Review: The Loud House “There Will Be Mud: Riddle School”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

The Hunnicuts find oil on the farm and try the rich life out for a bit before quickly rejecting it, while Lincoln and some of his school friends are taken on a series of riddles.

OUR TAKE

Another day, another Loud House episode as we whittle through the four weekly episodes this and next week. Once again, we have a pair of stories that don’t really focus on the Loud family but people around them, or at least just include Lincoln. The first half, which takes its title from the Paul Thomas Anderson “There Will Be BLOOD”, puts the spotlight on the Hunnicuts, who are apparently southern accent having down to earth farmers, and has them suddenly find oil on their property which immediately catapults them into the rich life. They try to adapt to the more hoity toity and posh environment of the richer families, among whom are other recurring characters who I have zero familiarity with. This episode is only ten or so minutes long and since there’s characters we’re supposed to like among the rich folk, there isn’t a whole lot the Hunnicuts can do to reset the status quo aside from just decide this isn’t really for them and decide to go back to normal. But there’s nothing indicating they gave up the oil OR the money, so I guess they’re still rich oil barons who just decide not to associate with other rich people. Okey dokey.

The other story also includes the Hunnicut kid and Rusty from a couple days ago, but also Lincoln and a bunch of other kids who I am not going to bother learning the names of because it does not seem relevant at the moment. They all get a bunch of clues, revealed to be from one of their teachers as part of a special class of some kind. If this were a show with a bit more serialization or continuity, I could see this leading into some sort of story arc or avenue for them to develop each of these kids individually, but it’s just about this one self-contained thing. Not that it’s necessarily bad it’s not serialized, and in fact there has been some character design updates in this show as, at a certain point, all the characters moved up a grade and some got different designs (but they still insist on using the same title sequence because they’re cheap I guess), it’s just not the case here. Anyway, that’s three episodes down and one more to go for this week, so let’s finish this batch up next time with what seems to be a musical romance episode!