On a mission for King Randor, Prince Adam and Teela free a creature trapped in a cave by a rockslide, seeing nothing of it but a giant claw. Beast Man had sealed it in to steal its eggs, then lost them through a hole in his sack. Orko ends up with the eggs, juggles them at the palace, and they hatch. The young dragons grow fast, wreck the city and are steered toward Castle Grayskull by Skeletor's forces. Pinned by a huge dragon, He-Man realises it is the creature from the cave; it spares him, then fights Skeletor's Serpintaur to help drive the Evil Warriors off.
"Kindness is an amazing thing. The more you give, the more you receive. And as Teela and I learned, a simple act of kindness can come back to help you when you least expect it."
Orko: "Four balls in the air, and at no time do my hands leave my wrists."
Ram-Man: "You ain't going to make me disappear, are you? Last time it took me three days to find myself."
Orko: "Oh, oh, I know, I know. From dragon mothers."
He-Man: "Ran into Adam. Borrowed his Sky-Sled."
Teela: "But it wasn't He-Man who was kind to the dragon. It was Adam."
Kindness on Eternia rarely gets a receipt, so it is a treat when "Dragon's Brood" hands one over in the middle of a fight. Prince Adam and Teela are racing through the forest on a mission for King Randor when they hear something roaring under a rockslide, and all we see of it then is a claw poking out of the rubble. The first reaction is the best line of the opening: "If that's a toe. I don't want to see what it's attached to." Adam talks Teela into levering the boulders off anyway, the creature is gone before they get a look at it, and the two of them carry on with the mission.
The script by Mark Edens and Michael Edens then turns to everybody else's carelessness. Beast Man trapped the dragon to steal its eggs, plans to raise the hatchlings himself, and loses the lot through a hole in his sack; Orko ends up with them and decides they are juggling balls; and by morning a brood that seemed cute the night before has grown big enough to set the city on fire. None of that is Adam's doing, and the only decent act anybody manages before the fighting starts is his idea in the cave, carried out with Teela's help. The episode is about that one decent act, done by the prince with no sword in his hand, and about who ends up getting thanked for it.
Watch how carefully the writing guards that point. When the Sorceress calls, Adam pleads trouble with his Sky-Sled to slip away from Teela, and when He-Man arrives at Grayskull he covers for himself with a joke: "Ran into Adam. Borrowed his Sky-Sled." Later, pinned in the courtyard under a dragon's claw, he gets a good look at the beast and says "You? At the cave," and the dragon sniffs him and holds off. The animal recognises the man that the secret identity is supposed to hide. Teela, who was in the cave too, gets halfway there at the end. Adam dodges her first guess with "You've seen one dragon, you've seen them all," and she keeps going: "But it wasn't He-Man who was kind to the dragon. It was Adam." The episode leaves her in the gap between what she saw and what she knows.
The animation is at its best in the market, where red dragons swoop low over the stalls and rooftops while the townspeople scatter, and in the long courtyard brawl that follows. He-Man crouches inside a glowing shield while flames burst around him, rolls past a loose boulder and ends up flat under the dragon with his sword out of reach. He loses this fight, and the episode is braver for letting him. Teela gets her own duel with Evil-Lyn by the burning walls, staff against staff.
The comedy stays light. Orko's juggling patter ("at no time do my hands leave my wrists") runs as a gag from the palace to the closing scene, and Ram-Man's worry that Orko will make him vanish again, since "Last time it took me three days to find myself," is the funniest line in the palace.
The weakness is the third act, and it comes from the toy shelf. Once the dragons reach Grayskull, Skeletor turns up with his Evil Warriors and a Serpintaur, the Masters arrive to meet them, and the story of a dragon and a prince gets squeezed into the corner of a crowded battle. An episode in a series built to sell figures has to put the figures on screen, but the dragon's return to fight the Serpintaur is the payoff of Adam's work in the cave, and it deserves more room than the Masters' quips leave it.
This is one of the warmer entries of the first season, and it introduces Chief Carnivus and his people as allies the series will come back to. What lingers is the dragon's nose. The beast has no reason to care about secrets, but it knows Adam and He-Man are the same man because it remembers who helped it in the cave, and it repays the prince on a battlefield where only the hero is supposed to be standing.
- Continuity: Chief Carnivus, who accepts King Randor's offer of an alliance here, is back in the very next episode, "Turnabout", when his village of Felis Qadi comes under attack.
- Continuity: The dragons return in the second-season episode "To Walk With Dragons", where Orko recalls the day his juggling balls turned out to be dragon eggs and hatched.
- Continuity: The He-Man wiki describes Serpintaurs as the dragons' natural enemy, which explains the creature that Skeletor's side brings into the final battle; "To Walk With Dragons" builds its whole plot on the same rivalry.
- Toys: Chief Carnivus, who makes his first appearance here, was released as an action figure in Mattel's Masters of the Universe Classics line in 2010, according to the He-Man wiki.
- Voice cast: The He-Man wiki credits Paul Dobson with Chief Carnivus as well as Man-E-Faces, Trap Jaw and Tri-Klops, so the new ally and two of Skeletor's men share a voice.
- Voice cast: Scott McNeil is credited with Stratos, Beast Man and Ram-Man, which means the egg thief who starts all the trouble and the Master who frets about Orko's magic are the same actor.
- Voice cast: Gabe Khouth voices Orko, whose juggling act hatches the brood, and Mekaneck, per the He-Man wiki.
- Voice cast: Lisa Ann Beley, the series' Teela, doubles as a Qadian cat-child in this episode, according to the He-Man wiki.
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