Elena of Avalor S3 E20

## Plot

Elena's right arm is still broken and in a cast after the previous episode, but she declines Luisa's offer for help picking up her food. Elena, you're using a fork. Stab the food! That's what forks are for! The food falls, and Flo eats it, but tells Elena that she was really close that time. The observatory that was mentioned in season 2 will be opening tomorrow, and Professor Ochoa asked Isabel and the other students to come by and help her set up for the grand opening ceremony. There are so many callbacks in this episode, and I love it. Francisco is sad for some reason, and he explains that there's a comet passing over Avalor tonight. Isabel tells Flo that a comet is basically a big ball of ice and rock that shoots through space. Elena expected her abuelo to be excited about the comet, since he's the founder of Avalor's astronomy club, the Celestial Beings. Now we finally know who Elena gets her pun based sense of humor from. Francisco's telescope isn't powerful enough for him to see the comet, and it won't appear again for another one hundred and seventeen years. The girls realize that he can use the telescope at the observatory to see the comet. They're sure that Professor Ochoa would be okay with Francisco using it before they officially open. Elena and Isabel take the gondola to the observatory and meet Professor Ochoa again. She agrees to let Francisco use the telescope, and says that the viewing conditions tonight will be perfect… after the storm clears up. There's a big storm coming soon, which is why everyone is leaving. The girls can set up the telescope for tonight, but they'll have to be quick about it. They meet Tomiko inside, who is still a big fan of royalty. She made a giant key for Elena to use to unlock the observatory for the grand opening tomorrow. I didn't know Tomiko was a Keyblade wielder. She and Isabel calculate the coordinates for the telescope while Elena watches them. She comments that she could never figure this stuff out. Isabel says she could if she ever gave it a try. Unfortunately, the storm arrives, and lightning strikes a metal pot, partially melting it. And then a second lightning strike hits the telescope. The girls are okay, but the lens for the telescope is completely shattered, which means that Francisco can't use it to see the comet. Elena wonders if they can make a new one. Tomiko points out that they have the materials for it in the storage buildings, since they built the original lens onsite. How would they forge the reaction to make the glass though? How would they grind it properly? How would they polish it? Elena points out that they're stuck here until the storm passes anyways, so they've got nothing to lose. Before they can make a new lens, they need to build a lightning rod so the lightning doesn't strike the telescope again and possibly damage it even more, or hurt them, or worse. Elena doesn't know anything about science, so she decides to clean up the broken glass instead. However, Isabel and Tomiko tell her to stop, since they need to combine the broken glass with silicon dioxide to create the new lens. The old glass acts as a flux, which is something that lowers the melting point of the reaction. Without it, they'd never be able to produce enough energy to create the new lens. They wonder where they can find enough metal in the building to act as a lightning rod. Elena suggests using the giant key, since it's long and metal. She worries that it's a silly idea at first, but Tomiko tells her that it's brilliant. Now they just have to attach a wire to it and get it on the roof. Elena climbs to the roof and replaces the flagpole with the key. She attaches a wire to it and throws the other end to Tomiko, who gives it to Isabel, who puts it in the ground. Now they need to do multiple things at once, so Isabel and Tomiko decide to start heating the flux while Elena gets the materials they need from one of the storage sheds. When she sees the list though, she's not sure that she should be the one doing it, because those things look really scientific. Isabel and Tomiko tell her to think of it like baking, and this is her list of ingredients. The first thing she needs is three quarters of a cup of silicon dioxide. She has trouble getting the correct amount into a beaker. Some of it spills onto the floor. She doesn't know which kind of flask she needs, so she just takes them all (she needs a titration flask, also known as an Erlenmeyer flask). Next, she needs sodium oxide, but she has trouble finding it, and when she does, she accidentally knocks over a beaker of a bright green liquid, which causes a chemical reaction when it touches the sand on the floor. I'd just like to point out that none of this would've happened if all of the beakers had lids, corks, or stoppers in them to prevent this exact sort of thing from happening. Anyways, it creates a pink bubbly substance that blocks the door. Elena panics when she sees it, and her dress turns a new color, grey, which causes the building to start shrinking. Isabel and Tomiko wonder what's taking her so long, so Tomiko leaves to see if she needs help. The door is blown off its hinges, which Tomiko sees, and she calls Isabel. Elena thinks of baby jaquins, which stops the shrinking, but doesn't reverse it, and her dress returns to normal. The pink stuff is blocking the doorway. She tells the girls that she lost control of her emotion magic again. She thought she had it under control, but it was a new color this time. The emotion that she was feeling was self-doubt. She was feeling totally overwhelmed, like she had no idea what she was doing or what to do next. She was nervous and had a meltdown. It sounds like this could also fit under the umbrella of anxiety, but whatever. Tomiko uses a blowtorch to melt the pink stuff and free Elena. Luckily, the materials she collected didn't break when the building shrunk, even though just about everything else did. Unfortunately, they forgot about the flux during all of this, and they let it heat too long. Now they can't make glass with fire. Elena blames herself and says she's no good at science, but Tomiko and Isabel encourage her. After all, they weren't born knowing all sorts of science stuff. They had to study, learn, and practice it, and Elena could too. Anyone can be a scientist, they just have to put their mind to it. Elena sees the melted cup and asks if they could use lightning to provide the energy needed to make the new lens. They just need to reroute the wire from the lightning rod into the thing they use to make the lens. Also, I love the girls' dresses when they're wearing lab coats, probably because the all white lab coats make their dresses stand out more, and also because they're all wearing primary colors. They mix the ingredients together, and hide under a blackboard as they wait for lightning to strike. It works, the glass cools, and then they grind and polish it. The storm finally clears up, and they admire the night sky. Luisa and Francisco arrive. They were worried about them due to the lightning strikes. They admit that they had a few hiccups with the telescope, but it's okay now. Francisco finally sees the comet, and thanks his granddaughters. I think that Elena is basically an older, Latina version of Mei from the Pixar film *Turning Red*. When she feels a strong emotion, something magical happens. They're also both young women of color who typically wear red. That's basically where the similarities end though.

## Review

This was a good breather episode, and it was great seeing Tomiko and Professor Ochoa again. I love it whenever they bring up old one shot characters or plot threads. This was another great episode with a feminist message, this time obviously being about STEM. I admit that even if I don't like science, I still remember stuff about it, and in elementary school, I loved learning all about math, science, and computers in one of my classes. It was called InfoTech back then, short for Information Technology, also known as IT. Now it's called elementary STEM class. My old teacher still works there, and even though his blog looks very different now and has a different name, it's still around, as are at least some of the links to websites for kids to let them play fun games that involve math and science. It made me super nostalgic, but because I'm not a student of his anymore, I'd have to make my own account and pay for my own membership, which is currently a fee of $150 per year. It's the kind of thing they expect teachers to use for their students, and I'm not a teacher, nor am I a student anymore. I feel like this episode was also about Elena trying and learning new things, never giving up, and being willing to ask for help from someone who knows more about a subject than she does. That's why she delegated the gondola project to Isa and Cat. It's also why I went into such a detailed description of Elena trying and failing to pick up and eat her food in the beginning of the episode. She may have declined Luisa's help, but she didn't give up and never stopped trying (similar to when Mateo and Zuzo encouraged her to try again in regards to her magic training in the season 2 premiere, or her and Cacahuate learning not to give up or fear failure in season 1).