Review: Star vs. the Forces of Evil “Night Life; Deep Dive”

We take a deep dive into the latest episode of Star vs the Forces of Evil.

Overview (Spoilers Below)

“Night Life”

Marco is sent on various adventures by “Heckapoo” to close a random series of dimensional portals that are seemingly affecting the fabric of other realities. Due to the severity of these occurrences, it starts to clash with Marco’s duty as Star’s squire when he’s not always there to babysit Glossaryck whose current mental state is still that of an animal after his mysterious resurrection in Rest in Pudding.

Eventually, Heckapoo figures out that the source of these random portals is due to Star’s sleep dimension-hopping that was revealed in “Sweet Dreams” but is less than thrilled that Marco withheld such vital information. After some persuasion from Marco, Heckapoo begrudgingly decides not to report this to the Magic High Commission and lets Marco privately handle the matter at the cost of not letting Marco work with her anymore with the parting words “Star is lucky to have a squire like you” before disappearing. When Marco confesses to Star that he’s been doing this to keep her safe and shows her a map Heckapoo created that’s tied to Star’s dimension-hopping patterns.

“Deep Dive”

Star decides to follow the pattern that was drawn by Heckapoo and begins to figure out that she keeps waking up by the time it tries to get to the end-point of the pattern. So in an effort to stop the random dimension-hopping once and for all,  Star has Janna hypnotize her so she can sleep long enough to reach this destination and as a backup plan, hooks up a magical mirror/camera to her body in case it turns out to be anything dangerous so Marco can pull her out. As Star reaches the location, she’s completely off the map, and due to the mirror/camera detaching itself off Star’s head, Marco & Janna are left with no way to figure out how to keep track while Star is in the “Realm of Magic” which is a place I can only describe as My Little Pony on acid.

At that point, Star finally discovers that the reason for her dimension hopping was a telepathic message by a majestic unicorn called a “Millhorse” who claims Star created her during the events of “Battle for Mewni” and was telepathically calling to her subconscious for quite some time. In an act of desperation, Marco decides to use Star’s wand but strangely enough, it transforms when Marco gets his hands on it and decides to find Star by using a spell from her notebook that she copied called the “seeing eye spell” which Star infamously used in the Season 2 episode, Bon Bon the Birthday Clown. When Marco performs the spell, crescent moon markings begins to glow from his cheeks and is finally able to contact Star and snap her out of her state of bliss in which she remembers who she is and manages to return to her bedroom thanks to Marco for taking such a risk and has discovered that she can now transform in to her “Mewberty” form at will.

Our Take

Both episodes together felt like a proper conclusion to “Sweet Dreams” and also worked as a series of call-backs to the “Running with Scissors” episode from season 2 while showing this whole other world between dimensions where magical “Dragon Bikers” exist. It’s a cool concept but the fact Marco didn’t inform Heckapoo about what’s been going on with Star consequently changes their dynamic that I’m sure was put there to affect later episodes.

But after watching “Deep Dive” I’m just left with more questions than answers such as why did the wand change when Marco got his hands on it? Why did his cheeks glow crescent moons? Marco was never a native to Mewni so is this what happens when normal people use the wand? It also took me a while to remember the Millhorse that Star indirectly created during “Battle for Mewni” because so much happened within that 2-hour event but now that Star has the power to create and enter portals without the use of dimensional scissors along with the ability to transform into her “Mewberty”-self at will, I could also see this as a major plot-point in later episodes & seasons as Season 4 was also announced.

Rarely do episode arcs tie neatly together like this. Sometimes this show doesn’t have a proper pattern or continuity and expects you to follow previous episodes just to coherently know what’s going on, but thankfully this knew how to properly finish an ongoing arc while still adding proper character development into the mix.