Saturday, April 6, 2019

Skooled! / Booth Buddies (Star vs the Forces of Evil Season 3 Part 18) - 'Toon Reviews 28

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Skooled!
 

Now this is one big and exciting follow-up to the big reveal of the identity of Eclipsa’s daughter and the truth behind the Butterfly family lineage.  It’s a spectacle of action, drama, and new depths to the ways of antagonistic characters.  However, the thing that makes everything so exciting is that the biggest parts of the episode can catch you off-guard. 
The first few minutes are devoted to the slacking, partying, stuck-up attitude of Pony Head.  She’s welcomed warmly by the princesses of St. Olga’s Reform School when they hear that she’s come to party.  This intro also comes with her many detracting attitude issues when she makes a scene over needing to take an exam before brunching.  Pony Head is certainly not too enjoyable with her complaints, though it is interesting that the school, despite being devoted to being wild, now has become somewhat restrained. 
Thankfully, it’s shortly after this moment when the episode really starts getting great.  The instant Ms. Heinous literally leaps onto the scene propels the episode into an intense direction.  The princesses are quick to fight back and defend the place where they’re now free to be true to themselves with a robot army and all.  With Ms. Heinous’ monster side starting to show more, their foe is far more powerful than they anticipated.  Her attacks get so brutal, she even reprograms those robots to attack the princesses, only to just rip out their hearts that act as bombs.  That’s not even mentioning her old lizard henchman, Rasticore, fully recovered from being blown up, packing a serious punch at her command. 
Ms. Heinous certainly makes a powerful introduction, but the really interesting part of her role comes when she enters one particular room.  There, it’s revealed that all this time, St. Olga is actually a robot who raised Ms. Heinous and left her the school.  Ms. Heinous looks through the master file stored in St. Olga which brings compelling reasons to why she is the way she is.  Most of them aren’t what she’s looking for, but they say a lot about her background.  She never saw anything wrong with her magical and monstrous attributes, but St. Olga always forced her to hide them against her will.  Also, as with the students before the uprising, Ms. Heinous was also forced into intense proper etiquette.  This is all very sad to learn that she was very different from how she is now only to be forced down a path of darkness. 
These feelings are even more apparent after she sees the memory of being switched and renamed at birth, and becomes the fully monstrous Meteora as a result.  When she carries out totally monstrous deeds of ripping off Pony Head’s horn and destroying her own henchmen, you can’t help but feel for her not being true to herself.  Also, while she has a believable goal to end the episode by approaching Mewni to take back the throne that belongs to her, it’s a sorry sight that she’s doing so in an unethical way. 
All of this goes down in an episode that starts out lightly only to surprise with heavy drama and deep character reveals.

A

Booth Buddies

If there’s one thing to say about the focus on potential couples Star and Marco have gotten involved in this season, it’s that it relates to a believable occurrence in life.  Just because a boy and a girl are best friends doesn’t always mean they get together.  In fact, much of the early run of episodes suggest that idea too.  Nevertheless, given how close they are and how much they show how important they are to each other, them getting together does make a lot of sense.  However, now is not the best time for the latter to happen since they’re both involved with other people, and that makes what this episode ultimately leads up to an issue. 
While at a wedding reception, Star gets excited when she spots the old photo booth from the Bounce Lounge.  These feelings are believable since she and her friends have frequently used it in past episodes and was once part of a favorite location.  Upon seeing the booth, Star is eager to relive the good old days and take some best friends photos with Marco.  However, she’s very hard to please all throughout.  She wants Marco to look the exact same way he did in the first photos they took in the booth, but he doesn’t fit her standards no matter how hard he tries. 
That’s pretty much it for the majority of the episode.  It’s just Star desperately wanting to recreate past best friends photos and Marco being unable to give the camera pose she sees fit.  This direction is not very exciting and doesn’t exactly bring out the best in either character.  Star feels very picky about what she wants from Marco, and Marco, even though he does try, just rolls along with this ridiculous activity. 
To its credit, these behaviors do have appropriate consequences.  Because so many photos are taken, the booth becomes jammed and Star and Marco are locked inside.  In fact, the booth breaks down so badly that a little creature living inside it has to take it to his home dimension to fix it.  He also gives creative background to the booth to explain why the door can’t just open to let Star and Marco out.  Apparently, it reads into their innermost feelings and the doors will only open if the photo they take shows those feelings. 
Out of this, Marco does make a passionate statement about how different his dynamic with Star feels ever since she admitted she has a crush on him.  I’ve often questioned how both of them could easily go through their friendship as if something as big as that moment never happened.  Marco at least gives a believable reason through just keeping his weird feelings about the moment to himself.  The fact that he can’t take the best friends photos the way he used to is simply allowing those feelings to show. 
With enough money for one more round of photos, he vows to do something about those feelings on the matter.  He does so by kissing Star.  I know this is a huge moment for these characters and their relationship, but it really feels wrong that they did so despite being in other relationships, especially Star.  It’s hardly ever a good move that two people had to be betrayed for one couple to work.  To add insult to injury, the booth owner was lying about the true feelings thing the whole time, meaning Marco kissed Star for pretty much nothing.  All I can say about Star and Marco getting together because of this kiss is that if it happens, they both have a lot of explaining to do with Tom and Kelly respectively. 
Despite the issues coming from the kiss and little happening with Star and Marco stuck in one place, this is still a fine watch of a simple moment getting them to really open up.
B-

The Ranking

1.      Butterfly Trap

2.      Total Eclipsa the Moon

3.      Moon the Undaunted

4.      Deep Dive

5.      Stranger Danger

6.      Sweet Dreams

7.      Skooled!

8.      Return to Mewni

9.      Rest in Pudding

10.  Night Life

11.  Demoncism

12.  Toffee

13.  Monster Bash

14.  Is Another Mystery

15.  Marco Jr.

16.  Club Snubbed

17.  Puddle Defender

18.  Sophomore Slump

19.  Starfari

20.  Lint Catcher

21.  Princess Turdina

22.  Ludo, Where Art Thou?

23.  Scent of a Hoodie

24.  King Ludo

25.  Marco and the King

26.  Death Peck

27.  Book Be Gone

28.  Booth Buddies

29.  The Bogbeast of Boggabah

30.  Stump Day

31.  Trial by Squire

32.  Lava Lake Beach

33.  Holiday Spellcial

34.  Ponymonium
 

Be sure to stay tuned for the review of the next episode where we see how Pony Head deals with the loss of her horn, and Eclipsa finally reunites with her daughter.
If you would like to check out other Star vs the Forces of Evil reviews on this blog, click here for the guide made especially for them.
 

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