At Snake Mountain, Skeletor has summoned General Tataran of the Goblins. "It is hard to resist one of your invitations when you say you have a way to finally defeat He-Man," Tataran tells him. After dismissing Trap Jaw, Skeletor explains his plan: a dimensional gate near the Crystal Sea village of Zak will bring the Goblin army to Eternia, but first there will be an "accident" that removes He-Man from the picture for good.
At the Royal Palace, Man-At-Arms and Prince Adam report to King Randor that Skeletor is building a huge structure on the far side of the planet, near the village of Zak on the Crystal Sea, and forcing the villagers to work on it. Randor sends Man-At-Arms to investigate, with Adam and Orko along. At the site, Adam identifies the structure as a dimensional gate and transforms into He-Man.
At the construction site, Skeletor and Tataran finish rigging the gate's right side to collapse, and Skeletor disguises Tataran as an ordinary human laborer. When He-Man arrives and confronts Skeletor over the villagers' treatment, Skeletor baits him toward the unstable side of the structure. He-Man strikes it, the structure collapses, and the disguised Tataran is "buried" beneath the rubble on cue. Digging him out, He-Man can find no pulse and believes he has killed an innocent man. Skeletor, also disguised, confirms the lie: "He was my brother. You have killed him!" In shame, He-Man abandons his weapons and returns to Castle Grayskull, where he gives up the Sword of Power entirely, dropping it into the bottomless pit and reverting to Prince Adam for good.
Orko, who saw Skeletor and Tataran drop their disguises after the Eternians left, is captured and thrown into Snake Mountain's dungeon before he can tell anyone. Skeletor rebuilds the gate at full scale, now heavily guarded and large enough to bring an entire Goblin army through. With He-Man unavailable, Teela volunteers to carry a Mesatronic bomb to the gate alone, on foot, and destroy it.
Orko shrinks himself to slip free of his magic-proof cell and reaches Adam, still in disgrace on a palace balcony, to tell him the truth: nobody really died. Adam takes a sky sled into the abyss beneath Grayskull to recover the sword, is thrown from the sled by the winds, and falls into the pit, landing in a giant spider's web within reach of the Sword of Power. He reclaims it and becomes He-Man again.
At the Crystal Sea, Teela is captured by Skeletor's Goblin guards and brought before him. She bluffs him with the bomb's timer; when Skeletor's own blast damages the timer and sets it running early, He-Man arrives on the sky sled just in time to scoop her up and run clear of the blast. The explosion destroys the gate and scatters the Goblin army back to its own dimension. Teela wakes in He-Man's arms and the episode ends with He-Man carrying her off into the sunset.
Man-At-Arms: "I want to talk to you today about safety. Accidents don't just happen to other people, they can happen to you too. But you can do some things to help prevent accidents from happening. Using a safety belt when riding in a car can save your life or prevent you from being seriously hurt. Now I know you've been told never to play with matches, because if you do you're playing with fire. And fire can burn your toys, your home, your family, you. So use your common sense and think about what you're doing. It's better to be safe than sorry."
John Erwin as He-Man/Prince Adam
Alan Oppenheimer as Skeletor and Man-At-Arms
Linda Gary as Teela and Queen Marlena
Lou Scheimer (credited as Erik Gunden) as Orko, King Randor, General Tataran, Trap Jaw and various unnamed Goblins
"This time, He-Man is going to defeat himself." -- Skeletor, laying out his plan to General Tataran.
"Oh no! What have I done?" -- He-Man, finding no pulse on the man he believes he has killed.
"Oh! I must have bumped my head." -- Teela, waking in He-Man's arms after the blast.
What does He-Man actually own: the sword, or the choice to pick it back up? "The Problem with Power" spends its whole runtime testing that question, and Skeletor never has to lift a finger to do it; Tataran's disguise and a collapsing wall do all the work. [1]
The setup is almost cruelly simple. Skeletor builds an obviously unsafe structure at the Crystal Sea, forces villagers to work it in plain sight, and waits for the Royal Palace to notice, because the whole scheme only works if He-Man shows up to stop it. He-Man does, lectures Skeletor about endangering "honest men and women," and knocks down the one rigged wall Skeletor needed knocked down. Tataran, disguised as a human laborer, "dies" under the rubble on cue, and He-Man spends the back half of the episode convinced he killed him.
That's the spine. The usual Filmation moral is a sword without a hand to hold it; this episode's is a hand that stops trusting itself the moment it might have done harm. Adam doesn't lose the Sword of Power to a spell or a theft. He throws it into the abyss himself, the same gesture he usually makes to call it up, inverted into surrender. Nobody takes his power from him. He decides he's not fit to hold it, and the episode is patient enough to let that decision sit for several scenes before it starts arguing him out of it.
It argues him out of it through Orko, not through a pep talk from Man-At-Arms or a reminder from the Sorceress, and we'll take that choice over the obvious one. Orko is the one character who watched the trick happen end to end, and the episode uses his smallness against the plot rather than for comic relief: he shrinks himself out of a magic-proof cell because a spell that size is still beneath Skeletor's notice. It's a clever bit of plotting, and it keeps the reveal in the hands of the character least equipped to force it. The suspense comes from watching him try anyway.
Teela gets the episode's harder assignment, and the better scene for it. With He-Man off the board, she volunteers to walk a bomb into a fortified gate on foot, says goodbye to her father like she means it, and then does the job herself rather than waiting to be rescued. The script lets her bluff Skeletor with the bomb's timer, take a hit for it, and still be conscious enough afterward to deliver the episode's best line without a trace of self-pity: "Oh! I must have bumped my head." It's a better note to end the episode on than He-Man's own redemption! The final shot, carrying her off into the sunset, works because she earned the ride rather than needing it.
Where the episode runs thin is the mechanics of the con itself. Tataran's disguise holds up because nobody on the Eternian side thinks to check a pulse twice, and the dimensional gate, menacing as Skeletor's plan for it sounds, mostly just sits there being rebuilt between scenes. The goblin army it's meant to deliver never gets more than a crowd shot. But the episode was never really about the invasion. It was about whether a hero who has only ever been asked to be strong can survive one afternoon of being wrong, and on that question it doesn't blink.
[1] The giant spider in the abyss reuses character animation from Arakna in "Fisto's Forest," the same model later recycled again as the Jawlik in "Search for a Son," standard practice for a Filmation season working through this many scripts a year.
- Behind the scenes: the script was approved July 12, 1984, with a final revision dated September 26, 1984. Tom Tataranowicz based He-Man throwing the Sword of Power into the abyss on a Prince Valiant comic in which Valiant throws away his singing sword. Filmation's bosses rejected Tataranowicz's original idea of having He-Man actually kill an innocent bystander by accident as too extreme for a children's cartoon, so the disguise/deception plot was used instead.
- Writer Bob Forward named General Tataran after Tataranowicz, reusing the character from "The Arena." The village of Zak on the Crystal Sea was named after Tataranowicz's wife, whose maiden name was Zak.
- Continuity: the giant spider He-Man encounters in the abyss reuses animation from Arakna in "Fisto's Forest"; the same design is reused again as the Jawlik in "Search for a Son."
- Source: heman.org desk. Dialogue and moral verified against the episode's own subtitle track. Screencaps hand-selected and tagged from the source video.
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