This is probably the most surreal He-Man episode I've ever taken it upon myself to review. Not only is the story typically incoherent (some nonsense about Skeletor sucking Castle Grayskull into a white hole which...well, I'll get to it), the dialogue is full of hilarious pseudo-scientific gobbledygook, He-Man solves virtually every problem he encounters in some incredibly crazy way, and I wouldn't be surprised if you told me that the visuals that appear in the latter half of the episode were inspired by a bad acid trip. Weird! (The second most surreal episode I've yet reviewed, in case you're wondering, is probably Reign of the Monster, which features a race of spaceship-operating cave-dwellers and a screaming, flailing, centaur-like beast that shoots beams out of its eyes. Compared to that, The Starchild, A Beastly Sideshow, Colossor Awakes, and the rest are all pretty tame).





We begin at the palace, where we find Orko in his room, talking to himself in front of a mirror. We learn that it's his birthday, and that he's quite excited about it (Orko, it should be kept in mind, is a vaguely childlike creature, despite having a girlfriend and occasionally significant magical powers, as seen in the Tar Swamp episode). Unfortunately, no one else around the palace seems to have remembered, and the hints he keeps dropping about it being a "very nice day" aren't picked up by anyone (Teela responds "Yeah, it's a nice day -- nothing special, though," and King Randor just wanders off). So he decides to go to the kitchen to see if the palace chef is preparing a birthday cake for him.

The palace chef -- Chef Allen, he's called -- turns out to be a lumpy, double-chinned fellow who won't let him into the kitchen (it's obvious, of course, that Chef Allen is hiding a cake, and that everyone in the palace is simply pretending to have forgotten Orko's birthday in anticipation of some huge surprise party, but he doesn't get it). The chef shoos him away, then reenters the kitchen, where we find Adam and Teela and Cringer chuckling over their little deception. Their party-planning is quickly interrupted, however, by Man-At-Arms, who waltzes in and starts yammering about some unspecified "trouble in the province of Basilia." The group -- sans Chef Allen, of course, who remains behind, obliviously stirring something in a pot -- immediately sets out for the province. (Incidentally, I loved this "Chef Allen" character -- pudgy dudes with ordinary names and an ordinary jobs are pretty rare on this show. Too bad they never made an action figure out of this guy). Oh, and Man-At-Arms offers up a snort-worthy line in this scene: "I'll contact Ram-Man. He may be of help." Ha! Well, it would be the first time.





Adam and Cringer surreptiously transform into He-Man and Battlecat respectively, while Teela and Ram-Man (accompanied by a crowd of soldiers) fly off in hovercars or some damn thing. They all reach Basilia in about ten seconds (it never seems to take these folks very long to get from one region to another -- evidently Eternia is a very small kingdom/planet). The province, we discover, is indeed beset by trouble: earthquakes are dislodging huge round Raiders of the Lost Ark-style boulders all over the place, and a big whirlwind is zooming around wrecking things. Teela saves an embracing couple from a rampaging boulder by shooting it with the cannon built into her hovercar (the cannon shoots a beam that makes the boulder simply vanish into nothing -- wow, high-tech), but is stymied by the whirlwind. Fortunately for the province, He-Man shows up to deal with it in a really ridiculous way: he takes his sword and kind of...how do I describe this...okay, he kind of spins it around, which somehow gathers the whirlwind around his body, which he then takes and throws it into space (seriously: they actually include a shot of the whirlwind leaving the planet). Way to go, He-Man!

It's not over yet for our hero, though: one of the boulders is headed his way. He reaches for his sword (which he had replaced in its scabbard), only to find that the weapon has suddenly and mysteriously vanished. "Use your sword, He-Man," Ram-Man suggests in his stupid duh-I'm-a-moron voice (he suggests this despite the fact that, from his vantage point behind He-Man, he ought to be able to see perfectly well that the sword is no longer in its scabbard, which He-Man wears on his back). What a great help Ram-Man has been so far! Anyway, He-Man explains that his sword is gone, but everything turns out all right anyway -- the boulder simply disappears before it reaches our musclebound friend. Confused, the group heads back to Man-At-Arms's workshop to try to make sense of things.

There, they discuss the possibility that Skeletor is screwing with them. Orko, who had earlier gone to Castle Grayskull seeking the Sorceress (everyone having apparently forgotten his birthday, he felt a bit dejected, and wanted to chat with her) returns and informs the group that Castle Grayskull itself has gone missing. Yikes! Naturally, our heroes head out to investigate this claim.





As it turns out, Orko was right: Castle Grayskull has disappeared and been replaced by a huge glowing white orb. Man-At-Arms, the brains of the outfit, is quick to realize what they're looking at: the orb, he tells them, is in fact a rare white hole -- "like a black hole, only it's not as dense!" Some extremely strange speculation follows: "I suspect he [Skeletor] utilized the Council of Evil after he located a dying neutron star!" To which He-Man, catching on, replies: "And was able to direct it over the castle to use the tremendous suction force from the nova to pull the castle with the Sorceress into another dimension!" This, I'm afraid, was a bit over my head, but I'm sure Man-At-Arms and He-Man know what they're talking about. They probably both have PhD's in this stuff. (Okay, okay: needless to say, the idea that Skeletor and company actually placed a neutron star on the surface of a planet is beyond ridiculous. Also, I can't resist pointing out that neutron stars don't die -- like all compact objects, they last more or less forever, or at least until the end of the universe).

In any case, He-Man decides that the best way to get Grayskull back is to jump into the white hole and look around for it. So he does. A moment later, Teela winds up inadvertently falling into the hole as well. (She screams "I'm falling!" as she descends. I wonder: has anyone in the whole history of falling ever actually felt compelled to yell something like that on the way down? I know it would never occur to me, upon taking a tumble off a ladder or something, to point out something so obvious).

Anyway, the inside of the white hole is, as per cartoon tradition, a terribly weird alternate dimension, where trees grow down and waterfalls fall up and all sorts of bizarre colored things float around in the air (surreality, as I mentioned). He-Man and Teela quickly meet up and work their way past a series of boring obstacles: a bottomless pit (which Battlecat merely jumps over), some kind of dragon-like, tentacled creature (no match, obviously, for He-Man), and some other crap I can't remember (I was getting pretty bored by this point: almost fourteen minutes in and still no sign of Skeletor).

Meanwhile, back in the real world, Man-At-Arms -- worried about Teela -- inexplicably starts to cry out of one eye.





Finally, He-Man and Teela and Battlecat find Castle Grayskull. Inside they find Skeletor (yes!) sitting on a throne, the Sorceress chained up at his side. He gloats when our heroes threaten him: "Now we're playing in my dimension, and I make all the rules!" So saying, he blasts He-Man with a "stun ray" from his ram's head staff. Uhh, okay. Considering he can (and does) do that pretty often in the real world, I'm not sure what the big advantage is. Anyway, Skeletor begins to laugh manaically at the fun he's having (blasting He-Man around being one of his favorite things to do in the whole world). He-Man, however, is unperturbed. His sword -- you'll recall it vanished early on in the episode -- suddenly reappears, having been somehow recreated by the "good of Castle Grayskull." Now properly equipped, he calls Skeletor a "loser" and, acting on the telepathic advice of the Sorceress, draws his adversary in front of a mirror (she says she'll be able to "use her powers in reverse" if he can get him in front of this mirror). Immediately, a yellow fog emerges from the mirror to envelop Skeletor. I guess this means that in the real world, she has the power to free people from violet fog by drawing it into her mirror. No wonder Skeletor's so nuts about trying to learn the secrets of Grayskull.

With Skeletor captured, all that remains now is to somehow get the castle back into the real world. How does He-Man accomplish this? Well...he picks it up and throws it. Yeah. He gets underneath it, lifts up the whole castle, and tosses it into the sky. And while it's flying away, he produces a grappling hook from somewhere, lobs it at the airborne castle, and rides it out of the white hole.





Everyone arrives safely back in Eternia. Skeletor somehow manages to escape (the good guys don't bother to chase him, which, as usual, struck me as pretty irresponsible -- despite the fact that he's powerful enough to move neutron stars around, He-Man and his pals seem incapable of regarding him as anything more than a nuisance), the castle's restored, blah blah blah. Back at the palace, Orko -- still under the impression that everyone's forgotten his birthday -- conjures up a huge meal for himself, leaving him too sick to eat his birthday cake at his surprise party later. The end.

The good? Well, Chef Allen, and the scientific-sounding gibberish about the neutron star, and He-Man's preposterous solutions to the dilemmas he faces are all entertaining. The thing with Orko's birthday never really goes anywhere, though, and the story as a whole is actually kind of a bore (and it doesn't help that Skeletor, who is probably the show's most entertaining character, makes his appearance so late). It's not terrible, and the surreal stuff is fun, but you won't really missing anything if you decide to sit this one out.

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