The Power of Grayskull

At a palace party for Teela's elevation to Man-At-Arms, Adam slips away while Skeletor tries to fool the Sorceress at Castle Grayskull with disguises. Skeletor, Evil-Lyn and the forces of Snake Mountain attack; Adam becomes He-Man and, with Teela, goes after Skeletor into the Heart of the Castle. Skeletor goads He-Man into using the Power Sword as the key to the Hall of Wisdom, then cracks the Orb of the Elders, threatening existence itself. The Sorceress freezes time, and He-Man chooses to absorb the blast through the sword. Afterwards Man-At-Arms tells King Randor that He-Man has died, and that He-Man was Adam. Randor banishes him; Teela rages at the lies and leaves the palace.

Orko: "This cat is scared and thinks there's trouble, so keep him safe inside a bubble!"

Prince Adam: "That attack is called a hug, Teela."

Evil-Lyn: "Sorry, Sorceress, I'm not Clawful, but I can be awful!"

Sorceress: "Because you're not the Lord of Destruction. You're nothing but the Lord of Failure."

Skeletor: "This castle is merely a shell! The pearl I seek is trapped inside!"

He-Man: "If I don't do this, everybody dies!"

King Randor: "I strip you of your title and banish you from the palace forever!"

Teela: "I am done looking out for the people who never told me the truth!"

The Power of Grayskull opens as though it were the next episode of the old cartoon: narration about the center of the universe, Skeletor ruling Snake Mountain, and Prince Adam defending Castle Grayskull as He-Man. The familiar format holds through the party sequence. Fireworks go off over the palace; Orko answers Cringer's panic with a rhyme that seals the cat in a soundproof bubble where, as Orko admits, he cannot breathe; and Teela is celebrated for her knighthood as Man-At-Arms. Everything is warm, a little silly and very safe.

Teela is where the episode turns. She tells Adam, "I know everything there is to know about battle," and a moment later a voice adds, "I'm pretty sure you still don't know who he really is." The episode is about what a secret costs the people it was meant to protect, and the people who pay are the ones closest to him: Duncan, Randor and Teela. Duncan's defence to a king who has just lost a son is "the Prince ordered us to keep his secret"; it is a reasonable answer, and the palace stops trusting him anyway.

The craft serves that turn well. The writing plants its setup in the party scenes, so that Teela's boast about the palace and Grayskull and Adam's easy deflections come back as accusations in the throne room, and Skeletor's vow to tear Grayskull down "stone by stone" explains why he attacks the castle in force. The art direction gives each place its own look: the firework-lit palace terrace, the skull-lined hall where Faker holds blue chains, the golden ring mechanism over thorny vines deep inside the castle, and the cosmic light that fills the frame when He-Man grips the sword in both hands. Moss Man's stand in the garden ends almost as soon as it starts, when Skeletor sneers "You first, Moss Man."

The standout is Teela in the throne room. She builds her speech as a list: "Enough of your secrets and lies!" then magic, monsters, the palace, Grayskull, until she says she is done looking out for the people who never told her the truth. It is the hardest scene in the episode because everyone in the room is half right. Just before it, the Sorceress holds time back while she explains that the Sword of Power could absorb the blast, but only in He-Man's hands, and that it will kill him.

The weakness is the Hall of Wisdom. At the moment the fight should be at its fastest, the script stops for a speech explaining that the Council of Elders gathered the knowledge of the universe into an Orb and hid it behind the illusion of Castle Grayskull [1]. The reason is plain: a single episode has to establish what is at stake before it can threaten it, and the sword has just become a key. Even so, the lore arrives as a lecture over a duel, and the tension drains out of it until the speech ends.

The ending follows through on the setup. He-Man takes the blast, Duncan reports that he has "succumbed", Randor banishes the Man-At-Arms on pain of execution, and Teela leaves the palace with "He-Man is gone. Skeletor is gone." Nothing is undone by the end [2]. This is the right way to open the series: it gives us a comfortable first act so the ending costs something.

[1] Once Skeletor cracks the Orb, the Sorceress says it has released "the very magical power that created Eternia", and the rest of the episode is spent holding that back. [2] The opening narration says "Only four others share this secret", yet Teela insists "Everybody I ever trusted since I was a child knew Adam was He-Man!" The king and queen plainly did not.

1. The MOTU wiki notes that the opening narration is illustrated with art from the original toys and the Masters of the Universe Classics line, and that its exploding-rocks background comes from the original figure's packaging.
2. The MOTU wiki says the opening narration reuses lines from the 1987 film and the Filmation series, and calls Skeletor a demon, echoing his early minicomic backstory rather than the later Keldor origin as Randor's brother.
3. The MOTU wiki points out that Marlena's description of Teela as a Warrior Goddess comes from the packaging text of the 1982 Teela figure.
4. The MOTU wiki notes that Skeletor uses the Shaping Staff, a device introduced in a Filmation episode, to disguise Faker, Night Stalker, Evil-Lyn and himself.
5. The MOTU wiki says Skeletor's final-battle line echoes the one Frank Langella delivered to Dolph Lundgren's He-Man in the 1987 live-action film.
6. The MOTU wiki says Skeletor's remark that Moss Man smells like pine nods to the pine scent of the 1985 Moss Man figure.
7. The Outer Haven's review observes that Alan Oppenheimer, who voices Moss Man, was the only original 1983 voice actor to return, and Animation Magazine's cast list identifies him as the original Skeletor.
8. Wikipedia reports that Kevin Smith described the series as set up as if it were the next episode of the original series while staying accessible to newcomers.