), 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 Last Laugh" - Season 9 Episode 14 · 4:04pm Aug 3rd, 2019
With the final mid-season hiatus over, and a short one at that (though it felt long due to the early Chinese airings that were in English, but subtitled), it’s time to get through the final baker’s dozen of episodes. And much like last season, we’re being brought back in with a Pinkie episode. Let’s hope it’s better then the travesty that was “She’s All Yak”, am I right? “The Last Laugh” also pays off a side ambition this season to see past guest stars return. We already had Patton Oswalt back as Quibble Pants, and here we have favourite eccentric musician Weird Al Yankovic back as Cheese Sandwich. How will it fare? Let’s dive in!
This was… atypical of Season 9's quality level as of late, though for entirely different reasons. Shrug-worthy, not bad or weak, but very bland and dull, and not fully worthy of being a good Pinkie episode or a comeback episode for Weird Al. Frankly, it’s even already slipping from my mind.
The episode starts with Pinkie getting an invitation from Cheese Sandwich to visit his gag factory, and she laments that everyone else seems to have found their purpose (and also lampshading how Applejack hasn’t had an arc or journey either), before she realises Cheese can help her out. Except when she arrives, she finds the factory has a boring, methodical approach to gags under a manager named Sans Smirk. Worse still, Cheese has lost his laugh. Pinkie sets about getting it back by trying to make him laugh, fails repeatedly, he decides to give up, she realises he needs to make others laugh, they do that, funny Weird Al song, Pinkie realises she already had her purpose, being a party pony, and roll credits.
It’s not impossible to execute that plot well, but this episode doesn’t do it. The obvious sin is how badly Weird Al is wasted here – being required to be gloomy until the last five minutes strips him of most of his usage. While having a character be used to explore creative matters being industrialised and a person losing and finding again their creative spark is a worthy notion, it's frankly perplexing to do that with a guest star like this. What’s going on here, is that his previous episode, though nominally featuring him, was still about Pinkie – he didn’t really have an arc or story or change. Here, he does, except his character is completely ill-equipped to handle one. With “Common Ground”, there seems to have been a reason for bringing Oswalt back, regarding the familial story they wanted to tell. Here, as far as I can tell, it started with “bring back Weird Al’s character” and then proceeded haltingly from there.
The weird thing is that it seems in some ways that they were going for a Willy Wonka vibe with the factory, but this failed even more then Cheese did. There’s never any irony or realisation made about producing jokes this way; the episode simply states that making humour this way, without directly seeing the results, isn’t right for Cheese, but continues to let the sterile factory proceed as it were. Weird, as the Willy Wonka angle is thematically present for Cheese’s character. What’s more, Pinkie’s “journey” has no nuance or arc to it; it freezes once she finds Cheese all depressed, and only at the very end does she realise she’s found her purpose already anyway. Within the episode itself, it exists to give Pinkie an emotional reason to come (given she got an invitation anyway) and to make it seem like her character has some agency here rather then simply being an engineer in the proceedings. And lastly, while Sans doesn’t turn out to be a Svengallop, the lack of any substance or bite to him or his approach to comedy makes the many moments he gets throughout just as dull as the underuse of our two nominal characters, despite his VA delivering just as proficient a performance as Weird Al and Andrea Libman.
All this would have been fine if the various jokes throughout were funny, but they are largely not. Being based on gags, comedic timing in the animation is everything, and the outsourcing of the animation really bites on this one hard. Gags finish too quick or too slow, lack delightful kinetic energy in the bouncing of objects, and alongside the steel greys of the whole thing, make it a very visually and energetically dull experience too. The show as of late has had this problem, the animation being low on creativity or fresh energy (while being high on meme faces, though not much here, thankfully), and that downright cripples an episode as focused on visual gags as this one.
The episode doesn’t assassinate any characters or write them in out-of-character ways or regress them, and it cannot be denied it does reflect to a degree how Pinkie has grown over the years for sure, so the characters are undeniably written well. And, in fact, the point it makes about Pinkie not being a character that needs a big change in her life, but simply one who wants to continue making others laugh as she had been, is a noble one to make, on top of being relevant to her. For every person who, like most of the Mane 6, go on in life to fulfil big personal goals and reach new heights step by step, there are those who are content to keep doing what they do really well, bringing pleasures to others and to themselves. And it's important to show that as a valid option through life. But that’s a small victory when Pinkie and especially Cheese, though written very, very well, don't end up doing much that's especially interesting.
All things considered, this isn’t that big a surprise. The Fox brothers seems to turn out two types of episodes – good ones that cover up most flaws thanks largely to the Lady writers being story editors, and others where the show’s nominal story editors don’t do much. Some writers need good editors to reach their peak. And given we’ve moved from Josh Haber to Nicole Dubuc as story editor by now… well, the problems with the structure and comedy should be readily apparent. Heck, ever Josh Haber would have ensured this episode had funny moments along the way – whatever it’s a clichéd plot and execution, P.P.O.V. is an episode I do find, until the end, rather funny.
Though the episode avoids all the flaws common of Season 9 thus far, it does so at the expense of being technically proficient but dull. Whether that's preferable to many other episodes that are more entertaining when watching them but have far more problems is up to the viewer. There are many worse episodes this season (in fact, on a objective level, this is well within the top half of this season thus far, possibly even top third), but outside of a Student 6 outlier here and there, few are this dull. And for an episode featuring Weird Al Yankovic, that’s a crippling issue.
STRAY OBSERVATIONS
- In an earlier season especially, even as recently as Season 6, the episode could have been so much better had it just gone full “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”, with the rest of the Mane 6 falling into the factory’s traps and Pinkie substituting for Charlie. That would have been a fun Pinkie episode even if it was an unapologetic copycat parody, and it’s something I could see being pulled off by the staff of those periods.
- The two-point gag with Cheese's boneless chicken turning around to words of his was one of the few visual gags that worked, due to the right timing and being unexpected. Unsurprisingly, it's one of the few that isn't also a gag characters within the episode are trying to make.
- All the factory workers were Earth Ponies. Maybe this has happened before, where to save animation time all models of a certain community are of one pony type, but it stuck out to me. Is professional comedy mostly an Earth Pony thing in Equestria?
- The factory worker who first giggles at Cheese right before the song goes uncredited regarding his VA. Come on, MLP; it’s not nearly as severe as all those “additional voices” in the credits of the Movie, but you’re better then that.
It strikes me that this episode has a similar problem to Rainbow Roadtrip -- a format that undermines one of its main attractions. The special benefited from the Toon Boom animation but wasn't able to show that off to full effect because of all the greyness. "The Last Laugh" benefited from Weird Al Yankovic, but wasn't able to show that off to full effect because of... well, all the greyness. A different kind of greyness, but still.
It's probably harsh to expect this episode to match "Pinkie Pride", which IMO is one of the show's very best. But there's no doubt that this one suffers badly by comparison. Like you, I don't think it's terrible -- I'd certainly place it above "Yakity-Sax" -- but I do think it's underwhelming.
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Mm, yeah, that’s a good comparison. Though I don’t feel Rainbow Roadtrip was undermined by the subdued shades of its characters and settings for much of its runtime much at all - if it did hurt it, it’s to a small degree, and far less damaging to the actual episode then this one.
Anyway, yeah, it is a peculiar case of a story that doesn’t allow the guests to do what you would theoretically have him onboard for. Not to say Weird Al doesn’t still play Cheese fine, for he does, but the actor and character make far less of an impression when stuck with material like this.
This is one of those episodes I find far more interesting to discuss then watch - as said, it provides a good counterpoint to Pinkie not being a character who needs to have an ambitious career arc the way most of the Mane 6 have - so at least it has that going for it. It’s not much, but it’s not nothing.
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Yeah, I think the lack of colour in RR was a bigger problem for me than it was for you. It was a significant disappointment for me, as I'd been really looking forward to the visual spectacle. It didn't ruin the special by any means, but it definitely took the shine off a bit.
Agreed about Pinkie. I thought this episode really picked up in the last third -- unsurprisingly, this was when Weird Al was actually able to be Weird Al -- and if this was indeed the end of Pinkie's character development arc, there are worse ways to do it. A shame the song was a bit meh to my ears, though again I'm rather unfairly comparing with "Pinkie Pride".