Despite the backlash from fans, I liked Kevin Smith’s “Masters of the Universe: Revelation.” As someone who didn’t expect much from a He-Man series, I enjoyed its complex themes of loss, self reflection and personal growth and I appreciated how it flipped the show’s typical formula on its head. For a show about campy toys from the 1980s, it proved to be an interesting character study of the franchise’s heroes and villains and how some of them learn to break their cycles — and why some of them can’t.
“Masters of the Universe: Revolution” is a truncated five-episode sequel series that follows up on the stories of Prince Adams/He-Man (Chris Wood), Castle Grayskull sorceress Teela (Melissa Benoist), Skeletor (Mark Hamill) and Lyn (Lena Headey). The show kicks off after King Randor (Diedrich Bader) falls fatally ill and eventually passes away after a rescue mission, which forces Adam to choose between becoming king and remaining as He-Man (Randor stresses that he cannot do both).
Conveniently, Keldor (William Shatner), the once-banished and presumed dead brother of Randor, returns to Eternia and offers to take his brother’s place on the throne. After fighting off a newly technologically converted Seketor (he goes by SkeleTek), he gains the trust of Adam and is crowned king. Despite being a kindly ruler who seems to value his subjects and their strengths, it quickly becomes apparent that Keldor is not everything he seems.
Meanwhile, Teela seeks out a way to restore Preternia (this world’s Heaven), which was destroyed in the previous series by Lyn, who helps Teela as a means of penance. In the process, she becomes perhaps the most powerful sorceress Eternia has ever seen.
This show continues many of the same themes of its predecessor, and has many of its strengths, prime of all being its introspective characters. There’s also an overall theme of magic vs. technology, which series villains the Motherboard (Meg Foster), who converts Eternian subjects with Borg-like technology, and her boss, Hordak (Keith David), exemplify.
There’s also a very bad and forced love plot thread between Adam and Teela that feels like it comes out of nowhere and isn’t necessarily needed or wanted.
Skeletor almost becomes the star of this series, as *spoilers* it’s revealed that he is in fact Keldor. His memories were sealed away long ago by Hordak, making him a tragic villain — if only Smith and company decided to fully develop this.
The series is pretty good despite its rushed pacing until the last episode, where Skeletor’s tragic backstory seems like it was trimmed for time (Smith sees him double down on his bad ways and never reveals why his memory was wiped in the first place, though he did suggest that it made him disloyal to Hordak). How it subverts He-Man’s crisis of assuming the responsibility of his father is also laughably subverted in the last ten minutes, providing an inadequate resolution to his arc that might become a meme.
This really needed at least eight episodes to work for the story Smith was trying to tell. None of what the show sets out to do is bad in concept, but there was no way for those working on this show to execute it well given their limitations.
It’s a shame, because the show has top-notch voice acting and production values and there are moments where its writing is really strong. How it handled Adam reacting to the death of his father and all of the implications that came with it was done beautifully. This is an 8/10 show that is knocked down a point due to its last episode.
“Masters of the Universe: Revolution” gets a 7/10
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