Devil without an advocate

I’m kind of split down the middle. The ending doesn’t really make much sense, which is more or less what I expected. This season has had one overarching theme in the meta sense and that’s “Character will take a backseat for plot at all times.” 

Let’s face it. The show ended off with a lot of unanswered questions. The ramifications of Star and Marco’s actions aren’t known... At all really. Just that they got together and Mina was defeated. Supposedly all of the problems with the Butterfly kingdom are also solved now and Star and Marco got together as I suppose they were destined to. If that’s all you care about, then this is almost a perfect ending. Every character that the show considers a “key player” by the end gets some form of resolution and the main conflict is over.

The problem is the show opened up doors beyond that. It promised a more ensemble cast, with side characters, development and relationships being cutoff pretty much by the credits. It promised a larger world which... Either got bigger or smaller depending on whether or not you believe all dimensions merged together or just Mewni and Earth. Something that carries with it possibilities that are likely to simply never be explored. Logistical issues like “Why did the magic portal explode and merge everything/how did it do that?” “With the MHC being dead, is there still a multiverse with Omnitraxus being dead?” Or just simple things like “What happened to the laser puppies?” all being things that probably should have been answered.

Not to mention smaller details like Tom not knowing Star got over him again in like... A literal day or whether his demon powers are going to still work. Or how Earth is going to handle all this crazy shit going on. It’s strange, because all of the minutia of the surrounding plot was stripped away during this ending, yet the things it focused on were handled in a minimalist way as well.

There are other critiques that I have. Far more really. About this season and the series as a whole, perhaps you’ll see some of those in some form at some point, perhaps not. Ultimately, my point here is that this ending raises far more questions than answers and none of it feels intentional. I understand that there was a time limit here and that all things have to end. Someway or another. Disney ultimately wanted episodes that could be aired out of order as well as they’ve always been mixed on episodic stories that require context and thus reruns are harder on them. I can’t imagine that helped at all during this either.

This ending is ultimately too simple, yet too complicated, and is far less than the sum of it’s parts. Which kind of re-contextualizes the entire series in a similar vein.