Ordeal in the Darklands

With Skeletor away from Snake Mountain, Evil-Lyn decides to move against He-Man on her own. Tri-Klops warns her that she will need real leverage, so she sets out to turn Kor, the powerful sorcerer who serves as Keeper of the Flame in the Darklands, against He-Man by making it look like He-Man and Man-At-Arms kidnapped Kor's daughter Mira. Back at the Royal Palace, Teela trains against one of Orko's robots and then announces she wants to practice further out in the Darklands on her own, over her father's objections.

Tri-Klops actually captures Mira while Evil-Lyn fakes crystal-ball images of He-Man and Man-At-Arms doing the deed. Teela heads into the Darklands anyway, trailed by a worried Orko, and the Reptile Men who guard the territory capture her once they spot him following her. Orko flies off to get help rather than risk a confrontation he cannot win. Kor, shown the faked images and told Teela's companions were seen nearby, assumes the worst and holds Teela hostage to force He-Man's hand.

He-Man, Man-At-Arms and Orko ride out in the Attak Trak, deliberately letting Kor's Reptile Men capture them so they can reach him directly. Kor refuses to hear them out and, after He-Man breaks a magic orb Kor uses to control his shadow, banishes He-Man into the sealed prison of the Crimson Scourge, a fire beast Kor has guarded for generations. While He-Man fights his way out from inside, Teela and Orko slip free during the chaos, make it to Snake Mountain, and rescue Mira from Tri-Klops themselves, swinging clear of a collapsing bridge as he fires on them.

Kor is about to banish Man-At-Arms into the same prison when Teela and Orko arrive with Mira and He-Man escapes the Scourge's pursuit, dousing the beast with water from an underground river. Ashamed of how quickly he judged the wrong people, Kor thanks Teela for saving his daughter, and father and daughter both resolve to listen more carefully before acting on anger next time.

Teela: "I had a really close call today. And it all started when I was so anxious to do something that I didn't stop to think of the danger and wouldn't listen to anyone who tried to warn me." Man-At-Arms: "Well, we parents may not always be right, but we try, because we love our children and we try to do what's best for them. And I'll tell you a secret: we really hate to say 'no' to something they really want. So when we do, we usually have a pretty good reason. Try to remember that the next time your mother or father says 'no' to you.".

John Erwin as He-Man/Prince Adam and Strought the Reptile Man

Alan Oppenheimer as Man-At-Arms and Kor

Linda Gary as Teela, Evil-Lyn and Mira

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

Kor: "You fight well, He-Man. But how will you fare against your own shadow?"

Kor spends most of "Ordeal in the Darklands" being wrong about who his enemy is, and the episode is smart enough to make that mistake the whole plot rather than a complication inside it.

Evil-Lyn's scheme is simple by Snake Mountain standards: kidnap Kor's daughter Mira, fake a crystal vision of He-Man and Man-At-Arms doing the kidnapping, and let a powerful sorcerer do Skeletor's work for him while Skeletor is conveniently away for a few days. Tri-Klops handles the legwork and Evil-Lyn keeps the credit. Kor, the peaceful Keeper of the Flame who guards the imprisoned Crimson Scourge, gets played. It's a tidy premise, and the episode trusts it enough to let the villain plot run almost entirely off screen in the first act, while the real story happens back at the palace.

That story belongs to Teela, and it's where the episode finds its actual subject, a third of the way in, once she's walked off from Man-At-Arms still set on testing herself alone in the Darklands. He tells her it's too dangerous. She hears a captain of the guard being told she can't handle herself, and she goes anyway. Orko tags along too, worried rather than invited. The episode doesn't punish her for this so much as hand her a mirror later on. Kor, told that two innocent people kidnapped his daughter, does what Teela just did to her own father: he refuses to listen, decides he already knows the answer, and acts on it. "No more of this," he snaps at He-Man and Man-At-Arms, ready to feed Man-At-Arms to the Crimson Scourge rather than hear him out. He isn't evil, just certain, the same way Teela was certain two acts earlier, and the episode trusts us to feel the rhyme instead of explaining it.

The Crimson Scourge is the episode's best idea and its least developed one. A beast that once burned across Eternia, sealed away and guarded for generations by a hereditary Keeper of the Flame, is exactly the kind of worldbuilding detail Filmation usually introduces once and never returns to. This episode mostly obliges: the Scourge exists so He-Man has something to fight that isn't a Reptile Man, and so the climax has a fire for a river to put out. But the animation gets more out of the idea than the script does. The Scourge's design, somewhere between dragon and bull, and its fire-breath cycle are more ambitious than the episode's budget seems to allow anywhere else. The flooded-prison climax even stages a real physical problem, find water, then aim it, instead of cutting straight to the solution.

Where the episode runs thin is Mira, who spends most of her screen time as cargo: captured by Tri-Klops, locked up, then rescued. The one moment that's hers alone is a quiet one, overhearing the truth and realizing out loud what Evil-Lyn has done, "it was Evil-Lyn who kidnapped me, not He-Man and Man-At-Arms," before Teela, Orko and the princess break out of Snake Mountain together and swing across a collapsing bridge while Tri-Klops fires on them from behind. It's a fun sequence to watch, but it's Teela's sequence, not hers. The episode keeps its sympathy on Teela and her father throughout, so when the closing scene has Kor thanking Teela rather than embracing some lesson of his own daughter's, it plays like the show admitting where its real story was all along.

It closes, as these episodes do, on a moral that for once isn't a stretch. Teela and Man-At-Arms both admit that anger got in the way of listening to each other, and Kor says almost exactly the same thing about his own judgment a few lines later, in the same scene. That's a rare Filmation coda the episode actually earned instead of bolting on.

1. Behind the scenes: Script was approved February 22, 1983 and final revision took place March 22, 1983. Skeletor does not appear, but the Collector is seen leaving Snake Mountain in the opening scene, after which Evil-Lyn mentions that Skeletor has gone away for a few days. Though never mentioned, the Darklands are underground, as made evident by a rocky skyline in the background of all scenes that take place there.
2. An entire subplot was deleted involving an invention of Man-At-Arms called the 'Shrinker'. The first scene would feature Prince Adam and Duncan testing this machine. Later, while the heroic warriors were in the Darklands, Evil-Lyn would sneak into the Royal Palace to steal the Schrinker. During the finale, Kor confronted Evil-Lyn as she attempted to use the Shrinker on He-Man. In the original script, the Crimson Scourge broke out of the Darkland and headed towards the Royal Palace. The Heroic Warriors would end up using the firefighting machine from the episode The Curse of the Spellstone in an attempt to stop it.
3. Continuity: The character model for Mira was used earlier as Celice in Song of Celice and would be used again as Princess Nami in City Beneath the Sea. A recolored version of the character design for Kor was used as Zanthor in Golden Disks of Knowledge. The close-up shot of He-Man deflecting laser fire was used again in the She-Ra: Princess of Power episode Sweet Bee's Home. The Star Wars inspired chess game also appears again in Colossor Awakes & The Gamesman.
4. More continuity: Part of the movement of He-Man attempting to strike his shadow will be seen again in Keeper of the Ancient Ruins when he is fighting Trap Jaw. He-Man's sword fight with his own shadow would be reanimated in the She-Ra: Princess of Power episode Treasure of the First Ones with the characters of Sea Hawk and Octavia using the same moves. Footage of Teela fighting the trained robot is reused in Pawns of the Game Master, except that in unlike the original version she is no longer blindfolded.
5. Animation errors and goofs: When Tri-Klops is flying away in the Basher after kidnapping Mira, the background is missing it's bottom plate. The rocky skyline is present, and the background just stops near the ground. Later, when Teela and Mira are seen flying a sky-sled, the same background is used and this time there is foliage placed on the bottom. A hand appears from Orko's hat three times during this story, but it is robot hand attached to a mechanical arm rather than the blue Trollan hand that usually appears.