The Defection

In the palace courtyard, Orko finally gets a magic trick right, and Adam and Man-At-Arms tell him he's improved. Orko shrugs it off, insisting people don't really change: the good stay good and the evil stay evil. Across the sea on the Isle of Tears, a sorceress named Sibyline tells her master Gorgon that his influence has made her evil and that she wants to be good again. Gorgon throws her in the dungeon alongside King Danton, the ruler she had earlier helped him depose. Sibyline has enough magic left to escape and resolves to seek out King Randor and He-Man.

Randor welcomes Sibyline and agrees to help free Danton, but Gorgon has since allied with Evil-Lyn, and the two of them loose a Dragosaur on the Royal Palace to make Sibyline look responsible. Orko, already suspicious of her, is unconvinced when she helps save the king and queen. A storm that follows nearly drowns Orko in a flooded river before He-Man and Man-At-Arms pull him out, and Orko blames the weather on Sibyline too. At Castle Grayskull, the Sorceress tells Adam that Sibyline deserves the chance to prove herself and will likely help bring Gorgon down.

Sibyline leads the Heroic Warriors to the Isle of Tears, where Gorgon and Evil-Lyn are waiting. Her old workshop has been destroyed, and when the group finds Danton in his cell, a second door traps them all inside. Gorgon gloats over the intercom that Sibyline was in on the ambush, and Man-At-Arms is ready to believe Orko was right, but He-Man hears Sibyline out. She explains that Gorgon has replaced her with Evil-Lyn and realizes Evil-Lyn is behind all of the disturbances blamed on her. He-Man tears the heavy door apart, and the group fights free of Gorgon's guards, with Orko and Sibyline covering for each other along the way.

He-Man punches through to Gorgon's throne room, captures him as he tries to flee by submarine, and Sibyline, sure of herself at last, stands up to Evil-Lyn, who escapes by magic rather than face them. King Danton is restored to his throne and pardons Sibyline for her past, and she and Orko part as friends, with Orko now claiming he always believed people could change.

Teela: "As you saw in today's story, people can change." He-Man: "Right, Teela. Sibyline had always been an evil sorceress. But she was able to change her ways for the better. Maybe there's something about yourself that you don't like, a bad habit maybe." Teela: "It's easy to say, 'I can't change'. But the truth is, you can change almost any behavior if you really want to." He-Man: "And the first step is saying to yourself 'I can'."

John Erwin as He-Man/Prince Adam and King Danton

Alan Oppenheimer as Man-At-Arms and Gorgon

Linda Gary as Teela, Evil-Lyn, the Sorceress, Sibyline and Queen Marlena

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

"I hate to tell a prince he's wrong, but Adam, you couldn't be wronger! People are what they are. The good stay good, and the evil are always evil, and I'd like to see somebody prove me wrong!"

― Orko

"The Defection" opens with Orko getting a magic trick right for once, and Adam telling him he has really improved. Orko shrugs it off. The weather changes, he says, not people. That line, tossed off in the first minute, is the whole episode. Everything that follows tests whether Orko is right, run through a sorceress nobody in Eternos has any reason to trust.

Ron and Sam Schultz do not waste time setting up Sibyline's dilemma. She is thrown back in Gorgon's dungeon within the first two minutes for having the nerve to ask to be good again, and the script keeps her on the back foot for most of the half hour that follows: disbelieved by Orko, tested by the Sorceress, framed by Gorgon and Evil-Lyn, and finally betrayed by the one person she broke out of prison to save. The show earns the lesson it is selling by making Sibyline's path back to good hard rather than a formality. When the Sorceress tells Adam that Sibyline has to be given the chance to prove herself, it plays less like a plot convenience than a rule the episode actually intends to follow.

Orko carries the skeptic's side of the argument. He is not written as comic relief tripping over the plot; he is the one character whose doubt is grounded in experience. Evil sorceresses have burned him before, and nothing he sees in the first act, a storm that conveniently appears the moment he starts asking questions, a Dragosaur loose in the Royal Zoo, gives him reason to stop asking. The episode is honest enough to let him be right about the method even while being wrong about Sibyline herself: Gorgon and Evil-Lyn really are behind the disturbances, engineered specifically to make Sibyline look guilty. Neither "the skeptic was a fool" nor "the skeptic was right all along" would have been as interesting as what the script actually does with him.

The episode's best scene belongs to Man-At-Arms and Orko in the flood. It is a small sequence, a storm, a rope, a dunking, but it is the one place the episode slows down to let two characters work a problem together without dialogue doing the heavy lifting, and the animation of He-Man diving in after Orko has the kind of physical urgency this series does not always bother with. Having just doubted Sibyline for causing the weather, Orko is the one who nearly drowns in it. The episode trusts us to connect the two without underlining it.

The weak stretch is the Isle of Tears itself, once the Heroic Warriors actually arrive. Gorgon's dungeon runs through the same beats as a dozen other Filmation lairs: guards, a fortified door, He-Man knocking something apart with his bare hands. Evil-Lyn's alliance with Gorgon is clean but thin; she exists mainly to spring the trap and then to lose the fight, with none of the specific menace she gets in her better episodes. King Danton, the deposed ruler Sibyline is trying to save, barely registers as a character beyond his captivity. The script cares more about Sibyline's redemption than about Danton's restoration. That is the right instinct, but it leaves the back half a little mechanical next to the courtroom-drama patience of the first.

Linda Gary does a lot of the episode's real work in the voice booth, playing both Sibyline and Evil-Lyn and finding a different register for each: Sibyline's pleading is unforced, never pitched for sympathy the way a weaker script might demand. By the closing minute, when Orko tells King Danton that he always believed people could change, the show lets itself have a small joke at its narrator's expense rather than a straight moral. We don't get one of the season's most eventful entries here, but as an argument for its own closing message, "The Defection" is one of the more patiently constructed.

1. Behind the scenes: Script was approved March 8, 1983 and final script revision took place April 21, 1983. John Erwin's voice for King Danton is an imitation of actor Ronald Colman. Gorgon's staff is actually a back scratcher.
2. Continuity: The dragon that escapes from the Royal Zoo is a recolored Dragosaur from The Time Corridor. The animation of He-Man running and diving would be used again in Search for the VHO, Jacob and the Widgets & Hunt for He Man. Orko's backflip in midair would be seen again in Origin of the Sorceress. He-Man's gallant bow as he allows the ladies to exit the cell first would be reused in both The Greatest Show on Eternia and Time Doesn't Fly.
3. More continuity: Animation elements from the fight sequence between Man-At-Arms and one of Gorgon's guards would be used again when he fights one of Rago's guards in It's Not My Fault. The animation of Orko reacting in shock and pushing himself backwards is seen again in Monster on the Mountain. The character model of Sibyline was reused as an extra on a balcony in the She-Ra: Princess of Power episode The Red Knight. The character model of Gorgon can be seen as part of the Keeper's menagerie in The Heart of a Giant. Gorgon's guards were going to be reused as Queen Balina's warriors in A Tale of Two Cities.
4. Animation errors and goofs: King Randor Holds up a piece of paper he received from Sibyline which has disappeared in the next shot he appears in. At Castle Grayskull, the heroic warriors are standing on the edge of the steps to the Sorceress's throne, with Cringer positioned awkwardly on the side of it's base. In the reverse shot, they are positioned much further back. He-Man is not shown transforming Cringer into Battle Cat, though the latter does appear in the second act. Sibyline's Cobra staff changes position in her hands during her fight with Evil-Lyn. When Sibyline is talking with King Danton in his cell she says that she need to travel to Eternia for help. Eternia is the name of the planet. She should have said Eternos which is King Randor\`s city. One of Gorgon's Guards rushes at Sibyline carrying a spear. When he slips on marbles that Orko has caused to appear, the guard is bare handed, but when he passes Sibyline he is carrying the spear again.
5. "The Defection" is one of the series' clearest statements of its own closing-message convention: a character argues people cannot change, and the episode spends its whole runtime proving her wrong through Sibyline.