Evil-Lyn

Evil-Lyn occupies a position no other Evil Warrior does. Beast Man is muscle, Trap Jaw is hardware, Mer-Man commands the sea. Evil-Lyn is the only one who could plausibly do Skeletor's job, and every era of Masters of the Universe has understood that about her, even when it did not know what else to do with her.

The Filmation series established the pattern. She is a recurring presence across the 1983 to 1985 run, voiced by Linda Gary, and the show repeatedly puts her in situations where she withholds help from Skeletor, pursues an agenda he does not know about, or manipulates his other lieutenants for ends of her own. "Evil-Lyn's Plot" in the first season is the clearest example, an entire episode built around her going around Skeletor rather than through him: she disguises herself as an innocent girl to trick the Widgets out of a supply of Coridite. She is not a henchman having a bad day. She is a rival operating inside the organization.

What Filmation never did was explain her. She arrives fully formed, with no origin and no surname, and the series is content to leave her that way.

Clipped from our own copy of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, The Cosmic Comet (1983), 1:26 to 2:20, 54 seconds. Nothing is added and nothing is sped up. Copyright Mattel.

Mattel filled that gap in 2010, and the filling is substantial. The Masters of the Universe Classics cardback gives her a real name, a birthplace and a motive, and almost everything written about her since traces back to it: "Real Name: Evelyn Morgan Powers. Raised alone by her father in the ruins of Zalesia, Evelyn left her home in a fit of teenage rebellion." The rest of the card has her take the name Evil-Lyn and travel Eternia learning magic and the dark arts from its great masters, meet and fall in love with an ambitious alchemist named Keldor and join his cause, then begin scheming against him after Keldor was transformed into Skeletor and lost all emotional attachment to her. It closes by saying that in "a series of miscalculations" she helped release both King Hssss and Hordak from their inter-dimensional prisons.

Three things in that account reframe the character completely. The first is that she loved Keldor. Not Skeletor: Keldor, the man before the transformation. Her hostility is not ordinary villain treachery, it is what happened after the person she chose stopped being able to feel anything for her. The second is Zalesia. Placing her childhood in ruins, raised by a father, with a departure framed as teenage rebellion, gives her something almost no other Evil Warrior has: a life before the villainy that is nobody's fault but her own. The third is the admission of failure. Mattel wrote its most competent villain a backstory in which her signature achievement is releasing two enemies far worse than her employer.

That third point comes with a caveat. Four different Classics cards give four different accounts of who freed Hordak. Evil-Lyn's claims it for her. The others disagree: Hordak's own card credits Keldor, the Filmation Hordak card credits Shadow Weaver's Laser Gate portal, and She-Ra's card says he found his own way out. Mattel was writing these bios across a decade of releases and did not keep a continuity bible, so the question stays open.

A smaller detail collectors ask about: the card spells the Snake Men leader "King Hssss", with four s. Other cards in the same line spell it "Hisss". Mattel was inconsistent with its own character, and both spellings are official.

Evil-Lyn has had two live-action turns. Meg Foster plays her in Cannon Films' 1987 "Masters of the Universe," Skeletor's steel-eyed second in command leading the hunt for the Cosmic Key on Earth. Alison Brie plays her in the 2026 film, which closes on her: the movie runs three post-credits scenes, Orko's, then She-Ra and Adora's, then Brie's Evil-Lyn walking away with Skeletor's skull once the credits finish. A number of outlets wrongly credited the role to Kristen Wiig, who plays Roboto.

Between those two films, the 2021 Netflix series Masters of the Universe: Revelation did the thing the property had been circling for forty years and made Evil-Lyn the main antagonist. Lena Headey voices her, and the second half of the run belongs to her almost entirely. She briefly attains godhood by taking the Power of Grayskull, and the story then undoes her with it.

Structurally this is the most ambitious thing anyone has done with a Masters of the Universe character on screen. It is also the thing that made her the center of the follow-up: Revolution brings her back as a figure who might be recoverable rather than a plain villain, which is only possible because Revelation put her somewhere that far out. The through line back to the Classics card is exact. A woman who was told her whole existence that she was second, taking the top job by force and finding it does not fit, is that bio played out at full length.