Wizard of Stone Mountain

A lovelorn wizard named Mallek makes a pact with an evil demon called Lokus to win the heart of Teela, but soon finds himself controlled by the demon. Teela tells viewers they may get away with a bad deed for a while, but it will eventually be punished.

Teela: "In today's adventure, Mallek thought he could do whatever he wanted. But instead he found that when you do something wrong, you may get away with it for a while, but sooner or later you have to answer for it. Fortunately for him, Mallek had friends who cared about him and came to his rescue. All of us make mistakes, but doing something wrong, when you know it's wrong, really doesn't make sense. Sooner or later it catches up to you. Until next time, bye."

John Erwin as He-Man/Prince Adam, Ram Man and the Spirit of Evil

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

Linda Gary as Teela and Karyn

Lou Scheimer (credited as Erik Gunden) as Orko and Mallek

"I am the master of fear and destroyer of hope. The enemy of mankind throughout the universe. Mortal, I am Evil itself."

― Spirit of Evil

Mallek never actually wants Teela. He wants the version of her that lives in his crystal ball, the one who never joined the royal guard and never told him no, and "Wizard of Stone Mountain" spends its twenty-two minutes watching that distinction cost him everything he does have. Janis Diamond and Paul Dini's script is a bargain-with-a-demon story in the oldest sense, but the demon here barely has to lie. Lokus doesn't promise Mallek false power; he promises him the one thing magic was never going to deliver, and Mallek signs anyway.

The episode is smartest about what it withholds. We never see Mallek actually court Teela, because he can't: the closest he gets is a crystal-ball vision and, later, an illusion he conjures for himself, flowers and a cherub with a harp included, built entirely out of his own head. Real affection is standing in the room the whole time in the shape of Karyn, his apprentice, who checks on him when something crashes and gets told to leave. The gap between the two women does the show's work for it. Teela is a fantasy Mallek has never had to risk rejection from twice; Karyn is a person he keeps failing to notice is choosing him.

Lokus himself is a nicely economical villain for a story this short. He doesn't threaten Mallek so much as remind him, pleasantly, that the bargain was his idea: "it's all part of the bargain, Mallek, the bargain you agreed to." That's the version of the devil's-deal plot that actually lands, because it never asks the audience to believe Mallek was tricked. He knew. He just didn't think through what "anything" meant until the crops were underwater and a messenger spirit was informing him who was in charge now.

Where the episode runs out of room is the back half, which has to do a lot of plotting in not much time: Karyn gets snatched and bottled by a flying creature, He-Man and company chase her across half the kingdom, and by the time everyone converges back on the tower, Lokus has grown into a wall of fire and the actual reckoning with Mallek gets compressed into a handful of lines. The spectacle holds up, the demon's animators were clearly having fun with those flame cycles, but Mallek's own choice to turn on Lokus happens almost off to the side of it, when it's the one beat the whole episode has been building toward. A story this interested in a man choosing the real woman over the imagined one owes that choice a clearer moment than it gets.

Still, the moral that closes the show says something true for once. Teela's closing message isn't really about Mallek breaking a rule; it's about him getting away with something right up until the people who actually cared about him had to clean it up. That's a truer note than "crime doesn't pay," and it's the one the episode has actually spent its runtime demonstrating. Karyn doesn't get a line in the epilogue to spell out what she's owed, but the animation gives her the reunion anyway, and Mallek looks more surprised by it than relieved.

"Wizard of Stone Mountain" isn't one of the show's more ambitious outings, and nobody's claiming Mallek as a top-tier one-off villain. But as a small, mean little fable about wanting the wrong thing on purpose, it does more with its demon-messenger premise than the format usually allows, and it has the good sense to let its quietest character be the one who was right the whole time.

1. Behind the scenes: Script was approved on April 11, 1983 and final script revision was finished on April 13, 1983. The first draft of this story was titled "Wizard of Stone" and centered on a wizard named Kaliga who was in love with Queen Marlena rather than Teela. The Spirit of Evil was originally far less comical and triangular looking. Instead, it's design resembled a shadowy horned demon with an iridescent glow.
2. Continuity: The character model for Karyn is a recolored and reused Oona from Masks of Power. Lokus's character model was reused as Slotty in the She-Ra: Princess of Power episode Darksmoke and Fire. A recolored version of Mallek's character model appears as a villager in One for All and yet another version is seen in the She-Ra: Princess of Power episode Duel at Devlan. The flooding of the crops sequence would be seen again in Evilseed and Game Plan
3. More continuity: Teela's shocked expression when a disguised Lokus tells her about Mallek was first used in Diamond Ray of Disappearance as she confronted Trap Jaw. He-Man's dive into the water would be used again in The Remedy. Mallek returns in The Witch and the Warrior.
4. A Paul Dini script using the sealed-prisoner-asks-for-help premise. The script's resolution gives the wizard a sympathetic but ambiguous resolution rather than a clean Skeletor-style defeat.