Year produced: 2022
Original air date: 3/18/23 (TV), 3/8/23 (Disney+)
Production code: 109
To avoid the more mundane aspects of her life, Lunella creates Skipster, an app that allows her to skip ahead in time by putting her brain in auto-pilot with the press of a button. However, she soon discovers that doing so creates complications in both her home and hero life — especially when Skipster starts to grow beyond its programming.
Tropes:
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Lunella designs Skipster to be a self-learning AI that generates its own updates. Naturally, it soon gains enough intelligence to lock her out of deleting it and repair itself when she tries to destroy it.
- An Aesop: Even the mundane, everyday moments of life are just as important as the exciting parts.
- Be Careful What You Wish For: Lunella wanting to skip past the boring stuff works... a little too well.
- Benevolent A.I.: Skipster is nothing but upbeat and helpful, but it just doesn't know when to stop and ignores her changing wishes to fulfill its original programming. After Lunella tells it she made a mistake and that she should appreciate even the slow parts in her life, it doesn't fight back or turn evil. Instead, it allows her to return to the point before she created the app.
- Call-Back: During the period where the Skipster takes her to different points in time, she ends up in a point where she appears to be singing karaoke with Tai and Brooklyn, possibly during or after "Goodnight, Moon Girl".
- Call-Forward: One skip briefly shows Moon Girl facing someone who'll turn out to be the villain of the season finale.
- Catchphrase: Skipster says "You're welcome" everytime she "helps" Lunella.
- Chekhov's Gun: At the beginning of the episode, Lunella complains about hearing "Just the Two of Us" by Bill Withers because it makes the day seem to drag on. At the climax, she recalls and plays the song to slow down the rapid fire moments of her life flashing by in Skipster's code to find the correct one she wishes to return to.
- Didn't Think This Through:
- Lunella added an A.I. and auto-update system to Skipster, which later allows it to run automatically. When Lunella decides to stop using it, it updates to the point of activating based on her previous skips. Plus, it cannot be thrown away or or deleted.
- Lunella uses Skipster to fast forward through Garko the Man-Frog's Evil Gloating, but forgets that villains always explain how the hero can stop them during said monologues and misses valuable information about his plans as a result.
- Futureshadowing: The montage of various times and places jumped around shows Lunella fighting Torg, a tiny Devil, Lunella seeing a figure wearing a ring, and fighting what appears to be an Evil Counterpart of herself, hinting at "Devil on her Shoulder", the "OMG" two-part season finale, and "The Great Beyond-er" Season 2 premier.
- Locked Out of the Loop: Lunella skipping through moments that are superficially boring causes her to miss out on time to bond with her family. She gets unnerved to learn that they have in-jokes and experiences she was technically present for but does not remember.
- Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!: Lunella learns the hard way that even boring parts in her life contain moments that can give her life mean. She does realize this when she loses control of Skipster, but it's when she explains this to the app that it finally sinks in.
- Magical Computer: App in this case. Along with mentally skipping her over moments in time, Skipster develops updates that make Lunella's phone invulnerable to damage, capable of teleporting to her, and levitating as well. When Lunella tries modifying her phone to stop Skipster, she not only begins randomly jumping into the past and future, but her phone is physically brought with her, Lunella lamenting she accidentally ripped a hole in space-time.
- Mental Time Travel: Instead of literally skipping ahead in time, Skipster is designed to send out a signal that engages the "default mode" of a person's brain while still allowing for basic mental engagement and responsiveness, giving off the illusion of skipping ahead in time. It is also apparently capable of showing future events of a person's life after Skipster's upgrades, as shown during "Shuffle Mode".
- Mythology Gag:
- Skipster's shuffle mode takes Lunella to what seems to be a future similar to Days of Future Past, complete with an older Lunella standing in front of a wanted poster of various heroes who are either captured or on the run.
- One of the potential future scenarios is Moon Girl being grappled by an Evil Twin done up like a devil. This references a story from the comic books where Lunella took a trip to a Bizarro Universe and met "Devil Girl and Moon Dinosaur".
- Race Against the Clock: At the climax, Lunella has minutes to discover the correct moment in time she wants to return to before her phone battery dies with her within Skipster's code.
- Ret-Gone: The end result of Lunella returning to a moment well before Skipster's creation and deciding not to do so.
- Ship Tease: During the Mental Time Travel Montage, Lunella is seen at a school dance with a corsage on her wrist and holding hands with Eduardo.
- Unwanted Assistance: The problem with Skipster starts when it updates to automatically activate and skip through any situation even loosely similar to what Lunella has used it for in the past. It skips over Lunella eating ice cream because she compared its green color to broccoli, which she had previously skipped through.
- Whole-Plot Reference: To Click, a movie about a remote control that allows the lead to mentally skip boring parts while appearing bored and zombie-like to everyone else. He loses control of the remote and it begins automatically skipping crucial moments, making him learn not to miss out on meaningful moments with his family by the time he is rewinded before discovering the remote.
- Wishful Projection: In addition to programming a skip ad button for life, Lunella also gives it the voice of acclaimed astronaut, engineer, doctor, and dancer Mae Jemison. When trying to talk Skipster down when it starts going rogue, Lunella states that the real Mae Jemison would never do something like this, only for the AI to point out that it's not the real Mae Jemison, but merely the projection of Mae Jemison that Lunella had in mind when she programmed it.
