No Job too Small

When Prince Adam, King Randor and the others travel to Phantos on a diplomatic mission, Evil-Lyn baits a trap with a buried sand creature and seizes Teela, Man-At-Arms, Orko and the king while He-Man is drawn off fighting it. Back at Snake Mountain she shrinks Orko with a new reducto ray and rigs a second trap for He-Man himself: touch the cage holding his friends or touch the ray, and either way they shrink for good. It takes Adam, not He-Man, to find the way through.

Man-At-Arms: "Being strong and powerful is wonderful. But you know what? There are some things even more wonderful, things like imagination and intelligence. In today's story, it wasn't He-Man's muscle that saved us. It was more Adam's clever mind and quick thinking. Exercising so you can be as strong as possible is a good idea, but exercising your mind, like reading books and, yes, doing your homework, that's also a very good idea. Think it over."

John Erwin as He-Man/Prince Adam

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

Linda Gary as Teela and Evil-Lyn

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

Evil-Lyn: "Everything is in balance. The cage balances the boulder. The boulder hangs over the reducto ray. The reducto ray points at the cage. It's a no-win situation. Touch the cage, and the boulder destroys the reducto ray, leaving your friends forever seven inches high. Touch the reducto ray, and it will automatically turn on, reducing your friends to the size of tiny microbes."

"No Job too Small" opens with a joke at He-Man's expense before he has even transformed. Prince Adam loses a wrestling match to a visiting strongman named Michi, and Teela needles him for it: size isn't everything, she says, there's something to be said for brains. It's a throwaway line in a palace courtyard, and the episode spends the next twenty minutes proving her right in ways neither of them could have predicted.

The plot, once it gets moving, is a double con. Evil-Lyn, left holding Snake Mountain while Skeletor is off on business of his own, decides this is her moment. She bluffs past Beast Man's nerves, ambushes the royal party on a diplomatic trip to Phantos with a buried "creature energizer," and lets a sand-dwelling, ice-breathing beast draw He-Man off while her people grab Teela, Man-At-Arms, Orko and King Randor. It's a decent trap on its own, but Don Heckman's script doesn't stop there. Once He-Man finally tracks his friends to Snake Mountain, Evil-Lyn has a second trap waiting, and this one is built specifically to make his strength useless. A reducto ray points at a cage holding his friends; a boulder hangs over the ray, wired to the cage itself. Touch the cage, and the falling boulder wrecks the ray but crushes everyone inside the cage along with it. Touch the ray instead, and it fires on its own. We get to watch He-Man actually stumped by this, not shrugging it off with some last-second trick of strength.

That's the thematic spine the cold open was setting up: the episode isn't really interested in whether He-Man can out-muscle Evil-Lyn, because this time he can't. The rescue belongs to Adam. Once he's shaken Evil-Lyn's suspicion by vanishing and sneaking in a back entrance, he works out that the only way through the trap is to stand in front of the reducto ray himself on purpose, shrinking down small enough to slip into the mechanism, rebalance the cage without tripping the boulder, and free his friends from the inside. It's a clever solution, and it's built out of the same "size isn't everything" idea Teela handed him in the first scene. The episode trusts us to follow the mechanics of the escape rather than wave it past with a cutaway. Tiny Adam creeping past a prowling Panthor, resetting the trap behind him so the escape goes unnoticed, and lowering King Randor down a rope one person at a time: it's the most inventive stretch of the episode, and the one scene here that couldn't have belonged to He-Man at all.

The back half settles for a more ordinary beat-the-villain climax once Adam changes back, with He-Man turning Evil-Lyn's own ray and boulder against Beast Man, Whiplash and Evil-Lyn herself. It's satisfying in the way these episodes usually are! But it's also where the episode's cleverness runs out. The villain who spent the episode building an elaborate trap gets undone by the most direct method on the shelf, and a puzzle-box rescue followed by a plain brawl makes for a slightly lopsided back half. Evil-Lyn herself carries more of the episode than Skeletor's absence might suggest she could. Her plan isn't a copy of one of his; it's smarter in its particulars, especially the second trap, and the script lets her enjoy it without turning her into a joke.

Man-At-Arms gets the closing word, and for once it isn't a generic civics lesson bolted onto the end. He's talking about this episode specifically: it wasn't He-Man's muscle that saved anyone, it was Adam's thinking. Given how deliberately the rest of the episode built to that very point, starting with a wrestling match Adam was never going to win on strength alone, it's one of the better-earned morals in the back half of the season.

cereal:geek's commentary on No Job too Small, with behind-the-scenes detail on how the episode was made.

1. The episode's own title card reads "No Job too Small," written by Don Heckman and directed by Marsh Lamore, matching S02E40; no filename correction was needed here. The planet Phantos, the destination of the royal diplomatic trip, also turns up as the setting of "The Secret Liquid of Life" elsewhere in the series. Evil-Lyn's plan runs without Skeletor's knowledge or approval from start to finish; Beast Man spends its opening minutes warning her against acting alone, and the closing scene shows Snake Mountain's lower ranks already planning a victory party before Skeletor gets home to find out what happened. Man-At-Arms is addressed by his first name, Duncan, once in the dialogue, by Prince Adam. The wrestler Adam loses to in the cold open, Michi, appears only in this episode and gets no last name or origin beyond "visiting." Orko is the first target of Evil-Lyn's reducto ray, shrunk down well before He-Man even arrives at Snake Mountain to be captured himself.