Orko's Return

Beast Man and Trap Jaw have left Skeletor's service to build a fortress of their own, funded by the Amber Crystal of Millarca, an amulet they steal from Evil-Lyn. The amulet lets them bind Orko's magic entirely to their own commands: he can cast only what they order, nothing of his own choosing, and they put him to work as a captive handyman while they settle into their new territory.

At the Royal Palace, Man-At-Arms and the royal family piece together what has happened to Orko through a vision of Trap Jaw and a warning from Evil-Lyn, who recognizes her stolen amulet the moment she sees it. With Orko's own magic turned against him, He-Man and Man-At-Arms seek out the Polti, a settlement of insectoid creatures with a history against the amulet, who agree to lend a nullifier capable of shutting down its power for a short window.

Beast Man and Trap Jaw bicker their way through fortress life, Trap Jaw blaming Beast Man for the theft and Beast Man blaming Trap Jaw right back, while Orko looks for ways to bend their commands without breaking them, soaking Trap Jaw in one backfired spell along the way. Man-At-Arms fires the Polti nullifier at the fortress, and He-Man forces his way inside during the short window it buys, reclaiming the amulet and freeing Orko before Beast Man and Trap Jaw can stop him.

With his own magic back, Orko gets the last word: a mock standoff with He-Man and Man-At-Arms over who is really "holding" whom, before he vanishes for home, glad to be done playing tricks for somebody else's benefit.

Orko, speaking directly to the audience: "Hi, kids. I wanted to talk to you for a moment about today's show. You saw me playing tricks on my enemies, all sorts of tricks, and it was pretty funny. But sometimes people try to play tricks on each other for fun. Well, it isn't. Lots of times, a trick can scare our friends or even hurt them. So play it safe and leave the tricks to the pros, like me!"

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

Alan Oppenheimer as Man-At-Arms

Linda Gary as Teela, the Sorceress and Polti Queen

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

Erika Scheimer as Polti warrior and Polti mother

Beast Man, once the pair are cornered: "Well, this is another fine mess you've gotten me into." Trap Jaw: "Me? Why, it seems like it was more you that got us into this particular mess. It was your idea to steal the amulet from Evil-Lyn."

He-Man and Man-At-Arms, after Orko is freed and plays one last trick on them: "Okay, He-Man, how long can you hold him?" "What? Hold who?" "Orko." "How-How-How long?" "Just give me ten minutes."

Beast Man and Trap Jaw, staking their claim at the start: "Ah, it'll be bigger than Snake Mountain." "Good. It's about time we went into business for ourselves."

"Orko's Return" starts by moving its villains out from under Skeletor's roof. Beast Man and Trap Jaw have gone independent, staking a fortress of their own that Beast Man boasts will be "bigger than Snake Mountain." It is built on the Amber Crystal of Millarca, an amulet they have lifted from Evil-Lyn rather than borrowed power from their old master. It is a small change in arrangement that does real work: this is a story about what two formerly mid-level villains do with power once nobody above them is giving the orders.

What they do with it is bind Orko. The amulet does not just hold him prisoner, it rewrites how his magic works: he can only cast exactly what Beast Man and Trap Jaw command, nothing more and nothing of his own choosing. That is the episode's real subject, and it states itself plainly about a third of the way in. Beast Man orders Orko to put something "safe from the brushes," and Orko answers with a spell that is technically exactly what was asked for, and a disaster all the same. A trick only works if the person casting it controls what it means, and the amulet has taken that control away from him. Watching Orko hunt for the gap between what his captors say and what they intend is more fun than watching him simply suffer, and the episode knows it; it returns to the joke more than once rather than spending it in a single scene.

The episode's best material is the double image this sets up against Orko's own closing routine. For twenty minutes, Orko is the one having tricks played on him by people who think a command is the same thing as control. Then, free of the amulet, he turns around and plays one last trick on He-Man and Man-At-Arms themselves: a fake-out about who is "holding" whom, before he vanishes toward home with the promise he is not going back to Snake Mountain. It is a clean piece of structure. A character defined by tricks gets to be the butt of one, then the author of one, inside the same twenty-two minutes, and the direct-to-camera message about leaving tricks "to the pros" lands as something closer to earned than the show's moral tags usually manage.

Where the episode runs out of road is the detour through the Polti. He-Man and Man-At-Arms go looking for help among a settlement of insectoid creatures guarding a nullifier that can counter the amulet, and the sequence never quite justifies its own length. The Polti are not named clearly enough on screen to carry the weight the plot wants from them, and the scene of He-Man comforting a Polti hatchling plays as a pause button on the actual plot rather than a complication of it. [1] It is the one stretch where the episode seems to be filling time rather than building toward the fortress raid, and it costs the back half some of the momentum the Beast Man and Trap Jaw material built up front.

Beast Man and Trap Jaw carry their end of the episode well past the amulet gimmick. Trap Jaw grouses that stealing the amulet "was your idea," and Beast Man snaps back with a line lifted wholesale from Oliver Hardy about "another fine mess." We get two villains who are usually muscle for someone else getting a turn as a funny double act in their own right, running their own operation badly. When He-Man finally corners them and reclaims the amulet, the fight reads less like a rescue and more like a partnership collapsing under its own management, a sharper note than this show usually hits for a pair of mid-tier villains. The Polti stretch keeps "Orko's Return" from being one of the tighter entries in the season, but the amulet plot and its payoff in Orko's own closing trick are built with more care than the premise strictly needed.

[1] Wiki Grayskull's episode notes identify the species as "Polti" and the nullifier as drawn from their own history with the amulet, context the episode itself only gestures at through dialogue rather than putting on screen.

Written by heman.org desk

1. Beast Man quotes the American comedy actor Oliver Hardy when he tells Trap Jaw, "Well, this is another fine mess you've gotten me into," a line Hardy used often against his comedy partner Stan Laurel in their films.
2. Continuity: the amulet at the center of the episode, the Amber Crystal of Millarca, ties the plot to the Polti, an insectoid people with their own history against its power; writer J. Larry Carroll later reused the Millarca name for a different amulet in the Filmation series Ghostbusters, in the episode "Little Big Bat."
3. Beast Man and Trap Jaw spend the entire episode operating independently of Skeletor, building their own fortress rather than working out of Snake Mountain, a rare stretch of the series where the two act as their own villain duo instead of Skeletor's muscle.