Eye of the Beholder is the second episode in the first season of the 1983 Marvel Productions Ltd., D&D Enterprises and TSR nonlinear animated series, Dungeons & Dragons.
Short Summary: The children come across a knight, Sir John, who helps them when they are being chased by a giant scorpion. When Dungeon Master sends them to battle a beholder in a distant valley the children decide the knight is the perfect person to accompany them. The only problem is that Sir John is in reality an utter coward.
Complete Summary: Warning, the following episode summary is complete and will spoil the episode totally for those who haven't seen it.
The episode begins with the children wandering through a parched desert, subject to the combined heat of the Realm's four suns. Eric and Hank begin to argue over which course they should take. Dungeon Master has ordered them to proceed in the direction of the setting suns, but they haven't seen him for two days and Eric dislikes blindly following orders. Just as things are getting interesting Uni decides to go and uncover a monstrous giant scorpion, which then chases the group across the desert towards a nearby mountain range.
A knight walking nearby hears the group's panicked cries. The British-sounding knight, Sir John, is hardly a brave individual and wisely decides the best thing he can do is hide in a nearby cave until the danger has passed. Regretably for him, he has chosen a cave that is home to a blue dragon, which swiftly pursues him.
The children take refuge in a crack in the mountain side, leaving the scorpion with nothing to do outside, until Sir John arrives with his dragon. Captured between the two monsters, Sir John lies down with his hands over his head and, as is usual in western animation, escapes unharmed as the blue dragon drives the scorpion away with bolts of lightning.
The children emerge from their cave and find the scorpion gone. With no other obvious explanation to hand they assume the knight has driven it away. Caught up in their enthusiasm, Sir John ends up claiming it really was him and conjuring up false heros in the children's minds. He excuses himself and hurries away into the distance, intent on returning to the village of Pendrake - a place he has been hired to protect.
At this point, right on schedule, Dungeon Master rounds the rockface and immediately begins confusing Eric with his nonsensical speech. He tells the children that he has found a way they can get home, but that it is very dangerous. He tells them of a land far to the East known as the Valley of the Beholder. The valley was once apparently the most beautiful in the Realm, but ever since the Beholder arrived from the underworld all things of "beauty" in the valley have withered and died.
Dungeon Master explains that the Beholder guards a portal back to the real world that is hidden somewhere in the valley. Dungeon Master disappears into thin air behind a mound of rock, leaving not just one riddle, but two, for the children to puzzle over:
"Sometimes by looking back you can see a clearer path through what lies ahead"
and
"But beware! For only beauty can defeat the eye of the beholder"
Hank works out that the only important thing in their past (remembering that this is a nonlinear western animation so that for all intents and purposes nothing exists before the start of the episode) was their meeting with Sir John. They decide to seek him out and get his help battling the beholder, one of the most powerful Dungeons and Dragons monsters that exists.
The next scene shows the village of Pendrake, where the mayor is expelling Sir John and his son, Timothy, on the charge that the cowardly knight is worthless as a protector. In response to the knight's desperate pleas, the mayor reluctantly agrees to give Sir John one last chance to perform an act of extreme bravery and keep his post. He and his son set out from the village with heavy hearts.
The children are wandering through a forest of giant fungi. Presto tries to conjure up some light, and ends up holding a birthday cake festooned with candles. In the dim illumination of the cake the characters make out snail creatures, who cower from the light. While this works temporarily, a sneeze from Bobby extinguishes the candles, plunging them into darkness once more. The snail creatures attack.
Hank tries to use his bow to light up the area with fireworks, but the snail creatures fire sticky ropes and quickly pin down the group. Presto tries an incantation, but uses the wrong wording..."powers that come and go in the night, banish these snail things from my sight"...causing a bucket to materialize over his head. The monsters stuff the children into sacks and carry them away down the hill. Only Uni escapes, with orders from Bobby to find Sir John so he can rescue them.
Sir John is wandering through another part of the woods, mumbling to himself that he has to do something brave. He bumps into Uni who struggles to convince him to come with it. When Sir John seems too reluctant to come, Uni steals his torch. Alone in the dark, he has no choice but to run after the thief who has taken his light source.
They stumble into the clearing where the children are held and Uni drops the torch. Sir John picks it up, only to be confronted by the hideous visages of an army of hungry snails. He wildly swings the torch around and the snail creatures run away into the forest. The children come out of the sacks and, again, assume Sir John has courageously saved them.
Diana tries to trick Sir John into not asking for a reward by offering him a forest flower. Obviously not thinking too clearly, Sir John accepts the flower and puts it on his armor. The children ask the old knight to lead them to the Valley of the Beholder, but he is reluctant to agree. He tries to make excuses that he hasn't got a shield, but Presto simply conjures him up a garbage can lid. Realizing he has no choice he agrees to go with them.
On the way up a snowy slope Sir John begins to literally get cold feet. He asks Hank to think up a plan and rushes on to "scout ahead." Sir John ends up running into Venger, who demands he lead the children to the beholder and leave them there. Venger has kidnapped Timothy and is holding him in a cage guarded by worgs. Sir John rushes back to the children and urges them to hurry after him to the beholder. They reach the valley and Sir John abandons them, claiming he has taken them to the beholder but never agreed to fight it.
The children wander through the valley, disillusioned now that the fearless knight has proven so cowardly. The beholder attacks them. Strangely for a beholder it's gaze attacks are lazer beams! The group takes refuge behind a boulder.
Venger, being a decent honourable chap, returns Timothy to Sir John after seeing the bargain fulfilled. Timothy rushes to save the children, who in the meantime have been tied up in the beholder's lazer beams. The beholder, for some absolutely inexplicable reason, just holds them there roaring at them and refusing to kill them.
Sir John is driven to action by his hysterical son, who has the unswerving belief that his father is really a hero. As Eric puts it, "Poor kid, this is going to be a disappointing day for him." Sir John dives over the cliff and rushes towards the beholder, garbage can lid at the ready. The beholder engages primary weapons systems (it's big central eye) and blasts Sir John off his feet. He is siezed and brought up to the mouth for feeding...
At the last moment, Diana solves the riddle. The "beauty" that will defeat the beholder is the flower she gave to Sir John earlier. He thrusts the flower into the poor creature's eye, and it wilts away into a crevice in the earth.
Right on time the portal home opens above the corpse of the beholder, and for no particular reason starts to spontaneously close. This portal, which has existed for thousands of years in the valley, picks this exact time to begin it's shutdown - how convenient. The children get to the stage that they are actually standing in the rapidly shrinking doorway, but some insane notion has them making long farewells to Sir John and his son, just enough time for Venger to appear and attack the treacherous knight and his offspring. Faced with the aweful choice of saving the two or going home, the group, of course, elect to stay and fight - letting the portal close forever.
The children defeat Venger, and the valley magically returns to verdant life. The ending has Dungeon Master sitting above a waterfall cackling evilly as he watches the children retreat into the distance. Another dastardly scheme come to fruition. Another portal home lost.
Trivia:
- The scorpion at the beginning of the episode has big bulbous eyes! That's the first scorpion I've seen with that particular ailment. Speaking of occular apparatus, the slug creatures have them too - big bulbous human eyes.
- The beholder is killed by looking at a flower, which leaves open the question of how it entered the valley in the first place. One possible answer is that it required one particular kind of, obviously hideous, forest flower to do the creature any harm - and why? Well, the flower itself was probably harmless, but maybe it was coated with deadly infectious spores - which the beholder's keen eyesight made out. Realizing that it mustn't breath the poison in and the flower being so close to the beholder's delicate respiratory mechanisms, it suffered a fatal heart attack and shriveled away.
- The animation of the slug creatures carrying the children away down the hill has at least 10 of them holding sacks. What hapless passersby were in the other sacks?
- My Monstrous Manual lists quite a number of potent gaze attacks among beholder-kin - but not lazer beams! Each of a beholder's eyes usually has a different attack. What unusual species of beholder is this?