I was pleasantly surprised how much I enjoyed the first batch of five episodes for the new, more adult-oriented Masters of the Universe. Focused as it was on a world where eternal enemies He-Man and Skeletor were both more or less absent from the scene, the show was able to shine the spotlight on the supporting characters and give depth to characters that, considering they were originally in an 80s kids cartoon designed to sell toys, they probably never really had before. I know I was a fan as a kid, but I would be the first to admit those characters really weren’t that deep. Kevin Smith, big time geek that he is, put a lot of work into making these characters more well-rounded and interesting while still making something that could probably be just fine at least for older kids.
I consider myself a big time geek, so that’s a compliment in my mind. And now, Netflix has dropped the back half. Will it be as fun as part one?
Part One ended in a rather ominous way. Prince Adam (voice of Chris Wood) was back from the dead and calling down the power of Greyskull when all of a sudden, Skeletor (Mark Hamill) himself revived from the not-quite-dead to stab the prince in the back, claim the Sword of Power, and call down the Power of Greyskull himself, all to the horror of Teela (Sarah Michelle Gellar), Man-at-Arms (Liam Cunningham), Andra (Tiffany Smith), Cringer (Stephen Root), and the Sorceress (Susan Eisenberg). Evil-Lynn (Lena Headey), who had been helping the heroes with Beast Man (Kevin Michael Richardson) as her bodyguard, quickly went back to her old boss, but it turns out Adam isn’t quite dead, and while two of Adam’s companions will sacrifice themselves in different ways to stop allow Adam and the others to escape, the real problem for Skeletor isn’t the heroes, but the fact that, deep down, he’s just a petty, self-important man of limited vision, and Eviul-Lynn is finally having enough of that.
The series also cast Beast Man in a Lady Macbeth type of role, which by itself is rather interesting.
The series from here does offer a few more twists to the He-Man mythos, mostly by expanding ideas that the old cartoon show did play with once in a great while, and in other ways by looking at concepts like where exactly Adam’s power came from. If the first part was about what the likes of Teela and Evil-Lynn would do without the likes of He-Man and Skeletor hanging around all the time, this one is more about what it means to be a hero, whether it’s Adam or He-Man that is the true champion (an idea that Part 1 played with too) as well as leading Teela and Evil-Lynn to come to their own respective destinies. And, like the previous part, the series does jump into giving other characters a deeper look. In this case, that would be Adam’s parents Randor (Diedrich Bader) and Marlena (Alicia Silverstone), showing their respective reactions to the loss and return of their son and how Marlena, but not Randor, was apparently aware Adam was He-Man all along.
As it is, I think I had more fun with Part One. To be sure, the things I liked in the first part are still more or less true, and while I finished part one convinced Teela was going to succeed Adam as Champion of Greyskull (that obvious didn’t happen) and the series is still unafraid to kill characters off, with a lot of recognizable character and genre actors in various voice roles, it wasn’t quite as fun as the first. Perhaps I preferred seeing He-Man and Skeletor as more or less background characters, and putting them back front and center wasn’t what I was looking for. The deeper character work wasn’t quite around like it used to be, favoring more action scenes. True, there was plenty of action before, but it just felt different this time. However, the last episode does end with a cliffhanger for a potential season two, and given how many angry Masters of the Universe fans there were after Part One…I am really hoping for more anyway.
That said, if you are going to cast Danny Trejo as Ram-Man, there better be more with that guy.
Grade: B-
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