Wild Child

Bow's prizewinning vegetables wither, the camp guards report white ghosts in Whispering Woods, and a locket bearing the crest of the Green Island Kingdom turns up. Madame Razz flies off to learn whose it is and returns with the story of Princess Allegra, lost in a sailboat storm five years ago. Mermista's sea creatures show the princess with a pack of White Fangs, and Allegra, now grown up among them, comes forward to say the animals are not killing the forest. The rebel woodsmen refuse to believe it and corner her White Fang sister Ayla, until the ground starts to steam. She-Ra heals Ayla, finds lava tunnels running under the woods from the volcano Mount Kandeela, and cools them by opening a cave into the volcano and letting in the sea. Allegra's father arrives, she chooses to go home with him, and she says good-bye to Ayla.

Loo-Kee: "Hi! I'm Loo-Kee! Did you find me in today's adventure? If not, look for me now. Here I am! Today, I'd like to talk to you about good health, or to be exact, vegetables. When you eat your vegetables, you get minerals and nutrients that help your body grow healthy and strong. And without a strong and healthy body, it's hard to do the fun things you like to do. So don't forget to eat your vegetables."

Kowl: "I haven't been near your prize losers."

Madame Razz's Broom: "No more Mr. Nice Broom."

Allegra: "Not exactly. I'm no ghost."

She-Ra: "Some ghosts. They don't even know how to say thank you."

Who gets the blame when the plants start dying? Wild Child answers before it has any evidence: whoever looks strangest. The episode opens with Bow accusing Kowl of messing up his prizewinning vegetables, and Adora settles that quarrel by pointing out that "Kowl could never wilt leaves like this." The garden, the brown undergrowth near the camp and the dying trees the woodsmen cut for lumber all have a single cause, and everybody shouting about it is looking in the wrong direction. The writing keeps the culprit underground for nearly the whole running time.

The ghost story carries the idea. Two guards on night watch see white shapes among the trunks and argue themselves in and out of believing it. A locket turns up during the search and sends the plot to the Green Island Kingdom, and the trip is mostly an excuse for Madame Razz and her broom to bicker about whether the islands lie in the north or the south, crash into a tree, and announce that from now on the broom does the navigating. It is the slowest stretch. Razz does come back with the facts about Princess Allegra, who was seven when her boat went down in a storm.

Mermista's sea creatures supply the picture: a small sailboat in rough water, a wreck on rocks, then three White Fangs in a clearing. Allegra's own entrance is just as clean. She turns up right after Adora has named her the white ghost, to say she is "no ghost" and that the Fangs only want to live in peace. The woodsmen are not villains. They supply lumber to the rebels, they watch their trees die, and they see a pack of animals, so they blame the animals. Adora admits it "doesn't seem possible" and still has to deal with the fact that they are convinced.

The camp children get the same reflex at a smaller size. Allegra arrives barefoot and wild-haired, and the camp children mock her hair, her table manners and whether she runs on two feet or four. Her answer is a footrace, and outrunning them ends the mockery in a few seconds. The adults are harder to move. In the gully, three woodsmen with clubs close in on Ayla, Allegra tells them to leave her alone, and the ground starts to steam under all of them. She-Ra turns up to deal with it.

Her fix is the best part. She cannot talk to the animals at first, because "Their anger is blocking me," and she can only help once Ayla is hurt, when she heals her. Then she finds the lava tunnels from Mount Kandeela and decides that "We've got to flood the tunnels." The sword becomes a rope, Swift Wind pulls, and the cave into the volcano opens. She-Ra and Swift Wind make waves to drive the sea in, and the tunnels cool. Few She-Ra climaxes are solved by plumbing.

The weak point is Allegra's choice. She has lived among the White Fangs for five years, she has a sister there, and in the last two minutes she decides to leave, in a halting speech, and the answer she gets is "I've always needed you." The farewell to Ayla, spoken in a language of her own, lands, but the decision behind it needed a scene of its own, and the rescue had used up the time.

Hordak is only named in the opening narration, and no Horde soldier appears at all. It is a gentle ecology fable, and Loo-Kee closes it by talking about eating vegetables, a neat echo of Bow's ruined garden at the start.

1. Continuity: The rebel camp's woods are the Whispering Woods, the same setting as The Peril of Whispering Woods. Someone here notes that no one from the Green Islands has ever visited them.
2. Continuity: She-Ra turns the Sword of Protection into a rope twice (Sword to rope!), where Enemy with My Face has her call out "Sword to lasso!" for the same transformation.
3. Continuity: Mermista greets Adora with "It's been a long time, hasn't it?" and Adora answers "Too long." Mermista consults her sea creatures' memories to show the storm that wrecked Allegra's boat.
4. Continuity: The opening narration names Madame Razz and Kowl among the few who share Adora's secret, and both are in this episode: Kowl in the garden quarrel, Razz on her flight to the Green Islands.