Evil Seed (200x)

Len Uhley's "Orko's Garden," which aired on March 15, 2003, reaches him through Orko. Left off the palace duty roster, Orko talks Man-At-Arms into handing him the royal gardens, drowns them with a rain spell, and goes into the Evergreen Forest to find Mossman, who is said to be able to make anything grow. The creature he meets there only growls at him until he mentions that he lives at King Randor's palace. Asked whether he is Mossman, it answers, "Who else would I be?" and gives him a stock of special seeds. Orko has never met Mossman, so a shaggy green shape with red eyes passes well enough; the thorned, crested body underneath does not show itself until the root cavern.

Filmation's version needed a hooded peddler and a miracle fertilizer; this one does his own selling, under a borrowed name. Orko plants the seeds, decides they are duds and walks away, while red thorn vines tunnel under the palace and carry off the King, the Queen and most of the Masters. When the real Mossman turns up he sets Orko straight: "No, you met Evil Seed. Enemy to everything that's healthy and balanced in nature."

In the root cavern Evil Seed explains himself, and his reason is what sets him apart from the Filmation original, who wanted Eternia for its own sake: "You humans have gorged yourselves upon plant life for eons. But no more! Time to even the score." Orko tries to frighten him with talk of the magic inside Castle Grayskull and gets "You don't say" for his trouble. Evil Seed rides a vine beast across the desert toward the castle and raises a many-headed hydra of thorns against He-Man, Battle Cat and Mossman. The art direction keeps the two sides apart by color: his vines are red and thorned, Mossman's are green, so even the race of vine beasts is easy to follow. His speechifying, in Don Brown's voice,^[2] draws He-Man's dry "Does he always talk like this?" The end comes after someone calls for "a little water" and Orko supplies it with the same rain spell that drowned the garden; Evil Seed is told he is going back to the Root Cellar "for a long time."

He does not stay there. Dean Stefan's two-part "The Council of Evil," first shown on 4 and October 11, 2003 at the end of the first season, opens with Skeletor's warriors behind the bars of Man-At-Arms' new prison and the Masters sent home on leave. Skeletor has already gathered new allies, and as the Masters are picked off in small groups Evil Seed's cackle is heard over the trap. In the closing minutes of Part 1 he sits with the rest of the council in Skeletor's red-lit cavern, clawed hands folded.

Part 2 gives him the ambush. He-Man rides out to rescue the captured Masters, follows a cry for help onto a volcanic plain and ends up pinned under black thorn vines while Evil Seed boasts of human muscle against the power of the vine. The vines hold He-Man so tightly that the only way out is to stop being He-Man: the Sorceress suggests that Prince Adam might be of some help, and he changes back with "Let the power return." The next episode, "The Last Stand," looks back on the scheme in Skeletor's own words.^[3]

No later series has brought him back: Revelation and Revolution both leave him out.

The 2002 design reached plastic on August 17, 2015, as a seven-inch Masters of the Universe Classics figure sold through Mattel's Club 200x subscription, and that figure is long retired. The cowled Filmation Evilseed has had figures of its own, from Mattel's Club Grayskull and from Super7, and they belong to the Evilseed entry.