The Ties That Bind

Badly wounded in battle, Teela receives a blood transfusion from the Sorceress and wakes able to hear other people's thoughts. Adam and Man-At-Arms fear she will learn He-Man's secret, and Teela starts asking who the Sorceress is. Man-At-Arms urges the Sorceress to tell Teela she is her mother, and the Sorceress refuses. Evil-Lyn plants a false telepathic warning that draws the Masters into the Sands of Time while Skeletor attacks Grayskull, and the Sorceress taps the Elders' power to defend it. As her new powers fade, Teela goes to Grayskull for answers and is given only riddles.

"A parent's love for a child is the strongest love imaginable. The sacrifices a parent will make for a child are many, and sometimes difficult indeed. Few have ever had to make the kind of sacrifice that the Sorceress made for Teela."

Skeletor: "Evil-Lyn, do I bore you?"

Man-At-Arms: "You hold out your hand then pull it back."

Man-At-Arms: "I'm not speaking of her destiny. I'm speaking of her history."

Sorceress: "Oh, but I do have a heart. And that heart is breaking."

Evil-Lyn: "It may be a field, but there's very little force behind it."

Sorceress: "I love her more than you can imagine."

What would you do with the power to hear every thought in the room, if the person who could answer your biggest question had learned to keep his mind shut? Teela wakes up with that problem in "The Ties That Bind," and it is the best question the series has asked of her so far.

She is badly wounded in a fight with Skeletor's forces, Man-E-Faces scans her and announces she needs blood, and the volunteers are told it is not that simple. The Sorceress calls for her to be brought to Grayskull, and Teela comes round in a sickbed with somebody else's blood in her veins and a head full of other people's voices. She hears Ram-Man wondering whether he could knock a wall down with his head. She tells a nurse about the bouquet her husband gave her when they first met. Adam and Man-At-Arms work out at once what it means, because Teela listening in is the fastest way for He-Man's secret to get out.

Dean Stefan's script then turns the gimmick toward the real subject. Teela is handed the means to know what everyone around her is thinking, and the people who could tell her about her mother will not. Man-At-Arms has trained himself to guard his thoughts in the way of the Elders, and when Teela asks her father who the Sorceress is, he gets as far as "She is your..." before the Sorceress cuts in from Grayskull with "Not now. Not yet."

That refusal drives the best scene in the episode. Man-At-Arms goes to the crystal chamber and tells the Sorceress, still weak from giving blood, that she is tormenting the girl: "You hold out your hand then pull it back." A short flashback shows him holding a baby while the Sorceress explains she cannot raise her daughter, and him promising to raise the child as his own. The argument that follows is all choices and no villains. He is speaking of her history, he says, not her destiny; she answers that Teela must not know, not yet, and when he suggests her heart has grown as hard and brittle as her crystals, she tells him it is breaking. Garry Chalk and Nicole Oliver get the episode's best material here, and the animators give the Sorceress tears and let her turn away from him more than once.

The telepathy gets some fun too. Adam spends a scene trying to fill his head with nonsense so Teela cannot read him, and in the Sands of Time she proves her gift to the doubting Masters by reciting Man-E-Faces's memories of three standing ovations for "Desert Knights" and Mekaneck's worry about sand in his neck. Evil-Lyn, meanwhile, has noticed a novice telepath who cannot shield herself, and she feeds Teela a false warning that sends the Masters into the desert.

That desert is the weakness. Sand worms rise, the Masters scatter, He-Man and Battle Cat clear the way, and Skeletor makes a run at Grayskull's force field; it is competent and it could be any episode. A show built to sell action figures has to fight somewhere, and the attack does force the Sorceress to break her own oath and draw on the Elders' power, but the battle half never comes close to the scene in the crystal chamber.

What it gets right is the ending. Teela walks into Grayskull alone, says she knows it was the Sorceress's blood, and asks why the powers are fading. The Sorceress tells her she was never meant to have them, that she alone could give that blood, and that she gave Teela life, again. Teela asks to be told what it all means and gets back nothing but her own echo. In the last scene the Sorceress tells Man-At-Arms she loves the girl more than he can imagine. Teela never hears it. Holding that back is the right call, because the series is saving the rest for later.

1. Homage: Teela's search for her mother echoes the 1983 Filmation episode "Teela's Quest", in which the Sorceress admits Teela is her daughter and then erases the memory, leaving her only the knowledge that her mother loved her.
2. Continuity: The story picks up in season 2's "Out of the Past", where the Sorceress recalls healing a wounded soldier she calls her husband and leaving with a baby, Teela, whom Man-At-Arms raised.
3. Fan observation: The He-Man wiki notes that the second-season DVD description hints Man-At-Arms may be Teela's biological father as well, while other unconfirmed sources suggest the writers meant the soldier to be Fisto. This is fan reading; the episode only shows Man-At-Arms promising to raise the child as his own.
4. Voice cast: Kathleen Barr is credited as both Evil-Lyn and the palace nurse, so the villain who plants the false message in Teela's head and the nurse who tells her she has been dreaming share a voice.
5. Voice cast: Scott McNeil covers Stratos, Beast Man and Ram-Man, and Paul Dobson covers Man-E-Faces, Trap Jaw and Tri-Klops.
6. Continuity: This series keeps Filmation's take on Man-E-Faces as a stage actor, which is why Teela finds his sickbed scene in the "Countess of Eternia" and his ovations for "Desert Knights" when she reads his mind.
7. Continuity: Skeletor's discovery that "Grayskull is where the Elders' great power resides" follows Man-At-Arms telling the Masters, in the previous episode "Siren's Song", that the Council of Elders became the Power hidden inside the castle.