Darksmoke and Fire

Adora steps into the gateway to Eternia just as Modulok's rocket, fired on Hordak's order, hits it, and she comes out in an Eternia a thousand years before her own. As She-Ra she rescues a man named Tarbin from villagers who call him a dragon-lover, and he takes her to Granamyr in Dragon Valley, who warns her she may be stuck in the past for good. Meanwhile the wizard Nazghal, who wants the dragons' magic, burns the villagers' grain and blames the dragons so that the village will go to war. She-Ra stops the army with a chasm, and the lie collapses when Nazghal's helper Slarti lets slip that the new fireball is bigger than the one that destroyed the grain. The dragons get their magic back, Granamyr offers the villagers food, and he and She-Ra's sword open a way home. On the way she shows her face in Hordak's gateway, and Hordak and Modulok end up blaming each other.

Loo-Kee: "Hi! Loo-Kee here. Did you see me in today's story? If not, take a look now. I'm here somewhere. Here I am! In today's story, the wizard burned the villagers' grain, and made things worse when he blamed it on the innocent dragons. Don't try to pass the blame for something you've done wrong. It just makes things worse for you when the truth is found out."

Nazghal: "To make the people call me sire, bring forth now a terrible fire."

She-Ra: "Looks like your war is off."

Granamyr: "We dragons have a saying: here goes nothing!"

Slarti: "Bigger than one you used to destroy the grain!"

Who pays when the grain burns? Darksmoke and Fire is dressed as a time-travel adventure, a thousand years back to a valley with no Royal Palace in it, but the part that holds is a story about blame, and how quickly a crowd will accept a convenient culprit. The villagers are hunting a man before the wizard has done anything at all. Adora, lost and newly landed, climbs a rock face, transforms, and finds a gang chasing someone with the shout "Get the rotten dragon-lover." That man is Tarbin, and the hatred of dragons is already in place when the plot turns up to use it.

The scene that carries the idea is the burning. Nazghal, with the winged Slarti beside him, has worked out that to capture the dragons and steal their magic he needs the people at war with them, and so he stands by a barrel on a bare hillside, speaks a couplet ("bring forth now a terrible fire") and lets the harvest go up. When the villagers find their winter food gone, Nazghal is already among them with the culprit: "A dragon, to be precise." One voice in the crowd suggests talking it over, and the crowd answers that the time for talk is over. The script moves fast here.

She-Ra's first scene in the past is a small model of the same mistake. The pink dragon Bright Star thinks it is protecting Tarbin from her, she thinks she is protecting him from the dragon, and the misunderstanding is cleared up in a few lines and an embarrassed remark. Granamyr, meanwhile, has never heard of King Randor, Man-At-Arms or Orko, and tells her what has happened to her without a flourish.

The sequence that works best is the double defeat of the war. She-Ra, deciding she has to stop the army "without hurting them", puts a chasm across its path and tells the villagers their war is off. Nazghal answers with a fireball aimed at Dragon Valley, and Slarti, admiring his master's work, observes that it is "Bigger than one you used to destroy the grain!" The villagers hear it. The fraud ends because a sidekick wanted to pay a compliment.

The weakness is the thousand years. The episode sets the period up with care, the right sun, a hill that looks like Kings Hill, a palace that is not where it should be, and then uses none of it. She-Ra could be stranded in any valley with any dragons. Nothing she sees says anything about the Eternia she knows, and the way home, a joint effort by Granamyr and the sword, is found in a single scene with no trouble at all. Time travel is only a ticket here, and a writer who plants a missing palace has promised the audience something.

What the episode does instead is stay on its moral, and it stays there to the last scene. Granamyr tells the villagers that Nazghal may have started it, but their own hatred made the blame easy, and then offers them food from Dragon Valley. Back in the Fright Zone, Hordak and Modulok, who were congratulating each other on the rocket, round on each other as soon as She-Ra's face shows in the gateway. A light, quick episode, sharper than its premise, and a good one for Granamyr.

1. Continuity: Granamyr tells She-Ra she has landed in the Eternia of a thousand years before her birth, and he does not know King Randor, Man-At-Arms or Orko, the names she gives him.
2. Continuity: Modulok says She-Ra and He-Man travel to Eternia through a gateway, and Light Hope tells Adora it will appear any time now.
3. Continuity: Granamyr gives Tarbin a piece of Nazghal's crystal with some of his own power in it, so he can look in on She-Ra from time to time.