Revenge is Never Sweet

Crossing the desert with Prince Adam, Teela, and Cringer, Orko is asked to stay out of the way while Adam repairs a broken-down Attak Trak. The sand slug Kothos, still trapped in that form since his defeat in "The Witch and the Warrior," flatters Orko into restoring his human body, then repays the favor by freezing Orko and his friends in stasis. Remembering his old grudge against Evil-Lyn, Kothos contacts Skeletor and offers to trade his captives for her; Skeletor refuses unless Kothos can deliver He-Man instead.

Kothos sets his prisoners adrift on a raft to draw He-Man into a rescue, then conjures a tidal wave once Adam transforms to save them. After guiding the raft to shore, Kothos traps He-Man's friends again and saps his strength with an enchanted helmet before summoning his floating palace to complete the trade. As Skeletor arrives with a caged Evil-Lyn, He-Man convinces her that despite being enemies, they need each other to get out of this alive, and she frees him and his friends. Skeletor and Beast Man try to finish him off, but He-Man and Teela turn the tables and send the pair fleeing.

With Skeletor gone, He-Man keeps his word and sets out with Teela and Orko to rescue Evil-Lyn from Kothos' palace. They fight through the wizard's traps to find her already dueling Kothos herself, each insisting their revenge is justified. Evil-Lyn gets hers by wrecking the palace's controls, sending it into a dangerous spin that throws her out a window and into the ocean below, where she realizes revenge cost her more than it was worth.

As the crippled palace plunges toward a mountainside, Kothos begs He-Man to save it, agreeing to give up his vendetta for good. He-Man holds the palace steady long enough for repairs, and Kothos sets off to use his floating palace for good, bringing rain to farmers in need, though his first delivery lands squarely on an unamused Orko.

Teela: "Today we learned there's no such thing as getting even, even if someone does something to you, and you get back at him." Orko: "And he gets back at you." Teela: "And you get back at him." Orko: "And he gets back at you." Teela: "And you get back at him again." Orko: "And he..." Teela: "So you see? It never stops. No one is really getting even at all. The best thing to do is talk it over and start fresh. Now, you were going to say something?" Orko: "See you next time!"

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

Alan Oppenheimer as Skeletor and Cringer

Linda Gary as Teela and Evil-Lyn

Lou Scheimer (credited as Erik Gunden) as Orko and Orc guard

He-Man: "Evil-Lyn, we're enemies, but we're also each other's only hope."

"Revenge is Never Sweet" wears its thesis in the title, but the episode earns it anyway by giving two different characters the exact same choice and running each one all the way to a verdict. Kothos picks revenge and chases it for twenty minutes. Evil-Lyn picks revenge too, late, after she has already been asked to trust an enemy and found out the trust was real. The distance between those two choices, and between how the episode treats them, does more to sell the closing moral than the speech Teela and Orko deliver to camera at the end.

Kothos' scheme runs on flattery before it runs on magic, and the sequencing matters. He does not just trap Orko; he compliments him first, floating the idea that Orko might be a wizard strong enough to undo a spell Evil-Lyn cast without much effort. Orko, vain about the one thing he is actually bad at, falls for it at once, and the episode lets that mistake stand uncorrected for the rest of the runtime instead of having a friend warn him off. It is a sharper hook than the show usually bothers building for a villain of the week, resting on an established flaw in a regular character rather than on a generic trap.

The raft sequence that follows shows the episode's best craft. Kothos does not fight He-Man directly; he sets the trap, then waits onshore for the rescue he has already engineered while the tidal wave and the drifting raft do the work. It is patient plotting for a show that usually resolves its action in a single chase. The sequence earns its length by making the water itself the threat instead of another costumed henchman.

Where the episode falters is in how fast it lets Kothos off the hook. Having spent most of the runtime building a vindictive, flattery-driven villain, it resolves him in a single exchange: He-Man offers to save his crashing palace if Kothos renounces revenge, and Kothos agrees on the spot, no more argument than that. His sudden new career as Eternia's weatherman plays fine as a closing joke on its own, but it lands seconds after a character who has spent the episode proving he does not forgive, let alone reform, that easily. The turn costs the show the one thing it had actually built.

The real demonstration of the title belongs to the heroes, not the villains, and specifically to He-Man and Evil-Lyn. With Skeletor backing out of the trade and leaving her to Kothos, He-Man offers her a deal backed by nothing but his word: "Evil-Lyn, we're enemies, but we're also each other's only hope." Evil-Lyn, who owes him nothing and has every reason to refuse, takes the deal anyway, and the episode lets that trust pay off without undercutting it with a betrayal later on. It is a rare moment of a Masters of the Universe villain acting on calculation instead of cruelty, and the show is smart enough not to wink at the audience about it.

Evil-Lyn gets her own revenge soon after, against Kothos rather than against He-Man, wrecking his palace's control system the moment she is free. The episode does not treat that as a clean win: the blast nearly drowns her and nearly brings the whole palace down with everyone else still inside. Teela and Orko spell out that same cycle afterward, trading the same line back and forth, "he gets back at you, you get back at him," until Orko loses track of whose turn it is. By the time they say it, the audience has already watched the pattern play out twice. The episode did the work first and let the speech close it out second.

1. Behind the scenes: Script was approved May 17, 1984 and final script revision took place October 16, 1984. This story was released on VHS in the UK together with One for All & Search for the Past.
2. Continuity: The villain Kothos from The Witch and the Warrior returns, but the color of his costume and skin have completely changed. The animated sequence of Prince Adam unsheathing his magic sword underwater previously appeared in Hunt for He-Man. The animation of He-Man retrieving the Sky Sled from the back of the Attak Trak was previously seen in Prince Adam No More & Journey to Stone City. The shot of He-Man turning to Teela after using his sword was first seen in Diamond Ray of Disappearance.
3. This is one of the few episodes where He-Man extends trust to Evil-Lyn directly, offering his word with nothing to back it beyond the promise itself; she accepts and keeps her side of it, a rare beat of calculation over cruelty from a Masters of the Universe villain.