), I do love fussing over stats where anything of interest is concerned, Fimfic included. Happily, I’m not alone (because duh 
): Recommendsday blogger, fic writer and all-around awesome chap TCC56 does too, and in his latestEpisode Review: "The Point of No Return" - Season 9 Episode 5 · 8:06pm Apr 28th, 2019
Ominous title, eh? Though unlike the Premiere, this is far from a serious, stakes-high episode. Only from Twilight's perspective could this be considered something of that magnitude. Anyway, as always, let's dive in!
You know, I'd say it's about time we got our first low-key episode of the season, wouldn't you? Uprooted was, at least in part, tying up threads from the Premiere. And while Sparkle's Seven is technically filler, the air of being the 200th episode gave it as high a status as an arc-centric episode, maybe even as much as a season opener or closer. 5 episodes in is just about the right time to kick back and enjoy some gentle slice-of-life pony goodness.
Which is kind of appropriate, for this episode's writer, Gillian M. Berrow, does almost nothing else BUT genial low-key slice-of-life stories. Probably something to do with writing MLP chapter books for years before being given a writer's key. And this also happens to be her final episode too. I've found her to generally be an okay writer, for the most part. She certainly has some weak episodes to her name - Fluttershy Leans In and The End in Friend don't really paint their starring characters in likeable or fun lights, among other things - and Grannies Gone Wild and Daring Done don't really linger in the mind much either.
My favourite episode of hers, was her very first from all the way back in Season 5: The One Where Pinkie Pie Knows. A little rough around the edges in places, but I find mild character regression is much easier to feel right with Pinkie then any of the others (and there isn't even that much of that there). Point being, I'm saddened she never got another Pinkie-centric episode since (I have also been told she did some Pinkie chapter books with mixed results prior to that episode, which probably explains why she started in the series with a good grip on her character).
So how did her sixth, and final, episode on the series fare?
Decently. It's a G. M. Berrow episode through and through, focused mostly on keeping you amused, being largely wry rather then actually funny (though there's good jokes in here too), if largely at the expense of being a somewhat scattershot story. My main relief comes from the two main things I'd feared largely not coming to pass. While it certainly echoes Amending Fences in many places, it's not nearly a clone of it the way Uprooted was of Castle Sweet Castle. More so, Twilight's freak-outs, while definitely present, are not only kept in moderation, but kept plot-relevant and given decent justification, by how seriously the library seems to take the late books. But, I'm getting ahead of myself here.
So, Twilight receives stuff from her old room back in Canterlot Celestia has packed up for her while cleaning up the castle. And we get another Muffins/Derpy speaking moment (as well as a G1 Starswirl figure, ha!) along the way to her finding a library book she never brought back. As befits Twilight, she's rather worried about this, especially as the librarian she checked it out from, Dusty Pages, prided herself on a perfect record just as much as Twilight did (cue adorable Employee-of-the-month-type portrait). From there, the episode follows Twilight and Spike, first to return the book, but then they get sidetracked when it turns out the late book may have cost Dusty Pages her job. After that, it's a wild goose chase until they track her down at an old retirement home, where she's living it up (and speaking as someone who always dug the Florida condo episodes of Seinfeld, there was lots in this sequence I liked).
So, yeah, the plot certainly is of the sort where it seems to need to restart itself every few minutes at times, a main contributor to the scattershot feel. Which would make it seem like the episode would be cramped and the resolution rushed, but if anything, the episode is padded, needing two dialogue-less montages along the way to reach the requisite 22 minutes. The first in particular is needless padding, existing only because they only found out Dusty lives in Silver... something. Literally no reasons they couldn't have got the full name and gone straight there, saving 50 seconds for anywhere else. Even the resolution is padded by another search given how easily Dusty Pages relents and discusses the issue once they find her a second time. Point being, the episode is a wobbly one structurally.
What saves this episode, or at least makes it largely enjoyable, is the low-key moments along the way. One-time ponies like the new librarian and the grumpy earth pony stallion each make decent impressions in their limited screentime due to their attitudes. Spike getting easily roped into being a waiter and just rolling with it, hilarious stuff. Moondancer is also back (though not Saffron, despite being at the Tasty Treat, though neither Twilight or Spike would know her or her Dad anyway), though it's also readily apparent why she never returned, as after her initial episode, she's just another Twilight (she gets maybe 4 lines, and was present only to introduce Twilight to a brief episode-specific character designed to speed the plot along). Could have just had First Folio introduce herself to Twilight.
To wrap up, there's a good moral at the end about not chasing perfectionism to the point of not living, delivered with just enough nuance and off-kilter execution to not feel redundant. Not set up especially well, and all the padding in the second half otherwise meant it felt rushed, at least to me. All in all, it's a decently amusing low-key episode to relax with, wry rather then funny, but structurally wobbly and equal parts padded and rushed along the way. Not one I'll ever revisit much, but it's okay, as episodes these days go.
STRAY OBSERVATIONS:
- Apple Rose makes a cameo, so there's that.
- That flashback of how the book got lost reuses footage from the debut episode (did Amending Fences? Not sure, I'll have to check). In the pilot, Twilight did sweep the book off the stack, but the shot of it sliding under the bed was new. So they did at least look back for a way to slot in into past events, though expectantly, the book's writing wasn't there on the reused shots. Eh, still good they slotted in it, kind of. Not as much as with how they reused Moondancer's mentioning in the pilot, but it's something.
- Spike will be Spike - his only standout moment was the waiter thing, but he manages to assist Twilight while being more assertive these days - there are at least two occasions where he prods her to just plunge in with an issue, and more where he does it for her. Hard to image the Spike of Season 1 or 2 doing that, eh?
A pity you can't upvote blog posts, I really enjoyed reading that.
To answer your aside: yes, Amending Fences did indeed directly reuse some footage from Friendship is Magic: Part 1, specifically the flashback to when Twilight brushed off Twinkleshine and the others as she was racing home ("Moondancer is having a little get-together!")
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Aw, thanks very much! Don't worry, in many ways, a comment expressing your enjoyment is far more valuable then a like where I don't know who it's from.
A fellow latecomer, eh? Hopefully I've been here long enough now (a year+) that that's not my defining label anymore, ha. I take it you found me by Logan's Text Review Roundups over on his blog? I read your perspective comments there, very interesting. Though I think having watched it for four years now, you can well and truly shake off the "latecomer" angle. If, you know, you want to. And being able to enjoy it with your children too must have been especially lovely.
You may have a point in nostalgia, or something similar, being a contributing factor to the elevated opinions of the older content. Having binged the first seven season in 2 months initially, and thus not having years-old opinions of any of them, I do personally find most of those comments have merit, but I'm willing to wait until I've rewatched the series chronologically again around when Season 9 wraps up before committing to that. That being said, I think it's a lovely thing that people (many people, at that) can find something in the later seasons that appeals to them more then the earlier ones. I may not always agree, but it's worth remembering there's so many shades to this cartoon, whatever its flaws (and they exist in not small numbers) And the changes are far more subtle then ones in many other cartoons - there's at least room for a debate with this one.
That Amending Fences thing was one of those half-rhetorical questions, where I was 95% sure I was right but didn't want to postpone the posting of the review to go check, though I did after. Musing for the reader's amusement, you know.
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Yes, that's where I found you, and thank you for reading my ramblings over there! I had written something that (in my mind) was a bit more coherent and cogent, and then I lost my connection while submitting, "failed" the ReCaptcha test, and was left with nothing but a blank text field and my cries of anguish. What's there now is my attempt to reconstruct and cram in as many of the points I'd made on the fly as I could possibly remember, but I think the gist is there!
As the maxim goes, the "Golden Age" of any community is always the period of time just before you yourself joined it. So, 'latecomer' in this regard isn't so much about the actual time that has or hasn't elapsed, but the point in the journey at which you got on board the pony train. Even when I joined, at the start of Season 5, the fandom was already bemoaning the decline in fan content, dwindling enthusiasm online, disappearing cons, and the show itself stretching beyond a natural end point. And yet Seasons 5, 4 and 7 are my favourites, beyond a doubt. If I'll never be able to recapture the sheer thrill of binging the first four seasons in a few short months, I still saw them in chronological order, and entirely without context as to what was and wasn't popular, and the unanimous feeling in the family was that the show was getting better and better as it went along. The first three seasons all have excellent episodes, but I do honestly feel the reality often doesn't quite match the hype, especially in retrospect, and the most obvious explanation to me has always been that people's fond thoughts and memories of those earlier episodes are inextricably tied to their own experiences at the time, and may even reflect that spirit of community and fan engagement and still-valid headcanon in a relatively uncluttered, invitingly simple mythos more than what's actually on the screen. (And going back to Season 1 now is visually jarring, just in terms of how far the animation has come, though I'm sure you have your own thoughts on that!)
(And as far as Fimfiction goes, I'm a Johnny-come-lately of the worst stripe. My Royal Canterlot Library feature came with a story I wrote after ten days of being a member, I feel like an utter fraud.)
Aha, a trick I learned from my old law blogging days - throw in a semi-rhetorical question you know the answer to (or that you could look up yourself, but don't), as a hook to drive readers to reply! Consider me, well, hooked.
Anyway, thank you for the considered reply, I look forward to catching up on the older entries I've missed, and to reading more of your thoughts in the future!
Pretty much my view as well. It was a stereotypical Berrow episode, being middle-of-the-road and fairly entertaining without ever quite catching fire. There were some good jokes -- on a third viewing I caught a reference I hadn't noticed before: "She moved to... Silver somethin'. Shoals, Seas, Surfer, whatever." But they were bright spots, not a connected bright line.
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That was happening even in early S4, which I suppose isn't surprising given the original plan to end the series at 65 episodes. I think the 11-month S4-S5 hiatus did significant damage, though -- it could have been even worse had Rainbow Rocks not appeared during it.
"The Ticket Master" is the episode I tend to cite when this comes up. It gets a pass from some because of being co-written by Lauren Faust, but it's actually way down my list of S1 favourites. I just don't find it all that involving. "Applebuck Season", which follows, is certainly the superior episode in my book.
Further to the bit about the chapter books, I think you're definitely onto something there, too. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think GM Berrow is the only writer other than MA Larson to have a background in prose fiction, as opposed to solely scripts for TV? I wonder if this could be a factor, given that (IMO) all her episodes are strong on good, witty lines - especially the wry and snarky ones - side character callbacks, and fun character interactions, but considerably less so on building cohesive plots and having good pacing (The One Where Pinkie Pie Knows is a taut and plot-driven exception, but that's a high-concept episode built around a solid skeleton that - I'm guessing - effectively wrote itself early in the process, leaving Berrow to do what she does best and hang her slice of life scenes from it to dry).
I was just idly musing on this after rewatching the episode with my daughter this morning and thinking to myself what a good fic it would have been, where some of the flabby or even timewasting parts on-screen (the montages, the journey to the bowels of the library, T&S picking their way through the food fight) would have made excellent descriptive chapters, and it struck me that this almost felt like an adaptation of itself.
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Very interesting points. I'll chip in and add that in conventions panels in 2015 Berrow described her transition from writing books to scripts as an easy one, the only notable change being a consideration for the voice cast (so less appearances of characters voiced by an actor not already in that episode if that character isn't hugely relevant to what's going on, for instance) and animators (be spare with scenes requiring higher-detailed character animation or lots of new ponies/backgrounds where not necessary - this is supposedly the main reason Saddle Arabia wasn't shown in On the Road to Friendship, the season didn't have the budget to design a whole new location that would only appear for a few minutes in one episode).
Those are good points, but I perhaps read a bit into that to what degree she changes/doesn't change her writing approach for a script as opposed to a chapter book. Pacing is less of an obvious concern in those books because the reader dictates the pace.
And an adaption of itself? Yeah, I've never read those episode adaptations of book or comic form, but this one DOES seem overly tailored for that, now I muse on it. Montages in tv animation are far trickier then theatrical, where you can storyboard it 20 times to get it just right and rely on re-revised music to sell the emotion. It's also harder with tv animation because lower-budget animation is harder to captivate for lengthy periods on its own without dialogue. By no means impossible, but it has a lower batting average, certainly.
Just some further points on the writing process for MLP that I think are worth mentioning:
In most other cartoon shows, the one who writes/storyboards the episode is the one who came up with the idea for the episode. In MLP, it's varied. They do (or did, dunno if they still do) have writer retreats in pre-production of a season to hash out the main story ideas. I do recall reading that in the first season or two, the person who wrote the episode rarely came up with the initial idea - they were assigned it. After that, they often WOULD come up with the idea themselves. But once Hasbro started excising stricter control again (as I recall), that pendulum swung back. I bring this up because, in the case of The One Where Pinkie Pie Knows, while we can't know if the general story was Berrow's idea or not, I think it may (may, now, not definitely) not have been. Which would at least somewhat explain why it avoids issues her other episode seem to often have, as she was given a scenario that had the tricky bits done already by virtue of its very concept.
This is all just a theory, of course. But certainly, the notion of writers been assigned episodes could go a long way to explaining recent episodes where it often seems the writer barely engaged with what they were writing (a few Student 6 episodes) or didn't have a clue how to proceed with the concept they had (especially for a new writer - Non-Compete Clause, anyone?).
And chances are NONE of the above observations are new - as Logan told me once, the writers were treated with nearly the same reverence as the cast in the fandom's early days where there was a definitive group of regulars. Everything regarding their individual styles has probably being analysed to death by the fandom, as has the show's general writing process. About the only thing I could add that lots of people haven't picked apart would be looking at the early writers that Faust brought from past shows she worked on and discussing to what extent each of them merges their past style with the parameters of FiM (Amy Keating Rogers is an especially good example, being a veteran of Powerpuff Girls and Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends).
Hope you enjoyed further ramblings! But I do find the writing process of animation very interesting, as I aspired (and still do, somewhat) to enter that area. Done my homework and practise in it over the years, certainly.