Thoughts on the Season 5 Premier: Ponifying Huxley and Orwell (Spoilers, Duh) · 5:18pm Apr 4th, 2015
On a scale of 1-5, one representing near-absolute dissappointment and five a sonic rainboom, the episode was...
4.5
Otherwise I'd call it a clean four and leave it at that, but Daniel Ingram did it again and pulled out the extra 0.5 with an awesome song, of which I'll soon be listening the heck out before turning my ears to the endless remixes. Anyway, how does the numeral really convert into words?
Not easily, that's for sure. Off the top of my head, I actually leaned towards 3.5 with my evaluation, mostly because of the episode's plot. The theme of "soviet style" equality has been around for decades, and especially sci-fi has pretty much exhausted it. Wyndham's Chrysalids and Huxley's Brave New World are just a few of the best known examples. Looking through this glass, the episode first appeared to me as beating a dead pony insofar as the plot was concerned: the game was up pretty much two minutes after the Mane Six had arrived to the village.
And this is exactly why I feel stoked about the season to come! The episode's plot (at least in the educational sense) might have been a big cliché, but it was one that really encapsulated the core of that cliché. If my hunch is right and the overlapping motive of the season is to study the various ways with which friendship can go wrong, then the game was thrown wide open from the start when such an obvious answer was dealt with in such a short order. It's a common view that the show's strong point really is to strive for originality by utilizing some of the oldest tricks in the book, and this episode really shines in that regard.
