The Witch and the Warrior

When the wizard Kothos launches another assault on the Fountain of Life in the desert city of Aridan, its guardian Mallek calls the Royal Palace for help. Prince Adam becomes He-Man and sets out with Teela, while across Eternia, Skeletor sends Evil-Lyn and Clawful to steal the fountain's water for himself.

The two sides collide at the temple: He-Man fights off a sand demon conjured by Kothos while Clawful drags him into an underground cavern, and Evil-Lyn and Teela end up trapped together when Kothos rips the temple itself from its foundations. Before Evil-Lyn can finish the fight, Kothos steals her powers with a magic gem and strands both women deep in the desert, leaving them to die.

With no way home except each other, Teela and Evil-Lyn call an uneasy truce, Teela showing Evil-Lyn how to find water, Evil-Lyn showing Teela how to avoid the desert's predators. Meanwhile, He-Man defeats Clawful and regroups with Man-At-Arms, Orko, and Battle Cat to track down Kothos's stronghold. The two pairs converge there: Evil-Lyn recovers her stolen gem, turns one of Kothos's own spells back on him, and transforms him into a sand slug, just as He-Man and the others arrive to clear out his guards.

Hurt in the final collapse of the temple, Evil-Lyn is healed with water from the very fountain she came to steal. Rather than try again, she flies off alone, leaving Teela with a grudging farewell and the rest of the group to wonder if that was as close to gratitude as she gets.

Teela: "I've been in a number of difficult situations, but none of them were tougher than trying to get along with Evil-Lyn. And yet, I found that if you make the best of a bad situation, you can come out a winner. So when things go wrong, instead of feeling sorry for yourself, try to work it out with a smile. You might surprise yourself when you see how well it works. Until next time..."

John Erwin as He-Man/Prince Adam and Kothos

Alan Oppenheimer as Skeletor, Man-At-Arms and Battle Cat/Cringer

Linda Gary as Teela and Evil-Lyn

Lou Scheimer (credited as Erik Gunden) as Orko, Clawful, Mallek, Orc guard and Aridan guard

Evil-Lyn, leaving Teela and He-Man without a fight: "I've had enough of fountains and you to last a lifetime. If this temple interests Skeletor so much, he can just come and get it himself! Farewell, partner. Our truce is over!"

"The Witch and the Warrior" opens like any other episode built around the Fountain of Life, a maguffin defended by one wizard and coveted by another, with He-Man dispatched to referee. But the episode spends its real attention somewhere else entirely: stranded together in the desert after Kothos double-crosses them both, Teela and Evil-Lyn have to get each other home alive, and the hour belongs to them.

That's the spine, and Paul Dini's script states it almost as plainly as the closing moral does: adversity makes for strange and useful partners. Nothing about the premise is subtle. Kothos steals Evil-Lyn's power, strips her and Teela of any reason to keep fighting each other, and drops them in a landscape built out of things that can kill them, sand devils, sunstroke, each other's tempers. What keeps the stretch from reading as filler is how specifically it argues the point rather than just asserting it. Teela knows where desert plants store water; Evil-Lyn knows the local wildlife well enough to read a pack of scavengers from a distance, a line she delivers with just enough smugness that Teela's "takes one to know one" lands as the episode's best joke. Each woman is handed one skill the other lacks, and the fountain-protecting plot evaporates in favor of two specialists learning to trust a colleague they would normally be trying to kill.

Marsh Lamore's direction backs the writing up visually, in the episode's single best choice: Evil-Lyn takes off her helmet. It happens once, with no dialogue to flag it as significant. It is the only time in the entire Filmation run that she appears without the helmet, her hair a pale, almost colorless white rather than the black it implies. There is no reaction shot from Teela to underline it. It's simply there, a small concession to vulnerability dropped into a scene about a canteen, and it does more to sell the truce than anything either character says.

The episode is less interested in Kothos himself, and that's the real weakness. He gets a motive, greed dressed up as desperation, and a handful of scenes posturing at Aridan and at his own stronghold, but he never earns the menace the plot assigns him. His punishment, turned into a drooling sand slug by his own stolen spell, plays as a punchline rather than a comeuppance, funny mostly because Evil-Lyn gets to deliver the last word over him. Clawful fares a little better, if only because his fight with He-Man in the underground cavern gives the episode its one real physical set piece, He-Man wrapping him in a stone slab and launching him home like a parcel. But the two halves of the episode, He-Man against Clawful and Teela against the desert, barely touch. They resolve in parallel rather than together, and nothing in Mallek's temple or Skeletor's throne room carries any real weight next to two rivals finding water in a cactus.

None of that undercuts what the episode actually does: it gives Evil-Lyn more interiority in twenty-two minutes than she gets across most of the series. Her parting line to He-Man, equal parts gratitude and threat, and her sign-off to Teela as "partner" are the kind of character beats the show usually reserves for its heroes. Teela's own closing message makes the lesson explicit, that you can come out a winner if you make the best of a bad situation, but by then "The Witch and the Warrior" has already shown its work. The moral is one of the rare times all season the show earns its own ending instead of just stating it, and after watching Evil-Lyn get there the hard way, we believe it!

1. Behind the scenes: Script was approved May 26, 1983 and final script revision took place June 3, 1983. Paul Dini's script described Kothos as the 'Eternian equivalent of Sydney Greenstreet.'
2. Continuity: The exterior shot of Aridan was briefly seen as the village of Calash in House of Shokoti Part 1. The background plates used for Kothos' Stronghold were originally used as Queen Elmora's throne room in She-Demon of Phantos and were seen again in The Once and Future Duke as the interior of Count Marzo's castle. The character model for the Sand Devil is reused as the Scarg in Trouble in Trolla and again as a worm-like creature that grabs Hordak in the She-Ra: Princess of Power episode titled Into the Dark Dimension. The Sand Demon that attacks He-Man was previously seen in Temple of the Sun and also appeared as Rabar of the Rock Men in Quest for the Sword as well as several identical rock men in Into the Abyss
3. More continuity: This is the first and only time in the Filmation series that Evil-Lynn takes off her helmet, revealing her short white hair. However, writer Paul Dini actually suggested in his script that it it should be short black hair. The background for the night time campfire scene was first used in House of Shokoti Part 1 for the shot in which the Lizard Man recognizes Lord Masque. Notices that the glowing section of sand where the campfire will be placed was already visible in the earlier story. This is the second time Teela is seen without her tiara. The first was in Eternal Darkness. When Kothos returns in Revenge is Never Sweet, his costume and skin color have completely changed.
4. Animation errors and goofs: He-Man appears to transform Cringer into Battle Cat right in front of Mallek the Wizard, thereby revealing their secret identities. Evil-Lyn grabs Kothos' crystal with her left hand, but in the next shot is holding it up in her right.