Eternal Darkness

Adam, Cringer, King Randor, Queen Marlena, Man-At-Arms and Teela all wake from the same unsettling nightmare on the same night, with Adam and Cringer even sharing an identical dream about Slime Monsters. Randor and Man-At-Arms' dreams point to Darkdream, a villain Man-At-Arms sealed away in the Chamber of Darkness years earlier, and the family gathers the next morning to discuss whether he could really be free.

Darkdream, still trapped but growing stronger, has already summoned Evil-Lyn and the wizard Tavor and ordered them to plunge Eternia into permanent darkness. The two settle on a plan to drag Eternia's moon out of its orbit and trigger an unending eclipse. At the palace, Orko's keen hearing picks up distant explosions in the Crimson Valley, and the group suspects mining activity may have cracked the seal on Darkdream's prison. When Adam and Teela fly out to investigate on Sky-Sleds, Darkdream reaches into Teela's mind and nearly brings her down, and Adam has to transform into He-Man mid-flight to save her.

As Tavor's spell takes hold and the moon begins to drift, gravity across Eternia goes haywire, and the heroes realize the planet itself is now on a collision course with its own moon. They race to Castle Grayskull, where Darkdream, now fully escaped, arrives to claim the castle just as the Sorceress and Stratos are trying to keep watch in secret. A scramble over Evil-Lyn's wand nearly exposes the Sorceress's identity as the falcon Zoar, and Man-At-Arms destroys the heroes' own Wind Raider rather than let Darkdream steal it. With the Sorceress's secret still protected, He-Man packs a boulder with the explosive Nodroxyn and hurls it at the runaway moon, blasting it back into its proper orbit and ending Darkdream's eclipse for good.

Back at the palace, the crisis past, the family tries to enjoy the restored sunlight, only for Orko's attempt at conjuring a picnic to leave Man-At-Arms soaked by a rain cloud and sealed inside a bubble instead.

Teela: "In today's story, I had a bad dream. You know, bad dreams or nightmares happen to everyone. and they can seem pretty real. But they aren't. They're no more real than any make-believe story or fairy tale. So don't be ashamed or afraid of telling anybody about your dreams. It happens to all of us. And like so many other things, talking it over with your mother or your father, or maybe even a good friend, can make you feel a whole lot better. Bye for now, and... pleasant dreams!"

John Erwin as He-Man/Prince Adam and Tavor

Alan Oppenheimer as Man-At-Arms, Cringer and Darkdream

Linda Gary as Teela, Evil-Lyn and the Sorceress

Lou Scheimer (credited as Erik Gunden) as Orko and King Randor

Norm Prescott as Stratos

Darkdream, to Tavor, after his eclipse spell sends the moon on a collision course with Eternia: "I asked for an eclipse, not a collision."

Darkdream never has to out-fight anyone in his own episode. Everybody else in "Eternal Darkness" does the damage for him: a villain sealed away for being too dangerous to leave loose gets sprung not by his own cunning but by a mining crew setting off Nodroxyn charges in the Crimson Valley, and nearly finishes the job by accident too, when Tavor's "simple eclipse" turns into a runaway moon on a collision course with the planet. The threat in this story is carelessness, and Darkdream is mostly along for the ride.

That framing pays off almost immediately in a cold open that trusts the audience with something stranger than the show usually risks: five different people, across two sets of royal quarters, wake from the same nightmare on the same night. Adam and Cringer share one dream outright, which the episode never explains and does not need to, since the uncanny coincidence is the point. It is a confident piece of structure for a twenty-two-minute slot, cutting bed to bed rather than explaining itself up front, and it buys the episode real atmosphere before a single blast goes off in the valley.

Man-At-Arms carries the back half of the story, and it suits him. Once the Sorceress tells him, by telepathy, not to give up Zoar's secret even if it costs Eternia, he is left holding a decision no sword fight solves: destroy the Wind Raider himself rather than let Darkdream steal it, fire his wrist blaster to cover a retreat, and watch the mountain for a throw he cannot make himself. The script asks a lot of him here, and gives him none of the usual transformation to do it with.

Tavor is the episode's weak joint. He is introduced promising an eclipse and immediately admits his last spell turned a jungle into a desert, which should be a warning the story heeds and instead plays as a punchline right up until the moon starts falling. Darkdream's fury at his own wizard, "I asked for an eclipse, not a collision," lands the only real laugh in an otherwise tense back half, but it also means the episode's actual climax, He-Man lobbing a Nodroxyn-packed boulder at an out-of-orbit moon, is cleaning up a mistake nobody competent would have risked making to begin with. A story willing to let a magician be fallible is a good instinct; one that lets him nearly end the planet on a shrug is asking a lot of the audience's patience.

What holds the episode together, more than the villain or the fix, is how much weight falls on people who are not He-Man. Teela flies her Sky Sled into Darkdream's influence twice and spends the back half of the episode unconscious, carried first by Adam and then by Battle Cat; the cold open treats her as an equal dreamer to everyone else, and the story she gets after that does not match it. Orko, by contrast, gets the episode's best structural joke: the explosions that tip off the heroes are the same explosions keeping him up at night, and his closing-scene rain cloud, landing squarely on Man-At-Arms after a hard-won happy ending, is the kind of small, earned bit of chaos Filmation does better than almost anyone when it bothers to set it up this cleanly.

Teela's closing message, a direct and sincere word about nightmares not being anything to hide from a parent or a friend, sits a little oddly against an episode that just spent twenty minutes proving a nightmare was a genuine warning about a real villain. That tension never gets resolved, and the episode is better for not trying to paper over it. "Eternal Darkness" is a mid-pack entry carried by a strong opening and a reliable supporting cast, undercut by a climax that asks its wizard to be funny and competent at the same time and settles for funny.

cereal:geek's commentary on Eternal Darkness, with behind-the-scenes detail on how the episode was made.

1. Behind the scenes: Script was approved May 5, 1983 and final script revision took place June 22, 1983. The story was loosely based on an early Filmation script premise called "Eclipse on Eternia" which featured Skeltor creating an eclipse, forcing He-Man to rearrange the planets.
2. Continuity: This is the first time Teela is seen without her tiara. The second will occur in The Witch and the Warrior. The animation of Orko after Man-At-Arms compliments his hearing is reused from the scene in Disappearing Act shortly before he and Cringer enter the Time Corridor. When Prince Adam and Teela run through the Palace to their Sky-Sleds, the Photon Cannon weapons from Reign of the Monster can be seen in the background. The Royal Palace courtyard where He-Man and Teela jump onto their Sky-Sleds to go to the Crimson Valley. was first seen in A Friend in Need when Jarvan re-materializes there.
3. More continuity: The Sorceress transforms into Zoar in front of Stratos, revealing he know her secret identity as the falcon.
4. Animation errors and goofs: In this story and in Jacob and the Widgets, it is stated that Eternia has only one moon. But in The Shadow of Skeletor, Into the Abyss and the She-Ra: Princess of Power episode He Ain't Heavy there are more than one. When Orko tells Duncan about the explosions in the Crimson Valley, the tiny Trollan is too large in proportion with Man-At-Arms. During the moral segment, the scene in which Teela wakes up from her nightmare is shown again, but this time it is much more brightly lit than it was originally.
5. Standard planetary-stakes premise. The Filmation animators got memorable lighting effects out of the perpetual-night setting, making this one of the more visually striking episodes of S1.