Welcome to your Friday episode rewatch! We’re coming off one of the better episodes in the series to date and with only four remaining, let’s hope we get a goodie to close out the week strong.
Let’s recap everything going on:
- King Hiss and his Snake Men are alive and well
- Skeletor just welched on his promise to serve Hordak by destroying his sanctuary so he’s unable to return to Eternia from Despondos
- Evil-Lyn is still acting as if she’s down with Skeletor after having allied herself with the Snakes and is the only one – outside of He-Man – who is aware of what Skeletor has done to Hordak
- Zodak is deep into his meditation and can’t help with anything
- The Sorceress is fucking useless and for someone with a ton of power, she’s not very effective at using it
- The Masters getting overwhelmed. They’re dealing with threats from the Snake Men as well as Skeletor and had the looming threat of Hordak over them and it’s an awful lot to take on seeing as how all these great allies King Randor has made with his council are never around to help when the battling happens
With that out of the way, we are ready to rock ‘n roll.
S02E10: Web of Evil
Original Air Date: December 20, 2003
Screen Cap Analysis: We are family! I’ve got all my Masters and me!
We open right off the bat with Webstor sneaking into Andreenos and stealing as much of their ambrosia as he can consume. He waxes poetic about how this will make him unstoppable and, right away, goes under mutations to make him a bigger, stronger, meaner spider.
Teela receives an emergency communication and sends Buzz-Off and Stratos to respond to the Mystic Mountains while she tries to contact the rest of the Masters who are tracking the Snake Men. She’s unclear as to what the real trouble is though, as she lost the signal before hearing the full transmission.
The Masters do come across Sssqueeze, Tung Lashor and Kobra Khan who are searching for fresh meat for King Hiss, but they’re unable to capture them and only barely escape with their lives as the Snakes cause a cave-in in the mine they’re fighting in. Buzz and Stratos arrive in Andreenos and find it abandoned, but they do notice spider webbing about and immediately think of Webstor.
We then move to a bar scene which is the MOTU version of the Cantina on Mos Eisley. Caligars, Andreenids and every species you can picture are sitting around and enjoying a few adult beverages as is one new entry into this series: Fisto.
If you know of Fisto, his trademark is his giant, metal right fist (…duh), but upon his introduction here, while said fist is overly large, it is not encased in metal and just a regular hand. Fisto knocks out a couple of Caligars who were giving him shit and in the aftermath, the Masters enter the pub with Man-At-Arms recognizing Fisto immediately. Apparently, they have some beef from back in the Great Unrest. Duncan calls him a deserter and are about to scuffle until He-Man puts a quick stop to it and announces to the bar to stay clear of the mines because of the Snake Men.
Buzz and Stratos finally track down all the missing Andreenids and birdpeople: all wrapped and captured in Webstor’s thick webbing. Not only that, but he’s got a huge patch of eggs he’s been marinating that are getting ready to hatch. His spider babies are sure to be hungry and he’s planning on feeding all the captured people to them.
The message goes out that the spiders are on the loose and that bar we just left starts closing its shudders. Fisto, though, steps out and heads toward the mountains to lend a hand…or fist (bah-dum tsssss). Fisto punches through a rockpile that entrapped the Masters, but has damaged himself seriously in the process. It’s then that we get the reveal that Fisto is Duncan’s brother which is something I never fucking knew.
When the Masters finally catch up to Webstor, all his spider babies have been destroyed at consumed by the Snake Men. To make matters worse, all those spiders were filled with ambrosia which will now have powering effects on the Snake Men. The Masters snake problem just got even worse.
PSA: Don’t fucks with spiders.
Final Thoughts:
I really didn’t know where this episode was going for the majority of it. It just seemed as if Webstor was feasting on the ambrosia and breeding an army of spiders so that he could be the next to take over Eternia, but then those plans are completely wiped out by the Snake Men who have been searching for food. The ambrosia and the results it will have on them is just a happy coincidence that will add to the odds that the Masters will need to overcome now.
I don’t know…did we need to add the ambrosia to make the Snakes more of a threat? This just comes across as another filler episode that becomes kind of maddening because of there only being three more episodes to go. Every time this happens, I say the same thing: it’s not a horrible episode, but how much of the story does it really advance? That holds true again here. The addition of ambrosia to the biological make-up of the Snakes may “supercharge” them, but will it be to the point that we feel the stakes are any higher for the Masters? I don’t really think so.
Writers know more than me because they know where they want the story to go and I’m just sitting here taking it in as it happens. But because I already know that there’s a finite amount of time left in the series, it’s got my antsy to see those loose ends begin to tie themselves together. Or at least see where they can be tied together. Today’s episode makes me nervous that we’re going to leave this show on a cliffhanger rather than a conclusion and that would suck.
Everybody go enjoy your weekend. I’ll be back Monday so we can polish off the final three episodes of this series. Hey, if nothing else, at least this rewatch has been time well spent amongst friends, right? Right.
Until next time.
Joe
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