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  • 304 weeks
    Season Eight Episode Reviews: Molt Down

    This week is a Spike episode? What a re-”molt”-ing development this is!

    Let's look at “Molt Down,” the episode that will surely be perfectly normal and have no long-lasting repercussions on a character's appearance.

    Read More

    2 comments · 2,376 views
  • 305 weeks
    Season Eight Episode Reviews: Break Up Break Down

    I dread going into this week's episode. For today, we discuss matters of the heart. Romance, love, heartbreak, and all that rot. Which means we run right into the most loathsome of all fandom constructs, the kind of thing that destroys friendships and leaves the most brilliant of minds curled up helplessly in a corner, foaming from the mouth:

    SHIPPING.

    Read More

    6 comments · 1,676 views
  • 306 weeks
    Season Eight Episode Reviews: Non-Compete Clause

    We've had a string of good episodes the last few weeks. Whether it be shapeshifting seaponies, an actual Celestia episode, or discovering Starlight's dark phase, we've had lots of fun and plenty of laughs.

    Today's episode is about Applejack and Rainbow Dash competing.

    The good times are over.

    Read More

    7 comments · 1,588 views
  • 307 weeks
    Season Eight Episode Reviews: The Parent Map

    Happy Cinco de Mayo, everyone who cares about that! What better way to spend the day than watching a cartoon about horses dealing with their mommy/daddy issues? Well, tough, because that's what we're doing. This is “The Parent Map.”

    Read More

    4 comments · 1,115 views
  • 308 weeks
    Season Eight Episode Reviews: Horse Play

    So hey, it's a new episode. Surely nothing to be excited about. Just another standard episode of a cartoon pony show.

    Only it's a CELESTIA EPISODE!

    Prepare for extra spicy biased scoring as we look at Best Princess' newest episode, “Horse Play!”

    Read More

    5 comments · 1,261 views
Jun
11th
2016

Season Six Episode Review: Spice Up Your Life · 5:33pm Jun 11th, 2016

Well folks, it's time for another hiatus. But before the ponies go lie down for a short while, let's look at the midseason finale. The map is back in “Spice Up Your Life.” Bring plenty of oregano.


TECHNICAL SPECS:

Season: 6
Episode: 12
Written By: Mike Vogel
First Aired: June 11, 2016


REVIEW:

We open with a surprise: Starlight Glimmer showing up in an episode she isn't starring in. Sadly, she has no lines and is mostly there to, once again, reference her horrible life decisions, but I can chalk that up to Spike being a tactless little brat and leave it at that. At least she seems genuinely pissed to have it brought up this time. Still nice to see that she actually exists when the spotlight isn't on her, rather than spontaneously forming into being whenever we need to see Twilight be a terrible teacher.

Anyway, remember the map episodes last season? Well, the reason we haven't gotten any this season is because of Starlight. When she went rip-roaring through space and time to destroy Equestria because her only foalhood friend got sent to school and was too much of a jerk to just write her a letter every now and then, she ended up breaking the map. So Twilight and Starlight use a combined spell to bring it back...as a staticy, fidgety hologram. (Kind of interested to see how that Twilight/Twilight mission would have gone.) And sure enough, Rarity and Pinkie are teaming up once again.

The focus this time is a struggling restaurant, one of the most standard of sitcom plot devices. It's an Indian-flavored place sitting in a back alley of Canterlot's food district, Restaurant Row. I admit that I really haven't tried Indian food that much, but I would gladly take whatever they offer over the vile, disgusting garbage everyone else offers, which is all just really tiny portions of basically inedible mush. I know it's a cartoon and I can't taste the food, but I've still been to these places, I know what that food tastes like, and I know it's just slop they massively marked up in order to fool gullible people with too much money into thinking they're eating something “cultured” and “trendy” because it's expensive and presented on a rectangular plate.

(And for those who like this kind of food, know that I am at least partially joking here. I just hate things that are expensive for the sake of seeming higher-class than they are. But most of all, I hate those rectangular plates restaurants started using. I don't care what business sense they make. When I go to a damn Chilis and shorten my lifespan with Honey-Chipotle Chicken Crispers, I want the little bundles of cholesterol served on a round dish that actually leaves enough room for everything stacked on it!)

The good restaurant is operated by Saffron Masala and her father, Coriander Cumin. They are your basic father-daughter restauranteer combo, with Saffron believing in the restaurant despite its abysmal popularity (Rarity and Pinkie may very well have been the only customers they ever had) and Coriander just wanting to give up because there's no way they can succeed with the snooty ponies of Canterlot. And standing in their way is yet another trademark of standard plot design: the evil food critic. Zesty Gourmand is her name, and her ratings will make-or-break a restaurant in Canterlot. Because as we established back in “Sweet and Elite” and “Canterlot Boutique,” the ponies of Canterlot are fashion-conscious sheep that will blindly follow whoever they have arbitrarily granted importance over their lives. Even Rarity was cheering the high-end restaurants on, despite wincing noticeably when she tried to actually eat what they were offering.

The episode ultimately plays with the standard strengths of our two Mane 6 members, putting them in a position where their assets become liabilities. Rarity is normally one of the most aesthetic members of the Mane 6, so making something that's pleasing to the eye should be easy. But she's also tapped into the same wellspring that made all the places on Restaurant Row look and operate exactly the same, so she decides that the best way to save the restaurant is to make it conform to Zesty's personal tastes. Pinkie, meanwhile, is normally able to charm anypony that isn't a toupee-wearing donkey, but she's completely lost on getting through to a culture that worships ratings over new tastes. The only ponies she can get to go with her are a pair of tourists who find the fancy restaurants bland. (Ponies after my own heart.)

So in the end, the heroines blow it, although Rarity is sadly the one who screws up the most. Not that it matters, because Zesty is, in fact, a total bitch and doesn't even give the restaurant a try. This, of course, leads to the standard resolution where the father and daughter finally bond over their happy memories of cooking together, and Rarity and Pinkie Pie salvage the situation by switching roles, with Pinkie fixing up the restaurant to look like it did before and Rarity using her Canterlot-style charms to lure in ponies.

The episode's lesson is a standard “Be Yourself” moral, framed in the device of not letting one person's opinion control you and to try things out for yourself. Zesty, though, is still a total bitch and continues to badmouth the place even AFTER everypony is enjoying the food, despite refusing to touch it. Heck, the map's purpose may have not just been to solve this particular friendship problem (albeit more of a family nature than anything), but to inspire the rest of the Restaurant Row restaurateurs to follow their own cooking passions rather than try to fit the narrow mold Zesty likes. I also like that Zesty refuses to change even after this revelation – it's nice to actually have a villain that stays a villain, even if they're just a food critic.

So we have our two ponies saving a restaurant and freeing Canterlot from a food critic's reign of terror. What's not to like? Well, there's the song. The second act is dominated by a musical number that's ultimately rather basic and uninspired. It's got a good beat, but the lyrics are wonky and feel a bit too forced in the message. The instrumental reprise near the end was a lot better, in my opinion. The episode's also rather light on laughs; about the only moments I really laughed at were Pinkie apparently absorbing food through her face. (The fact that I do not question this is a testament to Pinkie's randomness.) The characters were in good form, and I liked most of the newcomers, but it does feel like a bit too much of the mid-episode failure was piled onto Rarity's actions, as Pinkie at least had a minimal amount of success at her task.

Also, apparently elephants exist in the FiM universe. We don't see them, but the restaurant uses them as part of its logo. So, are elephants sapient? Do they have their own society? Or are they just basic elephants, albeit in a universe where woodland critters can take part in book clubs? As long as the comics don't turn them into something like the Eldeer, this is something that will hopefully be one day explored.


CONCLUSION:

Much like the map episodes of last season, this was a fairly typical episode. It didn't have any big laughs or surprises – it was just another thirty minutes of ponies. Still, it accomplishes what it set out to do, and I can't complain about that. The weakest point was definitely the song, but it was still a fun, nice little episode. But that's just my opinion. What's yours?


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Comments ( 10 )

Something I forgot to mention:

One of the ponies is named Chargrill Breadwinner.

derpicdn.net/img/view/2016/6/11/1175756__safe_screencap_text_credits_spoiler-colon-s06e12_spice+up+your+life.png

If I ever have children, I will name my firstborn Chargrill Breadwinner.

I had to laugh on your rant about high end places. The only expensive place that I crave is a Brazilian place that serves all you can eat meat brought to your table on pikes. Thirty bucks a person? Fine! Just give me my all you can eat fillet minion wrapped in bacon!

4015430

Now THAT is something I can get behind. :pinkiehappy:

But she's also tapped into the same wellspring that made all the places on Restaurant Row look and operate exactly the same,

That's probably the one thing that really bugged me about this episode, because the entire point of Rarity's character has always been that unlike the typical fashion snob so often seen in cartoons she is most assuredly NOT any kind of sheep. Rarity doesn't follow trends she MAKES her own. This was even reinforced when she started up her own shop Canterlot, where Sassy instituted what was within the context of the episode a highly successful business strategy of mass production, which Rarity absolutely hated because of how it sapped all of her own creative passion.

If anyone should know better than to chase success via bland conformity it really should be Rarity.

Heck, the map's purpose may have not just been to solve this particular friendship problem (albeit more of a family nature than anything), but to inspire the rest of the Restaurant Row restaurateurs to follow their own cooking passions rather than try to fit the narrow mold Zesty likes.

I'm very much inclined to agree. After all, previous map episodes had always been about not just helping out individuals, but improving an entire community. I just sort of wish that had been more evident throughout the entire episode instead of just sort of tacked onto the end as an afterthought.

The second act is dominated by a musical number that's ultimately rather basic and uninspired. It's got a good beat, but the lyrics are wonky and feel a bit too forced in the message.

The song was definitely the weakest part of the episode. Not that it was all that bad in and of itself, it's actually kind of catchy and I can at least appreciate what they were trying to accomplish by juxtaposing the lyrics against the inevitable outcome. The problem is that it's too long, and of course aforementioned fact that Rarity really should have known better in the first place. I sort of couldn't help but spend the second half of the song screaming at her to live up to her own standards and reputation.

I thought the song was a great tribute to Indian style music. The instrumentals and beat were unique and separate it from the rest of the songs in the show. I felt the song was a good way of showing the different ways Rarity and Pinkie believe you achieve success: doing what's already popular vs. staying true to your vision. Maybe a little long, but I loved the instrumentals enough to enjoy it the whole way through.

Only issue I had with it was that I knew what was going to happen the moment Pinkie and Saffron stepping back into the restaurant.

Watched episode.

Now I want curry. I could freaking murder a curry.

This episode continues the theme started in Sweet and Elite that most Canterlot ponies are SHEEP. I know it's a parody on the real world, but at least in the real world, I can expect to go down a 'restaurant row' and find variety, even if it's just the usual selection of standard franchises (McDonald's, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, etc.). Here all the restaurants in Canterlot have become clones of each other, apparently all on the say so of one pony...

How is this the mid-season finale if there are 26 episodes and the 13th would mark the end of the first half? Am I missing something? Do I suck at math? Help pls. :pinkiesick:

4018307

Because Discovery Family sucks at math. :derpytongue2:

The actual ninth episode apparently being moved until after the hiatus may be part of the issue, as well. This would have been the thirteenth episode if everything was in production order.

4015390 You know, arguably, Zesty might not have been as hateable if she just made some "no accounting for taste" assessment to herself and moved on.

But nope.

She's like Doug Walker's McNitpick. "NOOOOUUUUUU! You're all supposed to follow my opinions like a gospel!"

And I'm sorry, but that old pony must have gone through some Asami Nakiri levels of depraved training to be that damn picky about an entire STREET's food selection.

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