Attack from Below

Teela and Orko visit the farmer Agar's fields to thank him on Eternia's behalf for a bumper corn crop, only for chasms to tear open beneath the crop on their way home, swallowing the harvest and pulling Teela down into a vast underground cavern. There, the subterranean Belots, who have been stealing the corn, take her prisoner.

When Orko returns with He-Man, Man-At-Arms, and Battle Cat to find the fields stripped bare and Teela gone, Battle Cat digs down into the Belots' tunnels so He-Man can search for her. In the throne room of the Belot king Subternius, He-Man finds Teela held captive, but she convinces him to let her stay and try to reason with their captor instead of fighting.

Teela learns that Subternius blames all surface-dwellers for being enslaved by Skeletor years earlier, after he tricked the starving Belots into working his fields; ever since, the king has refused to trust any above-grounder and now plans a full-scale attack to wipe out Eternia's crops in revenge. While He-Man, Man-At-Arms, Ram Man, and Orko help Agar's farmers evacuate and fend off a wave of Belot corn-stealing machines, He-Man and Battle Cat track down the underground battery powering them, trailed secretly by Agar's son Garda.

Confronting Subternius at the battery, He-Man shuts down the Belot strike force, but Subternius takes Garda hostage and orders the fields flooded anyway, reasoning it will keep the Eternians from ever trying to enslave his people again. Garda angrily insists his farmer father would never do what Subternius accuses humans of doing, and the outburst finally breaks through the king's prejudice. With the threat defused, He-Man and Battle Cat race to block the floodwaters with boulders before they can reach the fields, and the Belots agree to help the farmers recover what was lost.

Teela: "In our story today we can all learn a valuable lesson. Subternius and his underground people hated all those who lived above ground because of the actions of a few. Orko: "Well, that's like throwing away a barrel of good apples just because one happens to be bad." Teela: "Right. Every day we meet all kinds of people." Orko: "Most will be nice. Some may be bad." Teela: "But its'unfair to judge an entire group by the actions of just a few." Orko: "Right! Until later, so long."

John Erwin as He-Man/Prince Adam, Ram Man and Subternius

Alan Oppenheimer as Man-At-Arms, Battle Cat and Agar

Linda Gary as Teela and Garda

Lou Scheimer (credited as Erik Gunden) as Orko and various unnamed Belots

Garda: "No, you're not! My father says a farmer would never hurt the fields." Subternius: "I judged you by what those other people did to us so long ago. And now it's... it's too late." Teela: "It's not too late. Just stop the flooding."

"Attack from Below" opens on the most domestic image this show offers: a farmer showing off his corn. Teela and Orko have come out to Agar's fields to pass along Eternia's thanks for a good harvest, and for a few minutes the episode seems content to just watch a boy introduce himself to royalty and a court jester eat more than he picks. Michael Kirschenbaum's script earns that patience later, but first it needs the ground to open up, and it does: chasms crack across the cornfield, the crop vanishes underground, and Teela drops into the middle of a war Eternia didn't know it was fighting.

The Belots are stealing corn, but the episode is not really interested in the theft. It is interested in Subternius, and specifically in where his hatred for the surface world actually comes from. He is not angry at Eternia. He is angry at Skeletor, who once lured the Belots up with a promise of help and put them to work in his fields instead, and the grudge never found its correct target. Every above-grounder since has absorbed a debt Skeletor ran up and never paid. The episode keeps circling that idea, and says it plainly once Teela gets Subternius talking in his throne room: the people being flooded out of their homes had nothing to do with the deception that started this, and the man ordering the flood knows it, yet keeps going anyway because the alternative is admitting the hatred was always misdirected.

Teela carries most of that argument, and the writing gives her real room to make it rather than just reciting a lesson. She does not win Subternius over with a speech; she stays his prisoner for most of the runtime and argues her case between genuine threats, which makes her eventual breakthrough feel earned rather than scripted. The better surprise, though, is Garda. He is set up early as a kid who wants to help and gets told to stay put, the standard shape for a character who exists to learn a lesson about obedience. Instead the episode hands him the argument that actually turns Subternius: his father is a farmer too, and nothing Subternius has described him doing resembles what Subternius is accusing him of. It is the one line in the episode that isn't filtered through an adult's diplomacy, and it lands harder for it.

He-Man's underground stretch, by contrast, is mostly incidental. The tunnels give Battle Cat something to do and give the episode its one real set piece, a Sky-Sled and Dragon Walker assault on the cornfields that the storyboard crew clearly enjoyed staging, but none of it complicates the Subternius plot. He-Man finds the Belots' central battery, shuts it down, and the episode's actual climax, Garda's hostage standoff and Subternius's change of heart, happens almost entirely without him in the frame. It is a defensible choice for a show obligated to deliver a fight scene every week, but it does mean the back half splits its attention between a legitimately interesting argument about inherited grudges and a corn-themed tank battle that exists mostly to justify the toy line's vehicles.

The episode's weak spot is Subternius's turn itself, which happens fast enough to feel like the clock running out rather than a mind actually changing. One good line from a child undoes a prejudice that supposedly survived a revolt and years of underground isolation, and the episode doesn't pretend otherwise. But the groundwork for getting there, a villain whose anger is explained rather than assumed, a hostage plot that resolves through argument instead of force, and a side character who's allowed to be right about something, is sturdier than the wrap-up suggests. "Attack from Below" is one of the better-reasoned entries in a season that mostly skips the reasoning, even when it runs out of time to finish the thought.

1. Behind the scenes: Script was approved May 14, 1984 and final script revision was done June 18, 1984. In the original script, it was not Skeletor whom the Belots asked for help during their flashback, but an unnamed king and queen. A character model for Agar's wife was designed by Alice Hamm but never used.
2. Continuity: Teela's scream will be heard again in Into the Abyss. He-Man's crescent kick was first seen in Quest for He-Man. Skeletor appears only in Subternius's flashback recounting how the Belots were once enslaved in his fields; he has no lines and does not appear in the present-day story.