Season Six Episode Review: PPOV (Pony Point of View) · 5:09pm Oct 1st, 2016
Another week, another episode. Our ponies discover disagreement as they bicker and rationalize away any self-blame over who ruined their vacation. It's time for “PPOV.”
TECHNICAL SPECS:
Whatever.
REVIEW:
So, there's this movie called Rashomon, directed by this one guy called Akira Kurosawa. In it, the events of a murder are recounted by multiple participants (including a witness, the killer, the victim's wife, and the victim's spirit) at a trial, with each person's description being ultimately self-serving and contradictory to the others. Much like many of Kurosawa's other works, the film was influential enough to basically take ownership of the plot device – which has existed since humanity invented lying – and inspire numerous other movies, series, and other forms of media to incorporate the same idea of contrasting viewpoints muddling the truth.
“PPOV” is basically the Rashomon-style story done to MLP. Applejack, Pinkie Pie and Rarity had a disastrous sea voyage, and each blames somepony else for everything going wrong. Their stories paint themselves as being the height of perfection, striving to give their friends a trip that's, as the episode repeats ad nauseam, “out of their element.” (Of course, said plans are in the element for the ponies planning them, and they basically spend all their lives with each other anyway, so I don't see how putting that on a boat will be more effective.)
Something I thought was interesting was the disparity between how each of the three stacks the story. Rarity obviously presents herself as the model of decorum and refinement, speaks about how she only brought the barest of essentials (which is likely a lie – this is the same pony that brought an entire wagon's load of supplies just to go camping, remember), and made exquisite food for everyone. In her version, Pinkie is mostly herself (albeit at the worst time), while Applejack went insane and thought she was an actual pirate, throwing the snacks overboard for not being piratey enough before driving the ship into the Storm of the Century and nearly killing them all. Pinkie's story is in much of the same vein, only it's Rarity who ruins everything by being a snob, bringing lots of unnecessary luggage, throwing out her perfectly good snacks she brought (and denying Applejack a sandwich because they literally just went out of style) and dooming the vessel because of her disdain for commoners.
And Applejack? She blames both Pinkie and Rarity. Her version is basically caricatures out of a really bad fanfic. Rarity says “darling” every other word and swipes their map to use as a tablecloth, while Pinkie is random for the sake of randomness. She did plan to hunt down some treasure, apparently, but she certainly wasn't the crazy psycho pirate Rarity cast her as. Why, she was nothing but polite to the ponies that hissed and cursed her for accidentally knocking the cucumber sandwiches into the water! And she never lies, remember!
So which of the stories was true? We never really find out. Some of the mystery is solved (the cucumber sandwiches caused the disaster, the ponies got back to shore because they barely even left the dock before sinking), but we never know who actually sent the sandwiches into the water, or who was responsible for steering the ship when they hit the tidal wave, or what other events transpired on the boat. And that's perfectly fine. Something that's often forgotten when doing a Rashomon-style story is that the film doesn't come out and say, “This is how it really happened.” We get a story at the end that sounds like it should be the way things really went, but it completely contradicts the other stories, is still exposed as being at least partially a lie by another character, and is just as self-serving and full of holes as everyone else's version. We don't need to know everything that happened when it's the effect these events have had that is truly important.
There was quite a few laughs this episode, mostly stemming from the way each of the ponies twists and exaggerates their friends' mannerisms. Applejack!Pinkie being dumb as a brick and Pinkie!Rarity being a snob that would give Blueblood pause were my favorites. I also loved Spike's growing frustration with finding out just how they got back (and the reveal of just how epically they failed this voyage was perfect), and Pinkie writing her note on Gummy's belly is wonderfully her. Twilight is also given a chance to shine, piecing everything together herself through logic and rational thought rather than just zapping up some spell or whatever to solve everything.
If there is one huge thing I would like to criticize, though, it's the bunyip. It's an actual creature of folklore and all that, but it just feels a bit...lame, with just the smallest hint of being a copout. Plus, it's an incredibly huge creature to be hanging out so close to the docks that the capsized three were able to just stand in the shallows afterwards, assuming it didn't just fling them back fifty miles or something. The moral is also a bit on the lazy side, which seems to be an increasingly common thing these days. Blunt lessons were a lot easier to work with when they were being framed in the form of letters and journal entries than just being something somepony says to somepony else.
CONCLUSION:
Overall, the episode was decently enjoyable. It was a fun little blast that I wouldn't mind watching again. But that's only my point of view, after all...
Next time, Applejack tells the story all about how her life got flip-turned upside-down...
Of course, that is just your version of the episode review...but how can we know what really happened?
I wonder if this episode was timed to come out around the same time as Magnificent Seven, seeing as the original Magnificent Seven was based on a Kurosawa film, Seven Samurai.
Agreed - The Bunyip was a deus ex machina to resolve the problem without any effort. It indicated that the Fox Brothers, having created the crisis of the week didn't actually know how to fix it in a 22-minute runtime. Would it have been so impossible for there to have been more time with Twilight showing how her three friends differing objectives to the voyage simply made it inevitable that something bad would happen? Now, the chance to do over without being so focussed on your own objectives that you feel the need to steamroller the other two!