Magicats

Prince Orwoll meets Adora to hand over supplies for the Rebellion, and Catra's Horde ambush interrupts them. As She-Ra she wrecks the robots, but Catra pins her with a device from Hordak, and a trapdoor drops She-Ra into a maze, where Catra lands too. Catra reaches the hidden cat city of Half Moon first, where the Magicats take her red mask for their missing queen's and she passes their test with the command "Freeze fire!". She freezes She-Ra and keeps her prisoner, but Sir Tao comes round to the prisoner's side when Hordak calls Catra's communicator, and She-Ra exposes the impostor at the coronation. The Magicats wipe Catra's memory and send her back to the Fright Zone. She-Ra then uses the communicator and an illusion of Hordak to bring out the real queen, and the grateful Magicats make Orwoll's wagons invisible to the Horde.

Loo-Kee: "Hi! It's your friend Loo-Kee again. Did you find where I was hiding today? If not, look for me now. See me now? Here I am! You know, you live on a beautiful planet, and you can help keep it that way. One thing you can do is not litter. Don't throw papers and cans and bottles on the ground. If you see a friend at school or play being a litterbug, ask them not to. Please help keep your world beautiful. Don't be a litterbug. Bye!"

Catra: "Oh, it did? Oh, of course it did."

She-Ra: "Why don't you tell them she's a Horde prisoner?"

Catra: "Who would've thought that losing to She-Ra would've been my lucky day?"

Mantenna: "Catra, where did you come from?"

Why would a whole city of cats hand its throne to a woman in a mask? Magicats keeps the answer simple: they want their queen back so much that the evidence only has to be passable. The episode opens elsewhere, with Prince Orwoll slipping supplies to Adora in tiny wagons because the Horde watches his kingdom, and the mask arrives with the plot. It is Catra's mask, a present from Hordak, and when she drops into the underground city of Half Moon and overhears two cats chatting about the hope that "our beloved queen will return", she takes it for a good place to slip through unnoticed.

The scene that carries the idea is the test. Minister Cloudfoot is careful ("we must be certain"), and asks the masked visitor to use the queen's secret command. Catra tells herself she has to show these fools, says it will work, and then says "Freeze fire!" and it works. Her reaction is the best joke of the half hour: "Oh, it did? Oh, of course it did." The logic of the test is poor, since the Magicats conclude that "Only the queen's mask would respond to that command", which proves the mask and not the wearer. They are not weighing evidence. They are relieved.

She-Ra's half of the story is slower, and she is kept out of the room for most of it. Catra uses the same command on her in the city, and she spends the middle of the episode held captive, explaining to Sir Tao that his queen is one of Hordak's force captains. The case she makes is a good one, and the writing lets it fail for a believable reason: Sir Tao says she attacked their queen, and that he cannot believe her. His answer to her closing argument is "I will think it over". It takes Hordak himself, calling Catra on the communicator to demand where she has been, to settle the matter.

The best sequence is the end, because it answers the beginning. She-Ra uses Catra's dropped communicator and the Magicats' gift for illusion to make Pursival look like Hordak, so that two troopers deliver their caged prisoner into the woods without a thought (one of them says they are not supposed to think). The caged cat turns out to be the real queen. Then comes the supply problem from the first scene: wagons too easy for the Horde to spot are made invisible, and the Horde cannot stop what it cannot see. A plot that starts with a shortage and finishes with the shortage solved is tidy.

The weakness is how Catra is disposed of. The Magicats make sure the Horde will never hear of this, and the means is a wiping of her memory, after which she turns up in the Fright Zone beside Mantenna and, asked where she came from, cannot say. The gag is neat. But nothing earlier hints that the Magicats can take a memory away, and it lets a villain who nearly won a kingdom walk home with nothing lost and nothing learned.

For all that, Magicats gives Catra the mask, the throne and the best joke. It trades She-Ra's usual strength for a patient argument.

1. Continuity: She-Ra tells Sir Tao that she once worked for Hordak under a spell, which looks back to her time in the Horde in Into Etheria.
2. Continuity: Catra says Hordak gave her the mask, and She-Ra says Hordak once told her he took it from a captured large cat who was then sent to a Horde slave camp. Hordak calls Catra back on her communicator and expects her within the hour.
3. Continuity: Mantenna is the one Catra lands beside in the Fright Zone wreckage, and in Flowers for Hordak, the next episode in broadcast order, Hordak sends him for a bath.