Horde Prime Takes a Holiday

Horde Prime leaves Hordak in charge of his flagship, the Velvet Glove, for a two-week vacation on Tropica and warns him not to touch it, and Hordak at once plans to use it to crush the Rebellion and then conquer Eternia. The Sorceress sends He-Man to Etheria to join She-Ra, and Skeletor, who hears Hordak's boast, decides to steal the ship himself. Hordak aims the freeze cannon at the Whispering Woods, She-Ra turns her sword into a shield to block the beam, and He-Man arrives to push beside her until Skeletor switches the beam off from aboard. Skeletor stuns Hordak and takes the controls, and He-Man hooks the ship with the Sorceress's grappling line while She-Ra climbs it; she then cuts the line so the ship hits an asteroid. She carries the stunned Hordak out of the exploding wreck and brings him down on a parachute made from her sword, while Skeletor escapes to Eternia. Hordak vanishes, and the heroes listen as Horde Prime asks him about his flagship, before He-Man, She-Ra and Orko close with a message to children about their bodies.

He-Man, She-Ra and Orko: "She-Ra and I want to talk to you about something that's very personal: your body. Remember, it's your body, and no one should touch you in a way that you feel is wrong. I'll get anybody who tries it. It's not that easy, Orko. It's hard for a young person to admit that he or she has been touched in a bad way. If you've been touched that way, don't be ashamed. Tell someone you trust, like your parents, your doctor, your teacher, or counselor, or your minister or rabbi. Right, Orko? Right on!"

Horde Prime: "If I find so much as a scratch on it, you'll be sorry... very, very sorry."

Hordak: "Please, Slime...uh, Prime, it will be safe in my hands."

Skeletor: "The Rebellion means nothing to me, Hordak. And I help no one but myself."

What does a man do with the one thing he has been told not to touch? Horde Prime Takes a Holiday builds its whole plot on the answer. Horde Prime leaves Hordak in charge of the Velvet Glove for a two-week break on Tropica, admits he is taking a great risk, and says, "You had better not even touch it." Hordak agrees with every word and, as soon as the owner has gone, tells Mantenna, "What he doesn't know won't hurt him." His plan is to use the ship on She-Ra and the Rebellion first and then warp it to Eternia.

Hordak is not the only one reaching. Skeletor hears the plan and resolves to steal the ship, and the Sorceress sends He-Man to Etheria because it will take the combined power of She-Ra and He-Man to stop Hordak. The Velvet Glove itself is a fine piece of design, a skull-prowed flagship with a curved tusk, and it looks like the most dangerous thing in the galaxy whenever it drifts across the stars.

Here is what the episode is about: Hordak is told not to touch the ship, and the story is the bill for ignoring that. Everything that goes wrong for the Velvet Glove goes wrong because he used it. The freeze cannon he aims at the Whispering Woods draws She-Ra, who turns her sword into a shield to block the beam, and then He-Man, who comes to push beside her. Skeletor's theft is a cheaper copy of Hordak's, and the heroes' part is mostly to make sure neither thief keeps the prize. Even the rescue underlines the point. She-Ra carries the stunned Hordak out of the exploding wreck and down to Etheria, Hordak vanishes the moment he is called a prisoner, and She-Ra tells her brother to let him go, since Horde Prime will do more to him than they could.

The grappling line sequence is the best of it. He-Man's tool is a present from the Sorceress, unbreakable and of unlimited length, and the only question is whether even he can throw it into space; he says there is one way to find out. The hook clanks onto the Velvet Glove, Skeletor stuns Hordak, and She-Ra climbs the line while He-Man holds it steady. Her sword is a toolkit throughout: sword to shield, sword to helmet when the air thins, helmet to sword, shield to parachute on the way down. When she judges that her brother cannot hold the ship much longer, she picks out an asteroid, turns the helmet back into a sword, and the line snaps as the Velvet Glove goes in. He-Man lands in a canyon under a pile of rope and reads the break right: "She-Ra must have cut it."

The weak point is that the heroes' two big set pieces are really one scene. In the first, She-Ra and He-Man strain beneath a shield while Hordak keeps telling Multi-Bot to give it more power; in the second, He-Man strains on the rope while Skeletor says he will just increase the power. Both have a hero close to breaking, both have a villain turning a dial, and the first ends when Skeletor switches off the beam while the second ends when She-Ra cuts the line. The idea that brains beat the most powerful ship in the galaxy is the right one, but the build is the same twice.

The payoff belongs to the villains. Horde Prime comes back rested, asks after his flagship and gets a stammer, and at a banquet table the heroes listen, hear banging and a scream, and laugh. How they can hear it is never explained, and the joke is a little cruel, but it is the right place to end, with Hordak paying for the thing he was told not to touch. Then He-Man, She-Ra and Orko give a plain, serious address to children about their bodies, and the episode gives it no joke to compete with. As a Horde caper it is lean: the ship is the star, Hordak is the fool, and Skeletor is the second thief who never gets to keep it.

1. Continuity: Horde Prime says he once had two flagships and would still have both "if you hadn't...", and Hordak cuts in before the sentence is finished.
2. Continuity: Mantenna is back, now at the controls with Multi-Bot, the day after losing his voice in A Loss for Words, where Hordak mentions Skeletor by name.
3. Continuity: He-Man reaches Etheria through a portal the Sorceress opens, and She-Ra calls him brother.
4. Continuity: She-Ra's sword changes on command into a shield, a helmet and a parachute, each announced aloud as she does it.