Monster on the Mountain

When villagers in the mountain settlement of Ruxtown report a monster called the Tingler prowling near their well, King Randor sends He-Man and Orko to investigate Mount Fear. The search turns up an avalanche and no monster, so rumor fills the gap with an eight-foot horror nobody has actually seen. The real Tingler turns out to be a lonely giant named Herman, hiding from a village that already decided what he is, and he spends the rest of the episode proving them wrong one rescue at a time.

[Teela] "It's human nature to exaggerate." [Squire Wilkins] "And then, He-Man put across a bridge to span the canyon. Why, it must've been two hundred feet, easy." [Jed Hansen] "Two hundred? Why that bridge was four hundred feet if it was an inch." [Teela] "I guess as long as there are people, some of them will exaggerate and others will believe them and spread rumors. It makes it hard to tell what is true and what is false." [Orko] "The important thing is to use our common sense and not to believe everything we hear." [Teela] "That's right. So until next time..." [Orko] "Bye."

The broadcast credits John Erwin, Alan Oppenheimer, Linda Gary, Erik Gunden and Erika Scheimer under "Starring the Voices of," with no per-character breakdown given on screen.

Herman: "People have always made fun of me because I'm so big. But here's the nice part: the birdies and the trees, they're my friends. They don't call me names. They don't care if someone is big or if someone is small."

Ruxtown has never had a good look at its monster. Every description in "Monster on the Mountain" comes from somewhere else: a glimpse at the well, a half-remembered shadow, a villager two removes from whoever supposedly saw the thing first. By the time the town square has finished arguing about it, the Tingler stands eight feet tall, has horrid eyes, and wears a dark hide, three details nobody in the crowd actually witnessed firsthand. Rowby Goren's script spends its first half building that rumor brick by brick, then spends its second half taking it apart.

He-Man and Orko draw the first search, not Teela and Adam, and the mission goes nowhere. An afternoon on Mount Fear turns up an avalanche he has to redirect himself and no monster to show for it. We get Ruxtown's verdict anyway: the Tingler is real, and bolder than ever. A mistaken-identity detour through Miller Perkins, a windmill keeper annoyed at being mobbed for fixing his own machinery, plays the same joke from the other direction: the town is primed to see a monster in anyone it does not recognize.

The episode's actual subject shows up once Orko and Cringer, hiding from their own search party, stumble into an ice cave and find the real Tingler nursing a hurt leg. He is enormous and immediately apologetic, more startled by them than they are by him, and the giant explains himself without much prompting. People have always made fun of him for his size, he says, but the birds and the trees are his friends, because they do not call him names and do not care whether someone is big or small. It is a plainer, sadder speech than this show usually risks. He delivers it to an audience of one small sorcerer and one nervous tiger, and it does more work than the chase that surrounds it.

The rescue that follows earns its welcome twice over. A mountain-bridge shortcut gives way under a search party and He-Man has to catch the fall, and in the same stretch of ice the giant finds a terrified villager, Emma, stranded on a ledge she will not let him near. He talks her down anyway, over her flinching and her "go away." Ruxtown responds to that scene, not a monster's defeat but a monster's patience with someone who is still afraid of him. The village throws him a party before it ever learns his name is Herman.

Where the episode loses a little of its nerve is the handoff between that rescue and the closing moral, which belongs to a separate bonus segment entirely. Teela and Orko wrap up with Squire Wilkins and Jed Hansen over how a routine He-Man feat gets exaggerated from a two-hundred-foot bridge into a four-hundred-foot one. It is a fair point about gossip! But it arrives as a joke about a bridge rather than as the lesson the previous twenty minutes already made about a hermit nobody gave the benefit of the doubt. The two morals agree without quite meeting.

It helps that nobody here is a villain. Skeletor never turns up, a rarity this deep into Season 2, and the episode is free to treat Ruxtown's fear as the only obstacle worth dramatizing. He-Man's own contribution, the avalanche and the broken bridge, is competently staged and almost beside the point. The giant has already made the episode's case before anyone needs rescuing. For a show that usually needs a sorcerer or a war machine to make an argument, that is a reasonably sized swing, even if the closing bit cannot resist one more joke at gossip's expense.

1. This episode carries no villain at all: Skeletor and Snake Mountain never appear, a rarity this deep into Season 2, and all of the story's tension comes from Ruxtown's own fear of a hermit it has never actually seen.
2. The village briefly suspects its own windmill keeper, Miller Perkins, of being the Tingler after mobbing him mid-repair; he is cleared on the spot once he is recognized.
3. The giant gives his real name, Herman, only in the episode's closing scene, once the village that spent twenty minutes hunting him has already invited him to stay.
4. The closing moral runs as a separate short segment after the main story rather than inside it: Teela, Orko, Squire Wilkins and Jed Hansen discuss how an ordinary He-Man rescue grew from a two-hundred-foot bridge to four hundred feet by the second telling, echoing the episode's own plot about rumor outrunning fact.
5. Dialogue in the review, morals and memorableQuotes above was transcribed directly against the episode's own burned-in subtitle track.