Douglas Booth

Ernie Schmidt

Thanks to Orko, the evil wizard Kothos, having been stuck as a sand slug ever since he tangled with Evil-Lyn in a previous episode, is restored to his human form. Now he's out for revenge - which, according to the title, will be disappointingly savory.

Teela, Prince Adam (He-Man), Orko, Cringer

Skeletor, Evil-Lyn, Beast Man

Kothos, orcs

Attak Trak, Roton, sky sleds

Adam, Teela, Cringer, and Orko are stuck out in the desert with a broken-down Attak Trak. Adam and Teela have the vehicle jacked up and are almost done the necessary repairs. They wisely demur when Orko offers to use his magic to speed the completion - but this leaves the denied Trollan more susceptible to random requests to use his magic, as we immediately discover. A voice calls to the magician out of the desert, soon proving to be attached to a brown sand slug which pops out of the sand, introduces itself as Kothos, and begs for Orko to change it back to its original form. Orko is clearly bad with names, or he would remember that he helped the Heroic Warriors fight Kothos in MU059's "The Witch and the Warrior," and it was the concluding battle with Evil-Lyn that left the evil wizard in his current slimy state. Oblivious, Orko twiddles his fingers, and for once completely succeeds: Kothos is restored to his impressively prodigious humanoid self.

Teela and Adam, who have sharper long-term memories and have overheard part of these goings-on, know that they are in trouble and rush over to stop Orko - or, failing that, Kothos. But the rejuvenated magician is anxious to flex his long-absent powers, and deftly freezes all four of the heroes with a quick spell. What Kothos wants most now is revenge - revenge on Evil-Lyn, who left him trapped as a slug for so long. And now he has the perfect bargaining chips! He calls up Skeletor and proposes a trade: Lyn for the four captured do-gooders. Since Lyn is actually in the room with him, Skeletor gives the offer a hard pass, calling the sorceress his "right hand of evil." But when Kothos ups the ante by offering to throw in He-Man as well, Skeletor changes his tune and tentatively accepts - explaining to an offended Evil-Lyn after he hangs up that he's just playing along with the villain.

Back in the desert, Kothos has built a raft and found an entire ocean to float it on. The raft is occupied by the four frozen heroes, and once Kothos has floated it out into the middle of the water, he unfreezes them all (because surely none of them will think to swim or float away - right?). Kothos is betting that He-Man will have heard about this whole hostage situation, and will be bound to show up and rescue the prisoners. Annoyed that the hunky hero hasn't yet appeared, he decides to speed things up by conjuring a giant tidal wave. Luckily for our villain, Prince Adam has jumped into the water and swum a few feet away in order to transform into He-Man, because no one can possibly see him from that particular spot in the ocean (they also all happen to be gazing in horror - or, in Kothos's case, smug satisfaction - at the giant wave). Thus He-Man does, in fact, appear, hopping onto the raft and steering it like a surfboard, riding the giant wave safely to shore.

But Kothos is ready for our blonde hero! Knowing that his freezing spell from before won't do for He-Man, the magician has fashioned a lovely metal helmet, which he floats onto the oaf's blonde dome. It has the effect of draining away all He-Man's strength, leaving him helpless and easily manacled (everyone else just gets refrozen). Kothos then makes a second triumphant call to Skeletor, who agrees to a meeting over Evil-Lyn's loud and blustering objections. Skeletor again assures her he's just playing along - and then traps her in a magic-proof cage, which Beast Man quickly wheels away and into the villains' Roton, so they can head directly to the prisoner exchange.

Out in the desert, Kothos has summoned his floating palace (still peopled with loyal orc employees) for a quick escape after the swap. A slightly apologetic Skeletor hands over his right-hand woman, explaining that he'd sell out anybody to get He-Man. As the satisfied Kothos is walking off with his caged Evil-Lyn, a desperate He-Man offers a deal: if Lyn will remove his hat, the hero promises to rescue her. Realizing it's the best offer she's likely to get, Lyn complies, even unfreezing the other heroes; and a bare-headed He-Man, back at full strength and free of his manacles, leaps for the already ascending floating palace. Kothos knocks him off, informing Skeletor that He-Man is now Bonehead's problem. Skeletor does his best, attempting to bury the heroes with the quick-digging Roton; but Orko, who can float out of these kind of situations, puts the energy-draining cap on Beast Man's head, preventing him from dropping a hero-crushing boulder into the hole; and He-Man jams the rotating arms of the Roton and uses one to fling Teela out of the trap. As she's flying by, she rescues Orko from the arms of a vindictive Beast Man. He-Man then throws the Roton at the fleeing wicked pair; an off-screen boom informs us they won't be causing anymore trouble this episode.

Now it's time to rescue Evil-Lyn! Over the amazed gasps of Orko and Teela, He-Man explains that he has given his word, so they now have to go pursue Kothos. He pops some sky sleds out of the back of the Attak Trak and tells Cringer (who ran off and hid during the preceding battle) to just run along home, and the trio head after the floating palace. Heading for the flying building, our heroes are ignorant of the fact that Kothos was spying on their approach by crystal ball and is ready for them. He magics up a storm that knocks out Orko's floating powers and destroys Teela's sky sled. Bundled onto one vehicle by a quick-thinking He-Man, the three heroes just barely make it inside the palace.

But Kothos hasn't run out of spells! He makes a try at magically imprisoning them with big stone columns, and He-Man must use a rope and grappling hook to surmount the problem. Splitting from the others, the big lug goes after the magician and tells Teela and Orko to find Lyn. Though the giant palace seems like it will take forever to search, they immediately locate the evil sorceress. Their stealthy approach past Kothos's orc guards is ruined, however, when Lyn loudly asks the pair what took them so long. Teela and Orko are forced to fight off the minions, and then reluctantly unlock Lyn's cell with the key. An ungrateful Lyn rushes off to have her own revenge on her tormentor.

Where is Kothos, anyway? Well, he spent some time tangling with He-Man, who busted his way out of a giant stone hand the magician used to grab him. The hero was then tricked into falling through a trap door. Stuck dangling from a grate at the bottom of the flying palace, He-Man takes a few minutes to climb back up and rejoin his enemy, who has been cornered by Lyn - she's pelting Kothos with pottery.

Deciding quite sensibly that this is not adequate revenge, and seeing that He-Man is determined to defend the target of her vengeance, Lyn flies off, vowing to destroy Kothos's entire palace. She gets right into the control room and douses with magic the giant crystalline ore chunk which is the apparent power source. The whole castle starts wobbling like crazy, and a not-quite-adequately-nimble Lyn is tossed out the window and into the ocean below, where she comments wryly that her revenge is somewhat lacking in sweetness.

On board the shuddering vessel, He-Man offers Kothos another deal: he'll save the palace if the magician promises to swear off revenge. A panicked Kothos wastes no time in agreeing, and He-Man jumps on his sky sled and flies over to a nearby mountain, where he's able to grab a corner of the palace and level it off. The day is saved! With the building's controls repaired, our heroes gather in the throne room to reconvene with the former sand slug.

End with a Joke: Kothos tells the heroes that he has not only sworn off revenge - he's also thought of a way to use his magic for good. To illustrate, he creates another little thundercloud, which "accidentally" pauses to rain all over Orko before heading out the window to sprinkle drops over a rocky patch of desert. Flowers sprout up from the moistened ground, and Kothos explains that he plans to roam around Eternia, providing "Kothos's Instant Weather Service" for any farmer with dry crops. A pleased He-Man promises to let Kothos know whenever they need Orko watered.

• Skeletor: I'm sorry, Evil-Lyn, but capturing He-Man is more important than the personal comfort of those who serve me. / Evil-Lyn: You - you're selling me out to this slug! ... / Skeletor: To capture He-Man, I'd sell out anyone!
• He-Man: Evil-Lyn! We're enemies, but we're also each other's only hope.
• Evil-Lyn (to herself): He-Man's right. He may be my enemy, but at least he will keep his word!
• Kothos: You disappoint me, He-Man. Heh-heh. You were so easy to stop - and after I've heard so much about your great strength. / He-Man (busts out of a giant rock hand and lays down a sick burn): I could say the same about your wisdom, Kothos. A great wizard - but you aren't smart enough to realize that revenge is a game that no one wins.

• Evil-Lyn, hands on hips, laughs with her head thrown back: At the idea that she should be "grateful" for being rescued by the heroes

One partial (missing Cringer/Battle Cat sequence)
Variation - for the third time in his career (see also MU074 and MU099), Adam transforms to He-Man while more than waist-deep in water. Oddly enough, though previous watery transformations carefully avoided showing him in his full-body pose (since logically he wouldn't be able to do that while floating in water), this one doesn't bother. We get the entire usual animation loop, only leaving off the tiger transformation.

Brought to you by Orko and Teela
Orko and Teela verbally demonstrate the endless and pointless cycle of revenge: people getting back at each other over and over, to the accompaniment of appropriate scenes from today's episode showing Kothos and Lyn getting back at each other. It solves nothing! "The best thing to do is talk it over and start fresh." Sure - tell it to Israel and Palestine, Teela.

Kothos episodes
Skeletor (or another villain) plots to capture Prince Adam: In this case Kothos, who believes He-Man will come to save the prince - and somehow turns out to be right!
Everybody deserves a second chance: Even, it appears, the wicked Kothos - who manages to redeem himself at the end of this episode.
Evil-Lyn power punches the glass ceiling: Perhaps a bit of a stretch, as Lyn is put in a vulnerable position here, and we see little of her ambition. But she is definitely at odds with Skeletor, and shows a lot of spunk in the end with her single-minded pursuit of Kothos.

• Kothos has returned, and surprisingly enough the character is in the same position we left him in! At the end of the landmark episode "The Witch and the Warrior" (MU059), the evil wizard - who had succeeded in temporarily taking away Evil-Lyn's powers - ends up turned into a sand slug after a magical battle with the restored Lyn. In an unusual direct link to a previous episode's plot, in this opening we find Kothos still in need of de-slugging. A naive Orko is happy to oblige. (In contrast, the wicked Count Marzo will be suspiciously lacking in any symptoms of amnesia when we see him again, in MU112.)
• Oddly enough, the transformed Kothos is dressed differently than he was in his debut appearance. He still has the same turban, open-front vest, and baggy pants, but the colors have changed to red and white with a black sash. In MU059 his clothes were shades of blue with a red sash. Maybe this dye-job comes courtesy of Orko's not-quite-perfect reversal spell?
• Skeletor refers to Lyn as his "right hand of evil." In MU057's "Castle of Heroes," Skeletor passed over Evil-Lyn and called Clawful (of all people) his "right-hand man." I guess his favorite changes from day to day.
• Poor job with the old secret identity: Oh, boy howdy, is there ever. Adam is on a raft in the middle of the ocean, with Teela on the raft and Kothos somewhere within sight on the shore. There is really nothing blocking anyone's view of him, and no reason why just swimming for a few seconds will make it impossible for them to see him transform into He-Man. Nevertheless, this seems to be exactly what happens; and Teela is easily convinced by He-Man's nonsensical assurances that Adam is "just fine," somewhere in the middle of the ocean, even though no one can see him anymore and there's no way he could have disappeared short of drowning. (The only reason Adam's transformation remains unwitnessed seems to be pure dumb luck: they're all too busy looking at the giant tidal wave that's about to swamp the raft. Regardless, Adam was totally going to transform before the wave came along.) Teela also never asks after Adam again, though you'd think it would come up at some point - after they've chased off Skeletor and Beast Man, for instance.
• He-Man can surf! Gnarly.
• Kothos produces a metal helmet with the ability to remove He-Man's strength! Quite a handy little artifact, as very few people have succeeded in doing this before. Squinch the Widget managed to be hoodwinked into weakening He-Man with some magical gas in MU092's "The Littlest Giant," and some swamp water did for our hero in the even more recent MU099. There are some earlier instances where Skeletor got lucky and took He-Man temporarily out of action, such as in MU001's "The Cosmic Comet" (with a zap of comet-infused magic) and in MU066's "The Cat and the Spider" (via a "stun beam" that came out of his hand). It's hard to understand what's keeping He-Man from just tilting his head to tip the helmet off - I suppose it's a tight fit!
• This episode features the debut Filmation appearance of the Roton, Mattel's first vehicle toy for Evil Warriors (even though Filmation has provided plenty of ideas for great villain rides - the Basher, Collector, Doom Buster, and more interesting ones like the unnamed tankish thing Skeletor unveils at the end of MU052). The toy was released as part of Mattel's third wave, in 1984. This means we've now seen all the toys from that wave in animated form, apart from He-Man and Skeletor's "battle armor" figures.
• You'd think that the Roton was meant to be a land vehicle (the toy was certainly meant to be used that way), but its first use shows it flying through the air, Beast Man at the wheel and a caged Evil-Lyn in the back seat. We also discover later that it's really good at digging holes.
• Unlike the Road Ripper, a vehicle which has appeared in the series twice without being named aloud by the characters, He-Man obligingly calls Skeletor's vehicle "your Roton" before throwing it at him.
• Kothos, we learn, has a floating palace, which has presumably been sitting on the ground all the time he's been a slug. There are some surprisingly loyal orc soldiers hanging around inside it, who must be wondering when their next paycheck is coming. Clearly Kothos is a big fan of floating palaces; in his previous appearance, he cleverly stole Aridon's Fountain of Life by simply levitating the entire building in which it resided, and rode that around for a while. (Actually this whole floating palace thing has the flavor of a new writer misremembering or misinterpreting why Kothos was floating around in a building in the previous story, which was written by someone else - the fabulous Paul Dini, who sadly handed in his last script many episodes ago.)
• We see Kothos again spying on the heroes using a crystal ball, as he did in MU059.
• Just to make the Trollan even more useless than he's already been in this episode, we learn that Orko's floating powers can be "shorted out" by a good lightning strike.
• Teela's broken sky sled means she has to sit in He-Man's lap on the one remaining craft - a suggestive position it seems the animators have deliberately avoided depicting in earlier episodes (see Teela clinging uncomfortably to the side of the Battle Ram in MU024, rather than show her cuddled up close to the person at the wheel).
• In another instance of Orko's magic somehow mishearing him, he makes "flowers" when he's talking about his "powers." (For other times that Orko's magical listener is hard of hearing, see MU083, MU084, and MU095.)
• Lyn compares her imprisonment in a cage to being "like somebody's pet floogle mouse" - an Eternian creature we haven't heard of before.
• Lyn turns herself into a fireball and flies through the halls of Kothos's floating palace, an escape method she's demonstrated before in MU012, MU019 - and of course MU059, the last time she tangled with Kothos.
• Clearly Kothos hasn't been able to locate himself a little nugget of eternium (see MU042); the power source in his floating palace is a much less efficient, boulder-sized chunk of ore.

• Animation error: In a closeup of Teela as she and Adam are working on the Attak Trak, we see part of the Trak's chassis behind her - and then above it, open sky. I don't think they stripped it down that much! Also, though the jack they are using to lift the vehicle is visible in the very opening shot, it is never seen again, giving the impression that the Trak is floating.
• It's no surprise that Orko's thoughtless behavior would help usher in this episode's problem; what IS surprising is that his magic could so easily and successfully reverse Kothos's slugginess. It's one of those things that only works flawlessly when the plot demands it...
• But let's just stop for a moment and consider the back story here. Orko meets sand slug Kothos, who helpfully introduces himself, as though he's never met the Trollan before. But Orko was present in the ending battle of MU059, the episode where Kothos last appeared. Since Adam and Teela remember Kothos, why doesn't Orko?
• Kothos successfully freezes Teela, Cringer, Orko, and Prince Adam. I suppose there's some magical reason why it would be a strain for him to keep them that way; so his solution, rather than to just pop them in a prison cell or maybe just tie them up for a little bit, is to find a huge ocean (one that's lying somewhere right near the desert they were in the middle of at the beginning of the episode) and put his prisoners on a raft in the middle of it. ...What? How was he going to retrieve his prisoners? He doesn't seem to have thought this part out, and even makes things more difficult for himself by throwing a giant wave at them. He also didn't seem to imagine that any of them would be able to escape the raft by swimming - or to consider the fact that Orko, who can just float away, doesn't need to swim at all to escape. I suppose he was counting on He-Man to appear and save them (which of course happens), but I feel like there were many better ways he could have handled this situation, and I really wonder if all that time as a slug has left his brain a little... sluggish.
• Skeletor seems to have an unusual and unnecessary amount of reverb on his voice in the Snake Mountain dungeon scenes.
• I love how Skeletor totally surprises Evil-Lyn by throwing a cage around her, but Beast Man doesn't seem the least bit shocked: he just moves right in to tote the cage away, like this kind of thing happens all the time. Did Bonehead have a chat with Fur Face beforehand about this little betrayal?
• Continuity error: Or perhaps a scaling error? We see Beast Man flying off with Lyn in the Roton from Snake Mountain, clearly filling all the available space in the cockpit. When the Roton arrives in the desert for the meet with Kothos, we have to assume that Skeletor somehow also climbed aboard (though the ship is carefully shown from below, so we can't see the passengers). How did he cram himself in there, I wonder?
• Animation error: When we see a caged Lyn in the desert next to Kothos, her right arm is colored incorrectly, with what should be her metal bracer painted flesh color, and her elbow painted metallic. Also her left foot is sticking out of the bars of the cage, which I initially thought was an error but actually isn't.
• It's interesting how this episode manages to call back to the truce Teela made with Evil-Lyn in the previous Kothos episode. Here, He-Man makes a bargain with the usually wicked sorceress, promising to free her if she rescues him. It almost seems like, if given enough time and the actual desire to show major characters changing over the course of the series, our Filmation writers might have brought Lyn over to the Heroic side. Maybe; let's not forget Lyn's unrepentant rampage at the end of the episode!
• Another continuity error: When Lyn removes the helmet from He-Man's head, it vanishes into nothing; but a few seconds later, Orko magically floats it over to Beast Man's head from a distant spot in the desert where it seems to be lying.
• Note this story shows another example in a trend I've spotted in the second season, of Battle Cat being snubbed or omitted from plots. Since Adam has to change to He-Man on the open ocean, he loses his chance to transform the tiger. In a later scene where He-Man could have perhaps taken Cringer behind a convenient sand dune and then tried to find a way to cram Battle Cat onto a sky sled, he instead advises his pet to just go home and sit out the rest of the episode.
• I noted in MU059 some variations in the pronunciation of "Kothos," and in this episode we hear more of the same uncertainty from the voice actors. In the character's first appearance the balance seemed to tip more in favor of "KOH-thohs," with a long "o" in the first syllable; by the end of this episode everyone seems to have decided they were wrong about that, and it's really "KAH-thohs."
• Kothos's floating palace is very sumptuous and well-decorated! And in what turns out to be a poor choice on his part, he seems to have filled it with a whole heck of a lot of pottery.