Spoiler alert for reader: Please be aware of the spoilers that await you. This article contains information in regards to the second half of the third season of “Star vs. the Forces of Evil,” and is meant to give my own thoughts, ideas, and possible theories based on this information as well as the previous material that’s presented as canon to the series as a whole, which can refer to the show itself as well as its published book entitled, Star and Marco’s Guide to Mastering Every Dimension. If you haven’t seen any previous content of this show, I suggest that you leave the remainder of this article unread, as it’s only directed towards fans of the show and its canon.

What is up, my “Star vs.” fans! Both of these episodes are just… Oh, my God! They were both incredible, crucial both to the story and for tying up loose ends, and not at all what we were initially expecting!! I’m telling you right now: if you haven’t seen these episodes and don’t want to be majorly spoiled for what went down, then I highly suggest that you turn back now… This is your second warning.

Now, without further ado, on with the spoils!

Episode 4A: Skooled!

Reaction:

This has to be one of the best story-driven episodes of season three to date. Suffice it to say that we were very misled with the promo that came out for this episode, with Ponyhead arriving at St. Olga’s and being forced to take a “waffle test” before she could chill with her Ponyhead self, so I decided not to write an analysis article for it, because there wasn’t much for me to break down. However, this episode tells a whole other story: the part with the confrontation between Ponyhead and Princess Arms, who now seems to be the one in charge as headmistress of St. Olga’s, only lasts the first two or three minutes before the real action happens…

Analysis:

Ponyhead, upset over how much St. Olga’s has changed, with a new curriculum solely on how to brunch, calls Star on her phone to complain, but of course we later learn that these two episodes take place around the same time, very much the way that “The Bogbeast of Boggabah” and “Total Eclipsa the Moon” had been formatted, so it would be later revealed that Star is currently at a wedding, which I will talk about in due time…

Not too long after Ponyhead leaves a voicemail message on Star’s phone, none other than Meteora shows up, flinging a carriage into the air and propelling Ponyhead through a window of the castle!

That’s right! Were we really going to have an episode centered on St. Olga’s without seeing Miss Heinous herself? Now, she is showing off her clover cheek marks, monstrous arms, and tail. Back and better as a villain than ever!

The princesses try to attack by using the robot guards that can be reprogrammed to serve their needs against Meteora, but Gemini reprograms them again with a remote control, causing them to rip out their hearts to be used as bombs to counterattack the princesses. When Princess Arms throws one of the bombs at her, Meteora only keeps walking through the blue smoke unscathed. She is getting more and more unstoppable as well as more competent as a villain. Needless to say, she would be the main antagonist of this season, as opposed to Eclipsa, her mother, who served as the show’s red herring.

Rasticore, now completely regenerated, uses his dimensional chainsaw to get inside the castle and let Meteora and Gemini in. It took over a whole season for Rasticore to be fully regenerated, and I was actually missing to hear his voice. Speaking of missing, he menacingly says to the princesses, “Did you miss me?” This doesn’t make any sense because no one other than Star and Marco would know who he is to be terrified of him! I wish I could say that his newly restored self will last a long time, but hold that thought for a little bit…

We finally see Ponyhead, who has gotten a black eye from the crash, brunching away and hiding from Meteora. However, when we see Ponyhead again later when she confronts Meteora, she appears to not have the black eye anymore. Animation inconsistency? I wouldn’t be too surprised if that were the case…

Meteora actually doesn’t have any interest in taking back the school. She only has come to retrieve a certain memory file from her mother/caretaker, St. Olga herself, who turns out to be a robot! St. Olga was actually programmed to give a fabricated backstory whenever the case would be that Meteora should question her origin, but of course, Gemini takes control by clicking on a computer mouse inside St. Olga, apparently the only thing that seems to keep her functioning, to search for the real file.

Then, we see a few flashback clips, one of which we saw from the “Butterfly Effect” promo when Meteora was just a child when she discovered that her cheeks can glow. Another flashback we get is when she was a teenager and was reminded by her mother to hide her tail

St. Olga defends her case by saying that she did her best raising her daughter, despite all the other robot moms laughing behind her back. There are really other robot moms like St. Olga who raise actual, non-mechanical children? Enraged, Meteora “thanks her” by punching her against the wall, disabling her in an instant. And of course, just as I predicted in my “Butterfly Effect” promo analysis article, she is the one who flexes her monster arm, immediately after flinging her “mother” against the wall, showing that she is getting much stronger. But Meteora’s rampage doesn’t stop there at St. Olga’s “death.”

When Ponyhead finally confronts her, Meteora comes at her and we just hear Ponyhead scream, the screen cutting to black. Shortly after, Meteora walks out of the castle with Ponyhead’s horn in her hand and drops it on the ground. Who knows what it would’ve looked like to actually see Meteora yank Ponyhead’s horn off her forehead on-screen? Yikes…

When Rasticore tries to go his separate way by rejecting Meteora and Gemini tries to comfort her, she yanks out Gemini’s heart, both revealing him as a robot all along and “killing” him, and throws it at Rasticore, causing a major explosion and reducing him back to an arm again. Jeez, you can tell that she’s done playing games at this point! At least, compared to how she “handled” things in the episodes “Heinous” and “Princess Turdina.”

Then, of course, Meteora takes Rasticore’s arm and goes off on her own to claim the throne of Mewni. Wow, I can honestly say that this is the best St. Olga’s-centered episode of the show, even surpassing the very first one from season one, which was a full half-hour-long special!

Now, get ready for this next episode, because it’s going to blow your mind…

Episode 4B: Booth Buddies

Reaction:

Oh, my God. Every Starco shipper’s dream has finally come true by the end of this episode!! I was not expecting the episode to turn out this way, but I am proud to say that I’m ever so glad it did! I’ve watched it so many times, which clearly shows my love for this episode and how I would consider it one of the best character-driven episodes of the season, if not the show as a whole. I swear this pair of episodes is the best of this season next to the pairing of “Nightlife” and “Deep Dive”!

However, believe it or not, the fandom is split down the middle about this episode specifically because of the circumstances or how the specific events within it were presented. For me though, regardless of the obvious assumption that can be drawn from it, this episode is one of my all-time personal favorite episodes of the show. In fact, I will most likely make a separate article detailing my own stance that would go against all the negativity surrounding it…

Now, on with the major spoilers…

Analysis:

Star, Marco, Tom, and Kelly are at a wedding for Ruberiot and Foolduke, who if you don’t remember were the two entertainers of the “Le Resistance” squad who were constantly bickering back in the “Battle for Mewni” two-hour special. Wow, this episode is already starting off with something that catches us completely off-guard! What a kicker! So, I guess Star eventually got over her grudge against Ruberiot for “ruining” her life with that song…

Also, the mime is shown to be the one administering the wedding, but of course in mime language like an artistic genius ought to do, and you can also see the Foolduke’s monkey in the background. She got her monkey back after all, ever since River lost it back in the “Battle for Mewni.”

As I briefly mentioned earlier, Marco and Kelly attend the wedding along with Star and Tom. It is very likely that they came there together since they also leave together in the end for they are only close friends, not as each other’s dates, but I’m getting a bit ahead of myself…

One of the things I instantly noticed was that Marco is wearing the same suit he wore back in both “Bon Bon the Birthday Clown” and “Monster Bash.” Both of those episodes were crucial to the overall storyline, with “Bon Bon” specifically being the episode in which Marco and Jackie had their first kiss. Again, if you saw this episode, you know what I mean, which I will ultimately reveal later…

Also, Star has yet another stylish outfit, this time a green dinosaur dress. I initially thought that this was another outfit that was stylized specifically to match one of her go-to aspects to her personality, much like the blue narwhal dress that is a clear reference to her well-known narwhal blast spell, but I was proven wrong when I came across a post on Pinterest that points out that the dinosaur-themed dress actually alludes to the dinosaur on Marco’s phone case! What could this possibly mean?!

Of course, as almost always, this episode would be nothing without the classic $650 running gag. Star wastes the bulk of it on taking photos with Marco, claiming that he’s wearing a “fake face” in every photo, and forces him to take real “best friend photos” with her to have them perfectly match the old photos that they took back in season one.

The thing that I noticed is that the second time they take photos in trying to replicate the ones from way back when, these new photos do look the same as the older ones, with no slight indication of anything that may seem visually off-putting. Although I can understand that at some point this season, Star has to have a reason to notice Marco acting differently around her as of late, in this case not genuinely having a good time taking photos with her, there is nothing in these photos, no slight alteration in any of Marco’s facial expressions, that actually gives off that impression. As Marco said, “they look exactly the same!”

Anyway, the photo booth traps them inside after so many photos clog the slot and as a result spits out a repair-goblin named Ben Fotino, who is actually voiced by the brilliant Alex Hirsch, creator of “Gravity Falls” and could likely be the John Ratzenberger (you know what I’m talking about, Pixar fans) of Disney televised animation since he has voiced at least one character in every modern-day Disney cartoon to date. Anyway, he tells them that the booth is magic and will let them out if they take an authentic photo, for “it can see the truth that lies beyond them pictures,” as he would say.

Sure enough, they only have enough money to take one more photo, so they have to figure out how to make it count.

Also, a bit of a slip-up: Star somehow gives Ben a $15 tip from Marco’s money. How was she able to give Ben the money if there was no physical way for her to slip the cash through? Also, when did she do this without Marco knowing when they were both in the booth the whole time?

Another slip-up would be that it didn’t occur to Marco to use his karate moves to somehow break down the door, since back in “Friendenemies,” he was able to kick open Tom’s carriage door that had a giant padlock with four chains on it. The only explanation I can gather from this would be that cartoon logic could be at play here.

Switching gears, I’m not even going to bother with the fact that Star just happened to not have her wand on her in this episode, mostly because she may have had it the whole time but chose not to use it so Marco would be forced to give her the photos she wanted him to take with her. Which leads to the moment of truth we’ve all been waiting to see for almost a whole season…

Marco finally addresses Star’s confession and how it made everything different between them. He even hints at his own feelings without outright confessing, saying that things have been different for him as opposed to her, but Star seems to understand what he was implying.

Although this moment, in particular, can be interpreted in a number of ways, a huge indicator being that she asks him if there was anything he needed to tell her before they take the last photo,

But wait— there’s more!

I swear, this goes by so fast that it’s hard to process the first time seeing it: throughout the four frames when the camera snaps the pics, they both smile, Marco turns to her, Star turns to him, and…

They kiss.

No turning back now: not only do they bring up Star’s confession back in “Starcrushed” and Marco’s own feelings about it, just as I originally expected going into this episode, but also, for the first time since the show began just three years before, they finally kiss! Also, you can hear the “Blood Moon Waltz” in the background! I’ll come back to the blood moon later…

After they pull away, they instantly become very uncomfortable from what just transpired. They soon find out from Ben that the booth wasn’t really magic and that he was the one who trapped them in there the whole time. Thanks, Alex Hirsch! You’re our hero for reviving Starco!!

Both of them awkward from the whole thing, Star tells Marco that he is her squire and that she does have a boyfriend, whose name is Tom. Yes, she tells him this in this exact order. She also tells him that she was glad he was honest but “maybe not that honest.”

But wait— it’s not over yet!

After they leave the booth and Marco leaves with Kelly on Nachos, Tom goes back to Star, saying that he was off falling in love with the pie that was served there. How much time could have possibly passed since Star and Marco went into the booth? They were likely trapped in there for up to an hour, so when Tom told her earlier that he was going to get some pie to eat, was he there by the refreshments table chowing down on pie the whole time? Wow, I guess it is pretty serious between him and the pie, just as he stated.

That same scene, Star’s phone rings, which she doesn’t answer at first due to her prolonged shock at what happened with Marco. Apparently, her phone was repaired or even replaced since “The Bogbeast of Boggabah” when River chewed it up. But when she does answer the phone, she drops it, tells Tom that something’s wrong with Ponyhead, and drags him with her, making him drop his pie. I can’t believe she just leaves her phone there after she just got it back!

Also, who exactly was she talking to on the phone? It couldn’t have been Ponyhead calling Star at the start of “Skooled!” because she only left her a voicemail message when Star didn’t answer, and Star didn’t get to her phone at all throughout this episode. You could say that she had it off during the wedding, but when she turned it back on, wouldn’t she have noticed that Ponyhead tried to call her and listened to the message? Aside from these unanswered questions, it must have been someone from Ponyhead’s family, likely one of her sisters, calling Star about what went down at the end of “Skooled!”

Star runs back to the photo booth and grabs the photo from the slot. Now, here is the most interesting thing to come from this episode, as if it couldn’t get any better: this can be an easy-to-miss shot if you saw the episode for the first time and haven’t heard from anyone else about this specific shot, but if you freeze this exact moment when she takes the photo away, you can see that both her heart cheek marks and Marco’s crescent moon cheek marks are glowing in the bottom photo in which they kissed! This is insane! And to top it all off, the blood moon is shown in the sky right outside the photo booth right before the scene cuts to black! The blood moon returns!!

Wow, these episodes are easily among the best to come out of the show so far!! I can’t wait for what’s going to happen next with the fate of Starco! I’m willing to assume that we will return to this within the season three finale, because we need to see how they’ll be affected by this or how Tom is going to find out. I seriously can’t wait for my OTP to finally become canon! The time has come! I hope you enjoyed what I had to say about these episode segments. Be sure to be on the lookout for my upcoming articles about nothing but “Star vs.”

Starco fans, rejoice! Long live Starco...