Review: The Great North “Saved by the Spells Adventure”

Overview (Spoilers Below):

Judy restarts the school’s Saved by the Spells secret club when Beef leaves her an anonymous note leading to the club’s old handbook. The club is planning a major prank on Friday, but all that goes out the window when Principal Gibbons decides to spend the week as an undercover student. Meanwhile, Wolf and Honeybee try to retrace their drunken steps to find out where Wolf’s b-button piercing came from, and Moon talks to a mysterious trucker on the CB radio.

Our Take:

The Great North is back for the second week straight with another new episode. Saved by the Spells Adventure gets things back to the status quo with a Judy-centric episode that chronicles the journey of a new generation of secret club, plus Wolf and Honeybee’s drunken escapades and Moon’s heartwarming conversations with his dad/trucker friend. It doesn’t quite hit the high points of last week’s mid-season premiere, but overall I think it’s perhaps a stronger episode.

The main plot with Judy restarting the Saved by the Spells club is an intriguing one on the surface. Getting together a bunch of friends after school to plan a gigantic prank seems like it’d open up a lot of opportunities for comedy and adventure. That doesn’t really happen though, as most of the storyline shifts the focus to Principal Gibbons. That’s not necessarily a bad thing since most of the club members are pretty one note, but I do think it was kind of a missed opportunity to give more of Judy’s school friends more development.

That said, seeing Gibbons slowly become one of the group in a small way and watching Judy realize it and end things on a sweet note was very nice. The initial shock of seeing the principal acting as a student was funny, but I think there could’ve been a lot more jokes mined off that premise. Instead, the show just relies on Gibbons spouting off random phrases like Tik Tok and Gangnam Style.

Wolf and Honeybee’s subplot was my least favorite of the episode, as it didn’t really seem to go anywhere. We’ve had episodes like this before, where Wolf follows a trail that leads to a few different places and people, but the ending where it was just them doing the tattoos/piercings to each other was sort of just… *shrug*. Moon and Beef interacting through the CB radio was adorable, however, and I wish we could’ve seen that part of the ep get a little more screen time. Beef really had a lot of emotional development in this ep despite not being on screen that much, between giving Judy the nod to start the club and giving Moon some fictional adventures to follow.

Overall, Saved by the Spells Adventure feels like a fine episode of the Great North. I don’t think it’ll end up on any ‘best of the season’ lists or anything, but it introduced three fairly fun storylines that all came to an ending one way or another. I don’t think any of the individual plots were as good as last week’s Beef mom group thing, but altogether they made for a solid episode.