The Shadow of Skeletor

When a backstage mishap convinces Ram-Man that Man-E-Faces has turned into a genuine monster, the resulting brawl wrecks a royal rehearsal and leaves the two Heroic Warriors refusing to speak to each other. The rift is still raw when a damaged Doom Buster nearly crashes into the palace; Adam becomes He-Man to steer it clear, and the heroes find Beast Man aboard, awaiting orders from Skeletor. Man-E-Faces poses as the captured villain to answer Skeletor's call and learn what Snake Mountain is planning next, keeping up the disguise even as his feud with Ram-Man festers.

The ship carries the heroes to Eternia's Dark Moon, where King Barbo is threatening to tear up his colony's decades-old peace treaty with the Bright Moon, blaming his neighbors for a string of disasters that were actually Skeletor's doing. Professor Orion shows the heroes the solar mirror his people have spent years building to warm the Dark Moon, and the heroes realize stopping that project is the real reason Skeletor wants the two moons at war. While Man-E-Faces keeps his cover among Skeletor's warriors on the Dark Moon, the real Beast Man breaks free of the royal prison and warns his master, and Skeletor strikes down Man-E-Faces the moment his disguise is discovered. Ram-Man, who has not stopped caring about his friend despite their quarrel, rushes to his defense, and Adam transforms to help them both.

With Skeletor racing to turn his captured photon cannon on the Bright Moon itself, He-Man catches up in time to destroy the weapon before it can do any damage. Barbo and Orion renew their treaty once the sabotage comes to light, and Man-E-Faces and Ram-Man patch up their own falling-out alongside it.

Man-E-Faces: "Today, you saw what happened when Ram Man and I got into an argument. It almost ruined our friendship." Ram-Man: "I'm sure happy we're pals again." Man-E-Faces: "When people lose their temper, they often say things they later regret. So, if you get angry, be careful you don't say something you really don't mean. Something you'll be sorry about later." Ram-Man: "I'm glad we made up. Because now we're better friends than ever. Right, Man-E?" Man-E-Faces: "Right, Rammy!"

John Erwin as He-Man/Prince Adam, Beast Man, Ram-Man, Whiplash and King Barbo

Alan Oppenheimer as Skeletor, Man-At-Arms, Cringer, Mer-Man and Professor Orion

Linda Gary as Teela and Evil-Lyn/"peasant girl"

Lou Scheimer (credited as Erik Gunden) as Orko, Trap Jaw and Man-E-Faces

"You two are all wet."

- He-Man

Rowby Goren's script for "The Shadow of Skeletor" runs two arguments side by side, and the smaller one is the real subject. Man-E-Faces and Ram-Man fall out over a stage accident in the first five minutes: Ram-Man mistakes a monster-face rehearsal for a real attack, wrecks the scenery, and the two stop speaking. Twenty minutes later, King Barbo is tearing up a peace treaty and threatening war over tidal waves and wrecked bridges that Skeletor's agents caused and blamed on the Bright Moon colony. Put the two plots together and they make the same point: an accusation nobody checks turns into a grudge nobody can walk back, whether the stakes are a ruined backstage or an entire moon.

Goren earns that parallel instead of just stating it. The only character who moves between both stories is Man-E-Faces, and the device that resolves them is the same one that started the trouble: an actor's disguise. Impersonating Beast Man to spy on Skeletor's operation is the plan that gets Barbo his proof, and it works because Man-E-Faces is good at the same skill that got him in trouble with Ram-Man in the first place. The writers hand him that redemption without much subtlety, but they make him pay for it first: Beast Man escapes his cell specifically to blow the disguise, and Skeletor strikes Man-E-Faces down the moment the ruse is caught.

Steve Clark's direction gets real mileage out of an episode that stays heavy on dialogue and light on action until the final third. The Bright Moon colony's solar mirror, two years in the building according to Professor Orion, gives the plot a stake beyond the usual Skeletor scheme. He is not trying to conquer anything here; he is trying to aim a weapon at infrastructure the Dark Moon needs in order to survive, a colder plan than this show usually bothers with. The episode is stronger for not softening it with a monster-of-the-week. The fight that finally breaks out, He-Man against Mer-Man and Whiplash on the Dark Moon's rocks while Skeletor and Trap-Jaw peel off for the cannon, lands because everything before it has been two sides refusing to listen to each other rather than two armies squaring off.

The episode's best scene belongs to Beast Man rather than He-Man. Locked in a cell with nothing but his power to call wild animals, he talks himself through the problem out loud, works out that the bars are wired to the colony's power, and solves his own escape on screen instead of offstage. It is a rare moment of real competence for a character this show mostly treats as muscle, and it pays off at the worst possible moment for Man-E-Faces, when his warning finally reaches Skeletor.

The weak stretch is the middle act, where the plot has to keep manufacturing reasons for Adam to almost-transform in front of Teela without ever actually doing it. The photon cannon swinging away from the Attak Trak is a reprieve the script needs but has not earned, and the episode leans on a version of that same dodge twice. Ram-Man's "duh" dialogue wears thin faster here, too, in an episode that mostly uses him for the joke rather than for anything else.

Where the episode lands is in letting its small story resolve the big one. Man-E-Faces and Ram-Man make up over a boulder, not a summit; Barbo and Orion sign their treaty because two friends worked out how to forgive each other first. The closing moral is about losing your temper, which sounds slight next to a near-war between moons, until the whole episode turns out to have been proving they are the same mistake at two different sizes.

cereal:geek's commentary on The Shadow of Skeletor, with behind-the-scenes detail on how the episode was made.

1. Behind the scenes: The original script only featured one moon. Arthur Nadel suggested to add a second moon, urging writer Rowby Goren developed the war between the two moons. During early stages of production, the Doom Buster vehicle was called the 'Thruster Buster'. King Randor's appearance during the signing of the treaty at the end of the story was not storyboarded.
2. Continuity: Professor Orion's character model was used earlier as Prime Minister Pangas in Song of Celice. The character model for King Barbo was recolored and reused as King Tamusk in The Time Wheel. The animated sequence of Whiplash turning and snapping his tail was first used in Betrayal of Stratos. The animation of Beast Man's pterodactyl was previously used in Like Father, Like Daughter, although the creature had a different color scheme in both appearances.
3. More continuity: The animation of Orko clapping his hands (with his ears missing) was first used in the episode Daimar the Demon and was also seen in The Search and Return of the Gryphon.
4. Animation errors and goofs: In Eternal Darkness and in Jacob and the Widgets, Eternia has only one moon. But in this story, Into the Abyss and the She-Ra: Princess of Power episode He Ain't Heavy there are more than one. When Man-E-Faces, disguised as Beast Man, meets with the Evil Warriors, Trap Jaw's mechanical arm is on the wrong side (his left) in both his close up and in the extreme wide shot, then switches to the right side (his right) for one close-up and back to the left for another wide shot. Orko is missing his ears when he claps his hands after Prince Adam's first transformation in to He-Man. King Barbo gives Prince Adam twenty-four hours to prove Bright Moon's innocence before the ninety-year-old treaty is void for good; the deadline never gets mentioned again once the Evil Warriors are caught, but it is the clock the back half of the episode is quietly running against.