Eye of the Beholder

When the Wind Raider's engine fails mid-flight, Adam has to transform into He-Man just to get himself and Man-At-Arms down safely, latching the grappling hook to a mountainside. Back at the palace, He-Man notices something stranger: he's losing strength for no obvious reason, and Man-At-Arms theorizes that Eternia's oxygen supply itself is somehow running out.

He-Man travels on foot to Castle Grayskull and finds the jaw-bridge standing open and the Sorceress weakened. She explains that the water feeding the Evergreen Forest and the Vine Jungle from the Sea of Eternity has been cut off, starving the plant life of what it needs to keep the air breathable. Heading for the Mystic Mountains with a breathing apparatus, He-Man is ambushed by a band of winged Insect People defending their home. Their leader, Garth, is less interested in fighting than in saving his tribe's unhatched eggs, which have stopped glowing the way they should, and when He-Man helps dig them out from under a rockslide, Garth becomes an ally rather than an enemy.

Together they fight past Beast Man and Tri-Klops guarding a cavern entrance and find Skeletor operating a huge machine, damming the river and pumping the Sea of Eternity into an underground pit. The confrontation costs He-Man dearly: his oxygen supply drops so fast in the fight that he's forced out of it entirely, and it's Garth who throws himself into the machine's pump to buy time, letting He-Man reverse the flow and destroy the dam before Skeletor can escape with his scheme intact.

Garth emerges from the restored waters changed, his insect features softened into something closer to human, a reward that arrives only after he's already proven, at real cost to himself, exactly the kind of person he is.

Teela: "Today, we met Garth, who to some people looked like a monster. But Garth wasn't a monster. He was a good person with a noble soul and in the end, his beauty showed through. Real beauty comes from inside, which is why ugly people can sometimes be the most beautiful people to know and why people who look beautiful sometimes act very ugly. Being beautiful on the outside is alright, but being beautiful on the inside, that's the best."

John Erwin as He-Man/Prince Adam and Beast Man

Alan Oppenheimer as Skeletor, Man-At-Arms and Shaman

Linda Gary as the Sorceress

Lou Scheimer (credited as Erik Gunden) as Orko, Tri-Klops and Insect guard

George DiCenzo (uncredited) as Garth

"No sacrifice is for nothing, if it helps other people, Skeletor. And your selfishness will be your own undoing!"

― He-Man

"Eye of the Beholder" states its theme in the title, then says it again out loud in the closing minute. Jeffery O'Hare's story, scripted by David Wise and directed by Marsh Lamore, gives He-Man an unusually physical problem: Eternia's oxygen supply is failing, and his own strength is failing with it. That turns the episode into a race against a condition instead of a fight with a villain who can simply be outmuscled. Skeletor is there, running the machine that caused the drought, but for most of the runtime he is the mechanism, not the obstacle.

The obstacle is Garth, and he is where the episode earns its keep. He-Man meets him at spearpoint, one of a tribe of winged Insect People guarding a brood of eggs that have stopped glowing as they should. The show spends real time on the misunderstanding before it resolves it. The Insect People read He-Man as a threat because every outsider who has come near their caves has been one, and Garth only sides with him after watching him save those eggs from a rockslide with nothing to gain from it. We get an alliance between two people who each needed the other to turn out to be more than what they looked like, not just a sidekick recruited for the back half.

The episode's weak spot is that it cannot quite trust that idea to stand on its own. Teela closes it out by stating the moral directly to the audience, that Garth "wasn't a monster," that "real beauty comes from inside," language the episode has already dramatized better than it is explaining. He-Man's own line to Skeletor in the climax, that "no sacrifice is for nothing, if it helps other people," does the same work with more economy, because it is a character talking to an enemy rather than a narrator addressing a classroom. That gap, between showing it and saying it, is the difference between the episode at its best and the episode covering itself.

Garth's sacrifice is the best scene in it! He has already fought alongside He-Man against Beast Man and Tri-Klops, who guard the cavern entrance and go down with the kind of ease that makes you wonder why Skeletor bothered posting them there at all. Then Garth throws himself bodily into blocking the pump that is draining the Sea of Eternity, buying He-Man the opening to reverse it. He comes out of the water transformed, his insect features softened into something closer to human. The "ugly" character becomes conventionally handsome only after he has already proven, at cost to himself, exactly what kind of person he is: a reward he does not need by that point, but proof the show is willing to put its money where its theme is rather than just saying the line.

Beast Man and Tri-Klops are the episode's missed opportunity, present mostly to be dispatched quickly on the way to the real antagonist. Skeletor himself spends more of the episode operating a machine than scheming, which flattens him into an obstacle course rather than a character. But the central relationship carries the rest. "Eye of the Beholder" is a message episode that occasionally forgets to trust its own message, and then, in its best scene, remembers.

1. Behind the scenes: Script was approved May 25, 1983 and final script revision took place July 18, 1983.
2. Continuity: The animated sequence of He-Man leaping out of the way of a freeze ray was first seen in Teela's Trial. Backgrounds showing the blue mountains of Trolla are reused for a location on Eternia when the Wind Raider goes down.
3. Animation errors and goofs: During the opening scene, set on Eternia, the background plate is one that previously depicted the blue mountainous region of Trolla. The Wind Raider is much larger in size compared to the human characters than usual. In the shot of Castle Grayskull's open jaw bridge, there are two large chains attached to the side of the castle for the first and only time.