Review: The Loud House “Time Trap!”

Overview (Spoilers Below):

When the kids break Mom and Dad’s priceless vase, they decide the only thing to do is go back in time to their wedding day and prevent them from ever receiving it.

Our Take:

The Loud siblings have encountered plenty of weird stuff amid its slice-of-life episodes throughout the series. They even discovered the ghost of one of their ancestors and a dragon in The Loud House Movie for crying out loud. This week’s episode sees the kids going where no Loud child has ever gone before: back in time. In the words of Christopher Lloyd from Back to the Future: Where they’re going, they don’t need roads.

The story in the show’s latest half-hour special sees the Loud kids pulling a Back to the Future approach after they accidentally broke their parents’ wedding gift again. Fearing that they’ll get grounded for a year, the kids use Lisa’s time machine to travel back to the parents’ wedding day and switch their gift with a mundane toaster. Unfortunately, the siblings’ interference caused a rift in the timeline, forcing them to restore it before it’s too late.

Some of the show’s recent episodes can sometimes surpass their slice-of-life elements with cartoonish mishaps. However, they still retain the amount of enjoyment and heart as the earlier ones. “Time Trap” is no exception, with the siblings traveling through the space-time continuum to replace an expensive vase and avoid getting grounded for a year.

Despite its heart lacking in some places, mainly the vase’s importance in the parents’ wedding, it’s a fun time-twisty episode that deserved the two-part treatment. Part of that is due to its high stakes. The kids’ interference with the wedding created an alternate timeline in which Rita and Lynn Sr. despise children. This resulted in them attempting to fix their mistake before they disappeared forever. Obviously, they made it out alive since the show’s renewed for another season, but that doesn’t make their little time quest any less fun.

Additionally, much of its humor consists of the siblings encountering alternate versions of the characters who attended the Loud wedding. One of them is their neighbor Bud Grouse, who’s a lot nicer due to the lack of children, and Flip as a health guru. However, Mr. and Mrs. Gurdle are still the same as before as they believe that the kids are aliens, making them a respectable adversary for the characters.

Overall, “Time Trap” is an enjoyable riff on Robert Zemeckis’s time-traveling classic, even though its themes got overshadowed by the siblings’ shenanigans. This would’ve been a great half-hour special if it had spent a bit more time explaining the significance of the parents’ vase and how much it meant to them. Other than that, its comedy and high-stakes plot prevented it from erasing out of existence.