Siren's Song

After a battle at Castle Grayskull, Man-At-Arms tells the Masters about the Power hidden inside it, and Ram-Man calls for a loyalty oath that newcomer Buzz-Off refuses. Evil-Lyn hatches a plan to turn the Masters against each other, and a Siren's song puts Ram-Man under a spell he cannot remember. He steals Man-At-Arms' new Kinetic Immobilizer, accuses Buzz-Off of being the traitor, and is himself condemned for treason. The hearing is a ruse: Man-At-Arms has found the spell and blocked it, and the Masters turn Skeletor's ambush back on him. Ram-Man apologises to Buzz-Off.

"Ram-Man and Buzz-Off both learned a valuable lesson. Friends give each other the benefit of the doubt. Don't make accusations or draw conclusions until all the facts are in. That's the true meaning of loyalty and trust."

Skeletor: "But those cursed Masters, they're like burrow rats. Always popping up!"

Evil-Lyn: "Oh, Skeletor, however do you come up with your ideas?"

Skeletor: "It's a gift, dear Evil-Lyn. Now, enact my plan."

Skeletor: "My faith in eternity and justice is rekindled."

Siren: "Go on. Jump in. The fire's fine."

Ram-Man: "For all my yappin', you were the ones who were really loyal."

Who would you suspect first if something went missing from the workshop: the newcomer who refused to swear the oath, or the big man who proposed it? This episode bets that the Masters, like most of us, would pick the newcomer, and then makes them pay for it.

The episode opens with a training exercise that turns into a battle, and the Masters win it. Skeletor's forces hit Castle Grayskull and are thrown back, and afterwards Man-At-Arms finally tells the team why the castle matters: the Council of Elders became a single Power hidden inside it. Ram-Man wants everyone to take a loyalty oath on the spot: "Especially, the new guy." Buzz-Off, newly allied after "Sky War," flatly declines. In Snake Mountain, Evil-Lyn proposes breaking the Masters from within by turning someone they would never suspect into a traitor, and Skeletor repeats it back to the room as his own. Her target is Ram-Man. Out fishing on a lagoon, he hears a Siren's song and wakes to be told he will obey it and remember nothing.

Swearing loyalty and extending trust are different things, and the episode is about a team learning which one it needs. Ram-Man is the loudest voice for the first, and Evil-Lyn chooses him because nobody would ever doubt him. When the new Kinetic Immobilizer disappears overnight and Buzz-Off is found knocked out on guard, Ram-Man is the first to cry traitor, and the charge sheet he reads out against Buzz-Off is the oath scene played back as evidence.

William Forrest Cluverius builds the script around that irony and keeps the screws turning. The song returns at every bad moment, so the audience knows what Ram-Man does not, and the moment Ram-Man apologises for his outburst, it starts up again. The animation helps with small, concrete things: rain on wet stone the night of the theft, muddy footprints across a dark floor, Ram-Man chained to a bench under a single shaft of light. Buzz-Off and Ram-Man going nose to nose in the workshop, with glass breaking behind them, is the moment the team visibly comes apart.

The standout is the denial. Confronted with the lagoon, Ram-Man starts to say he was helping clean up and runs out of memory halfway through the sentence; "I-I remember starting to help you, but... but then I..." trails into "I-I don't know." Scott McNeil gives the stammer room to breathe, and Ram-Man comes across as a man frightened of his own head. It is the character's best scene so far. Without it, the later apology to Buzz would not land half as well.

Evil-Lyn gets a good episode too. Her scheme works, her boss steals the credit, and once the Immobilizer is hers she muses aloud about taking Grayskull's Power to conquer all. "Even you, Skeletor." Kathleen Barr voices both Evil-Lyn and the Siren, and the episode lets the two blur into one by the finale.

The weakness is the rescue. Man-At-Arms neuro-scanned Ram-Man in the palace, found the spell and fitted everyone with an earpiece to block it, and the treason hearing was a performance for Skeletor's benefit; all of this arrives in one speech once the ambush has been turned. Hiding the plan protects the surprise, but it means the cleverest move in the story is narrated afterwards. A single shot of the scan would have let us in on it without giving the game away.

The finale is lively, with Evil-Lyn turning the song on He-Man at the edge of a lava fall and Ram-Man cutting it off at the last moment, and the coda gives him a sincere thank-you to the friends who stood by him. As an early ensemble piece it does what the series needed after "Sky War": it puts a newcomer and an old hand in the same room, lets them fail each other, and makes them earn the handshake. Not bad for a man who spent part of the episode in chains.

1. Continuity: Ram-Man's jab at "the new guy" follows "Sky War", three episodes earlier, which ends with Buzz-Off declaring the Andreenids allies of the kingdom after first refusing any alliance.
2. Voice cast: Brian Dobson voices both Skeletor and Buzz-Off, so the villain who claims the scheme as his own and the Master who is wrongly accused of treachery share an actor.
3. Voice cast: Kathleen Barr is credited as both Evil-Lyn and the Siren. The dialogue confirms the link late on, when Evil-Lyn tells Skeletor it is a pity her Siren song will not work on him.
4. Voice cast: Scott McNeil voices Ram-Man along with Beast Man and Clawful, and Garry Chalk doubles as Man-At-Arms and Whiplash, the villain Buzz-Off's attacker is first assumed to be.
5. Fan observation: The He-Man wiki calls this Ram-Man's most significant episode of the series and points to his fondness for fishing, which is how the episode first finds him.
6. Fan observation: The He-Man wiki traces Evil-Lyn's later ambitions back to this episode, where, holding the Immobilizer, she muses about stealing the Power of Grayskull to conquer all, Skeletor included.
7. Continuity: Man-At-Arms' explanation that the Council of Elders transformed themselves into the Power hidden inside Grayskull pays off in the next episode, "The Ties That Bind", where Skeletor declares that Grayskull is where the Elders' great power resides.
8. Fan observation: The He-Man wiki notes that Whiplash is mostly a background thug in this series. Here he is only a name, the first guess offered when Buzz-Off says the one who attacked him was big.