The Ancient Mirror of Avathar

Melaktha and Adam go on an expedition to find Avathar Island, home to the ruins of the ancient Avathar Empire. Moss Man, Two Bad, Trap Jaw and Evil-Lyn appear as the classic He-Man series nears its end. He-Man tells viewers that doing chores keeps a house running smoothly, even if they seem pointless or boring.

He-Man: "Have you ever had a job to do you thought was boring and unimportant? We all have. Opie did. But no job is unimportant. Opie learned that if he'd done the little jobs his father gave him, things would not have gone wrong. So remember, any job worth doing is worth doing well. No matter how dull it may seem at the time. Bye for now."

John Erwin as He-Man/Prince Adam

Alan Oppenheimer as Melaktha, Angus Og, Captain Falk and Helmsman

Linda Gary as Teela and Opie

Lou Scheimer (credited as Erik Gunden) as Trap Jaw, Moss Man, Two Bad, The Ancient Mirror of Avathar and Computer

Angus Og: "That's because I do all these boring jobs you hate so much."

"The Ancient Mirror of Avathar" opens on a complaint that has nothing to do with Skeletor: Opie, left to run his father's lighthouse, thinks the job is boring. "Check this, check that, look at the weather report," he tells Angus Og, "nothing ever happens." The episode spends its first scene on a kid who would rather be anywhere else, and that scene turns out to be the whole point, because the Avathar plot the title promises is really just the mechanism that puts the lighthouse's boring checklist to the test.

Melaktha's expedition to Avathar Island gives the back half of this late-season episode something a lot of Filmation adventures skip: a reason to care what the villains are actually after. The mirror itself gets to explain its own stakes, speaking in Alan Oppenheimer's register as a relic that has waited centuries for someone to ask what it knows, and the knowledge on offer, the lost spells of a vanished empire, is exactly the kind of prize Skeletor would want and Melaktha would never sell. Trap Jaw's theft of it off the ship is a plain grab, but the script gives Two-Bad's demand ("bring that mirror to Snake Mountain") and Trap Jaw's baffled "how am I going to do that?" a beat of actual comic friction between henchmen. Skeletor's crew rarely gets even that much personality.

What elevates the episode past a routine artifact chase is the storm. Once Trap Jaw's sabotage sets both ships fighting the weather, the story crosscuts between He-Man's fight to keep the Fair Wind afloat and Opie's fight to keep the lighthouse beacon turning. The script spends far more of its climax on the second fight than the first. Angus Og's earlier line lands with real weight in hindsight: "that's because I do all these boring jobs you hate so much." The beacon fails not because of sabotage or magic but because the routine maintenance Opie dismissed as tedious turns out to be the thing keeping Captain Falk's crew off the rocks. He-Man scaling the lighthouse cliff to help free the jammed mechanism is a fine action beat, but it is Opie's own hands on the controls, working through the same checklist he complained about an episode earlier, that gets credit for saving the ship.

The animation leans into the storm for atmosphere more than most Filmation half-hours bother to: driving rain sheets across nearly every exterior frame for the back third of the episode, and the lighthouse beam cutting a visible cone through it is one of the better lighting effects the series attempts. The mirror's own visual, a spectral face forming inside an ornate frame, is similarly a step above the standard glowing-effect shorthand, giving Melaktha's discovery scene a genuine sense of something ancient waking up rather than a prop lighting up on cue.

Where the episode runs thin is the Trap Jaw subplot once it is airborne. He steals the mirror, gets confronted by He-Man, and largely vanishes from the second half in favor of the storm; the confrontation that should resolve the theft instead gets swallowed by weather, and Two-Bad and Evil-Lyn's scenes back at Snake Mountain add set dressing more than tension, since neither of them does much once the order is given. For a show two episodes from the end of its run, there is also something a little perfunctory about introducing an entire lost civilization only to spend most of its screen time on a generic storm-rescue plot that could have happened without Avathar in it at all.

That mismatch is also what makes the closing moral work better than most. He-Man's sign-off about "any job worth doing is worth doing well" could read as a non sequitur bolted onto an adventure about ancient mirrors and villainous theft, but it is not: Opie's arc is the actual spine of the episode, running in parallel to the treasure hunt rather than growing out of it. "The Ancient Mirror of Avathar" never quite earns its own title. Three episodes from the end of the series, it earns its lesson instead. Not every Filmation half-hour this late in a run manages that.

1. Behind the scenes: Script was approved August 31, 1986 and final script revision took place September 4, 1984. The story started life as a freelance script titled 'Angus Og, Lighthouse Keeper', which Robert Lamb heavily rewrote to work in the context of the series. He put in so much exposition about the history of Eternia that the story became a two-parter, but when the Filmation heads realized the series was coming to an end the decision was made to keep it as one part.
2. Continuity: The character model for Opie is a recolored version of Prince Glitch as seen in Things That Go Bump in the Night. The interior of the main Avatharian temple reuses backgrounds from Shokoti's lair as seen in House of Shokoti Part 2.
3. Episode order: this is the third episode from the end of Season 2, not the penultimate episode; 65 episodes make up the season.
4. A lore-rich script that the Filmation continuity rarely produced. The Mirror of Avathar premise gives the writers an excuse to show pre-MOTU history without committing to a specific origin narrative.