Bargain with Evil

Angast, an evil king from the Dimension of Evil, has kidnapped the good wizard Landros. In order to win his freedom, his daughter Lady Arvela makes a bargain that she will kidnap the Starchild so that Angast can look upon her. However, she soon finds out that she has been duped when Angast breaks his bargain and transports her, the Starchild and our heroes (along with the Starchild's body guard) to his dimension, hoping to force the Starchild to use her powers to open a gate to Eternia for himself and his forces to come through and take over. King Randor tells viewers afterward that even a wrong done for a good reason is still wrong, and that problems are best solved the honest way.

King Randor: "In today's adventure story, Arvela was so anxious to help her father that she didn't care how she went about it. But she found out that doing something wrong really doesn't help solve anything. You know, from time to time we all have problems, but the way we try to solve them can make the difference between getting rid of them or making them even bigger. I hope you remember today's story so that the next time something goes wrong for you, you'll work out the problem the right way. The honest way. Bye for now."

John Erwin as He-Man/Prince Adam and Landros

Alan Oppenheimer as Battle Cat/Cringer, Angast and Poole

Linda Gary as Teela, Starchild and Bowena

Lou Scheimer (credited as Erik Gunden) as Orko, King Randor, Tree Topper Pilot and Evil One

Erika Scheimer as Lady Arvela

Jay Scheimer (uncredited) as Queen Marlena

Angast, breaking his word the instant Arvela asks for her father back: "As I promised."

Arvela, after learning the truth: "I should never have trusted Angast."

Angast never breaks his word so much as he reveals what it was worth all along. Arvela brings him the Starchild, he looks at her, and that, by the letter of the bargain, is the whole of what he promised: he never promised to let anyone go. "As I promised," he says, laughing, the moment Arvela asks for her father back, and the line does more work than anything else in the episode, because it shows a villain who was never lying so much as choosing his words with more care than Arvela chose to listen to them.

That is the spine of "Bargain with Evil": the wrongness of what Arvela does was never really about Angast's betrayal, it was set the moment she decided a kidnapping could be made acceptable by who was asking and why. Larry DiTillio's script keeps that distinction in view rather than letting the episode collapse into a plain rescue. Arvela is not written as a dupe tricked by a smooth operator; she is written as someone who talked herself into a plan she already half knew was wrong, and the episode trusts the audience to notice the difference. "I should never have trusted Angast," she says afterward. Not that the plan was wrong. That he was the wrong one to trust with it.

The structure backs that reading up. He-Man and company do not spend the episode out-thinking Angast so much as cleaning up after a mistake that was Arvela's to begin with, and the show gives Landros, not He-Man, the reunion scene that actually lands: a father embracing a daughter who got him free by doing the one thing he would never have asked her to do. The Dimension of Evil set-piece around the rune-carved gateway, with Angast's ranked soldiers and his own flying mount, is competent, well-staged action, but it is the hinge of the plot rather than its point.[1] Starchild's own power, the beam she channels to work the gate, gets exactly one clean demonstration. The episode does not spend the rest of its runtime proving she is valuable; the entire conflict already assumes it.

What makes the episode's closing argument sharper than usual is who delivers it. The recap after the credits usually falls to He-Man, standing in for the show itself. Here it is King Randor, seated with Starchild on the palace throne, working through what Arvela did and why doing it for a good reason still is not the same as doing it right.[2] Coming from the girl's own king and protector rather than from the hero who rescued her, the moral reads less like a tag appended to the plot and more like a judgment the story has actually earned: Randor is not telling Starchild a lesson he picked up from watching the episode, he is talking through the thing that happened to someone he is responsible for.

The epilogue gag, Cringer stalking Orko's shadow down a palace corridor for a laugh, sits oddly close to all that. It is a fine beat on its own, the kind of low-stakes comic relief the back half of every episode needs after an act of real danger. But set against a story built on someone deciding a small wrong serves a larger good, a scene built entirely on Cringer scaring someone for fun reads a little pointed, whether the writers meant it that way or not.

[1] The Tree People's streamlined Wind Raider variant, referred to in production material as the "Tree Topper," appears in an earlier sequence but is never named on screen in this cut. [2] Man-At-Arms references the kingdom of Eastfen in passing, the same location Skeletor invokes while disguised as Ambassador Therin in "The Dragon's Gift."

Written by the heman.org desk

1. Behind the scenes: Script was approved August 10, 1984 and final script revision took place September 25, 1984. The more streamlined version of the Wind Raider that the Tree People use is called a 'Tree Topper'.
2. Continuity: The Starchild was previously seen in the episode of the same name. Man-At-Arms mentions the kingdom of Eastfen, a location previously mentioned by Skeletor when he was disguised as Ambassador Therin in The Dragon's Gift. The animation of Orko's shocked reaction was previously seen in Teela's Quest, Just a Little Lie and Fraidy Cat. The backgrounds seen in Castle Landros were previously used for Spydra's castle in The Return of Orko's Uncle and as Castle Fear's interiors in Search for the Past.
3. More continuity: The animated sequence of Orko, He-Man and Battle Cat leaping into the portal one by one would be used in the "I Have the Power" music video created to promote The Secret of the Sword.