J. Michael Straczynski

Bill Reed

Farin is so annoyed that his girlfriend can't stop talking about He-Man that he decides to trick her into thinking he's actually He-Man. The problem is, he also convinces the villain Modulok!

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

Galen Nycroft (Modulok), Skeletor

butterfly, Karil, Farin, Ommy, shrieker, Eternian guards, Mangor the Horrible, Quix the Shapechanger, bat servant, Karil's father, messenger, Grabber

sky sled, Modulok's jet chair

It's a lovely day for a picnic! At least, that's what several of our Eternian friends have decided. The first bunch comprise some very familiar faces: Orko, Cringer, Prince Adam, and Teela. Cringer is feeling particularly frisky today, and is busy batting at a butterfly. He pursues the insect, cat-like, away from his friends and deeper into the forest; but one of his pounces lands him over a pile of loose brush that proves to be covering the entrance to an underground nest. Falling inside, the tiger eventually discovers that he has disturbed a sleeping shrieker. The annoyed cries of the pterodactyl-ish thing send our cowardly friend leaping out of the nest and streaking back to his comrades.

Meanwhile, lounging nearby are the other group of picnickers: the young man Farin and his girlfriend, Karil. Karil is irritating her boo with breathless tales of He-Man and his heroic adventures. She theorizes that Eternia's protector must have some other identity when he's not busy saving people; but Farin is tired of hearing about it. Positing that he is jealous, Karil sends Farin off with a pitcher to fetch some river water, accompanied by his little pet omaran, Ommy. Not long after he departs, the angry shrieker swoops in! Karil and Orko, who was trying to assist, both end up huddled under a picnic blanket while Teela ineffectually attempts to zap the threatening creature with her wrist blaster. Adam and Cringer, under the pretense of going for help, find a private spot to transform, and He-Man and Battle Cat arrive to convince the shrieker to return to its nest and go back to hibernating.

While He-Man is showing off his acrobatic skills, leaping on and off the back of the shrieker, Farin is watching from behind a tree and formulating a plan. He decides that Karil will like him better and pay more attention to him if she thinks he is secretly He-Man. The first part of his plan involves him staying out of sight until well after He-Man has departed, then strolling up to his girlfriend looking excessively nonchalant and claiming that he got lost in the forest where he's spent his childhood. Karil's father then dashes up, warning the couple of a nearby dragosaur that has been heard roaring in the crystal caves. Farin makes a paltry excuse about having "things to do" and wanders away, effectively raising his girlfriend's suspicions.

The real He-Man has disappeared, having changed back into Prince Adam and returned to the palace; but when the prince gets word from a messenger about the dragosaur, he does his transformation thing (this time without his tiger, who has wandered off to get a snack) and hops on a sky sled to investigate the cave. Inside, we discover (though He-Man does not) that the dragosaur call was being faked by Ommy. A watching Farin carefully enters the cave under the spying eyes of Karil, who watches long enough to see He-Man walking back out. Coming to a conclusion that no one else in the series has managed to make about Prince Adam, even though he does this sort of thing all the time, Karil decides - shocking though it seems - that He-Man's secret identity must be Farin.

Now over to Plot B. It turns out the royal palace dungeons are just chock full of dangerous criminals today, and among them is the mad scientist Galen Nycroft. His adorable little bat servant has just brought him the final piece he needs to assemble a huge transformation chamber. He steps into the completed invention (which he's apparently been hiding from the prying eyes of his jailers by keeping it in an invisible pocket dimension), and it explodes around him, leaving him transformed into a many-legged red monster. Dubbing himself Modulok, the satisfied criminal rips a chunk out of the wall of his cell with his new-found monster strength and walks free. He returns to his cave-like laboratory and secret base, where he makes a tele-beam call to Skeletor and tries to submit his resume to the arch-villain. But it seems Skeletor is not accepting new applications today - especially from "wimp" scientists who would likely turn out be "wimp" villains - so Modulok has to find some way to prove himself to his prospective boss.

Luckily, he ventures out of his hidey-hole just in time to overhear Karil accusing Farin of secretly being a blonde-haired hunk. Seeing his opportunity for fame and fortune, Modulok ambushes Farin and zaps him with a paralysis ray, then totes He-Man's alleged alter ego back to his base. A horrified Karil runs off to fetch help. At the palace, she runs into Prince Adam, who is very confused on hearing her story about He-Man being in trouble. The deluded Karil feels compelled to explain that her kidnapped boyfriend is secretly Eternia's protector! Adam assures the young lady that some mistake has been made, then runs off to "fetch" He-Man and Battle Cat, who are led by Karil to the location of Farin's kidnapping. There, they meet Ommy, who was with Farin and has just escaped from Modulok's cave via a very tiny omaran-sized crack. Battle Cat helpfully sets to widening the crack by digging out the hillside with the horn on his head armor.

So how is Farin faring? Modulok first put the kid in a cell with some "energy cuffs" on, supposedly strong enough to restrain his more muscular form, then demanded that Farin transform into He-Man. Since he is (unsurprisingly) unable to do this, Modulok has to come up with alternate methods of persuasion. He cleverly opens the cell door remotely, allowing Farin to wander through the underground base. Modulok then traps the young man in a sort of arena, and sets a giant monster named "Grabber" on him. Surely now Farin will have no choice but to change into He-Man! But of course he can't, and it's very likely at this moment, running and dodging the attacks of the enraged Grabber, that Farin begins to really regret his plan to impress his girlfriend. Luckily for him, the real He-Man finally busts in, astounding Modulok and taking over the fight with Grabber. Rather then use his big muscles on the beast, He-Man opts to trick it into running back into the elevator chamber from which it was loosed: the elevator prison closes and descends back into the ground, solving that problem.

Modulok, channeling his role model Skeletor, decides now would be a great time to make his escape. Lacking old Bonehead's teleportation skills, Modulok must settle for riding away on his jet throne, which is restricted to the rails on which it rides. This makes it very easy for Farin's pet Ommy to switch the tracks and send the villain careening into a jail cell (for which he very nonsensically built a rail siding).

End with a Joke: Modulok is horribly embarrassed (as he should be - stupid jet throne!) at having been defeated not by He-Man, nor by Farin, but by a silly little two-limbed omaran. Everyone else is just amused, and laughs at him. Afterwards, outside the cave laboratory, He-Man informs the others that he will be heading to the palace to send the royal guard to pick up Modulok - hopefully to do a better job this time of keeping their prisoner locked up. Farin boasts of the great job he did helping He-Man defeat the villain, but then has to back off of his claims when an annoyed Karil points out he's still not being truthful. The young man apologizes for all the pretending he did, and Karil claims (against reason) that she likes him just the way he is. A pleased Farin decides that it doesn't matter what He-Man's other identity is, "as long as he's here when we need him." He-Man tips us an ironic little wink.

• Karil: Oh, he's fantastic! Too bad more people can't be like He-Man. / Farin (to his pet, Ommy): She means me, ya know. ... But wait a minute! Karil wondered if He-Man might also be someone else. So, there's no reason that I can't be He-Man - or at least, no reason why I can't let Karil think I'm He-Man.
• Karil: I was right! He-Man does have another identity! Farin is He-Man!
• Modulok (to Skeletor): But why can't I join your gang? / Skeletor: Because, you were a wimp scientist, and you could be a wimp villain!
• He-Man: Don't worry, Farin; strength isn't everything. / Modulok: But it's a good place to start!
• Modulok (angry at He-Man's defeat of Grabber): No, that's not fair! He was stronger than you, bigger than you. He would've beaten you. / He-Man: And that's why you lose, Modulok: because brains and skill will always overcome brute strength, every time. When you were a scientist, you used to know that.

• Teela rolls along the ground: To dodge the swooping attack of the shrieker

One full, two partial (missing Cringer/Battle Cat sequence)
Variation - the second partial transformation, being the third in the episode, is greatly shortened and only shows Adam raising his sword and announcing the first line of his magic words.

Brought to you by Prince Adam and Cringer
The prince, petting his tiger in the palace courtyard, brazenly tells us (with added irony, since he's using his deeper He-Man voice to remind us of his own failings in this category) that if you pretend too much, like Farin did in today's episode, you're actually lying - and lying is bad. "Sooner or later, lies have a way of catching up with you." Oh, yeah? When will all your lies catch up with you, Prince Adam, hmmmmMMMMM? When the prince tells us we should "tell the truth and be yourself," Cringer hopefully asks whether that means he doesn't have to be Battle Cat anymore. No such luck, Cringe!

Games and gladiators: A stretch, but I think I can tag this category because of the brief ending battle with Grabber. This episode comes glancingly close to several other of my chosen categories without actually hitting any of them on the nose. In the most generic sense, you could actually consider this story a "use of a transformative device," a category that hasn't gotten any play since MU010; but the sort of device I was thinking of there was one that could transform things into all sorts of other things, not just one evil scientist into a red, many-limbed monster. Farin learns a valuable lesson about not pretending to be He-Man, but he's not the "wayward child" necessary for the category. In an indirect way, you could argue this one is "dealing with Adam's secret," but it's not really about Adam - it's about Farin.

• According to my DVD set, this is episode 48 of the second season (making it overall the 113th episode of the series); but according to the Wikipedia article I use to get my production codes, this is MU123 - putting it well out of sequence with the surrounding episode codes. Though this out-of-sequence coding has happened once or twice before (see MU004's pilot, or MU027 and MU023, the two episodes named after Orko's uncle), it's a very unusual occurrence. Actually, I suspect the reason for this switch-up is very similar to what happened with the pair of Uncle Montork episodes, where Montork's introduction episode (MU027) needed to be played first, before his "Return" (MU023). Here we get the origin for the character Modulok, which needs to appear before his return in MU113.
• Cringer evinces some very out-of-character behavior at the episode's beginning by chasing after a butterfly. In MU084, the identical butterfly design was used to prove that Cringer was terrified of butterflies. He also expressed his distaste for moths in the opening of MU058.
• The story Karil is telling to her very uninterested boyfriend, about He-Man saving the village of Cafene from some sand demons, is very similar to what happened in MU111's "Double Trouble," with just a few crucial differences: He-Man didn't do it "single-handedly" (he was aided by Man-at-Arms, Teela, and Kol Darr), and they weren't sand demons, but sand crawlers. It seems the facts have already been degraded by the game of telephone that is Eternia's word-of-mouth news network.
• The creature that crawls out from under the couple's picnic blanket, and which proves to be Farin's pet "Ommy," is identical to the "gronk" that ended up with Orko's magic in MU045's "Orko's Missing Magic." Karil later disappointingly identifies the creature as an "omaran," missing the chance for taxonomic consistency across episodes. Farin's name for the creature recalls the Pokemon-like simplicity of other creature naming in the series - see MU100's Myrtle the myrtlephant, for example. The interesting thing about the word "omaran" is that it's similar to "Omiros," the world He-Man and Orko ended up while tracking their gronk in MU045.
• Cringer makes some guesses into what kind of nest he's fallen, providing us with the Eternian creature names of "lyrebird" and "corduck."
• The "shrieker" who turns out to actually own the nest is a poorly chosen character design to recycle, since it was introduced as an extinct animal out of Eternia's prehistory in MU018's "Creatures from the Tar Swamp." We saw it again, magically regenerated from an articulated skeleton by the evil imp Lokus, in MU024's "Wizard of Stone Mountain." In that form, it could still potentially have been the same tar swamp beast; but there was a live, non-extinct one flapping around in Snake Mountain to terrorize some children in MU088's "Three on a Dare," and terrorizing the father-and-son historian duo on the island in MU032's "Search for the VHO."
• We see Teela make use of her wrist blaster, which this time is not set to "freeze ray," but some kind of generic stun beam. She tries to use it to scare off the shrieker - to no effect.
• We are treated to a fun tour of the royal palace's dungeon, which we haven't seen in quite a long time. Beast Man had a tower prison cell in MU080; the actual underground dungeon has possibly not been seen since as far back as MU019. Here, it looks very similar to the version of the dungeon seen way back in MU002's "The Shaping Staff."
• Currently being held in the palace cells, and judged by the veteran guard as being among "the most dangerous criminals in all of Eternia," are such nasties as "Mangor the Horrible," "Quix the Shapechanger," and (the central villain for this episode) one Galen Nycroft. To begin with, all of the prisoners are surprisingly humanoid in nature, not much like the more colorful and chimeric lackeys of Skeletor.
• We learn from the veteran guard that Nycroft is a sort of mad scientist who tried to take control of Eternia using a mind control machine. Neat!
• Unusually, after He-Man hops onto a sky sled to visit the crystal caves, we see him emerge from a hole cut in the side of a rocky cliff - apparently an exit route from the palace for flying vehicles. It seems much cruder than the hangar bay we've seen used in other episodes.
• It's supposedly a "dragosaur" (based on the spelling of the DVD captions) that's hanging out in the crystal caves. We've encountered "dragasaurs" before, when our heroes travelled to Eternia's ancient past in MU008's "The Time Corridor." This makes the second instance in this episode of a previously ancient form of life apparently appearing in Eternia's present day. Hmph! You might also be wondering if these "crystal caves" are similar to the ones He-Man visited with the blind boy Loos in MU101's "Not So Blind;" well, they're not. So there.
• This episode sees the first appearance - indeed, the origin story - of the villain Modulok, Galen Nycroft's new name for himself after emerging as a red monster from his illicitly constructed transformation chamber. Filmation's Modulok bares a passing resemblance to the toy version, with red skin, claws, pointed ears, a bald head, and multiple legs. But the toy Modulok was an absolutely awesome and innovative departure for Mattel, since, like its name, it was modular in nature: rather than the squat, one-piece, musclebound stature of a typical He-Man figure, Modulok was thin and lanky, came in a box instead of on a card, and was a collection of body parts that could be snapped together in various ways. The animated Modulok does not demonstrate any tendency towards owning swappable limbs (though he does show that he's able to grow his ears larger at will). Also different from the toy: animated Modulok is not - and does not seem likely to become - a member of the Evil Horde (which hasn't really been introduced yet in the series, though we glimpsed their logo in MU073). In fact, the plot of the story has Modulok trying to join Skeletor's crew. For a vague suggestion of Modulok employing the body-part-swapping nature of his toy, see MU113. Modulok will eventually defect from Skeletor to the Horde, but not until an episode of She-Ra.
• The second episode in a row (by my DVD ordering) that omits Man-at-Arms.
• Yet another in a long line of consecutive episodes featuring the variant ending credits.

• In a rare divergence from the trend of this season, we get an episode that uses both Cringer and Battle Cat, and gives both characters parts to play in the plot. Cringer instigates the opening adventure sequence with some surprisingly outgoing activities. Then He-Man pulls a cool stunt with some help from his pet when he leaps off the back of the shrieker and makes a well-timed landing onto the tiger. It seems like our writer (in this case the great J. Michael Straczynski) is still contriving to put Cringer out of the picture at about halfway through the episode, when the tiger wanders off to fix his own meal; but Battle Cat returns in the show's closing minutes to help dig a path to a kidnapped Farin.
• I like how even Ommy realizes right away that Farin's plan is bound to cause problems. As Farin self-rates his scheme to pretend to be He-Man "a great idea!" we can see the creature wincing.
• The veteran guard begins talking to the rookie using a considerably different voice than the one he eventually adopts; he starts out sounding American, but to tell the story of Nycroft he drifts into a British accent, sort of on the Cockney side.
• Animation error: Reality starts to get even shakier as we enter Nycroft's cell, where the wall with the cell door in it extends past the side wall instead of meeting it at the corner. Looks like our mad scientist has already been at work, mind controlling the background painters!
• I really wish I had an adorable little bat servant like the one Nycroft has - he's so cute and awesome. I could eat him up! Also interesting to note: no one captures the little cutie, so he is still on the loose at the episode's ending, leaving him available to perhaps arrange another prison break for his master. (The creature will make a return appearance in MU113.)
• Before Karil and Farin's forest picnic is over, they've been menaced by a shrieker and have to flee from the nearby presence of a dragosaur. Um, maybe you should be looking for a different picnic spot? (Admittedly, the dragosaur attack proves to be merely a clever ploy of Farin's, but the fact that the Eternians believe it so readily seems to show the forest is plum full of dangerous beasts - not a great place for pleasurable afternoon outings.)
• Animation error: We haven't seen this for a long time, though it has happened in the distant past: the very end of Adam's second, curtailed transformation sequence shows He-Man just beginning to move his sword to point at a non-existent Cringer.
• Animation error/continuity error: And only mere seconds after the last one! He-Man has to hurry to the crystal caves: we see him running down a pretty, tiled hallway in the palace. But when we immediately cut to him leaping onto his sky sled, he has abruptly teleported into a cave-like tunnel, with rocky walls and a dirt floor. Huh?
• I pictured Galen's transformation into Modulok as being the typical mad scientist blunder, like what happened in the classic horror movie The Fly: you step into a chamber thinking you're just going to be the world's first teleported human, but instead start changing into a hideous monster. Based on his reaction, however, turning into a hideous monster was exactly Nycroft's plan, and it went off without a hitch. He even had a new name for himself all picked out ahead of time. Huh! Well... congratulations, I guess?
• More continuity/animation errors? Based on earlier shots, Nycroft's cell seems to be located firmly in an underground dungeon of the royal palace. However, when Modulok tears open the wall of his cell, we see an open field spreading out beyond.
• I give Nycroft a lot of credit for being able to build himself out of his prison cell; but it's also possible that the dungeon guards are not doing such a great job. They do seem to spend at least some of their shift looking inside the cells at their charges, but if they were really paying attention, you'd think they'd notice a guy building a huge transformation chamber - even if Nycroft has contrived to keep it invisible most of the time.
• I find it completely hilarious that the logical leaps Karil makes to conclude that Farin is secretly He-Man are just the kind of conclusions Teela should be drawing about Prince Adam's secret identity in pretty much every episode of the series. Adam has just as poorly hidden his true secret identity as Farin cleverly fakes his, and in incredibly similar fashion; for instance, in just the last episode (MU112), He-Man rode away into a canyon on back of Battle Cat, and was immediately replaced by Adam and Cringer coming out - all while Teela was watching. Very similarly, it's Farin walking into a cave and He-Man immediately walking back out which convinces Karil her boyfriend is in fact Eternia's protector. The only thing that seems to excuse Teela's (and everyone else's) ignorance of He-Man's secret identity is that no one seems to have ever considered before that he might have one. Modulok, for instance, is amazed at the very concept when he hears Karil discussing it.
• Skeletor picked an odd time to get picky about who joins his gang. We see him rejecting Modulok, claiming as his reason that the monstrous scientist is a "wimp." But doesn't a scientist have more mental potential than, say, the less-than-intellectually-stunning Beast Man? (Sorry to throw you under the bus, Fur Face.) Isn't a guy who just successfully transformed himself using a machine he built secretly in prison, and then successfully broke out of prison, more promising as a lackey than consistent failures like Trap Jaw and Mer-Man? Did you see what happened to Spikor on his first time out, Skeletor?! (See MU107.) And let's not forget the fact that, in MU087, Skeletor allowed the cowardly and gangly young boy named Glitch to join his gang (though he admittedly changed his mind about the decision very quickly). We'll also get to see our bone-headed villain trying out a "wimpy" scientist along the same lines as Nycroft in the form of Maddok, in MU129's "To Save the Creatures."
• It's odd how very well-informed Adam seems to be about Galen Nycroft not only having escaped, but also having been turned into Modulok (as we discover when Karil describes the red monster who kidnapped Farin). It seems the only way he could know that was if the prison guards told him; and the only way they would know would be if they witnessed Modulok's escape. But if they were watching, why didn't they show up and try to stop him? It's also interesting that Karil describes Modulok as having "all these arms and legs" - even though the animated character possesses the normal number of arms.
• I found myself wondering how long Modulok has been in jail when he sets his caged monster Grabber on Farin. If Nycroft had that critter living in his cave laboratory the whole time he was imprisoned, how was it getting fed and watered? Perhaps the fact that it's starving is what makes it extra mean! (It's also possible Grabber wasn't locked away all that time, and Modulok only just freshly plucked it from the horribly dangerous nearby forest.)
• I was shocked by the scale of Grabber, when it is finally shown on screen with He-Man next to it. When the monster first appears out of the elevator chamber in which Modulok was storing it, it seems fairly small - comparable in size to Modulok. During He-Man's fight with the beast, it suddenly appears gigantic, towering several He-Mans high.
• OK, so I know I was arguing earlier for having the ostensibly "smart" scientist Modulok getting accepted into Skeletor's band, but having witnessed the full majesty of his "jet throne" invention, I am now having serious second thoughts. Why the hell would you invent an escape vehicle that runs on rails? And, having done that, why in the name of the Ancients would you lay down an alternate track that leads directly into a jail cell? Then, having completed all these moronic tasks, why would you further screw yourself by leaving the track-switching mechanism out in the open for any little omaran to operate? Yeah, on second thought, stay in your lab, Modulok. Skeletor doesn't need to add to his roster of scrubs. He's full up.
• Though it suffers - as should be seen from a perusal of this commentary section - from several errors in the animation department, this script from Straczynski is a playful exploration of He-Man's secret identity as seen from the outside, and a fun introduction for a new villain. As I've also already noted, it gives some good screentime and contributions to our hero's pet tiger, something that has been lacking in other S2 episodes (even in previous Straczynski scripts - see how he short-changes the tiger by temporarily and rather callously replacing him with Stridor in MU073). True, it does go heavy on the He-Man transformation sequence, a trait that drew my criticism in the recent MU112; but in this case I think the several changes are necessary for the story (since Farin needs a chance to drop some heavy hints that he's the one doing the changing).