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Today, we’re starting another look at a season featuring
everyone’s favorite interdimensional princess heading in a fresh and exciting
new direction.
Star vs the Forces of Evil (Season
3)
Basic
Premise
Star vs the
Forces of Evil is one of those shows that goes both ways. Sometimes its focus is on the reckless
mischief of the title character and her friends. When that’s the case, episodes are either really
enjoyable or directionless and not necessarily worth one’s time. However, there are also times that suggest
that the show has something far bigger and grander in mind. From there, the lore, characters, and scope
of the series become far more interesting and especially creative. So while light-hearted fluff doesn’t seem
really do the show justice, it becomes quite the experience with anything
world-building related. With Season 3,
the latter subject is at the forefront and boy does it make the series more
exciting than ever.
The reason I’m so enthusiastic about Season 3 has to do with
how varying in quality Season 2 is. Most
of the observations of the show’s fluctuating tone attribute to that
season. Light-hearted episodes are very
mixed with some solid fun ones and a couple of incredibly weak ones. However, anything lore-related is
consistently strong and interesting, and seamlessly puts the show into a more
serious direction while still keeping true to its free spirit. Those particular lore-related episodes bring
a lot of interesting background. There’s
backstory on the Queens of Mewni, after effects of Star’s wand getting cleaved,
and insight on how hard monsters have it on Mewni. Now with Star Butterfly suddenly forced to
leave her new Earth life behind for her home kingdom, this new season is all
about world-building lore-filled adventures.
As you can see from my excitement, I find that they turn out
very well, but how well? That’s what the
oncoming reviews will determine. One
thing’s for sure though; it’s going to get weirder and wilder than ever before.
Now on with the reviews:
Return to
Mewni
At the end of Season 2, the news that Star needed to leave
Earth was shocking, at least from her perspective. While we saw plenty of reasons for this, all
the devotion to how adjusted Star was to her new life made her needing to leave
it behind feel surprising to the audience.
This is the tone that defines the entire episode shown at the start with
Marco feeling depressed over Star’s sudden departure among old end of the
school year party decorations. On a side
note, it’s interesting that he shows no hint of awkwardness that the last thing
she told him was that she has a crush on him even though he’s already in a
relationship. While this sets the
episode’s mood, its real focus is on something more interesting.
Shortly after spending much of that night on
relationship drama, Star is thrown into legit drama. She already knows that Toffee has returned,
but at the moment, she and her mother, Queen Moon, have a majorly pressing issue. They’re traveling to a magic sanctuary to
cure the three members of the Magic High Commission who have had their energy
drained and have become inflatable. The
frequent magical fritz that’s been around since the previous season makes the
travel difficult. That said, it does
bring some creative effects like turning the carriage Star and Moon are using
into much weaker forms of transport before vanishing it completely.
As Star and Moon press on towards the
sanctuary, there’s a dynamic clash on how they both approach the matter at
hand. Star mainly acts out of adjustment
to her old rebel lifestyle through jumping in to use her wand and fight off enemy
rats without hesitation. While foolish
given the seriousness of the events, this being in line with Star’s character
is enough to believe that she has some idea of what she’s doing. As for Moon, she has way more intel on what’s
going on and pushes towards safer options.
This includes having legit reasons for Star to not use the wand since
it’s linked to Toffee’s magic, and that fighting the rats attracts too much
attention. This is all a part of Moon’s
most endearing trait of doing what she does for Star’s well-being and not
because she doesn’t accept her for who she is.
It truly proves that she’s one of the best-defined characters on the
show. At the same time, Moon’s good
traits are balanced out by her over-protectiveness coming from not knowing her
own daughter well.
With all this said,
it’s a pleasing direction that both Star and Moon are just as capable as they
are flawed, making for a balanced perspective.
For the moment at least, despite their conflicting approaches, they come
to a point of endearment when they reach the sanctuary. After placing the Magic High Commission in
pods for the time being, Star is put off by Moon wanting them both to stay in
the sanctuary instead of go out to fight Toffee. Since she fought him before, Star is
understandably tense by this decision and believes that Moon had her drop
everything for nothing. Thankfully, she
becomes much more considerate of her mother’s feelings when Moon reveals when
she was Star’s age, Toffee and his army killed her mother. The last moment of
the episode features both of them becoming closer as Moon proceeds to tell Star
the whole truth about her background, paving the way for the next episode.
This return to Mewni kicks the season off to
a great start. The tone is exciting,
there’s a believable shock to the change in the norm, and endearment from a
mother and daughter who think differently, yet love each other very much.
A
Moon the
Undaunted
When a show has a creative premise and world, it’s best to go
all out with everything, including its history.
This is what makes this episode on a character’s history
noteworthy.
Queen Moon is quite
multi-layered through her personality functioning out of love as opposed to
standards. She’s even gone beyond being
regal by facing Toffee long ago. This
episode expands upon that going off of the very end of the previous one where
Moon agreed to tell Star about her past.
The entire episode is a flashback of that very event. With her mother killed by Toffee, she had to
take on the responsibility of ruling as a Queen of Mewni at such a young age. The feel is especially apparent with young Moon designed very similarly to Star. Despite how torn up she was by her loss, Moon
had no time to deal with her feelings.
Being queen brought all sorts of issues.
Some were as major as the armies and Magic High Commission disagreeing
on how to handle Toffee and his armies.
At the same time, smaller issues like deciding which boy she liked best
were also taxing. Out of her relationship
matters was at least a nice moment where she was touched by a young River’s
suggestion to decide what to do on her own.
It goes to show how he has her best interests in the present.
As for the royal staff’s conflict of whether
to handle Toffee with a peace treaty or a war, Moon’s understandable unease
brought out another side of her. She went
against customs to solve problems by looking into the royal spell book’s dark
chapter of Eclipsa. It was mentioned in
previous episodes that Eclipsa is notorious for abandoning the throne to marry
a monster which everyone sees as treason.
She was so bad, she was imprisoned in crystals by Magic High Commission
member, Rhombulus. Her dark chapter and
Moon’s uncertainties of how to deal with Toffee led Moon to face Eclipsa.
Behind everyone’s backs, she had Rhombulus
temporarily let Eclipsa’s crystals down.
Adding credibility is this being the first onscreen appearance of
Eclipsa as opposed to exposition and portraits.
She’s charming and likable for such a criminal. Rather than malice, her only desires were
little things like a chocolate bar. Her
sympathy for Moon losing her mother and the pressures of ruling Mewni also feel
very genuine. It’s honestly hard to
believe she’s as bad as past events claim. Since the claims are in full force, her
morality behind granting Moon the spell to destroy Toffee in exchange for
freedom feels appropriately ambiguous.
As for facing Toffee, the moment is creatively staged. Moon goes alone, and nonchalantly sets up a
picnic in the middle his camp. When Moon
performs Eclipsa’s spell, she doesn’t even sound pumped for battle. She calmly states it, yet it produces a beam
that blows off parts of the lizards that usually grow back. Even though Moon only blew off Toffee’s
finger, it not growing back due to the spell was enough to make the army
retreat. So Eclipsa’s spell was the very
thing to beat Toffee and started the custom of all holders of the wand using it
to face all monsters without any armies.
That said, the disapproving looks of the Magic High Commission, and Moon
getting dark veins like Eclipsa continues to make the audience wonder if all is
well. The answer comes in time, but as
for this episode, it’s one of the absolute best world-building episodes. It makes Moon an even more endearing
character than she already is, stands as its own emotional story, and leaves many
more interesting elements to look into.
As for the latter point, those elements go on to practically become
series highlights…
A+
The Ranking
- Moon the Undaunted
- Return to Mewni
Be sure to stay tuned for the review of the next episode where Ludo has a hard time writing in the spell book, and River needs help from Marco to run Mewni while Moon is gone.
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.
