And yet again, we have another episode that needs to be prodded with a stick. Let’s see what’s next…

…

And it’s #17, “The Show Stoppers.”

---

TECHNICAL SPECS:

Season: 1
Episode: 18
Written By: Cindy Morrow
First Aired: March 4, 2011

SUMMARY:

Now that the CMC have been established, Applejack has decided to give them a place to hang out: her old clubhouse on an isolated part of the farm. Unfortunately, the long-abandoned place is a wreck, thus forcing the fillies to clean it up. While Apple Bloom single-handedly repairs and paints the building, Scootaloo races around town to draw a map of Ponyville and Sweetie Belle works on the Crusaders’ theme song. Once their tasks are finished, the three head out to find their Cutie Marks.

Once again, however, their attempts all end in failure, culminating in them deshelving every book in the library. Fortunately, Twilight and Cheerilee enter at that moment with news of a school talent show. The three immediately jump at the opportunity to do more insane stunts, but Twilight points out that they should try to think about what they already enjoy doing and just do that.

The three gather up materials from around Ponyville, with plans to put on an epic rock performance. As always, however, they misinterpret Twilight’s advice. Sweetie, who is a beautiful singer, wants to design their outfits and make the sets. Scootaloo, whose moves on the scooter can translate perfect into choreography, decides she wants to sing. And Apple Bloom, who is good at building and designing, decides to use kung-fu as dancing. Almost immediately, the three begin to struggle and fail at each task, but continue to fail to notice what’s going on.

The night of the performance, Twilight goes backstage to give the girls a pep talk, but when she discovers how they’ve assigned each others’ roles, she realizes that she’s been ignored again. Enraged, she curses their already doomed performance by wishing them “Good luck,” which is just one step below shouting Macbeth in terms of things you never do in a theater. The fillies throw their concert, but Scootaloo can’t carry a tune to save her life, Sweetie Belle’s designs and stage direction are flat-out awful, and Apple Bloom’s punches and kicks only serve to smack the others around and finally cause the entire backdrop and props to fall on them. Nonetheless, the fillies stand up triumphantly…until the audience erupts into laughter.

Embarrassed, the three try to retreat backstage, but are quickly thrown back out for the awards. To their surprise, they do win…for “Best Comedy Act.” Rallied once again, the three throw off their costumes, but their flanks are still blank. When Twilight asks if they’ve learned something, they say that they’ve learned that they should focus on what they do best, rather than try and force themselves to be something they’re not. And so they decide to devote their lives…to comedy.

REVIEW:

I’m going to admit it right now: “The Show Stoppers” is the worst CMC episode so far. “Cutie Pox” comes close, but when it comes to just being annoyingly pointless and frustratingly bad, it’s hard to beat this one. And it certainly doesn’t help that it comes right on the heels of “The Stare Master,” a mostly mediocre episode also staring the CMC. Much like with Season Two, if you group all the character episodes together, it can actually start rubbing you the wrong way unless the episodes are really good.

The introduction of the Cutie Mark Crusader clubhouse is one of only two highlights in this entire episode. I just love the CMCs’ reaction to the dilapidated wreck Applejack expects to make their new headquarters. Of course, AJ tries to spin the positive by saying it just needs a little TLC, which prompts one of my favorite Scootaloo lines of all time:

And of course, Applejack leaning against the side, only to go crashing through, is a classic bit of comedy gold.

After this comes the CMC repairing the clubhouse with almost zero effort, while also scoping out the range of their activities. Scootaloo draws a crude map of the town, which she then follows with a demonstration of her mad scooter skillz. The sequence itself is visually impressive, but otherwise, there’s not a whole lot to comment on. It’s just Scoots jumping off ramps and going slow-mo over tree branches. Apple Bloom, meanwhile, has managed to clean, sand, rebuild, and paint the entire clubhouse in the amount of time it took Scootaloo to go around town. And then we have Sweetie, singing a lovely little melody while dusting with her tail. Her song turns out to be the first verse of the Cutie Mark Crusader Theme Song, thus completing this massive clump of foreshadowing. We even get to hear Scootaloo’s…angelic singing voice.

Now that they have a headquarters, the ponies grab their stuff and head out for a meaningless montage, showing them failing at life in every possible way. They get trampled by pigs, ruin a pony’s mane, get sucked into a taffy machine, get chased by a squid that’s in a lake for some reason, fail to climb up a short rock, and so forth. This is a fairly lengthy montage as well, and to its detriment, it’s just not very funny or amusing. The only scene that’s kind of amusing is them testing to see if Apple Bloom has ESP, which is kind of cute and amusing in its own right. Still, it just feels like padding of the highest caliber.

The episode finally remembers it needs a story when the girls destroy the library. I love Spike immediately saying he had nothing to do with this; seeing as he’s still a kid, it makes sense that he’d try to deflect the blame before it could be dished out. I also like Twilight and Cheerilee as friends. One’s a bookworm scholar, and the other’s (supposedly) the best teacher in Ponyville, so it’s only natural that the two would at least be casual friends. This, of course, leads to the introduction of the school’s talent show, as well as Twilight saying that they should focus on what they’re already good at and enjoy doing and work from there. We’ll discuss that more when we get to the moral.

The CMC gathering materials was actually decently funny, if only for Rarity losing her accent again and the fillies just grabbing stuff without any sort of guideline to how they were going to use it. We also get a bit of foreshadowing when they borrow the book about ghouls and ghosts – or is it ghosts and goblins? Either way, we learn that they want to sing a dramatic song for the talent show; naturally, it’s all about how they’re crusading for their marks and how much it sucks to be a blank flank. But then we get to where they damn themselves to failure. Sweetie refuses to sing because of stage fright, and uses Twilight’s advice to do what she enjoys doing to become the designer, since she enjoys being like Rarity. Scootaloo doesn’t give a reason why she doesn’t want to do the choreography, but given her worship of Rainbow Dash, it’s likely she didn’t want to do anything as “girly” as dancing and instead wanted to be the center of attention. And that leaves Apple Bloom to plot out their moves, but since she doesn’t know the first thing about that, she just falls back on karate. You know, that thing she utterly failed at back in “Call of the Cutie?”

In any case, the CMC all take on the roles that they aren’t suited for, and despite their best efforts, they consistently fail in these tasks until the one pony actually skilled in them steps in. For example, when Scootaloo can’t think of the right words to the song, Sweetie Belle manages to put together an entire tune – with lyrics – within a matter of seconds. When Apple Bloom’s twirls and spins just end with her landing on her face, Scootaloo pulls off a perfect spin on one forehoof. And when Sweetie sews five legs for one of the outfits, Apple Bloom tells her to use the models to measure out each piece; she also points out that she should wash her paint brush between colors.

And thus we get to one of the big problems I have with this episode. The whole purpose of the CMC is to find their special talents. In their last two appearances, there really wasn’t much to go on, so their antics were at least justifiable for the most part. But here? We see what they’re good at. We know what their talents should be. This is honestly a major misstep, since it not only makes the Crusaders look even dumber than they should be, but it also renders this episode, and any other episode about them hunting for Cutie Marks an exercise in frustration.

The root problem with the CMC and how they try to acquire their magical butt tattoos is that they think it’s just as simple as doing something once, and that fate will just hand it to them once they, say, play hopscotch for the first time. However, it’s been said time and again that it isn’t how Cutie Marks work. In fact, the pony who gave them the idea to do random things was Rainbow Dash, who just happened to luck out and find what made her special without really trying. Furthermore, “The Cutie Mark Chronicles” says that a Cutie Mark is more about a pony finding out who they really are, thus implying that they must find the meaning and purpose behind why they enjoy doing something, or the mark won’t appear. And yet, every time the concept is brought up, the fillies shoot it down within moments.

In other words, we see them doing things they’re incredibly gifted at, but since they expect instant gratification, they won’t bother to look past the surface details and instead just throw themselves into something they SUCK at.

Still, there are a few lines that are just gold here:

The talent show gets off to a bad start with the mere reminder of Snips and Snails’ existence. The joke here is a pretty basic one, but it’s cute enough, and does make some sense considering their infatuation with Trixie. We also get a good lesson on theater superstition, introducing the kids to the meaning of the term “Break a leg” and why it’s used in place of “Good luck.” (Also, just as a word of warning, never say “Macbeth” in a theater, either. Trust me, I know.) Twilight also makes an appearance, if only to serve as a visual representation of our own frustration at the CMC’s willful blindness. She even wishes then “Good luck” after Apple Bloom trips over her own hooves, thus making the previous lesson the set-up for this punchline.

As for the song itself, it’s actually kind of awesome. Granted, a lot of it is in just how ridiculously over-the-top the spectacle is; the CMC are dressed like something from a deranged late-80s music video, the props and sets are ridiculously horrid in design, and everything that can go wrong does go wrong. The tune is actually not that bad, but it’s a little hard to tell when paired with Scootaloo’s tone deafness. Sweetie Belle running around backstage to trigger all the machinery was also funny, if only because she keeps goofing it up and adding to the chaos. As for Apple Bloom, most of her stuff is just her trying to pass off martial arts as straightforward dancing; her part doesn’t pick up until she gets a hoof stuck in a backdrop, thus causing the whole thing to start collapsing. Fortunately, it’s one of those disasters that doesn’t trigger until just as the song ends, allowing Scoots to mangle another chorus before everything but the kitchen sink buries the three.

And thus, we get to the start of our moral. Despite their attempts to make a serious song, the CMC are laughed off the stage. Only now do they realize the folly of their ways, but it is too late; Cheerilee (and Spike, for no reason whatsoever) returns to push them back out for the awards. Snips and Snails win for magic, and immediately start bickering for no reason other than to raise my hatred of them to new levels. We also have two otherwise unimportant fillies win the “Best Dramatic Performance” award, which was apparently what the three were gunning for to begin with. And then the CMC win…for comedy. And like any good spin doctor, they start telling everyone that they had always intended for it to be a parody, and it wasn’t rendered a joke simply because of their ineptitude.

Of course, they don’t get their marks, but are still able to compose the moral. Unfortunately, it’s one of those ones that’s a bit too vague and misdirected for its own good. At face value, the lesson seems to be that if you’re not immediately good at something, you should give it up and not try new things ever again. Personally, I don’t see it that way. It feels like what they were trying to say was that you should focus on your strengths and work from there, rather than force yourself to keep doing something you’re not good at and show no sign of improving at. While it’s a nice sentiment to say that anyone can do anything, that’s often not the case. It’s better to do something you know you’re good at and enjoy than to try and push your square peg into a round hole. Much like with “Feeling Pinkie Keen,” however, the episode doesn’t do a good job phrasing its moral, and thus makes it seem like it was pointing to something else entirely.

There ending also raised some confusion back in the day regarding Scootaloo and Rainbow Dash. Up to that point, the two had never been on camera together, and the former’s hero worship of the latter was not an established fact. So when Dash appeared next to Rarity and Applejack, both of whom are big sisters to one of the Crusaders, many assumed that the same was true for them. Word of God quickly said otherwise, and “Cutie Mark Chronicles” effectively crushed the theory dead, but for a short time, there were a surprising number of fics and art showing the two as sisters.

CONCLUSION:

If you want an episode that highlights the difference between Season One and Season Two Crusaders, then this is it. The second season refined the characters, making them more three-dimensional while also beefing up their brains enough that they just seemed like clueless kids rather than rock-stupid morons who can’t see the bloody obvious. Here, their behavior is just so stupid and aggravating that it wrecks the episode for me, with the three remaining utterly flat and serving only to belt out how much they want their Cutie Marks. Overall, it’s just a poor episode.

One last thing I’d like to point out is that this barely feels like a FiM episode at all, with most of the adult characters feeling like they were jammed in there at the last minute. It’s like it was a script they had for the rejected spin-off that was just brushed off to serve as some last-minute filler. That probably isn’t true, but as I sat down to thinks the episode over, that just came to mind.

---

And that’s the end of the CMC in Season One. There’s only one Crusader episode left (“Cutie Pox”), and we’ll probably be getting to that one soon.