Unexpected Ally

Hordak doubles the taxes, and General Sunder arrests Loden and Elsa when Loden fights the Troopers who come for the farm, while their daughter Mally is shut in a separate wagon with an unlocked door. She reaches the rebel camp, where Adora recognises Sunder as a Horde officer she once respected and doubts that the open door was an accident. She-Ra and Glimmer draw off the Troopers while Bow and Mally free the prisoners, but Sunder captures Bow, trades him for She-Ra's surrender, and keeps his word by releasing him. Hordak cannot understand keeping a promise to a rebel, and he has She-Ra taken to a cell, where Sunder asks what drives the rebels and decides to unlock her chains. The rebels fight their way out of the Fright Zone with Sunder, who breaks his leg, and She-Ra drives off Hordak's charge. Sunder takes off his helmet and joins the Rebellion.

Loo-Kee: "Hi, here's Loo-Kee again. Did you find where I was hiding? If not, here's another chance. Find me? Here I am! See? One more chance and you found me. Have you ever said it's too late to change bad habits or mistakes you've made? Remember, it's never too late to make a change for the better. There's always one last chance. Bye, now."

Hordak: "Of course not! Promises were made to be broken!"

General Sunder: "Of course. Let him go. I always keep my word."

She-Ra: "It is, Sunder. It's as precious as life itself."

She-Ra: "I'm offering you the chance to fight for something, not against something."

What do you do with a decent man who works for an indecent master? Unexpected Ally is built on General Sunder, and its whole case is that his decency was never the Horde's to spend: he keeps his word, he does not like what the taxes do, and the episode sets about proving that a soldier like that is more dangerous to Hordak than any rebel.

The opening is a farm family losing everything. Loden has paid half of what he owed and is told Hordak doubled the taxes that morning, so the Troopers will take the farm instead. Loden swings a club at them, Sunder arrives, and the family is loaded onto a prison wagon with their daughter Mally put in a separate one. The oddest detail comes afterwards: Mally later says "he just forgot to lock the door." Adora, who was once a Horde Force Captain, answers that the general does not make mistakes, and the episode leaves that remark hanging until the end.

What the story is really about is that Sunder's honour is already working against Hordak before She-Ra says a word to him, and she only gives it somewhere to go. The scene that proves it is the surrender. Sunder takes Bow, offers to trade him for She-Ra, and then actually frees him, which Hordak cannot understand. "Promises were made to be broken!" is Hordak's idea of an answer. Moments later Sunder tells him the taxes are unreasonable, someone quips that so is Hordak, and Hordak notes that the general is not laughing. Sunder's reply, "then why don't you try it?", is the best exchange in the episode, because it shows a man who is not rebelling and is simply no longer afraid.

The cell scene does the converting. Sunder asks what gives the rebels their courage, She-Ra says their cause is an honest one, and he admits he has never known freedom. When he asks a Trooper why it fights for the Horde, the robot's answer is that it follows orders and likes bullying people, and Sunder says "Wrong answer" before the robot ends up on the floor. That is a neat bit of staging, since the Trooper gives Hordak's case in its worst form and loses to it. She-Ra's plea to join them is not subtle, but it is aimed at a man who has already shown a flicker of doubt, so it lands.

The weakness is that door. Someone asks whether Sunder let Mally go on purpose and Adora says she does not know, Sunder watches the rebels approach and says he has another plan, and then the episode never tells us what he meant. If he wanted to be followed, the open door was bait; if he wanted her free, he had half chosen a side before the cell. Either answer would have made the later scene richer, and the script takes neither. A small price, since the surrender and the cell scene are both strong.

The ending is warm, with Sunder bandaged, helmetless and admitting he is starting to like freedom, and Loo-Kee's closing line about last chances is exactly what the plot has been about. Sunder changes sides here for a reason the story has shown us.

1. Continuity: Adora says she was once a Horde Force Captain, and that Sunder once stood up to Hordak on her behalf.
2. Continuity: The Horde's tax collecting, here doubled by Hordak and enforced against a farm family, is the same pressure that Leech's patrol puts on Petro's farm in The Wizard, broadcast the day before.
3. Continuity: Catra, Grizzlor and Imp are in the Fright Zone throne room as She-Ra is brought in chained.