So, let’s talk about that Masters of the Universe: Revelation. I’ve steered clear of it so far because there has been what is becoming standard issue polarization around the subject. On one side are hard-core purists who hate it. On the other side are people who adore it. Unfortunately, those battle lines also seem to “shockingly” correspond with two all-too-familiar demographics of the speculative fiction community. The hard-core haters either are or are being painted as the same misogynistic d-bags who drove the Gamergate controversy. The adoring fans are or are being painted as the progressive wing of the community.
There is an element of truth to those characterizations. It is, however, a pretty incomplete picture of the reactions to Masters of the Universe. If you consider the basic distribution on a bell curve, those two camps make up the most vocal 5% of the community. Everyone else is somewhere inside that middle 95%. So, yes, it’s possible to dislike Masters of the Universe and not be a misogynistic, repressive douche who thinks that anything with a female lead is crap. I know, because I’m one of them. I intensely disliked Masters of the Universe and it had nothing to do with He-Man not being in the lead for most of the first five episodes. It had a lot to do with the stupidity of how they wrote Teela in the first episode.
One of the major plot points of the first episodes is Teela’s promotion to Man-at-Arms. In the context of the He-Man universe, she’s being promoted into an officer’s rank in their standing army. Her father gives this little monologue about how proud he is of her and how she’s become this master strategist and warrior. All of that implies that before that promotion, Teela was essentially a foot soldier. Maybe she was some kind of non-commissioned officer like a sergeant, but a foot soldier, nonetheless.
Then, there is Prince Adam, the sometimes hero known as He-Man. You could argue that He-Man’s actual identity is probably the single greatest military and national secret in all of the lands. There are also very good reasons to keep that secret as tightly held as possible. While He-Man might prove all but unassailable, Prince Adam is far more vulnerable. Just as importantly, he likely spends far more time as the vulnerable Prince Adam while he eats, sleeps, attends state functions, and interacts with citizens. Adam’s safety is precarious at the best of times.
By keeping the circle of people in the know very small, Adam has deployed a basic operational security measure called compartmentalization. That information was kept to the people who, in the INFOSEC parlance, had a “need to know.” If there’s anything that soldiers understand, it’s that not all information is available to all parties. They’re trained on information security. They get the importance of “need to know.” You can’t disclose to the enemy -- a terrifying, skull-headed death mage, in this case -- what you don’t know.
That brings us back to Teela, the professional soldier, the supposed master strategist. What happens when she finds out that Adam is also He-Man? She loses her shit because the people around her were “lying.” Despite the fact that she’d been a foot soldier up until literally that day, she apparently believed that she had a right to the biggest military secret in the land. A piece of information so personally dangerous to Adam that he’d issued royal commands that the information not be revealed. Information that was so dangerous that Adam kept it from his own father, someone who arguably did have both the right and need to know. Then, she rage-quits from the army.
A real master strategist and professional soldier would have grasped how desperately vulnerable Prince Adam was whenever he was out of his He-Man persona. They would have grasped why that information was held back from a foot soldier. They would have understood the absolutely critical need for compartmentalization and information security around this topic. They wouldn’t have to necessarily like it, but they would get it. This wasn’t some secret that Adam was keeping about a crush or a surprise party. This was information that could easily cost him his life. Plain and simple, Teela didn’t need to know. If she was half as competent as her father thought she was, she would have accepted it.
Instead, she whined and quit her job. It made her look entitled, petulant, and stupid. To put it in context, it’d be like a corporal screaming at a general for not sharing details about a classified mission that launched from the base the corporal happened to be stationed at. After seeing that, I didn’t really care what Teela did next. Why? The odds were good that if they wrote her that way in the first episode, we could expect more of the same in the episodes that followed. Big shocker, that’s exactly what we got. That certainly isn’t the only problem with the episodes to date, but it is an example of the kind of terrible writing that marked the show.
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Eric Dontigney is the author of the highly regarded novel, THE MIDNIGHT GROUND, as well as the Samuel Branch urban fantasy series and the short story collection, Contingency Jones: The Complete Season One. Raised in Western New York, he currently resides near Dayton, OH. You can find him haunting obscure sections of libraries, in Chinese restaurants or occasionally online at ericdontigney.com.
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