Of Machines and Men

A power failure sweeps Eternia, bringing down Queen Marlena's craft over the Corridors of Lithos and grounding Adam's Sky Sled. The cause is Sortech, who sends He-Man a suit of battle armour and threatens to leave the planet in a dark age unless he comes. While King Randor rides Battle Cat in search of his wife, He-Man fights past Sortech's metal creatures and finds the mighty wizard is a broken old scientist kept alive by the Ergon, an energy device he needs help repairing. Skeletor arrives to steal it, He-Man shuts down both their suits to stop him, and Battle Cat leads Randor to Marlena.

"Sortech tried force to get He-Man to repair the Ergon when all he really needed to do was ask. Family, friends and neighbors help each other in times of need. Remember, it's a sign of strength, not weakness, to ask for assistance."

Sortech: "Imagine Eternia devoid of weapons, vehicles of power."

He-Man: "Got a few tricks up your armored sleeve, don't you?"

Sortech: "Pay no attention to that pathetic creature!"

He-Man: "So you're the great wizard, Sortech."

Queen Marlena: "Picked up my scent? In this wind?"

Switch off the machines and see who is still standing. Michael Halperin's script runs that experiment on Eternia, and it runs it on both sides of the war at once.

The blackout arrives as a string of small humiliations. Marlena loses contact over the Corridors of Lithos, Adam's Sky Sled dies under him, and back at the palace Mekaneck and Man-E-Faces have lost their powers while the battle orbs sit dead. Snake Mountain fares no better: Trap Jaw comes back from a simple reconnaissance mission able only to mumble, Tri-Klops complains that his eye sensors are out, and Skeletor decides that whoever is behind all this is someone he should get to know. Halperin wrote the original 1982 Masters of the Universe bible, according to the He-Man wiki, and the script knocks out the gadgets the characters were built around.

Then Sortech sends He-Man a suit. Much of the strength in this episode is borrowed from a machine, and He-Man wins by switching his off. He climbs into Sortech's battle armour because the alternative is Eternia hurled back into a dark age. For the middle stretch he is a blond head peering out of a blue robotic frame, stomping across a scrapyard of wrecked machinery and punching through Sortech's metal creatures. King Randor, meanwhile, rides out to find his wife on Battle Cat, who is faster than any steed in the Royal Stable.

The best scene borrows from somewhere else. Inside the mountain a giant glowing face with blue eyes does the talking, and when He-Man goes toward the machinery the face shouts "Pay no attention to that pathetic creature!" The creature is Sortech himself, an old man in a red helmet wired into the Ergon, and He-Man's reply, "So you're the great wizard, Sortech," makes the nod to The Wizard of Oz plain. It is a smart homage because it changes the story's terms: the tyrant is a scientist whose invention was stolen to power war machines, the explosion nearly killed him, and the favour he was willing to darken a planet for is a cave-in cleared.

The cost of that turn is speed. Sortech's history arrives in one monologue over a sepia flashback, and he goes from a voice threatening a world to a frightened man begging He-Man not to touch his machine almost at once. A half hour with a second plot running alongside cannot give him much more, so the script spends what it has on the reveal; the man gets less. The sharper line belongs to He-Man, though, who tells Sortech that if he needed help he could have reached out in a civilized way.

Skeletor turns up because Sortech summoned the most powerful beings on Eternia to help him, and Skeletor has no intention of repairing anything. The final act puts him in bulky bone-armoured battle armour of his own, and the fight between the two suits is the toy commercial the He-Man wiki says the episode was, written to promote the 2003 Battle Armor He-Man and Skeletor figures. It still lands, because He-Man ends it by giving the borrowed strength up. He warns Skeletor that pulling the plug kills both suits, does it, and leaves Skeletor shouting that he cannot move. When Sortech asks why He-Man risked his life for him, the answer is the one He-Man gave him earlier: some things are worth fighting for.

The Marlena plot is thinner; it has the Queen holding off snake men in a misty canyon until Randor and Battle Cat come charging in, but it gets the last laugh. Early on she mentions bringing young Adam and Cringer to explore these caves. At the end Battle Cat finds her among hundreds of them, and Marlena wants to know how he could pick up her scent in this wind. The audience knows, and so does the cat.

For an episode built to sell two action figures, this is a thoughtful half hour, and we would happily take more like it. The armour is a toy-shelf product and a borrowed power inside the story, and the script makes He-Man's best moment the one where it goes dead.

1. Toys: the He-Man wiki records that this story was written to promote the 2003 Battle Armor He-Man and Battle Armor Skeletor action figures from Mattel's line.
2. Production: writer Michael Halperin is credited with the original Masters of the Universe bible, dated 1 December 1982. He also wrote a 2001 bible for this series, which was replaced by the 2002 bible the show was made from.
3. Goofs: Sortech disables all technology on Eternia, yet Randor's electronic binoculars still work, the He-Man wiki points out.
4. Goofs: Gabe Khouth is listed in the credits as the voice of Orko, who has no lines in this episode.
5. Voice cast: Paul Dobson voices Trap-Jaw, Tri-Klops and Man-E-Faces, three of the characters whose built-in gifts the blackout knocks out. Michael Donovan doubles as King Randor and the snake man Tung Lashor.
6. Continuity: the He-Man wiki singles out this episode as the one occasion the series shows Marlena as a diplomat and a fighter, wearing battle armour and defending herself against the Snake Men.
7. Continuity: the fan record disagrees on who hunts Marlena. The He-Man wiki's episode page names Kobra Khan and Tung Lashor, while its Sssqueeze entry says Sssqueeze and Tung Lashor; the dialogue only has an unnamed snake man promising King Hiss a queen for dinner.
8. Broadcast: in Germany the episode was retitled Planet ohne Strom (Planet Without Power) and first shown on RTL II on 24 August 2004.