She-Ra and the Princesses of Power Rewatch 2.3, "Signals"

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Hints of a far wider world emerge as Hordak comes further forward in the series.

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2.3, "Signals"

Written by Noelle Stevenson and Katherine Nolfi
Directed by Lianne Hughes

Synopsis

Is lime green ever a good color to glow?
Image taken from the episode, used for commentary.

Hordak works on a strange project in his laboratories in the Fright Zone. It fails, to his annoyance.

Glimmer, Adora, and Bow proceed through the Whispering Woods as they confer about Entrapta. Bow tinkers as he walks, explicating the peril of their circumstances. Swift Wind joins them, announcing their approach to their destination. Glimmer reinforces the need to reestablish contact with an outlying outpost, Alwyn. The approach leaves Adora uneasy, however.

Entrapta continues work, finding problems with her workspace and making to solve them. Catra calls on Hordak. He is displeased with her interruption and her lack of progress, and he voices that displeasure emphatically. But he also offers her a chance to redeem herself.

Nope, not scared at all.
Image taken from the episode, used for commentary.

Swift Wind notes strangeness as the group approached Alwyn, which they find deserted. There is no sign of struggle, and scans taken are inconclusive. Glimmer reports stories of the area being haunted, which puts the group on edge--the more so when Adora contributes similar information.

Catra ponders Horde logistics, aided somewhat ineptly by Scorpia. The demands of managing the forces tell on her, not aided by Entrapta's interruption as she looks for a tool she needs--ranging to Hordak's laboratories, over Catra's objections.

Glimmer, Bow, Adora, and Swift Wind investigate Alwyn, finding no people but signs of sudden departure. Further searching finds more of the same, and tension mounts. They also find a standing obelisk.

Entratpa enters Hordak's lab as another experiment fails. She takes the tool, and she works on Hordak's materials. He is initially displeased, but after seeing the results of her work, he changes his opinion of her. He also lays out his plan to open a portal to other worlds.

Catra calls on Shadow Weaver for information. The latter takes the chance to pry at Catra's insecurities. Catra also notes the disappearance of Entrapta. Following her, she arrives at Hordak's laboratory; he repudiates her, commending Entrapta. The rebuke stings.

It's one way to test a theory.
Image taken from the episode, used for commentary.

Meanwhile, apparitions begin to appear in view of Glimmer, Bow, Adora, and Swift Wind. Adora investigates, finding little, but Bow begins to piece together the mystery of the place; it is an active, if defective, transmitter, and the apparitions are holograms. He enlists Adora to translate and deactivate the facility. With some sorrow, she does, but matters return to normal--with the exception of a single message Bow picks up and puzzles over.

Elsewhere, something else awaits...

Not ominous at all.
Image taken from the episode, used for commentary.

Discussion

The Exeter Book poem "The Ruin" comes to mind as a particularly apt point of reference for the present episode. The poem, easily accessible in edited early English and modern English translations, describes a city as enta geweorc or "the work of giants," fallen into disrepair and neglect. It is an old place, formerly splendid, but now decrepit due to the work of wind and weather and unkind hands--and even the poem itself exists in fragmented fashion, words and lines and letters burnt and branded away. For an episode that focuses in large part on degraded messages recorded long ago and never transmitted by equipment that has long since fallen into quiescent disrepair, the text makes an eerie parallel, and I have to wonder if the writers had the poem in mind, somehow, when they drafted the episode.

Related, at least tangentially, is the idea hinted at in the episode that Etheria is a backwater, disconnected from a vibrant celestial life outside. The "work of giants" in "The Ruin" is, at times, asserted to be a Roman ruin, likely in Bath, England--and the British Isles were something of a backwater to the Western Roman Empire, not removed from it entirely but effectively abandoned by the receding Empire in the decades before the city, Rome, was sacked. Given the admittedly muddled but certainly present Arthurian overtones of the series and the linkage between Arthuriana and the years between the withdrawal of Rome from the British Isles and the beginnings of the English, as such...the idea seems to push itself forward a bit.