J. Michael Straczynski

Marsh Lamore

In an unexpected development, Evil Warrior Kobra Khan approaches the heroes, begging assistance from He-Man! It seems his people, the Reptons, need their Eternal Flame relit. Can our friends trust the snaky fellow, or is there ssssomething ssssinissster behind this cry for help?

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

Kobra Khan

mechanical birds, korlock, Repton Chancellor, Repton guards, King Pythos, Scales the Jester

Attak Trak, Land Shark

Man-at-Arms is giving us the bird! Three birds, actually, and they're mechanical. Very delicate and intricate machinery, so it's no wonder he gets mighty peeved when Orko, trying out his latest juggling magic trick, accidentally sends the birds whirling away along with the balls he was juggling. Trying to assuage his mustached buddy's anger, Orko dashes off to collect the birds. Duncan, Adam, Cringer, and Orko are all out in the field, having driven some distance away from the palace in the Attak Trak, presumably to provide sufficient open space for the flying robo-birds to get a good workout and test. Orko floats a hundred yards or so away from his friends and has just managed to net the three birds, when along comes the Evil Warriors' vehicle, the Land Shark!

Orko flees back toward the other heroes, yelling out a warning as he comes. The Trollan returns, the Shark pulling up just behind him, and out of the vehicle pops Kobra Khan. But Khan is not looking for a fight - he claims to be looking for He-Man. Adam explains that He-Man is not available just at the moment, but they promise to pass on whatever request Khan may have. As the snaky villain explains, his people, the Reptons, are in trouble because the Eternal Flame that heats their home has gone out. Without the fire to keep the cold-blooded critters warm, they will be forced in a very short time to go into an extended hibernation - possibly forever. Khan seems to think that He-Man is the right choice for reigniting this pilot light. Having been hit with this bombshell, the heroes take a moment to talk over the request. They don't trust Khan, for obvious reasons, but Adam and Duncan argue that they can't ignore a cry for help, regardless of its source. Besides, the Reptons in general have never been particularly evil. So having settled their truce, and Khan having conveniently driven off over a hill and out of sight, Adam raises his sword and He-Man and Battle Cat are on the scene, ready to touch base with an unlikely ally.

Khan leads the heroes on the road back to his home, which - as he warns them - is laid with devious traps to dissuade intruders. The main one they have to deal with is a korlock, a huge tentacled beast that blocks the path and tosses boulders at them. He-Man leaps in to tie up all those tentacles; just as he's wrapping things up, a tree trunk weakened in the battle begins to collapse - right on Man-at-Arms! The quick-thinking Khan uses his eye beams to zap the widow-making log out of existence. Who would have thunk it? The cobra man helping our heroes? But as we immediately learn from Khan's internal monologue, he is not nearly as beneficent as he is making himself out to be: skullduggery and betrayal are on the horizon for our unknowing friends!

The convoy makes the rest of the journey to the Reptons' pyramidal main entrance without incident, and leaving their vehicles outside (the unhappy Attak Trak stuck with the snappy repartee of his parked partner, Land Shark), they make their way underground. Kobra Khan leads the heroes on, getting further and further ahead until they can no longer find any traces of him; they do, however, find an impressive stairway leading up to a reptile mouth doorway, inside of which lies an obvious hole in the ground which must be the usual home of the Eternal Flame. The heroes are just beginning to examine the hole to see how they can fix the problem when they're surrounded by Repton soldiers and the Repton Chancellor - and accused of being the flame-extinguishing culprits!

The heroes are quickly brought before the Reptons' leader, King Pythos, who was just having a sad conversation with his jester Scales about their impending sleepy time (and complaining about Scales' poor jokes). Presented with the captives, Pythos asks them why they put out his people's flame; when He-Man and the others plead their innocence, the Reptons bring out a witness who swears they're the ones to blame: yep, it's Kobra Khan. That snake! Err... that sneak! Khan lies to the heroes' faces, telling the king that he saw them put out the fire, and the king - choosing to believe his kinsman over the strangers - takes Khan's word for it. The heroes are summarily taken away, He-Man's attempts to resist being overcome by Khan's venom mist. Pythos, who hadn't been too thrilled with Khan previously, on account of his having turned evil and all, is impressed by what he's achieved, and asks how he can reward the slimy turncoat. Khan manipulates the king into making a decree: whoever can relight the Eternal Flame can have the throne as a reward.

Everyone else seems okay with this situation, but Scales the Jester is starting to get suspicious of Khan's true intentions. He follows Khan down to the Eternal Flame, where he witnesses the villain pulling out of the flame hole the ice crystal that he stuffed there earlier, to put the flame out in the first place. Kobra is about to solve the sabotage that he created, thus stealing himself a crown. But there's a problem! The crystal, which was only meant to put the fire out temporarily, seems to have quenched the flames for good. A thwarted Khan leaves to regroup, while Scales sneaks down to the dungeon where the heroes are being held, arriving in time to almost get flattened by the prison door that an awakened He-Man has punched down. Scales explains what he's discovered, and leads the heroes back to the flame, where they finally get a good look at the thing.

Duncan theorizes that there is lava deep below the hole, but it would take too much time to develop a drill that would be able to bring it up to the surface. No worries! The heroes have a human drill, and his name is He-Man. The blonde oaf snags an icy stalactite from the ceiling to act as his drill bit, and dives his way into the flame hole, twirling and twirling (and, we hope, spotting his turns to avoid dizziness). With grim determination and much gritting of teeth, he drills his way to the molten bedrock, bringing up a toasty flow of magma - and making it back out without singeing a single blonde lock on his well-sculpted head.

The flame is relit! And just in time for our friends to be confronted by the Repton guards and king - and Kobra Khan, who appears once again to accuse the heroes of malfeasance. He claims that he relit the fire, and the escaped prisoners were trying to undo his work. It seems like it's going to be back to a dungeon cell for He-Man, et al - but Pythos has learned his lesson about trusting fellow countryman Khan. He sets the guards on the true villain, and they drag him off. The king thanks the heroes, and apologizes for his initial misjudgment of them. He points out that, in accordance with his earlier decree, He-Man is now the rightful king of the Reptons! But our modest hero turns down the offer, pointing out that the Reptons already have a perfectly good ruler in Pythos.

End with a Joke: Orko wonders where Scales the Jester has gotten to: he wanted a chance to say goodbye before the heroes left. King Pythos explains that Scales is busy training an apprentice. The jester returns with said replacement, who turns out to be Kobra Khan: his punishment is that he will be forced to make people happy for the rest of his days. Scales does a juggling trick with the villain that ends with Khan covered in a pink cream of some kind. It's an extra terrible punishment for Khan, since (as he admits) he hates fun. And, for the one hundred and thirtieth time, they all laughed...

• Man-at-Arms: Orko, I don't think I've ever been ready for one of your tricks.
• Prince Adam: I never thought I'd see the day when Kobra Khan would come to He-Man for help. / Cringer (his eyes covered with his paws): I still haven't seen it, and from the sound of it, I don't want to!
• Prince Adam: We can't ignore a plea for help just because it comes from someone we don't like.
• Kobra Khan (to himself): You will understand sssoon enough, Man-at-Arms. Then I will not sssssave you - ha ha ha ha ha... ssss.
• Scales: Cold? You call this cold? Why, where I grew up, it was so cold we had to put sweaters on the icicles! / King Pythos: Ah friend Scales, even your jokes begin to suffer the effects of the cold. Soon we will all be forced into the sleep of hibernation. I shall not hear your jokes again for a long time... which, come to think of it, may not be such a bad thing after all.
• King Pythos: Whoever succeeds in restoring the Eternal Flame shall be king of the Reptons. So let it be.
• Scales (to himself): By my beard! There's something strange going on here; even stranger than the fact that I don't have a beard! So perhaps I should keep an eye on Kobra Khan.
• He-Man (with teeth gritted): Got...to...drill...deeper!

• He-Man swings sword overhand: The unsheathing part of this loop is used as He-Man prepares to fling his sword at an icy stalactite

One full

Brought to you by Man-at-Arms
Duncan, back to holding his mechanical birds on his arm, rudely criticizes the decision-making powers of King Pythos, who incorrectly chose to believe the lies of Kobra Khan. He advises us not to be like Pythos, and to carefully judge the evidence when making a decision, and avoid jumping to conclusions. He then tips us the very final MOTU wink - along with one of his cheeky birds.

Skeletor-less episodes in Season 2: That's right, we'll hear nothing from our favorite bony villain for this, the last episode of MOTU.

• Things that come out of Orko: A net on a hinged yellow arm, very handy for catching runaway mechanical birds.
• We learn that Kobra Khan is a member of the Reptons, a generally peaceful snake people, of whom Khan is the black sheep.
• Touchy Attak Trak doesn't like driving behind the Land Shark, facetiously complaining that it has "a big mouth." I'm reminded of that time Trak and Mekaneck seemed to be jealously competing for He-Man's attentions, in MU116.
• The korlock that attacks our heroes is a recycling of an oldie but baddie, the Lovecraftian fiend Yog from MU022's "Song of Celice." This version is purple and pink instead of its original green and tan.
• The handheld, flashlight-shaped ray that Man-at-Arms uses to zap a boulder looks very similar to the gross web cord climbing device he invented in MU064's "The Remedy."
• Kobra Khan demonstrates an ability to completely disintegrate a falling tree with beams that shoot out of his eyes. That's a new ability! The best he was able to do in past episodes was spray sleeping gas out of his cobra's hood. He also eventually does that in this episode, but He-Man now refers to it as "venom mist."
• We get just a touch of science in this episode since the plot hinges on the fact that the reptile people, being cold-blooded, need a fire to keep themselves warm. Why not just set up some tanning lights? Or maybe stop living in an underground cave, out of sight of the sun? Just throwing out some ideas...
• He-Man's plan for relighting the Eternal Flame gives us the privilege of seeing him act as a human drill once again. He did this in MU097 to hit the water table in a desert; here it's more of the opposite goal, as he tries to bring lava up into the icy caverns. He's drilled for lava, too, though - in MU108.
• Well, here we are: this was the last regular episode of Masters of the Universe. Everything we see done here is being done for the last time. Sniff... Farewell, you blonde-haired stud you. (But don't worry! There's more He-Man to go around! See the movie-length specials.)
• This final episode continues and concludes the solid run of sequential episodes, starting all the way back in MU104, featuring the variant ending credits with the flat-painted Jawbridge in the background. 32 of this season's 65 episodes (basically half of them) have featured this different background painting in the credits.

• We've seen the Land Shark before on the show, and like its toy model, it's always had an open cockpit, making its driver easy to spot. To make Kobra Khan's appearance a surprise, however, the animators contrive to draw it as a closed vehicle while it's chasing Orko, with the snaky villain somehow popping out of somewhere when he stops in front of Duncan and Adam. This inaccuracy is forced to continue throughout the rest of the episode - or at least until the heroes and villain make it to the Reptons' home, after which the vehicles are never seen again.
• When Kobra Khan describes to the heroes the prospect of his people going to sleep, he says it will last "forever." But when King Pythos talks about going to sleep with his jester, he says that he won't hear Scales' jokes again "for a long time." Which one of them is right?
• I love the dynamic between Pythos and Scales, giving us some classic king/jester banter. Orko almost fulfilled the role of Eternos's royal jester (and villains like Evil-Lyn accused him of having that job), but he never quite got on the level of cracking jokes with Randor, as happens here. Orko's comic relief was generally unintentional.
• I also thought the moment where the flexible Pythos twists his snaky head entirely upside-down to speak to a hand-standing Scales was charming and clever.
• In order to better lay out the byzantine plotting of Kobra Khan for the apparently dense viewing audience, the creators of this episode felt it necessary to give us a window into Khan's thoughts, providing us several rare lines of internal monologuing. Usually if a MOTU character needs to express their thoughts, they just state their musings aloud for the benefit of the viewers. (One exception that comes to mind is He-Man's internal monologue in MU032 - though in that instance he wasn't able to talk to himself, since he was underwater at the time!) Since they're on this kick anyway, they also give us some of Scales' internal musings, making for a very thoughtful episode.
• He-Man turns down a chance to be king of the Reptons! What a guy. Honestly, though, I can't think he'd be a popular king of snakes - out of touch with his people, they'd say. He'd also be disappearing half the time, replaced by some mysterious pink-vested chump.
• Continuity error: Kobra Khan is taken away by the guards, and just a few short seconds later we're to believe that Scales has already taught him a juggling trick? Did we just lose time somehow? Did the Reptons abduct us in a spaceship?
• It seems odd that the last episode of the series should be so everyday and regular, and with comparatively very low stakes. The season and the run of episodes seems to conclude abruptly and without fanfare; we don't even get a last chance to see Skeletor in action. Even though he did appear in the previous episode (MU129), Old Bonehead hasn't made a try for Grayskull since MU126, and we haven't seen the Sorceress since MU118.