he's quickly tracked down by He-Man through means of a Battle Cat roar, which the captives hear and respond to. Our rescuing hero jams the controls of the sky sled Trap Jaw's using to tow the prisoners, then cuts the villain loose to careen down the hall.

The full complement of good guys soon find themselves in Skeletor's "launching pad" or hangar bay, where Skeletor is poised atop a rich and very obvious vein of rainbow quartz (which isn't so urgently needed now that He-Man's found the kids, but let's not think about that). The villain calls in all five of this episode's side villains - tacking on Tri-Klops for good measure - and an all-out battle commences. He-Man uses some interesting tactics for battling gangs, including an oil slick and a human Jenga tower. He turns Evil-Lyn's freeze spell back on her and punches Teela free of the ice block she got herself stuck in, then herds all of his field trip charges into a stolen Basher and propels it out the torn-open hangar door. A quick pause to grab a hunk of rainbow quartz, and he and Battle Cat are out of there!

Back at the royal workshop, the three shamefaced children apologize to Teela and assure her they will never challenge anyone to a dare - or accept a dare - ever again. Now supplied with a lovely chunk of rainbow quartz, Man-at-Arms has meanwhile managed to finally fix that gizmo from the beginning, as Adam and Orko look on.

End with a Joke: Excited to see the repaired radio transmitter, Orko slides on over, very nearly smashing the new "beam switcher" part that Man-at-Arms has just completed. He dodges it at the last second, to everyone's relief. Adam compliments Duncan on his good work; Duncan suggestively replies to his friend that he couldn't have done it without He-Man. Adam says, "Well, if I see him, I'll tell him." Brazenly endangering the prince's secret identity, the pair share a belly laugh at their ironic joke.

• Adam (his eyes covered by Cringer's paws while he's trying to fly the Wind Raider): Cringer, I can't see! / Cringer: Well I can, and it's pretty scary!
• Beast Man (disappointed that he doesn't get to capture Teela): Aww, I never get to do the fun stuff.
• Cringer (to Adam): Ohh, you are a dreamer.
• He-Man (to Skeletor): I come here in peace. If I can leave that way, it will be a pleasant surprise. My people will be pleased.
• He-Man (taunting his enemies, who are all slipping in an oil slick): Just think what you could do if you had skates!

• Skeletor laughs, head back: Enjoying the shade he just threw at Beast Man
• He-Man jumps on the back of Battle Cat: About to go find Teela and the children in Snake Mountain, again later for the same reason, and a third time as he prepares to grab some quartz
• Skeletor shakes his fists, three-quarter view: Declaring that Teela is doomed, and again to yell at his minions
• He-Man punches the viewer: Freeing Teela from a block of ice

One full

Brought to you by Prince Adam
Adam predictably advises us against taking dares, like that silly Tager did in today's episode. You shouldn't worry so much about what people will think if you don't take the dare. "If you only do what you think is right, you'll come out the winner." I don't know, Adam: that's putting a lot of faith in your viewing audience's good judgment.

Teela does something dangerous by herself: Well, with three children in tow. But it's Teela's brash choice to go off in the Jet Crawler before Duncan has managed to repair the only radio.
Wayward child learns a valuable lesson: In this case children, since Krill, Cynda, and Tager need to learn that it's dangerous to make - or take - a dare.

• As the episode opens, Adam and Duncan are tinkering in what appears to be Man-at-Arms's workshop; but one of the backgrounds used is of the palace's radio room instead. The two locations seem to have gotten mushed together at this point.
• Made-up names of parts that Man-at-Arms lists during his repair: ballast regulator, transducer, octal base, screen grid, beam switch (or switcher), diode. Many of the spare parts that Orko roots through, looking for some of these nonsense parts, just look like spools of thread.
• We get introduced to yet another Eternian forest in this episode... In MU087, Glitch was afraid of the "Enchanted Forest." In MU084, a trail led through the "Haunted Forest." We know from several previous episodes that Castle Grayskull lies in an open field in the midst of the "Evergreen Forest." But Teela's trip today is to the "Mystical Forest." Whew!
• Orko is providing his own special brand of "help" again in this episode, right after having splattered a cake and crashed the king's birthday present to set off the events of MU087. Here, his clumsy bumbling involves dropping a new magic wand into a delicate piece of machinery.
• We meet a new Eternian vehicle: the Jet Crawler. It's just a kind of car on caterpillar treads. One wonders why Teela didn't use an Attak Trak - probably to make the malfunctioning radio plot more believable?
• Teela has a little handheld communicator device, a kind of gadget we've seen used before, but varying from the wrist communicator we've seen some characters (including Teela) use. She also later shows that she has a tiny grappling hook launcher hidden in her boot.
• In an odd but humorous touch, it seems that whenever the villains even speak the word "Grayskull," it causes tremors and cracking noises inside Snake Mountain. It's never done that before!
• The rock creature that Adam and Cringer meet during their foray into Snake Mountain is unlike any other monster we've seen before, with an interestingly shaped head and some impressive camouflage skills.
• Skeletor seems to have some kind of tractor beam or magnetic force, which he uses to snatch up the kids in their Jet Crawler. After he manages that, though, he largely ignores the children in favor of his more valuable captive, Teela. Skeletor showed off an "attractor" beam in MU055's "Eye of the Beholder."
• In some rare inter-episode consistency, we hear again from Cringer that he can't swim - something we learned about him in MU084's "Fraidy Cat." Adam is forced to tow his pet through the underground mountain spring.
• Krill, Cynda, and Tager are menaced by a blue, purple-spotted, pterodactyl-type creature which we've seen a few times before. It was one of a couple of types of prehistoric creatures that Skeletor conjured back to life in MU018's "Creatures from the Tar Swamp." It was also brought back to life by the demonic imp Lokus to grab the smitten lab assistant Karyn in MU024's "Wizard of Stone Mountain." It showed up again on Selkie Island in MU032. We're probably not intended to connect this creature to its original prehistoric character design: for the purposes of this episode, it's just a pest that lives in Snake Mountain.
• Based on Evil-Lyn's announcement calling for guards over Snake Mountain's PA system, we learn two things: 1) they have a PA system, and 2) they have guards - presumably Skeletor's robot soldiers, though they never appear.
• Teela alternately refers to Trap Jaw as a "walking junkyard" and a "lump of worthless ore," breaking the usual Eternian insult formula of "[noun] face" (for instance, earlier in the episode He-Man referred to Mer-Man as "scale face," and one of the most common epithets for Beast Man is "Fur Face").
• We are surprised to learn that Skeletor actually owns multiple Basher vehicles - a pair are seen parked side by side in a "launching pad" within Snake Mountain.
• Evil-Lyn wields a straight, standard magic wand instead of her clawed mace, using it to freeze Teela into a block of ice. She spends far too long doing it, giving He-Man time to take care of four other villains and then swing by to reverse the beam onto her.
• This episode slowly piles on the villain count, introducing one classic minion after another. By the time Tri-Klops shows up in the final minutes, we are up to six!

• Duncan claims that he was meant to receive a shipment of rainbow quartz that never arrived. He then claims that the only place to get it is a cave in Snake Mountain. Okay, so what happened to that previous shipment? Did the guys he sent to get it get killed by Skeletor?
• Beast Man gets no respect from anyone: The minion requests permission to be the one who goes to get Teela. Skeletor immediately denies his furry minion the pleasure, announcing that he's going to do it himself; but a few seconds later he tells Evil-Lyn to do it instead. Later, as Mer-Man is receiving a bony tongue-lashing for failing to stop He-Man, Beast Man senses his time has come, crowing: "It's time to turn He-Man over to a real monster." Skeletor rejoins: "Do you know a real one, Beast Man?" Beast Man (literally): "I get no respect."
• Home invasion again! For the good of Eternian radio receivers everywhere, Prince Adam and Cringer have no choice but to penetrate Snake Mountain. (Why our hero does this as Prince Adam and doesn't immediately change to He-Man is anyone's guess.) After a failed attempt involving a rock-like creature, the pair eventually find a way in through an underground spring. They don't set off any of the alarms we've seen Skeletor use previously, and Skeletor doesn't catch wind of them on his spy dome - but Mer-Man notices!
• Given Skeletor's usual skills at spying, it's odd that he notices Teela and the kids when they are still at a distance from his fortress, but doesn't detect the house-breakers Adam and Cringer, who are much closer to hand.
• Strange that we don't get to see the confrontation between Evil-Lyn and Teela - we just witness the aftermath, with Lyn leading her captive into Snake Mountain on a chain. I'd like to think Teela would have put up a better fight than she seems to have done! Perhaps she was ambushed. We also see no trace of the rapport these two seemed to be forming back in MU059's "The Witch and the Warrior."
• Teela later makes up for having been so easily captured by independently escaping from her captors - though that also happens off-camera.
• Note that the children enter Snake Mountain in the Jet Crawler, but afterwards the vehicle is never seen again. Presumably they ditched it, the better to sneak around without being seen. But that's no doubt an expensive piece of machinery which has now been lost to Skeletor. They should take it out of Krill's guard salary - once he starts earning it!
• Animation error: He-Man begins to peel back the steel door closing off Skeletor's hangar, but all we see behind it is another metal door.
• He-Man sends his friends off in a stolen Basher, staying behind to ride Battle Cat over to a vein of rainbow quartz and finally complete the mission that brought him there in the first place. But how is he going to get home? Leap out of the hangar doorway into space? Hopefully there's a gentler way down and out!
• It feels like we've been plagued lately by a run of "lesson"-based episodes, lousy with annoying kids. I hope we can get back to straight sword and sorcery soon! (No such luck! There's one more lesson episode to go, in MU089.)