Jina Bacarr

Marsh Lamore

Time has stopped all over Eternia! Turns out it's all part of a wicked plot by the evil wizard Hexon, a bid to steal the leadership of the empire of Simbar. To stop the villain and restart time, He-Man will have to plead before the Council of Seasons and track down the imprisoned Keeper of Time. This is a wacky one, people!

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

N/A

Princess Kathay, holepher, Keeper of Time, Emperor Kathar of Simbar, Hexon, the Council of Seasons (Lady Spring, Miss Summer, Count Fall, Mister Winter), electric giant

Hexon's flying disc

It's the kind of morning you wish would last forever! Adam, Teela, and Orko are enjoying a lovely game of Unnamed Eternian Ball Sport while Cringer enjoys a lengthy nap. Actually... it seems like they've been playing for quite a while now, and the sun hasn't moved. Isn't it about time to have lunch? The heroes slowly realize that all their clocks (not just Teela's wristwatch, but also the incredibly gigantic free-standing one they've brought with them on their camping trip) have stopped at exactly 10 AM. Just as they're trying to wrap their heads around this situation, they overhear some female cries for help. The cries are coming from somewhere in the midst of a field of evenly sized holes that have been dug in the ground. Teela eventually finds the young girl who's been yelling stuck in the bottom of one of the holes, but when the captain tries to assist, the rim of the hole crumbles, dropping her in as well! With Teela out of sight and some rescuing needed, Adam decides the moment has come to transform into his more shirtless self.

As He-Man, our hero discovers the source of all the holes is an aptly named holepher: a giant mole creature, who appears to be menacing the pair of women in their hole. But our hunky scientist of the natural world stops Teela from using her stun ray, because he's already realized that the holepher is just disturbed and confused because of its instinctive sensitivity to time. He-Man leaps on the creature's back and leads it back to its den, where it happily lies down; then he helps the women back up to the surface. There, the heroes learn that the young lady is a princess: the Princess Kathay, daughter of the Emperor of Simbar. They invite the princess back to Eternos, where she explains to King Randor and Queen Marlena that she is on a mission to save her father, who has been kidnapped - along with the Keeper of Time - by the evil wizard Hexon. Hexon is the one who's responsible for this whole time-stoppage problem: he has divided the last second in an hour over and over again, to infinity, to keep time from elapsing. Hexon has performed this evil deed because he knows that the emperor must stand before the Council of Seasons every year at the beginning of spring, to be once again declared emperor. With time stopped, and the emperor imprisoned by Hexon, Kathay's father won't be able to renew his vows, and Hexon will be free to take over Simbar! Furthermore, our heroes realize that if the sun won't set and rise, and the seasons won't roll by, crops won't be able to grow or be harvested - which will certainly cause problems for food-eating Eternians everywhere.

Having agreed that their assistance of Kathay is necessary, the heroes decide to divide their forces: Teela and Orko will accompany Kathay to Hourglass Mountain to try to find Kathay's father and the Keeper of Time, while Prince Adam and Cringer head off to the Council of Seasons and try to convince them to wait for the rightful emperor. Adam, of course, immediately transforms back into He-Man to do his job. He finds the seasons (Lady Spring, Miss Summer, Count Fall, and a very sleepy Mister Winter) understanding and sympathetic, but powerless: they can't bend their laws to help out the emperor, so He-Man is just going to have to fetch the fellow in time.

Over at Hourglass Mountain, Teela and company are having just as little luck with their mission. Hexon has locked up the emperor and the Keeper of Time in an evil-powered energy cell at the top of the mountain, then busily emptied the Keeper's hourglass and sent the shaken-out Sands of Time over to the Sand Dunes of Runyerre, where they'll be even harder to collect than a needle from a needle-filled haystack. Checking his video screen, Hexon spots the trio of heroes approaching and bursts outside to trap them - and cover the mountain - in a twisty forest of magical vines. Then he flies off on a cool little flying disc to claim his emperor-ship. On the way, he runs into He-Man, headed to assist his friends. Hexon thinks he's taken care of the hero when he leaves him in the "charge" of a summoned electric giant; but He-Man easily dispatches the creature by absorbing it into his power sword.

The blonde oaf then continues on his way, finding Teela and the others trapped in vines. He easily tears them free, then swirls some dusty sand up onto the mountain-covering vines to make them less slippery and easier to climb. Everyone (except Battle Cat) then scales the mountain - Kathay receiving a bit of a lift from He-Man. At the pinnacle, they find the door locked against them - but that's nothing a good swing from a power sword can't fix. The sword comes into play again once they get inside, when He-Man stretches out one bar of Hexon's evil prison cell with his good-powered blade, allowing the Keeper and emperor to step out.

Everyone's saved! But Simbar is still in danger of being taken over by a stupid wizard, and Spring won't ever spring until time gets rebooted. He-Man learns from the Keeper where the Sands of Time have gone and rushes off with his tiger to collect them; everyone else (except the Keeper, who doesn't seem too spry and stays at the mountain) heads for the Council of Seasons. At the council building, Kathay, Teela, and Orko interrupt Hexon as he's trying to convince Lady Spring and the rest to crown him emperor. When Hexon learns from Kathay that He-Man is in the process of trying to restart time, he rushes off to Runyerre to interfere. Orko decides to help his friend and sprinkles some magic powder on himself, which makes him sneeze, but also successfully teleports him to the desert.

Out on the sandy dunes, He-Man and his tiger are slowly but surely putting the glowing time grains back into the hourglass - but it's taking forever. Hexon swoops in as a fiery ball, astride his flying disc, and decides irony is his greatest weapon. He traps the hero and his cat in a spinning whirlwind that's made out of the Sands of Time. When Orko arrives, Hexon just casts the spell on the Trollan as well. But Orko actually shows some smarts, and coaxes the sands to follow him into the hourglass. He-Man is then free to tie up the fleeing villain with a well-tossed bolas, and then loose the squished Trollan from one end of the hourglass.

The Sands of Time are returned to their Keeper, who restarts time and forces Hexon to sit in his workshop and set the time on all of Eternia's clocks. Once the wizard is done doing that, it will be off to jail! Or whatever passes for a jail on Eternia. Having taken care of that, He-Man is finally able to return to the Council of Seasons, where Kathay's father has been kindly and patiently waiting for the blonde oaf's arrival. Everyone is able to witness the emperor's re-coronation, and He-Man gives a lot of the credit for the happy resolution of the story to young Kathay. The happy princess pronounces the latest in her long line of homey aphorisms; something about a girl with good parents having the strongest magic of all? Yeah, something like that. She gives her father a big hug, and the parentless Teela happily concurs with the girl's sentiment.

End with a Joke: N/A; unless you count Orko's ending question to Kathy: "You weren't afraid with me around, right, Kathay?"

• Orko: Maybe your watch stopped, Teela. / Prince Adam: Well, perhaps Orko; but the clock's stopped, too. / Cringer: Then the nap I took doesn't count! Guess I'll try again.
• Prince Adam: But if time has stopped, why are we still able to move? / Princess Kathay: He has taken the very last second in an hour and divided it, and divided it again, on and on, so that the same second will go on forever; or until he gets what he wants - our kingdom.
• Miss Summer: Oh, what's the use, Lady Spring? You'll never get the flowers open in time. Spring will never come! / He-Man: Don't count on it.
• Hexon: Farewell, He-Man. The clocks may have stopped, but your time is up!
• Keeper of Time: I have a new helper. Come, Hexon: you have a few clocks to set. / He-Man: And when he's finished here, the authorities will come to pick him up. He'll be "doing time" for a good long while.
• Kathay: One thing overcomes all fear. A daughter who has the faith of her parents has the strongest magic of all - love.

• He-Man juggles his sword: The unsheathing part of the loop is used as He-Man prepares to face off against an electric giant
• He-Man from above, runs to mid-screen and pauses, battle-ready: The loop up to the beginning pause is used as He-Man dashes up to deflect a magical bolt

Two full

Brought to you by He-Man
Very appropriately, He-Man pauses to rap with us about time. The way our hero tells it, we shouldn't wish for time to stand still, as it did in today's episode: time is our friend, as its passing allows plants to grow and young children to mature and develop into hormonal teens. He glosses over any downsides. For instance, once children get older, they no longer want to spend their parents' money on He-Man toys! Not, that is, until they reach middle age and it becomes pathetically nostalgic.

Skeletor-less episodes in Season 2: I considered tagging this as a Time Corridor/time travel episode, but in fact the heroes are doing the exact opposite of traveling through time, so I don't think it applies!

• At the episode opening, we see our heroes engaged in some kind of ball-based sport, in which Orko is pitching the orb to Teela, and Teela is (presumably) preparing to swing at it using an electronic-looking swatter with an open, triangular head. One has to assume that some kind of magnetic field or energy netting is produced within the triangle, to make the "bat" capable of doing its job. Interesting!
• Teela checks the time on a digital clock that's embedded on her wrist bracer; later, we see she also still has her usual "stun ray" on her wrist. Amazingly, the clock is on her right wrist, the blaster on her left, so there is no overlap or inconsistency here!
• The "holepher" or giant mole creature which the heroes encounter is identical to one of my favorite side characters, the adorable Moak from MU069's "The Gamesman." Even though all the heroes present met Moak in that episode, everyone acts as though they've never seen the fellow, and there's no confused and embarrassing moment of false recognition (He-Man, for instance, doesn't have to say: "Sorry, I thought you were a different giant blue mole"). I guess they can tell right away that it's not Moak, since at the end of MU069 he was given a massive pair of glasses, which this holepher isn't wearing.
• He-Man immediately understands the holepher's distress, claiming that the creatures "have a keen sense of time." Looks like we just caught another episode of Science Hunks with your favorite lecturer, Professor He-Man!
• Princess "Kathay" and her people evoke the fashions and customs of Asian countries on Earth - specifically China. The princess's dress, her accent, her love of aphorisms - even her name, which sounds like Cathay, the historical European name for the northern region of China - are all very Chinese. Or at least, these are all what a Western person would stereotypically consider to be Chinese characteristics.
• This is the only He-Man script written by Jina Bacarr - making her something less than a MOTU veteran. That fact is certainly born out by this very unusual story, giving us an entirely new and very strange set of characters and circumstances, completely atypical to He-Man. I googled Jina and, if it's the same woman, she has evolved into an author of rather trashy-looking historical romance novels. No offense - the world needs trashy romance novels.
• Kathay's description of how the evil wizard Hexon has stopped time is basically a description of one of Zeno's Paradoxes, a series of problems set by the Ancient Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea (look it up on Wikipedia if you don't believe me!). Hexon's gambit of dividing a second over and over again most closely resembles Zeno's "dichotomy" paradox. I'll simply quote the description as taken from Wikipedia: "Suppose Atalanta wishes to walk to the end of a path. Before she can get there, she must get halfway there. Before she can get halfway there, she must get a quarter of the way there. Before traveling a quarter, she must travel one-eighth; before an eighth, one-sixteenth; and so on. ... This description requires one to complete an infinite number of tasks, which Zeno maintains is an impossibility." Still, this thought problem only deals with the measuring of distance or time, not with its actual elapsing, so Hexon has taken Zeno's idea a large step forward (which, ironically, Zeno might argue was impossible).
• Hexon has a fun (though problematic - see commentary) character design that was never produced in toy form - even in later Mattel releases of the 21st century.
• Hexon shows that, just like Skeletor and other He-Man villains of his ilk, he possesses the video equipment necessary to spy on the doings of his heroic enemies.
• He-Man absorbs an entire electric giant into his power sword. Neat-o!
• The blonde hero next does his spinning trick - something we've seen him use before to become a human whirlwind (MU080), drill into the ground (MU097), or toss away some wolf-bats (MU112). This time, and less excitingly, he simply kicks up some sand to make Hexon's conjured vines less slippery. You have to admire his apparent ability to fling the sand only on the vines, and not get any on his friends; after all, as Anakin has taught us, sand gets everywhere.
• We see one of Orko's magic spells characteristically backfire (at least, so it seems at first), resulting in the magician sneezing. Orko has sneezed before on screen, in case you were wondering: when he mistakenly thought pepper would put out fires in MU015, and when he got fooled by the irritating Yukkers in MU053.
• Orko plays a surprisingly positive role in today's story - without his having successfully teleported himself to the desert and cleverly gotten the Sands of Time to follow him into the hourglass, the day would not have been saved. Perhaps more evidence that our writer was somewhat unfamiliar with these characters! But I kid Orko... Odd that, at the conclusion of the story, He-Man gives all the credit to Kathay and none to the Trollan.
• The Keeper of Time's timekeeping ability seems oddly mechanical rather than magical in nature, as we see the guy wielding what looks like a kinked screwdriver in the episode's closing minutes.
• In one of the extreme instances of the series waiting until very late in an episode to reveal the name of a character, we don't find out until the very end of the story, when the emperor is reclaiming his title, that his name is Kathar.
• Yes, it's another episode featuring the variant ending credits with the flat-painted Jawbridge.

• I love how the Eternians are out camping with the bare necessities: some tents, some outdoor sporting equipment - and an absolutely gigantic clock on a huge metallic pedestal. Sure, everyone brings those on their hikes!
• "This is a job for He-Man," claims Adam, as soon as Teela falls into a rather shallow hole in the ground. Um no, dude; this is a job for a short length of rope. He-Man is a crutch!!
• Animation error? The pit in which the heroes find the girl, and into which Teela falls, is initially shown as being a simple dirt-lined excavation - naturally, since it proves to have been dug out by a "holepher." But in later shots the walls of the pit are shown as being lined with brick, as if they were deliberately constructed.
• Small inconsistency: Kathay refers to her father first as the "Emperor of Simbar," but later slips up and says "my father, the king." Make up your mind, lady.
• Also - aren't emperors by definition more impressive, and rulers over larger territories, than kings? Doesn't that mean Kathay's dad could beat up Adam's dad? Again, another suggestion that Randor is perhaps not the valid ruler of the entire planet of Eternia - something that has been very inconsistently treated in the series (just as one contrast, it seemed implied in MU081's "The Arena" that Randor was ruler of the whole planet).
• Prince Adam very naturally asks why everyone in Eternia is still able to move, even though time has stopped. Kathay's explanation, while intriguing and fun, doesn't really seem to answer his question. Why does dividing a second over and over again allow sentient things to move (and presumably age), but not allow living things like crops to grow or be harvested? Why can Cringer go and take another nap, but the planets cannot turn through space? I suppose the inconsistent effect of the time stoppage works well for Hexon's plan (since he's holding back the first day of spring, when Kathay's father's emperorship will be reinstated, so that he can reach the Council of Seasons first and take over), but just how it's working is still a mystery. One would think he could much more easily have taken over the empire by simply doing away with the current emperor. If you kill the guy - or even just keep him locked up in a cell, as Hexon is already doing - there's no way he can show up to the Council of Seasons before you.
• Also - is time stopped just on Eternia, or throughout the universe? Will people get hungry? If you eat something, will you still need to poop? If you drop a ball, will it still fall? Will flowers still wilt if they don't get watered? If you fire an arrow into the sky, will it still come down? I have many questions!
• I love the character design for Hexon, but there's more than a little whiff of embarrassing Eastern stereotyping to be detected here. He looks a lot like the original design for the Marvel Comics villain Mandarin, or the Flash Gordon villain Ming the Merciless - both classic examples of Yellow Peril paranoia. It's just a good thing there are also some good-guy Asian stereotypes here, to balance things out. Right? That makes it okay, right?
• Continuity error: Though when the heroes reach the top of Hourglass Mountain, they find the door shut and locked against them, in an earlier scene we see a very energetic Hexon burst out of the same door, smashing it off its hinges and onto the ground. I suppose he must have magically repaired it off-screen before he left?
• Since I've been doing a lot of complaining in this season about people avoiding the use of Cringer and Battle Cat, it's only fair to mention that the tiger plays a central role in this episode's story. The only time Battle Cat is shoved to the side is when He-Man tells him to stand guard outside Hourglass Mountain, rather than accompany the other heroes inside - which is only fair, since no one could expect the cat to be able to climb up the vine-choked walls.
• He-Man relies on his sword a surprising amount in this episode, and in a quick succession of scenes. First he defeats the electric giant; then, rather than punch open a locked door (usually one of his favorite things to do), he slices it open; finally, to release the emperor and the Keeper of Time from their cell, he pries out a bar with his weapon.
• Animation error: we see a bolas-restrained Hexon neatly land smack in the middle of Battle Cat's saddle (albeit facing the wrong way); but in a later scene, Hexon appears to be riding just behind the saddle's seat.
• It's pretty funny that, now that time has started back up again, it's apparently Hexon's job to set everyone's clocks. We won't leave that to the various people of Eternia? Can they not be trusted to adjust their own clocks? Did everyone swing by Hourglass Mountain to drop off their wall clocks for setting?
• The appearance of the Council of Seasons raises some further questions (beyond all the other questions I had about how this whole time stoppage thing was supposed to work). It's a strangely pagan and pseudo-religious turn for the series to take. Are they... gods? Do these season-based entities actually control the seasons on Eternia, and are they therefore worshipped by all the population of Eternia - not just the citizens of Simbar? I mean, seasons are planet-wide, so it's odd that this council only seems to have jurisdiction over the governance of Simbar. Does Randor have to show up every fall to have his kingdom re-endowed?
• This was just a strange episode, no doubt. It's one of those ones - like MU019, or maybe MU045 - that throws such a completely new universe of characters and locations at you, that you have to wonder whether the original story was meant for some other purpose or series, and was just shoehorned into MOTU.