The Starchild

Two rival forest tribes are caught in a battle for custody of a little girl with amazing magical powers. He-Man takes her to the Royal Palace. The Sorceress tells viewers they all have the Starchild's invisible power to bring people together; it is called love and is invoked through being kind and gentle.

Sorceress: "Today we saw people fighting over the Starchild, but in the end, her power brought these people together. It might surprise you to know that all of us have a power like the Starchild's. You can't see it or touch it, but you can feel it. It's called 'love'. When you care deeply about others, and you're kind and gentle, then you're using the power, and that's very special magic indeed. Until later, good-bye for now."

John Erwin as He-Man/Prince Adam and Palos

Alan Oppenheimer as Man-At-Arms, Cringer and Willen

Linda Gary as Teela, Starchild, Queen Marlena and the Sorceress

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

Starchild: "I don't need teaching. They do! If they had my power, they'd destroy each other."

"The Starchild" opens like a custody dispute and plays out like one straight through to the final scene, and the dispute is the whole engine of the episode. Palos leads a tribe of hooded cave dwellers, Willen leads a tribe of forest folk, and both men are certain their people alone can raise the little girl with the uncontrollable energy powers who keeps running from both of them. J. Brynne Stephens and Arthur Browne Jr. do not waste time pretending this is a mystery about where the Starchild belongs. She belongs to herself, and the episode spends twenty-two minutes making two grown men, a king, a queen, and eventually He-Man figure that out.

What the episode is actually about sits in a single exchange near the end, once Palos and Willen have followed the Starchild all the way into the Royal Palace and are still arguing in front of the throne. "I and my people will teach her," Palos says, and Willen cuts him off before he finishes the sentence. The Starchild has heard enough. "I don't need teaching," she snaps. "They do! If they had my power, they'd destroy each other." That is the thesis the whole script has been building toward: the only person in the room who understands the Starchild's power is the Starchild, and nobody has thought to ask her what she wants until she says it herself. The forest ogre fight and the flooded cave rescue that bookend the episode are not detours from that idea, they are the same idea staged as action. The Starchild does not need He-Man's sword to survive the first ogre, she drops it with a bolt of her own energy. He-Man's job in this episode is custody of the custody dispute, not rescue.

Lou Zukor's direction leans into that reading without underlining it. The forest scenes keep Palos and Willen in the frame together even when they are supposedly on opposite sides of an argument, shoulder to shoulder in identical compositions. Willen gets the exact camera angle Palos got two shots earlier. The palace scenes do the opposite: Teela giving Man-At-Arms a rose in the garden, Orko performing tricks for a child who has just watched a monster nearly kill her, these are warm, ordinary beats dropped into the middle of a crisis, and they make Eternos feel like a home worth running toward rather than just a safer set of walls. The episode is also doing something quietly generous with its two antagonists. Palos and Willen are never cruel to each other and never cruel to the Starchild, they are just both wrong about the same thing in the same way, and the script lets them discover that together instead of declaring a winner.

Where the episode runs thin is the subplot in the palace's power room, where He-Man and Teela chase down a malfunctioning energy source that has nothing to do with the Starchild, her tribes, or the ogre that nearly kills her twice. It eats several minutes in the back half of the episode on a problem the Starchild herself could probably fix with a wave of her hand, and it never connects back to the custody plot the way the ogre fight does. The sequence exists to give He-Man something to punch in an episode where the real conflict is two men arguing in a throne room, but it stalls the momentum right when the Palos and Willen standoff should be building toward its resolution.

The ending earns itself anyway. Willen and Palos leave the palace holding the Starchild's hands between them rather than pulling her toward separate homes, and the Sorceress's closing message, that the power to bring people together is just love expressed as kindness, lands less like a bolted-on moral and more like a plain restatement of what the Starchild already told everyone in the throne room. She did not need either man to teach her that. She was the one teaching them.

1. Behind the scenes: Script was approved March 28, 1983 and final script revision took place June 24, 1983. This episode was story-boarded by Byron Vaughns. In his storyboards, Vaughns illustrated the Starchild more like an elf with pointy ears, not unlike the big-haired troll figures popular at the time, rather than a little girl. Palos and his race of Cave Dwellers were originally designed to have blue skin.
2. Continuity: The character model for Palos would be reused for that of a carpenter in One for All. The design of the Ogre that attacks the Starchild was previously used as Bakkull in Teela's Quest. The two Cave Dwellers who accompany Palos are repainted character models of Old Zak and Jaymar from the episode The Curse of the Spellstone. Teela's bedroom in the Royal Palace of Eternos will be seen again as the room in which Adam and Adora were born in as seen in a flashback in The Secret of the Sword as well as Ariel's room at Castle Mystacor in the She-Ra: Princess of Power episode The Anxious Apprentice.
3. More continuity: The power source for the Royal Palace seen here is different from the one featured in Double Edged Sword. Sound effects are often reused from earlier Filmation cartoons, including several from the Star Trek SFX library. The sound of the laughing Tickletrap is the same as the Tribbles as heard in the 1973 animated Star Trek episode _More Tribbles, More Troubles_.
4. Animation errors and goofs: When Queen Marlena says "You two are just in time to year this tree man's story", instead of the correct background of her seat on the Eternian throne, the background show the middle part between the two seats instead. Near the end, when Starchild takes the hands of Palos and Willen, the black band on Palos' arm disappears.
5. Title card note: the frame previously used as this page's title card showed the farewell handhold scene near the episode's end rather than an actual title plate. It has been replaced with the genuine The Starchild title card, captured at the 77-78 second mark of the broadcast.
6. Quote verification: the Sorceress's closing message and the Starchild's line to Palos and Willen in the throne room ("I don't need teaching. They do! If they had my power, they'd destroy each other.") were transcribed against the episode's matched subtitle track rather than carried over from the prior wiki-sourced draft.
7. Two rival tribes race to claim a little girl whose uncontrolled powers could destroy them all, until He-Man brings her to the Royal Palace and lets her settle the argument herself.