In which there’s an unwelcome blast from the past.
Adora and co. are overjoyed to be safely back on Etheria, but – as I’m sure you can imagine – they don’t get much of a respite before it’s all danger and peril again. Finding the rebel encampment deserted, they decide to check out the nearest village, Erlandia, for clues – but on arrival, they discover that Erlandia has fallen to the Horde and is surrounded by hundreds of Hordak clones. Never ones to pass up an opportunity to make amateur errors, they all get dolled up in silly disguises and traipse into the village to be inevitably unmasked.
In utter fairness, they last longer than I expected – by which I mean, longer than 5 minutes. After that, though, the game’s up when Spinnerella arrives and immediately attacks the team. They escape pretty pronto and meet up with Netossa, who fills them in on the events that have occurred in their absence. The team then make the decision to return to Erlandia, find Spinnerella and remove her chip.
Rather to my surprise, they fail to achieve this objective, despite spending a good portion of the episode’s runtime whacking hell out of Spinnerella. Instead, Spinnerella escapes and flies off to do some mischief elsewhere, and all the inhabitants of Erlandia cheer like idiots. Our heroes then head off to the new rebel camp, where they reunite with the rest of the unchipped rebels and stand about making inspirational speeches to disguise the fact they’ve not really managed to do anything of import this week.
In today’s adventure…
In an early scene, we find Horde Prime monitoring uprisings on a fair number of Horde worlds. This is all well and good and wouldn’t really warrant a mention, if it weren’t for the fact that in the background of a shot of one such world, there’s that bloody Loo-Kee. And if that’s not bad enough, in a shop in Erlandia, there’s a scrawled drawing of Loo-Kee too! These are probably just nice little Easter eggs for Filmation fans, but frankly I’d have preferred it they hadn’t bothered, because now I’m really concerned that Loo-Kee has been present in every single episode so far and this is the first time I’ve seen him. It’s upset me so much that I have been too distracted to figure out what the moral of this week’s episode is.
Character checklist
Leading the pack this week are Adora, She-Ra, Catra, Glimmer, Bow, Entrapta, Wrong Hordak, Spinnerella, Netossa, Melog, Horde Prime, various inhabitants of Erlandia, and of course there are loads of Horde Troopers and Hordak clones (including Original Hordak, who’s still moping about that jewel which I assume has some significance). There are also brief appearances for Perfuma, Frosta, Swift Wind, Emily the bot, King Micah, the Star Sisters, and that little bastard Loo-Kee.
Insults
Horde Prime describes the First Ones as “fools”. He’s probably not wrong, tbh. I’ve kind of had enough of hearing about the First Ones. Less sympathetically, Frosta addresses Catra as “Horde scum”.
Oh No, Bow!
Bow describes himself as the team’s “resident regular guy”. I mean, if your definition of a regular guy is someone who always carries archery equipment, wears a stupid crop-top, usually runs round shrieking, is overly handsy, and generally behaves in socially unacceptable ways, then yeah. Otherwise no.
Does it have the Power?
It may be a fairly average affair plot-wise, but there’s some pretty sparky dialogue in this one, which really elevates it – I especially chuckled when Adora comments, “How are we meant to fight our own friends?” and instantly elicits a tart “Never stopped you before” from Catra. The fight sequences between Spinnerella and the rebels have a great energy: Netossa is fighting for the restoration of her wife’s soul, and we really get a sense of her anguish – and it makes Spinnerella’s taunts even more painful. It’s also a pretty good twist that the rebels don’t succeed in rescuing Spinnerella. All in all, we have here a strong contender for a good, action-packed and humorous instalment – recommended.
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