I LOVE this episode for what it is - fun, goofy MOTU adventure. I can overlook its (many) flaws because at the end of the day it’s Adam/Cringer then He-Man/Battlecat in an adventure in Snake Mountain that turns into a rescue mission against Skeletor and the “original 5” Evil Warriors. To me you can’t top the excitement/fun of peak MOTU when He-Man and Battlecat are chasing Trap-Jaw to free the captives while the He-Man theme plays.

But boy oh boy, this thing is filled with some head scratchers: the Beastman/Grayskull thing, the intercom in Snake Mountain, Skeletor telling Beastman he wants to take Teela himself then sends Evil-Lyn to do it, and of course as you mentioned the plot revolves around going into the enemies home to straight up steal. Feels like if the roles were reversed the heroes would probably act equally defensive. That said, I can personally forgive it because this episode always makes me smile.

Meh episode

Considering this episode is about dares, I'm betting if it was made like 15 years later, there would've been a Christmas Story reference after that movie started it's cable TV cult following.

A good portion of the worst episodes in my opinion have these prominent one-off kid characters. I get it. They want the target audience to relate and see themselves reflected in these roles. A lot of shows do this and kid audience surrogate characters can be done well (Orko, most Transformers human protags, etc.) but whenever the writing requires a human kid the audience and sometimes characters haven't met it most of the time fumbles the bag.

But to be fair most of these episodes I'm watching for the first time.

Spoiler alert: we haven't got to it in the Watch-A-Thon, but one exception to what I just said is the episode where He-Man takes a blind fan on an adventure. Love that one. It was sweet.

It was a good choice to make Adam a youthful teen in both 200x and Netflix 2021 and have a Shazam thing going with He-Man. I think it should be a standard of all new kid targeted MOTU media in the future (Nothing like Revelation or the new movie, just stuff like the two examples I just gave). It can be executed well. He-Man having the types of powers of Superman and Adam having a semi-Peter Parker like personality.

Kids would rather see themselves as the hero rather than the sidekick let's be real

@battlecat327 I always wanted to know why Snake Mountain shook at the mention of Castle Grayskull but I never could figure it out. I once looked at James Eatock's book for the answer but it seemed like he didn't pay attention to the scene. All he saw was Beast Man being afraid of the words Castle Grayskull and missed that the entire room was shaking and Skeletor reacted to it too.

This episode is fun. 7/10.

3 stars. Fun to see the original council of evil back, but it's a very paint by numbers episode.