The Good Shall Survive

Buzz-Off's Bee People come under attack by the Tycons, aided by Skeletor. He-Man tells viewers to treat envy not with theft, but by asking politely to share; they might even make a friend.

He-Man: "We learned to day that there are right ways and wrong ways of getting what you want. If someone has something you want, say a toy you'd like to play with or maybe some candy or cake, don't just take it. That's stealing and chances are you'll only bring out the anger in the other person. But if you ask rather than take, or if it's yours, offer to share. You'll get back more than you give, like maybe even a new friend. Right, Orko?" (Orko waggles his ears) "See you next time."

John Erwin as He-Man/Prince Adam, Webstor and Tycor

Alan Oppenheimer as Skeletor, Man-At-Arms, Battle Cat/Cringer and Buzz-Off

Linda Gary as Teela and Tike

Lou Scheimer (credited as Erik Gunden) as Orko, King Randor, Kobra Khan and Bee people

Man-At-Arms: "We don't think you're bad. You just haven't been given a chance to be good. Besides, it's more fun to make friends than enemies."

Most of the threats Eternos deals with know exactly what they are and like it that way. Skeletor wants the castle. The Tycons want lunch. "The Good Shall Survive" spends its whole runtime on the difference, willing to let a swarm of honey-stealing bug monsters be the sympathetic party rather than the punchline.

The setup is almost too simple. Buzz-Off's hive gets raided by a species everyone on Eternia assumed was extinct, and the Tycons do not bother denying what they are doing. They are hungry, there is honey, and they take it, chanting for more while the bee people scatter. Richard Pardee's script could easily have stopped there and built a standard monster-of-the-week around it, but it keeps pulling the thread: a species this reduced, scavenging this openly, is not a threat so much as a symptom. Skeletor spots the opening before He-Man does. He does not fight the Tycons or trick them! He feeds their leader Tycor a warehouse full of someone else's food and lets desperation do the recruiting, a meaner move than anything he usually pulls, because it costs the Tycons nothing to agree to it.

He-Man's answer to that is not a bigger sword. It is Man-At-Arms misreading a recipe, baking a batch of Orko's "baker's supreme pie" with so much soda in it that the Tycons who eat it get violently sick, and the heroes using that mess as cover to go find them and talk instead of fight. The line that the episode is actually built around arrives here, almost thrown away: "We don't think you're bad. You just haven't been given a chance to be good." It is not profound dialogue, but it is the whole title in one sentence, and it reframes everything that came before it. The good surviving was never about who wins the fight at Snake Mountain. It is about whether anyone bothers to find out if the Tycons can be anything other than what hunger has made them.

Tycor gets to prove it, and the episode gives him the space to do so rather than rushing the turn. He is still fighting alongside Skeletor at the midpoint, still a believable threat, and his choice to switch sides reads as earned rather than scripted because the show has already shown him groaning in pain from a trick Skeletor played on his own side. The standout scene is the smallest one: Man-At-Arms and Buzz-Off finding the sick Tycons in the cavern and treating them instead of finishing them off, with Duncan flatly stating "it's more fun to make friends than enemies" to a creature that has just spent the episode robbing his kingdom. It is a strange, quiet beat for us to hang a whole episode's thesis on, and it beats any sword fight.

The climax is the weak link. Skeletor and Kobra Khan end up planted in their own garden traps, a fun image and a cheap way out of a fight the episode has otherwise earned. After twenty minutes spent arguing that the Tycons deserved a real chance rather than a quick dismissal, handing Skeletor the same quick dismissal undercuts the argument the script just finished making. Buzz-Off and the bee people, who started this whole mess as the victims, mostly disappear from the back half in favor of He-Man and Tycor, a shame given how much ground the opening act spends establishing them.

Still, an episode willing to make its villain's victims the ones worth listening to, and to let "monster" turn out to mean "hungry," is doing more than its 22 minutes usually ask of it. Tycor ends the episode guarding the honeycomb fields he once raided.

1. Behind the scenes: Script was approved May 24, 1984 and final script revision took place July 1, 1984. During the transformation sequences, Cringer says 'Why is it I never like this part?" According to the script, this line concluded with "...of the story?"
2. Continuity: The animated sequence of Skeletor sitting in a pool of water was first seen in Return of Evil. The shot of Skeletor sitting at the far end of the council table was previously used in The Dragon Invasion, with Beast Man, Evil-Lyn, Jitsu and Trap Jaw sitting at the table instead of Webstor and Kobra Khan.