Master Sebrian

Richard Merwin's "The Test of Time" opens with Sebrian out of breath. "Mara, please slow down. I'm not as young as I used to be," he says, and when she reminds him that he once told her age is all in the mind, he agrees: "Quite true, Mara. Except when it's my mind." A radiation storm has knocked out the anti-gravity system holding up the floating city of Levitan, the city is sinking, and the beryllium ore that would save it has been hijacked by the Mutants, who set its trader adrift.

He-Man brings the trader in, and he turns out to be Treylus, who went to school with Sebrian and greets him with "Sebrian, you old bookworm!" Treylus is everything the scholar is not, a spacefaring adventurer who puts his own youth down to hard work, hard play and all the adventure he can find, and when the rescue plan is made he takes the astrosub to the Mutant base on Denebria himself. Sebrian says he will stay behind with the scientists. Treylus agrees that a man his age should not risk getting hurt, and Sebrian, alone with Mara, decides that he will just have to teach Treylus a lesson.

So he stows away. Halfway to Denebria a startled Treylus asks what he is doing there, and Sebrian answers, "I'm beginning to wonder myself." Inside the Mutant base it is the scholar's trick that saves them. Flogg's side orders its fighters to stop the escaping cargo ship, and Sebrian, at a synthesizer, sends out an order of his own to cease firing and return to base, so that the Mutant leaders end up arguing over who said what. "A simple synthesizer adjustment," he explains, and then, a moment later, "It was nothing a younger man couldn't have done. Almost as well."

By the closing scene the change has run slightly too far: Sebrian invites himself along on the Guardians' next patrol, and one of them decides he prefers the old Master Sebrian. It is a small, warm story, and it gives Antony Holland more to do than usual.^[3]

Clipped from our own copy of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, Council of Clones (The New Adventures of He-Man, 1990), 19:28 to 21:12, 1 minute 44 seconds. Nothing is added and nothing is sped up. Copyright Mattel.

Sebrian's instinct, as a leader, is to trust people, and the series tests it more than once. In Jack Olesker's "The Gift," Flogg calls the Inner Council to talk about ending the war and offers a peace gift, the furry Zeps. Some voices on the council want nothing to do with it; Sebrian argues that the two sides must try to trust each other or there can be no peace, and it is hard to say he is wrong, but within days the Zeps are everywhere on Primus and then turn into Anadroids. By the end he is handing He-Man the key to the shield and sending him into the wilderness with Mara.

"Council of Clones" plays the same note harder. The council is exhausted after days of attacks on one sector, Skeletor lets the Primans capture a supercomputer, and He-Man warns that anything from Skeletor can bring nothing but evil. Sebrian takes it anyway: "It's a chance we'll have to take," and, of the machine's clone program, "Trust me, it's perfectly safe." The cloned council strengthens the shield and then brings it down. He-Man's warning comes true, but so was the exhaustion that pushed Sebrian into the gamble, and the episode ends with him in bed, ordered to rest.^[4]

When he is cornered, the same steadiness is a weapon. In "Skeletor's Victory" he is the Mutants' prisoner, and when Skeletor moves to smash the Vasionic Resonator, Sebrian stops him with one piece of information: the machine was built from unstable material, and wrecking it would set off a chain reaction across half the galaxy. In "The Battle for Levitan" it is Sebrian who tells Adam to accept Skeletor's demand and surrender, because every Mutant in one place is an opening Primus can use.