Like Father, Like Daughter

Skeletor builds a robot army out of Serpentoids at the fortress of Stardica, while back at the palace, Man-At-Arms benches Teela from the mission to keep working on the still-unreliable Laser Lasso. She isn't happy about being sidelined, and the episode doesn't entirely convince us she's wrong to feel that way.

Teela: "In today's story, I asked my father for permisson to do something I wanted to do. When he didn't give it to me, I did it anyway. I was lucky. Nothing happened to me, but it could have. Now maybe mothers and fathers aren't always right , but if they don't always let us do something we want to do, there's generally a pretty good reason. All in all, I think it's pretty nice to have someone who's always trying to do what's best for us. And who loves us enought to say 'no' when it would be much easier to say 'yes'."

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

Alan Oppenheimer as Skeletor, Man-At-Arms and Battle Cat/Cringer

Linda Gary as Teela and the Sorceress

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

Janis Diamond's title plays a double game. On the surface, Like Father, Like Daughter is about Skeletor building a robot army at Stardica, weapons that inherit their creator's temperament the way children are supposed to inherit their parents'. Underneath, it is another entry in this season's ongoing thread about Teela and Man-At-Arms, who benches her from the actual mission to keep improving the Laser Lasso while the men in her life go fight Skeletor without her, and the episode's insistence that she obey without complaint sits uneasily next to how capable every other Teela-focused script this season has shown her to be.

The Laser Lasso itself is a nice piece of Chekhov's-invention writing; introduced as a demonstration that immediately fails on Orko, it becomes relevant because it does not work yet, which gives the opening scene a purpose beyond padding. Trap Jaw and Beast Man assembling a robot force at an abandoned fortress is fairly rote Skeletor scheming on its own, competent but unremarkable, the kind of plot the show could generate in its sleep by this point in the season.

Teela's closing message, that parents disallowing fun things usually have a child's best interests at heart, is the flattest moral of the block so far, and it lands as a strange note to end on for a character whose other appearances this season keep proving she is right to push back against being sidelined. That gap between what the episode tells its young audience and what its own heroine's track record actually demonstrates is worth sitting with rather than waving off. Like Father, Like Daughter is competently built and briskly paced, but it is the first script this season to ask Teela to simply accept a limitation the show has spent several other episodes arguing she has already outgrown.

1. Script approval came December 20, 1982, with a final revision dated July 14, 1983, loosely built on an earlier Filmation premise of the same title.
2. He-Man's line calling the Serpentoids 'the Masters' unstoppable army' is one of the rare moments the show acknowledges Skeletor and the Evil Warriors as the original titular Masters of the Universe.
3. Some UK VHS releases dropped the title card entirely and packaged the tape as The Army of Robots instead.
4. The 1984 Topps Masters of the Universe trading card set used stills from this episode.
5. Stardica itself gets renamed and reused repeatedly: as Polonia in Castle of Heroes, the Weather Station in The Ice Age Cometh, and Station Zeta in Happy Birthday Roboto.
6. Another Paul Dini-scripted Teela-spotlight episode that continues the Sorceress / Teela parentage thread laid down in Teela's Quest. The episode delicately addresses Man-At-Arms's ambivalence about Teela's true heritage without breaking the Filmation status quo.