They Came, They Faked, They Conquered: Season 8 Episode Four (spoilers) · 1:58am Apr 11th, 2018
I needed a miracle from this writing team and I got one. Thanks to this episode I can live One More Day.
My take is a bit tardy. I blame sheer laziness for it. I won't say Fake It Til You Make It somehow redeemed the crime against humanity that was School Daze but it went a long way in assuring me the rest of the season will be redeemable. It showcases that absolute strongest card the writers have isn't flashy new races or huge, epic storylines that take the show way too goddamn seriously, but small "bottle shows" — to steal a phrase from SF Debris — that cost a buck fifty to make and only cast a couple of the Mane Six in the leading role. Episodes like Rarity Investigates! and Green is Not Your Color from back in old timey days. It's a proven formula that works time and time again.
Yes, the best part of MLP is the filler. Fight me!
The episode starts with Fluttershy and her animals having a picnic outside her home. Because there is no justice in this world apparently, Angel Bunny is still alive after eight friggin' years despite the average age of a rabbit being 1-2 years. The madman must be stopped! But before we get too much douchebaggery out of the little fuzzy-tailed craphead, Rarity shows up. She's looked high and low for somepony to look after her shop during the height of shopping season in Manehatten and come up dry even going as far as trying to enlist the Cutie mark Crusaders among a huge montage scene of other ponies. We even get a cute little record scratch sound effect out of Vinyl Scratch when she shakes her head.
Upon reaching the shop Fluttershy is greeted with an assorted grab bag of Manehattenite scum. The first, a pretentious archtype who requests a series of contradictory things who Rarity manages to satisfy with the use of female power politics and amateur psychology. All well and good for her but now Fluttershy is thrown to the wolves and Rarity and her posse head out to some fashion show. Fortunately for Fluttershy she won't be completely abandoned; the raccoons from last season are still living in Rarity's shop and helping her take care of it, no less!
Unfortunately no plan survives contact with the enemy and Fluttershy is forced to retreat into the backroom after some snooty stallion asks for a thread count on one of the vests. Our intrepid raccoon assistants suggest putting on an act through the use of animal charades and Fluttershy takes on the persona of a stern businesswoman to bully her first challenger into submission. Later on said snooty stallion meets Rarity on the street and tells her how well Fluttershy did, prompting some relief. Rarity was nearly convinced of the folly of her plan when she met a particularly nasty customer heading to the shop before running into him.
Unfortunately Fluttershy's improvisation is already starting to give her bad ideas by the end of customer two of being even more snooty and the hook is set when the third customer also results in success, seeming to confirm the validity of her flawed logic process.
This is what I mean by smaller is better. FiM gets a misery 22-minutes including the theme song to tell a good story and in almost all cases you're left with a race for the finish by the end where plotlines are hastily sewn together at the end. 11-minutes in and we not only get motivations and character logic that makes sense we get a novel and interesting pacing mechanic in the form of interactions with the customers. The customers themselves are also fairly interesting, if a bit jerky. We get the pretentious blowhards who are countered by an authoritarian counter-personality, a weirdo goth stallion personality, and a truly dreadful Gen-Z uptalking hipster type mare, both of which Fluttershy end up incorporating into her acting routine.
We also get a canon reference to "leather" meaning we have to assume the ponies skin animals for their hide or it's a synthetic form. You can guess which one most bronies will roll with if they even acknowledge it at all.
Sadly, goth pony is her last real success and when some British wanker gets mad about her tea being cold the interaction of Fluttershy's three invented archtypes take control and begin to assert themselves at entirely the wrong time with hilarious results. The poor raccoons realizing Fluttershy has gone full crazy mare make it all the way back to Spike at the school and explain the situation, who manages to translate their raccoon talk using his skills as "a dragon charades champion". Back at Rarity's shop, the customers are beginning to leave without buying anything as Fluttershy sinks ever deeper into madness, reaching it's crescendo with the Fluttershy-Unity Abomination tossing Twilight, Rainbow, Applejack and Pinkie Pie out onto the street. Keep your Friendship religion in church, ladies! 
Setting aside the fact that the story that's already been a great evolution on the "Fluttershy tries to be assertive" trope, the best remains to be seen with Rarity firing all three personality types, one after the other in a bit of physical comedy that had me and Firesight in stitches as we watched it! The animaters had Fluttershy reappear behind Rarity repeatedly after being fired and disappearing off-screen until only Fluttershy herself remained, who then apologized for letting things get out of hand.
If School Daze proved without a doubt what can make FiM fail, "Fake It" shows everything about FiM that makes it work: the clever animation tricks, everyday ponies acting crazy in a way that's relatable to us normies, and a simple message for the intended demographic about being an improved version of yourself as opposed to an insincere fake. An absolute homerun all-around and one of my new personal favorites. 10/10 for sure!
And now that I've said something nice about season 8, I've kept my karma good. 
I'm with you. This was a very imaginative episode, showcasing the show at its best--brilliant, ballsy, and coming up with stuff I'd never have thought of or at least thought could never have worked. Fluttershy taking over Rarity's shop and inventing three new personas to handle it which slowly overtake her was absolutely inspired, and the ending had me laughing hard as Rarity had to fire each of her alternate personalities in turn. We got to meet Fluttersnooty, Hipstershy, and Fluttergoth, each brilliantly sold.
I admit I had grave doubts about this season after the first two weekends, where the Maud episode was merely meh to me and the season opener... should be nuked from orbit, and then the rubble bounced to be sure. But this? 10/10 one of my all-time favorite episodes. Kudos, MLP crew. Now how about more of it?
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May we never witness another trash fire like that one ever again. Thanks for the reply.