Lessons

Sent away from the palace rebuilding as a mere jester, Orko tries to help with a spell that brings a wall down, then asks the Sorceress to send him home to Trolla. While she prepares the spell, a hooded stranger shows him the Book of Yesterdays and the times he has helped his friends. Skeletor sends Evil-Lyn, Beast Man and Trap Jaw to take the Ram Stone, which can pierce any barrier, from the Faceless One in the ruins of Zalesia. Skeletor turns it on Castle Grayskull, but Orko tricks the stone away from him. Orko chooses to stay, and the Faceless One calls Evil-Lyn his daughter.

"Everybody makes mistakes, but your friends appreciate you for who you are, even when you mess up."

Orko: "Here, I'm nothing but a useless jester."

Evil-Lyn: "If you want it so badly, get it yourself."

He-Man: "You three on some kind of tour?"

Skeletor: "You've got to be kidding, jester!"

Orko: "I'll clear a rock, lat you! I mean, clear a clock, troll off!"

Faceless One: "Perhaps there's hope for you yet... my daughter."

Every royal court keeps a fool, and the trouble with being the fool is that nobody listens when you say you would like to be something else. Orko opens "Lessons" offering to help rebuild the palace wall, and Man-At-Arms sends him off to plan the King's party instead, because "this is no place for a jester." One overconfident spell later, the statue he means to lighten comes out far too light for the workers to hold, and the wall comes down.

What follows splits in two. Orko flies to Castle Grayskull and asks the Sorceress to send him home to Trolla, where he was Orko the Great, and while she prepares the spell a hooded stranger in the library walks him through the Book of Yesterdays. Across the map, Skeletor sends Evil-Lyn, Beast Man and Trap Jaw into the ruins of Zalesia for the Ram Stone. Legend says it can pierce any barrier, and an old wizard called the Faceless One stands guard over it.

We get the hinge from a throwaway gag in Snake Mountain, of all places. Watching Tri-Klops's footage of the collapsing wall, Skeletor muses that he should recruit the jester, since the jester at least is doing something, and a moment later Evil-Lyn tries to object and is cut off. This is an episode about two court magicians who are taken for granted at home, and about the outsider each of them needs to hear it from.

Larry DiTillio's script handles Evil-Lyn with more care than a villain subplot usually gets. Her meeting with the Faceless One is cool and wary on both sides; he tells her she is still wasting her talent on Skeletor, and she admits she came to warn him, adding that he will not appreciate it. Mid-fight she whips up a sandstorm and slips away, leaving Beast Man and Trap Jaw to He-Man. In the final scene the Faceless One answers her with two words that recast every exchange before them: "my daughter." The Book of Yesterdays does the same for Orko. It shows him what he has already given, from saving a stranded boy from Swamp Hoppers on the day he arrived to the botched spell at a royal ceremony that left the King and Queen laughing when they needed it.

The animation has fun with scale. The towering statue and the long plank under Grayskull's drawbridge chain make Orko look as small as the court treats him. He is still tiny when he plants himself on that drawbridge to face Skeletor, and he holds his ground. The Ram Stone's green energy does real damage too: Battle Cat goes down, and He-Man bows over him before taking Skeletor on alone.

The standout is the bluff. Orko meets Skeletor at the gate holding what he calls the Great Jar of Grayskull, Skeletor laughs and agrees to a duel of magic, and a rhyming swap spell puts the Ram Stone in Orko's hands before Skeletor finishes his incantation. Gabe Khouth plays the follow-through perfectly. Orko's attack spell collapses into "I'll clear a rock, lat you!" and he flees anyway, with the stone.

The weakness is the Book itself. Twice the episode stops so Orko can be read his own history, and both flashbacks are charming, but they tell him he matters when the drawbridge is about to prove it. The desert battle probably explains the shortcut, and the climax would have landed harder if Orko had found his worth there rather than been handed it first.

By the end he has quietly changed his mind about Trolla, and the answer from Grayskull is that he is needed more than ever. Seven episodes in, this is the one that makes the case for the jester, and it opens a door on Evil-Lyn that we will be walking back through later.

1. Homage: The flashback in which Orko arrives on Eternia and saves young Adam from Swamp Hoppers retells material from the 1983 Filmation episode "Creatures from the Tar Swamp", where Adam tells the story of how Orko saved him in the Tar Swamp on the day he arrived.
2. Production: The He-Man wiki reports that Larry DiTillio suggested showing the ruined Temple of Shokoti, from his Filmation two-parter "House of Shokoti", in the background of the Sands of Fire, and that the idea was turned down.
3. Production: Orko was familiar ground for Larry DiTillio, who wrote the Filmation episodes "Orko's Missing Magic" and "Trouble in Trolla" in the 1980s before this script.
4. Continuity: The closing line "Perhaps there's hope for you yet... my daughter" establishes the Faceless One as Evil-Lyn's father in this series. The link returns in "The Price of Deceit", where she calls to him for help and he answers "my daughter" again.
5. Continuity: The Ram Stone is not finished with here. "The Council of Evil Part 2" mentions the Faceless One refusing to give it up without a fight, and in "The Last Stand" Skeletor says he still has it.
6. Voice cast: The He-Man wiki credits Michael Donovan as both the hooded stranger in the library and King Randor, and David A. Kaye as the 11-year-old Prince Adam in the flashback. The wiki's summary identifies the stranger as the Sorceress in disguise, which the episode itself never states outright.
7. Voice cast: Gabe Khouth voices Orko and also Mekaneck, who is heard here only over the radio reporting Skeletor's thugs in the Sands of Fire.
8. Continuity: Orko tells the stranger he had his wand when he first came to Eternia and that his magic does not work so well without it. The He-Man wiki notes he lost it saving Adam, echoing Orko losing his magic medallion in the Filmation telling, and that the MVCreations comics later send him after the missing wand.