Review: Star vs The Forces of Evil – “St. Olga’s Reform School for Wayward Princesses”

The episode begins with Star talking to her best friend, Ponyhead, via mirror. It is Ponyhead’s birthday but she can’t celebrate since she is stuck in St. Olga’s Reform School for Wayward Princesses. When Ponyhead breaks the rules for the third time by showing emotion, she gets hauled off to solitary confinement. Star recruits Marco to travel to St. O’s to help save her best friend!

When Star and Marco arrive, they find a new batch of wayward princesses being led into the castle. They don some magical disguises (Marco looks super cute as a pretty, pretty princess!) and join the group. Once inside, they find out that Star’s dimensional scissors will not work inside the castle walls due to a crystal in a tower. That means they have to do this the low tech way.

Marco tricks the other princesses into distracting the guards. He sneaks away with Star to find Ponyhead. They find the floating head locked in her room. Marco picks the lock with a bobby pin and voila! They find that Ponyhead has been brainwashed. She is now a cookie cutter princess. Star decides to bring Ponyhead back to Earth. Hopefully that will fix her.

As Star and Marco race through the castle, they come upon the other princesses in a tea drinking class. Marco riles them into a revolution, giving the friends yet another distraction from the guards. In an attempt to escape capture, Star and Ponyhead leap into a laundry shoot. Unfortunately, Marco’s princess dress won’t fit through the door and he gets taken by the guards.

Miss Heinous, the head mistress of St. Olga’s, takes Marco to solitary, where he is strapped into a chair. His eyes are forced open as an etiquette movie plays before him. Meanwhile, Star finds a poster in the laundry room stating that individuality is bad and she tries to destroy it. Instead, she ends up bursting into tears. Ponyhead, seeing how the poster affected her friend, tries to destroy it herself. This breaks the brainwashing, bringing Ponyhead back to her bad self. Together, Star and Ponyhead race off to rescue Marco.

Once Marco is saved, the gang finds out that, despite being locked in their rooms, the other princesses still want to revolt. They free everyone and begin attacking the guards. Star then shoots a magic beam at the tower, breaking both the crystal and the spell that stops the dimensional scissors from working. She opens a portal back to Earth but Ponyhead refuses to go. She wants to stay behind and help the other princesses.

But what about Miss Heinous? She found Marco’s bobby pin and performed a spell that told her it came from the Earth Dimension. Who knows what her plans are for him?

When I tuned into this episode, I didn’t realize that there was only one story. I kept waiting for the second one to start but it never did. But that is a good thing. I think the show really needed to break down why Star was so afraid of St. Olga’s and to let Marco take the lead again. We’ve had too many episodes where Star lead the way and, let’s face it, she doesn’t make the best decisions. I’m really interested to see where they go with this cliff-hanger. Will Miss Heinous travel to the Earth Dimension to just wreak havoc everywhere or will she know where Star and Marco are? I hope they don’t make me wait too long for an answer.