Three on a Dare

While Man-At-Arms and Adam work to repair the palace's high frequency transmitter, Teela heads off with three students, Krill, Tager, and Cynda, for a field trip to the Mystical Forest. Orko's meddling makes the transmitter's damage worse, leaving it in need of pure rainbow quartz that only exists in a cavern inside Snake Mountain, so Adam and Cringer set out to retrieve some while Teela is busy showing the children the forest's dangerous plant life.

Back at the forest, Krill and Cynda dare Tager into taking the Jet Crawler for an unsupervised joyride, unaware the palace transmitter is down and Teela has no way to call for help. Teela watches helplessly as the vehicle speeds straight toward Snake Mountain, where Skeletor, who can see and hear her from his lair, sends Evil-Lyn to capture her and hold her for the secrets of Grayskull. Meanwhile, Adam and Cringer run into Mer-Man while diving for rainbow quartz and are forced to transform into He-Man and Battle Cat.

Trapped inside Snake Mountain, the three children discover Evil-Lyn has captured Teela and narrowly dodge a Shrieker before finding a way out, planning to come back for her. Skeletor, keen to finish his scheme before He-Man interferes, offers to let him leave peacefully with the quartz, but backs off that plan once Teela escapes and He-Man goes after her and the children instead, fighting off Trap Jaw's ambush with Battle Cat's help.

Regrouped, He-Man, Teela, and the children find Skeletor's launch pad lined with rainbow quartz, where Skeletor and Evil-Lyn try to immobilize Teela and force He-Man to leave without her. He-Man turns Evil-Lyn's own spell back on her to free Teela, and the group escapes aboard a stolen Basher while He-Man tears open the hangar doors, despite Tri-Klops cutting the power. With everyone safe, He-Man and Battle Cat grab a piece of rainbow quartz on the way out.

Back at the palace, Tager admits he only took the dare out of fear of what his friends would think, and Man-At-Arms gets the quartz he needs, crediting He-Man's help for getting it, moments before Orko nearly wrecks the equipment all over again.

Prince Adam: "Taking a dare doesn't prove you're brave or smart. It could prove you're pretty foolish because most of the time it will get you or someone else in trouble. The smartest thing to do is not to take a dare, and not to worry about what people will think. If you only do what you think is right, you'll come out the winner. Don't learn the hard way, like the children in today's story. Until next time, so long."

John Erwin as He-Man/Prince Adam and Beast Man

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

Linda Gary as Teela, Evil-Lyn and Tager

Lou Scheimer (credited as Erik Gunden) as Orko, Trap Jaw and Tri-Klops

Erika Scheimer as Cynda and Krill

Tager: "I was afraid the others would think I was a coward if I didn't take the dare."

"Three on a Dare" opens with a joke at its own expense: Orko wrecks the palace's high-frequency transmitter before the plot has even started, and the damage he causes is what strips Teela of radio contact for the rest of the episode. It is a strange choice to hang an entire crisis on a sight gag, but it also sets the terms for everything that follows. Nobody in this episode gets into trouble because Skeletor is clever. They get into trouble because somebody made an ordinary bad call, and the machinery of the plot made sure nobody could call for help afterward.

Tager's own bad call is the episode's real subject, and the writers are honest enough to let him say so out loud. Dared by Krill and double-dared by Cynda, he takes the Jet Crawler for an unauthorized joyride rather than risk looking scared in front of two kids his own age, and the show does not dress that motive up. Back at the palace, apologizing to Teela, he says it plainly: "I was afraid the others would think I was a coward if I didn't take the dare." Most closing-scene apologies on this show stay vague. This one names the actual fear.

The trick is that He-Man spends the episode doing a grown-up version of what Tager does. He flies into Snake Mountain on a mission he could delegate, accepts a direct risk he does not need to take, and narrates the stakes to Cringer in the same bravado Tager uses on his friends ("we'll be in and out so fast, he'll never know he had visitors"). Skeletor even frames the distinction for him near the end, gloating that taking the quartz alone would have been the smart move: "You should've taken my first offer. Then you would've had the quartz." He-Man's answer, "And you would've had Teela," is the episode's actual argument. The dare itself isn't the problem. What you're risking it for is.

Evil-Lyn gets the episode's best scene for that reason. Dispatched to intercept Teela's distress call, she spends her screen time running Skeletor's capture plan with more competence than anyone else in his employ, right down to immobilizing Teela with a wand blast that He-Man then reflects back onto her, an old trick we have seen the show lean on before, but one the animation sells well here: Teela's boots crust over in ice a beat before the spell completes, a nice bit of visual foreshadowing most episodes don't bother with. Beast Man, by contrast, is barely holding his nerve. His flinch at the word "Grayskull" plays as pure comic relief, though the script never quite earns the reaction the way the original outline apparently intended, since the promised lightning strike never shows up in the finished episode.

The episode's weak stretch is Krill and Cynda themselves, who exist mainly to generate the dare and then vanish into the background once Trap Jaw strings all three kids up by a rope trap. Tager gets a name, a motive, and an apology. His two friends get a cage and a getaway. That lopsidedness is a minor sin in a show that has to wrap its lesson up on schedule, but it leaves the episode's point about peer pressure resting entirely on one kid's shoulders while the two who pressured him coast through unexamined.

Prince Adam's closing message undercuts its own point a little by framing the solution as simply not taking dares, when the episode he just finished proved the opposite: the right answer was never caution, it was choosing a worthy reason. Tager's apology already said that better than the moral that follows it.

1. Behind the scenes: Script was approved on April 13, 1984. Beast Man cowers when he hears the word 'Grayskull'. In the original script it was stated that when Skeletor uttered the word, lighting would fill the throne room. But this is not evident in the finished product, making Beast Man's reaction's quite unusual. However, the room does shake whenever Skeletor says the word, at one point knocking Beast Man off his feet. This marks the third and last time the five original Evil Warriors summoned by Skeletor in Diamond Ray of Disappearance are featured as a group. Their second group effort being in Prince Adam No More.
2. Continuity: He-Man's humorous lines about skates and a circus are used again by She-Ra during the final battle at Horror Hall in the She-Ra: Princess of Power episode Shades of Orko. The stormy background seen when Adam and Cringer approach Snake Mountin in their Wind Raider was first used in the episode Keeper of the Ancient Ruins.
3. Animation errors and goofs: At one point, Beast Man, Trap Jaw and Mer-Man end up on He-Man's shoulders. Beast Man is heard to say "Put me Down" but it is Mer-Man who's mouth moves. When He-Man is next to Trap Jaw, pursuing the villain, just behind He-Man the cells of Teela in jail are not layered correctly, the cell covering her face should be behind her. In the hangar in Snake Mountain, in one shot Cynda's bonnet is yellow while at all other times it is orange. When Teela is in the lab, in one shot the linings of her boots are red instead of the usual white.