DANNYJ REVIEWS: MLP SEASON 9 PART 2

Continued from part one.

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Episode 7 - She's All Yak:

So far we've only talked about the "veteran" writers' episodes, but this one comes to us from a relative newbie. Brian Hohlfeld started on this show in season eight, and wrote only two previous episodes, those being Surf and/or Turf and The Hearth's Warming Club. If you'll recall, I was heavily critical of the former, but mostly enjoyed the latter. If I were to observe a trend in his writing from those two examples, it would be that he's good at establishing newer characters such as Terramar and the student six, but that he fumbles with the already established characters such as Twilight and the Cutie Mark Crusaders, likely because he's just as unfamiliar with their personalities as every other newbie freelance writer. Does this hold true for She's All Yak as well?

Of fucking course it does. What else did you expect?

This is a Yona episode, the first and only one of its kind. I said in my previous review that what season eight was really missing were focus episodes for each of the student six individually, to develop them outside the context of their group. She's All Yak is pretty much exactly what I was talking about. Had this come in the middle of season eight, I think that it would've done a lot to strengthen the central student six arc. But of course, there was no time back then for six whole focus episodes in this vein alongside everything else that they had going on, and there's still no time for that in season nine, so we just get a couple here. I guess that that's the downside of introducing six new main characters in your penultimate season. See, I wouldn't have done that. But then again, I'm not a bigshot screenwriter like Josh Haber, so what do I know?

So Twilight's school is hosting the Fetlock Fete this year, one of Ponyville's oldest annual traditions that of course we've never seen or heard of before. They could've just used a holiday that we already knew for this, like Ponyville Days or Nightmare Night, or hell, Hearts and Hooves Day, but Brian Hohlfeld doesn't know about any of those because he's new to the show, and nobody in charge like Haber or Dubuc ever told him about them or suggested them as an alternative. But it's also different this year, because Twilight's taking it over. Now it's called the Amity Ball? I don't get the narrative purpose of giving this event two competing names. Seems like it could've just been the Amity Ball, full stop. But it's a date event, so Sandbar asks Yona out to the dance, and she tries to learn to be more like a pony to fit in for it.

I like the idea of the Yona/Sandbar relationship. It wasn't a pairing that I ever predicted, and it wouldn't have been my first choice, but I approve of the show actually approaching the topic of romantic relationships in its characters rather than dancing around it right up until the series finale like it did with the mane six. I appreciate that the show is called Friendship is Magic, so romance shouldn't be a major focus for it, but it just doesn't feel natural for them to ignore it all the time. It's why I'm one of the few people who never minded Flash Sentry that much, despite his general lack of personality in the earlier movies. And speaking of boring characters voiced by Vincent Tong, Sandbar's interest in Yona here is also the closest that he ever comes to having a personality, even if he still keeps his dumb glazed stoner expression for most of the episode.

On the other hand, I do not like the way that Yona tries to become a pony for this dance. It's yet another "just be yourself" episode, which is already unoriginal enough on its own, but this time it's also laden with all of this uncomfortable subtext.

I feel like this is one of those topics that I shouldn't be touching with a ten foot pole.

Some people didn't like how Spike in Dragon Quest learned that other dragons are all awful and decided that he was more comfortable being like a pony. They read it as a story about rejecting your racial identity to adopt another, which, yeah, hot-button topic to say the least. Personally, I don't think that it was ever intended that way. I think that Dragon Quest was more just a "know who your real family are" lesson which unintentionally fumbled its message because it used a bad allegory. Father Knows Beast basically went for the same theme in a less controversial way, because it explicitly spelled out that it was actually about family, and it had Smolder there as a counterexample, so it was clearly about Sludge being shitty, not dragons. But then here comes She's All Yak, repeating the same mistake seven seasons later, because that's what happens when the writers have no collective memory.

Again, I don't think that this episode was intended to be read as someone rejecting their race to adopt a new one as such, but it's even easier to read it like that this time, because the show consistently draws attention to the fact that the student six are not ponies and are different from them. They're explicitly the only non-ponies in the crowd at the Amity Ball, and the mane six always single them out by addressing the whole school with these new politically correct terms just for the six of them, despite never uttering the word "everycreature" around Spike even once in the preceding seven seasons. The way that everybody talks to the student six, it's like they're trying to be sensitive and inclusive, but they all keep being super racist by accident, like with Rarity's "yakccident" comment at the end of this episode. And really, what is the School of Friendship if not an institute for teaching other races how to behave more like ponies? So it's no wonder that Yona picked up a "non-pony = bad" impression when this is how ponies act around her.

But even if we set the controversial race angle aside, the way that Yona tries to change herself for this dance is still uncomfortable. If we don't think of Yona as a different species, then what is she? Well, she's still a big, clumsy, hairy girl who talks funny and wants to fit in, and so her teachers, the mane six, tell her she needs to change everything about herself to do so, even though the entire purpose of this school is to learn how to not be a judgemental cunt. Yeah. Not really a positive message, is it? Of course, this is still a "just be yourself" episode, so we at least have Sandbar to come in at the end and tell her that he likes her just fine the way she is, which is good. But the fact that the main characters of the show were pushing the opposite message is troubling to me.

Now, okay, I don't think that all of their advice was terrible. Teaching Yona to cook food that other people would like was probably a good idea for an event where they're trading food, and there's nothing wrong with her learning to dance if the Amity Ball really does expect attendees to know these specific dances. I don't even mind Rarity's language lessons, because speaking properly is a skill just like any other, and it's one that will always serve you well in life if you let it.

THE ONE TRUE KING.

But a lot of the rest of their advice falls into "don't be yourself" territory, especially the dress and makeover. Rarity openly disapproves of Yona's mane style, and even says that she dislikes earth tones, when Yona's whole body is earth tones. And hey, look! There are those racist undertones again! The mane six say at the end that they weren't trying to turn Yona into something that she's not, but at least in Rarity's case, that's exactly what she did regardless, and I don't know how else we're supposed to read her intent in these scenes. And it's a shame, because the song that this sequence plays over, "Fit Right In," is actually a really catchy tune. If it weren't a song about Rarity indoctrinating a young girl to be just like her, I'd probably like it a lot.

But even forgetting all of that, I still have problems with the logic of what they're doing. What the hell is the expected level of formality for this Amity Ball? They have two dances with almost polar opposite tones: a fancy classical waltz, and a high-energy party dance. Rarity tells Yona she has to learn proper manners, enunciate correctly, and wear a fancy dress as if this were the Grand Galloping Gala, but this is for an old annual tradition in a small podunk farming town where Rarity is the only person who speaks like this. Nobody else at the Amity Ball is dressed up for the occasion either! What's going on here? This only reinforces that Rarity did all of this deliberately.

The episode comes with the usual pack of general inconsistencies too. Silverstream is still getting excited about mundane things that they didn't have underwater after more than two years on the surface. Rarity is carting around the season one Gala dresses and talking as if she just made them because some animator carelessly reused the assets. And Yona and Sandbar can casually walk through the Everfree Forest at night to go visit the Treehouse of Harmony for a scene, even though the Everfree is meant to be dangerous again now since the season premiere. Unless that particular change was also undone when the Tree resurrected itself? I don't know. Wouldn't surprise me.

...Gallus's voice bothers me. I know that this is an odd time to comment on it, but it really does. He's meant to be a kid or teenager like the rest of the student six, but he just doesn't sound like one at all. He sounds like an adult man. I've always thought so.

Last thing to mention is that I think that this episode's final scene was a bit much. I liked the callback to What Lies Below, but it was completely unprompted here, and I think that they took it way too far. I know that Sandbar's hatred for Imperial Japan is well-established by this point, but the way that he praised the Japanese American internment camps in World War Two crosses a line, and the sheer number of racial slurs in the scene was unnecessary and, frankly, gratuitous. I get that the point was to illustrate Sandbar's emotional downward spiral as he's unable to let go of his need for revenge, and lets hatred seep into every aspect of his life, but I think that we can all agree that this was too much. We didn't need to dedicate four whole minutes of a twenty-two minute episode to this, and we also probably could've done without the part where he looks directly into the camera and tells the audience that we need another war with Japan.

I mean, props to Vincent Tong again. He really nailed the performance. I just think that it was a mistake for Hohlfeld to try to ape Sam Raimi's style like this.

Episode 8 - Frenemies:

So now we come to Michael Vogel's first episode of the season, Haber's partner in crime. He's another "veteran" writer who's been with the show since season six, with a mix of both good and bad episodes under his belt. Mostly bad ones, if we're being honest.

I liked A Hearth's Warming Tail and Viva Las Pegasus, and he even wrote the Best Gift Ever holiday special, which I thought was surprisingly decent after the miserable slog of season eight. But pretty much everything else of his was so-so at best. Spice Up Your Life, Stranger Than Fan Fiction, Cart Before the Ponies... I don't think that any of these are really regarded as classics. He also wrote or co-wrote a few downright awful ones like Times They Are a Changeling, Where and Back Again, and School Daze. So I guess the rule is Michael Vogel is a good writer so long as he's writing about Christmas, but that he shouldn't be trusted with the season arc episodes under any circumstances. How unfortunate for all of us then that Vogel wrote almost nothing but season arc episodes here.

I will admit, however, that Frenemies is an enjoyable episode. I still don't actually think that it's good, but it's fun, at least. The Legion of Doom storyline was severely mishandled in my opinion, but you can see a glimmer of the potential that it had here. As much as I don't like the idea of big egos like Chrysalis and Tirek being subservient to another villain, I did want at least one mid-season episode with the Legion of Doom hanging out, hatching evil plans, and comically bouncing off each other in amusing ways, like that one episode of Avatar where the villains all went out to the beach together. And this episode gave me almost exactly what I wanted.

Man, I really wish that I were watching Avatar right now instead.

Before I really get into the episode, though, I need to talk more about the Legion of Doom as a story concept. On paper, the idea of a big villain team-up is great, but to my mind, there were two major missteps to the way season nine handled it. The first, as I mentioned before, was making everybody subservient to Grogar, as it undermines the independence and agency of the other villains, even if they do eventually turn it around by plotting to betray him. The other mistake, and in my opinion the worse one, is that the Legion of Doom had terrible team composition.

We had five villains this season for our big team-up. Sombra, Tirek, and Chrysalis were all solid choices, and if it had just been the three of them, then this would've been great. But it wasn't. Instead, we also add Cozy Glow into the mix, and also an entirely new character, Grogar, who was a fake anyway. This still could've worked, but then Sombra goes rogue and is killed off again in the premiere, and Grogar is never actually a core part of the group, despite being its official leader. So instead of a solid core trio of the show's best remaining villains, we have two of the show's best remaining villains, the severely underused and underwhelming new guy, and also the stupid nonsense villain only introduced in the previous season, who doesn't fit with the rest of these characters at all.

And that's just from a writing perspective. Even in-universe, Discord's choice of villains doesn't make any sense to me. Okay, fine, he may as well grab Cozy while he's already in Tartarus anyway, but Sombra was dead until Discord raised him again. If necromancy is an option, then why isn't the Storm King also here? I mean besides them not being able to afford Liev Schreiber? If the point is to assemble all of the most powerful unreformed villains, then why not? Sure, maybe he doesn't bring much to the table without his army or his artefacts, but Cozy is worthless too, and she's still here.

I again come back to what I said at the end of my season eight review. Cozy Glow is impossible to take seriously as a villain, because her very existence as an irredeemably evil little filly with zero backstory that everybody is inexplicably fine with abusing completely breaks the rules of the world. And her presence as part of the Legion of Doom only worsens that.

Ever see a nine-year-old kid get caught in an avalanche and fall off a fucking mountain, so you just shrug and go back inside?

Cozy stands beside all these big powerful villains and acts like she's their equal, but she's not, and there's no reason for anybody to think that she is, Discord included. All of her apparent knowledge that actually made her dangerous in School Raze came from Tirek. Her plan was only possible because of stolen magical artefacts which she doesn't have anymore. And the only reason that she even got that far was because she was trusted by Twilight, and she lost that trust when her plan was revealed. She has some level of personal knowledge of the mane six, I guess, but they published their diary for all of Equestria to see, so it's not like she has much more insight than the average person does.

Cozy is a good manipulator, I suppose, but Chrysalis already covers the manipulation niche twenty times better, and in this episode, Cozy doesn't even have that going for her; she can't even trick an old man who wears a bucket on his head into helping her up a mountain, and she drops her facade and explodes with rage almost immediately when he doesn't help her. Literally the only two things that she's good for in this episode are fitting through small gaps, which Chrysalis could've also done if they hadn't needed to drain her magic, and bringing the Legion of Doom closer together as a team, which Tirek and Chrysalis absolutely could've done on their own given enough time. Let's not forget, Tirek's whole plan here was to sit and wait for Chrysalis to fail and come crawling back to him for help.

In short, killing off Sombra in the premiere and keeping Cozy was a mistake. Sombra, Tirek, and Chrysalis are the iconic villains with power and legacy. Cozy is just an upstart who contributes nothing tangible to this team, and she has no business being here.

But don't assume that the other two are off the hook just because I dislike Cozy. I was dissatisfied with the handling of both Tirek and Chrysalis in season nine. They're mostly fine in this episode, but their late-series portrayals in general are pretty lame, and neither of them really fit their roles here.

Tirek was previously the biggest of big bads on this show, so it's weird seeing him be this petty, subservient, and dependent on others to accomplish anything, not to mention so easily intimidated by the scary goat man. Even as a frail old man in handcuffs at Discord's mercy, he had more dignity than this. Yet now he's reduced to a second-rate villain who takes shit from the likes of Cozy Glow, just because a supposedly bigger and badder villain came along. This is the primary reason why I don't like Grogar even in concept. Tirek was already a power escalation from Discord, who was himself an escalation from Nightmare Moon. So escalating from Tirek is beginning to push into the realm of absurdity. I mean, what is this, Dragonball Z?

Actually, yeah, pretty much.

Then there's Chrysalis, who it has to be said, is a much less impressive villain as a crazy girl talking to herself in the woods instead of an actual queen with a real plan and an army behind her. Her story could've been done so much better if we'd actually had a changeling civil war arc in season seven instead of just teasing one in dialogue and then resolving it offscreen. Hell, any interaction between Thorax and Chrysalis after Where and Back Again would've been better than none. And School Raze was yet another missed opportunity to fix her character trajectory, as I discussed in my season eight review last time.

Chrysalis is just the most interesting of the remaining villains in general, and it's a shame that we never really got to explore that. Lord knows I'm not the biggest fan of Thorax and the vomit changelings, but the fact that she lost the loyalty of her children, her subjects, and her entire species all in one go was a pretty big blow for Chrysalis, and informs a big part of her character. Yet she never gets to interact with any of them again in season nine, probably because that would remind the audience that Chrysalis has a family who might still care about her and hope for her to change her ways and come back to them one day, and that would get in the way of turning her to fucking stone at the end.

So instead, all of her previous goals and personal relationships are simply ignored in favour of a shallow pursuit of revenge on a bunch of ponies who, let's be honest, were never the ones who actually gave her the most trouble. Which is disappointing, because I would say that Chrysalis previously had the most sensible motivations of any of the Legion of Doom.

For most villains, nobody loving them would seem like a pretty cliché excuse for being evil. But for one who feeds on love, it works, because it means that Chrysalis is both sexually frustrated and hungry at all times. I mean, wouldn't anyone go a little crazy under those circumstances? When you think about it, it's really more Equestria's fault that Chrysalis keeps attacking them, because they keep being such tempting targets for her with all that love to spare and their absolutely dogshit security. It's basically entrapment. If anything, Chrysalis is the real victim here.

Free my girl.

But still, most of my complaints about the Legion of Doom apply to a wider view of the series. Comparatively few of them are specific to this episode, which taken on its own doesn't actually do much wrong with their characters. Frenemies didn't ruin Tirek and Chrysalis; School Raze and The Mean Six did that. If anything, Frenemies was an improvement on both of those episodes. I may have my problems with how Vogel wrote the Legion of Doom here, but at least they're not all grade-A fucking idiots in this episode, which is already a huge improvement. Cozy's plans actually make sense from start to finish. Tirek is exercising actual forethought. And Chrysalis even got a few opportunities to be cool. I really loved the scene where she cocooned that snake-cow monster.

Actually, I quite enjoyed the character dynamics between the Legion of Doom in general here, despite my many, many reservations about them. I like the way that Tirek in the beginning casually steals some of Chrysalis's magic over breakfast, and she doesn't even immediately try to stop him, because it's just annoying to her rather than a threat. I like their song, which almost sounds like a classic Disney villain number with Tirek and Chrysalis's voices. I even like a few minor character touches, like Tirek being a body-builder, or Chrysalis still talking to her log dildo from The Mean Six.

By far the episode's biggest strength is its character development, though. The Legion of Doom start out at odds, with only Cozy really pulling for them to come together, and then they bond and seem to learn the value of friendship over their journey. The campfire scene where they're all reminiscing about their evil plans and mocking the mane six is great, even if Chrysalis apparently forgot that she could mimic voices. And of course there's the episode's climax, where they finally come together, trust one another, and combine their strengths to retrieve Grogar's bell. The fact that Chrysalis willingly let Tirek take her magic, and that Tirek willingly gave it back even though he didn't have to, was a huge step for the both of them. To my mind, it's definitive proof that the two of them, at least, are capable of reforming, even if they're resisting it for the time being. Jury's still out on Cozy Glow, but at least there's a case to be made for it. We'll come back to this in the finale.

So that's all cool, and that's what makes this episode enjoyable. But I did specify that it's still not good, even setting aside my wider issues with the Legion of Doom's character arcs through the rest of the series. And we can start right here with the episode's climax.

For as much as I appreciate what it represents for the Legion of Doom's character development, their final challenge getting into the cave is pretty damn contrived. Tirek's magic-draining just happens to only work on living creatures now, even though the last season's plot hinged on him being an expert in all kinds of magic-draining, including draining magical artefacts. Despite that, he can still pierce the barrier by expending magic, but he's just short of what he needs, and Chrysalis's magic just happens to be exactly enough to make up the difference. But even once he does that, he can still only make a small hole which he can't go through himself, but which just happens to be exactly the right size for Cozy Glow. You can tell that they were really stretching here to find some way, any way for Cozy to be useful in this plot.

"Mr. Vogel, I think I've got it."

Backing up a bit, there's also a lot of contrivance in this episode to justify the villains failing on their own. I can understand that the story needed to give them all a reason to work together, but the obstacles that we see them facing don't seem like they should be this great a barrier to them.

Okay, sure, we see that Chrysalis isn't strong enough to fly through the magical winds, but she can turn into anything. Why not turn into something that can climb, and scale the mountain manually? Or turn into a diamond dog and dig her way up? She probably could've bypassed the magic barrier that way too. I think that it was a dumb idea to make changelings into omni-shapeshifters that can become literally anything, complete with abilities, rather than just being able to convincingly mimic ponies. But if you're gonna give the changelings that kind of power, you have to really think about all of the possibilities that it opens up. How is flying halfway across the ravine, throwing Cozy Glow the rest, and then navigating by climbing across on a fragile rope a better solution than anything that Chrysalis could've done on her own? And how is Tirek even able to cross on that rope at all? He's huge, and his weight isn't evenly distributed.

Even Cozy gets in on the narrative contrivance. Why is she suddenly unable to manipulate this one buckhead guy into helping her up the mountain? This filly successfully manipulated the entire cast of the show last season. What happened to her?

A better solution to all of this might've been that Chrysalis is super versatile and can easily make it to the summit by herself, but that she can't break the magic barrier, while Tirek can break the barrier, but is too big and cumbersome to make it up the steep mountain paths without falling. Meanwhile Cozy has been needling the buckethead guy all episode, so she learned an alternative path from him which she and Tirek can take, but they still need Chrysalis's versatility and navigation skills to clear obstacles on this other path.

But that's just my suggestion. There are plenty of ways to approach this problem, but the point is that I just wasn't a fan of the way that this episode handled it. As is, the magic barrier scene seems contrived to me, and everything leading up to it seems arbitrary, which is a shame when this episode excels in so many other areas.

I also have one more major problem with the episode with regards to its overall plot. I think that I've been pretty positive towards Frenemies on the whole so far, but this one issue really drags it down for me. Unfortunately, we're going to have to come back to this later, because it informs much of the rest of the Legion of Doom's arc throughout season nine, and the full scope of why it's such a problem doesn't become apparent until the finale. You probably know what I'm referring to already, but for now, let's just talk about dragons instead.

Episode 9 - Sweet and Smoky:

Sweet and Smoky is the last real Spike episode of the series. There's also Dragon Dropped later in the season, but that one's really more about Rarity; this is the last episode where Spike is the protagonist. So going back to season nine wrapping up loose ends and acting as a conclusion to the series, let's examine Sweet and Smoky through that lens.

Spike episodes have always gotten kind of a bad rep in this fandom. To be clear, I don't think that it's entirely undeserved, because there have been some really bad ones. Spike At Your Service is generally regarded as one of the worst episodes of the first three seasons, Equestria Games set the bar for cringe in this series until Hard To Say Anything raised it into the stratosphere, and I believe that forcing someone to watch Times They Are a-Changeling technically qualifies as a war crime under the Geneva Conventions.

This song alone is a valid casus belli to declare war on Canada.

But I don't think that it's anything specific to Spike's character that causes that. Sure, maybe he works better as a supporting character than as a protagonist in his own right, but there are still plenty of good Spike episodes in the series. People seemed to like Gauntlet of Fire a lot, and personally, Secret of My Excess was one of my favourite episodes of season two. I think that it's more just plain old bad luck that Spike got saddled with more bad scripts. The fact that Spike is generally less popular than the mane six probably also contributes something to the stigma.

Still, the generally rocky reception of previous Spike episodes makes it harder to identify the top hits and fan favourite moments. This is especially true if the episode is intended to be a celebration of Spike, given that a lot of Spike episodes don't exactly paint him in a flattering light. I mean, even Secret of My Excess, one of my favourite Spike episodes, is about him being consumed with greed, turning into a monster, and rampaging through Ponyville. Spike's actual triumphs and personal best moments are pretty few and far between, and usually don't even come in his own spotlight episodes.

This is why I'm actually pretty happy with the premise of Sweet and Smoky. Spike episodes in general can be all over the place, but his relationships with other dragons and exploring what the dragons are like are persistent themes in them, and this dragon stuff is usually at least interesting. So bringing Spike back to the Dragon Lands and putting him together with Smolder, Ember, and Garble for his final focus episode makes a lot of sense. It takes place in the setting of arguably Spike's most significant accomplishment (crowning the Dragon Lord), brings together all of the characters most closely associated with Spike (or all of the dragon characters, at least), and by reforming Garble, it also resolves a long-running subplot which is narratively significant for Spike.

Premise is one thing, though. Execution is another, and there I have a few things to say.

This episode comes to us from Kim Beyer-Johnson. If you don't recognise the name, she's another season eight newbie. Probably her most significant contribution to the franchise, and by far her best, is that she wrote the Rainbow Roadtrip special. She also gave us Non-Compete Clause and Ail-icorn, so clearly she doesn't have the best grasp on the series' continuity or characterisation, but that's nothing out of the ordinary as far as these late-series freelancers go. Sweet and Smoky doesn't have many outright mistakes in either of those areas, but I'd still say that both could be significantly improved, and the story is still generally quite sloppy.

It begins with Smolder requesting time off to return to the Dragon Lands and see her brother, who's been having a hard time since she left for school. Right away we have a problem, because she "left for school" over two years ago now, and has been back multiple times since then, but maybe she just meant that he's been having a harder time than usual this semester, so whatever.

Then suddenly Twilight is concerned about Smolder travelling all that distance by herself, when as far as I'm aware that's never been a problem until now. Sure, Ember escorted Smolder to the school the first time, back in School Daze, but Smolder seemed to come and go just fine on her own every time since then, most notably in Uprooted. Even Spike was allowed to go to the Dragon Lands on his own back in season two. Well, he thought that he was alone, anyway. Whatever. The point is that Smolder is an independent dragon that doesn't need a chaperone, until the plot needs her to.

But I'm not even sure why it needs her to. Maybe in an earlier draft it was the justification for getting Fluttershy to come along, but Spike is the one who volunteers for the job in the actual episode, not Fluttershy, and Spike didn't need an additional reason to go with Smolder. He was already jumping at the chance to go as soon as Smolder mentioned that she has a brother who's a "sweet guy." He's very excited to meet this "sweet guy" dragon through the early parts of the episode. He even starts knitting a gift for him.

Not gonna lie, that's pretty fucking gay, Spike.

Once in the Dragon Lands, we get the revelation that Smolder's brother is Garble, and I think that this is a pretty cool idea. I said in my season eight review that of all the student six, Smolder was the most well-integrated into the main cast, and this is another example of that. They don't look much alike aside from their colours, but linking Smolder to Garble is a plausible and interesting connection, the kind that fanfics make all the time, and it allows the episode to do new things with both characters, most notably humanising Garble.

This episode casts Garble as misunderstood, telling us that there's more to him than we see, and that he has a sensitive, creative side deep down that he just doesn't show because of peer pressure and the culture that he lives in. Now, I do think that the episode is a bit too quick to gloss over Garble's more extreme flaws; he sure seemed like the ringleader of his little crew back in Dragon Quest, and wanting to smash those phoenix eggs is a bit much to just dismiss as putting on a tough front. But it does make total sense that Smolder would have insight into Garble that Spike and the audience lack, and that she would want to see the best in him.

It makes a little less sense how exactly Garble's unseen sensitive side is handled. Him being a beat poet feels... pretty random. It's not the worst thing in the episode, but it does make me wonder where and how he was able to pick up an interest like this in the culture that he grew up in. Where does a dragon even get a shirt and beret in a society that doesn't have a fabric industry? Or a tablecloth? Were these pillaged from other kingdoms? Do the dragons actually trade for clothing? Or is Garble just into knitting too?

Still, I'm mostly fine with Garble in this episode, and I approve of the idea of reforming him.

On the other hand, I'm really not fond of the B-plot with Fluttershy and Ember trying to figure out how to hatch the baby dragons. I like seeing Ember struggling to learn how to be the Dragon Lord, but it's coming a little late in the series, don't you think? And is this really the time or place for this kind of sink or swim learning? She's responsible for looking after all of these eggs, but her father won't even give her advice on what to do? Do he and all of the other adult dragons not care that their entire next generation will die if she fucks this up? This is like the yaks in Not Asking for Trouble all over again. Why are the other species in this world all so fucking inept that they need help from ponies to not go extinct?

You know, maybe friendship imperialism is justified!

The problem makes no sense to me either. Apparently the eggs are cold because Garble's friends are redirecting the lava flows for their games? Sounds okay on paper, but how does redirecting the above ground lava flows mean that the eggs aren't getting enough heat? Surely they're supposed to be heated from underneath? You know, by subterranean magma? Are they redirecting that too? Unless the eggs are meant to be literally submerged in lava flowing through this canyon? In which case, why not just lay them in a volcano? And surely this can't be the first time that this has ever happened? Wouldn't screwing around with the lava flow be a normal and regular thing in the Dragon Lands? What the fuck else are these dragon kids doing with their days otherwise?

The solution to this problem is equally nonsensical. After eight previous seasons of seeing Spike laugh to no effect, this episode suddenly invents the concept of "laugh fire," which burns hotter than regular dragonfire for no apparent reason, and thus can save the eggs after Garble embarrasses himself in public. It's the most blatantly contrived part of the entire episode. Just like anti-flight spells, manes being immune to magic, and the dragon-sneeze trees in Princess Spike, it's a stupid, pointless, and overly convenient world-building detail that exists solely to justify a badly written plot.

None of this was necessary. This episode goes to such great lengths to somehow make Garble's character arc matter to this B-plot, but this is completely backwards. The B-plot is the B-plot; it is secondary in importance by nature. Garble's character arc isn't the plot that has to justify itself. It can stand just fine on its own. Meanwhile, everything about the hatching season subplot is utterly contrived and pointless. Spike and Garble barely have anything to do with it until the end. It's just there to give Fluttershy and Ember something to do. But Ember could've just been part of the main plot with Spike, Smolder, and Garble instead, maybe being a mediator or something. And Fluttershy didn't need to be here at all.

Now maybe this is just my particular biases in play, but I'm thinking of Sweet and Smoky in terms of it being the last real Spike episode, and through that lens, I don't understand why Fluttershy is here. She's never really been closely associated with Spike. If he had to bring along another pony with him to the Dragon Lands, why not Twilight or Rarity, the ponies he's closest to? Even Rainbow Dash would've made more sense, because she at least has been to the Dragon Lands twice before, and knows Spike's history with Garble.

It doesn't make sense for Fluttershy to be here in-universe, either. Sure, she likes baby dragons, as established in the pilot, but she's afraid of adult ones, even after Dragonshy. In Dragon Quest, she was so afraid of the dragon migration that she kicked Rainbow Dash in the fucking stomach and flew out the door to avoid being dragged along to it. Now okay, Fluttershy has been through a lot since then, but her character development over the seasons was all about baby steps. We never really saw her fear of dragons addressed after that, did we? It was never resolved, because after Torch, big scary adult dragons just stopped appearing altogether. Even in this episode, when Ember calls all of the dragons together to save the eggs, we don't see any big ones. Just more weird anthro dragons like Sludge. So Fluttershy's fear is just forgotten.

On a final note, this episode again tries to convince us that there's actually a point to friendship schooling when Smolder claims that she "grew up thinking it was okay to make fun of differences," until her friends taught her otherwise. Isn't that contradicted by this very premise? She grew up with a brother who was different from other dragons, was close with him, and kept his secrets. Clearly she already understood that being different was okay, and that he was sensitive to being made fun of like this. This isn't a lesson that Twilight's school taught her. It's a character trait that Smolder already had that she and the writer are trying to give the school credit for, just like how the student six were already friends in the season eight premiere, and yet the show keeps insisting that their next three years of schooling somehow achieved something.

I ain't buying it, Sweet and Smoky.

So in conclusion, this episode has some good ideas, but it also has a lot of bad ones, and the writing lets them both down. It's an improvement on Non-Compete Clause, but not nearly enough of one. I can see potential here, but this script really needed another couple drafts to either excise or redo the B-plot. Even just the story editors stepping and saying "no" to the addition of laugh fire would've improved this significantly. But we only have one world, and this is the one we're living in.

God help us all.

Episode 10 - Going to Seed:

This next episode comes to us from Dave Rapp, a writer who joined the show in season six. He hasn't got many credits to his name, even counting non-MLP work, but I think that he's quite decent, especially as far as these late-series writers go. Newbie Dash was one of his, which I personally found extremely cringeworthy, but he also wrote Flutter Brutter and The Parent Map, which were not just good, but some of my favourite episodes of their respective seasons. This man wrote a good episode in season eight, so you'd better believe that he has my respect.

His only other notable credit, and the most relevant to this episode, was Where the Apple Lies, a season six episode which filled in some backstory about Applejack and Big Mac's childhoods, and about how they used to be completely different from how they are now. I don't consider it among the best of Rapp's episodes, but it's okay. More importantly, unlike many other writers, it means that Rapp is already starting from a foundation of familiarity with the characters that he's writing here. Not only that, but he's tackling a topic which he's already proven that he can write well – realistically complicated family relationships. So for the show's final ever Applejack episode, he's a solid choice.

Applejack is a character that the writers on this show have always struggled with, even in the pre-Haber days. The problem is that she's too grounded, actually has her life together, and gets along with everyone, so she doesn't have much drama of her own. Applejack episodes usually have to either push her into other people's drama to get the ball rolling (hence why Flim and Flam came back so many times), or write her out of character to force her into some wacky conflict (Somepony to Watch Over Me, Honest Apple, Non-Compete Clause, etc.). Even Where the Apple Lies falls into this mold, though it at least does a better job of justifying it than most others, since it's explicitly about a younger, less wise Applejack who had not yet internalised her core values.

Pun intended.

But the best Applejack episodes have always been about her family, and here we are with Going to Seed, bringing it all back to that, while somehow still managing to have conflict in an organic way.

Applejack's initial frustrations in this episode are understandable, because there's a lot of work to do with this apple confluence thing, and she isn't really getting much help with it. Instead of a young, strong worker like Braeburn, she gets Goldie Delicious, and not only is Goldie not the best help on her own, but she's also distracting Apple Bloom with her tales of the Great Seedling at a time when she's needed. Goldie has a point that kids should be allowed to enjoy themselves, but you can also totally see where Applejack is coming from, and it's a natural thing for the family to disagree about, especially given Applejack's reasonable suspicions that Goldie was the one faking the apple tracks.

This also sets us up for a kind of Santa Claus metaphor around the Seedling about letting kids be kids and have their fun. I find this a little strange to be pulling with Apple Bloom this late in the series, as I think that she should be a bit too old for this already, but it's not too bad here, just kind of questionable. Growing Up is Hard to Do later on in the season is far worse about this. But the episode does make good use of Apple Bloom's enthusiasm, especially by drawing a parallel to Applejack for a short flashback scene.

I think that the flashback is probably the best part of the episode. We get to see young Granny Smith, the Apple siblings as kids, and we even see Bright Mac and Pear Butter again one last time, calling back to the best Applejack episode to date. It even has a cute moment where we see Big Mac get his yoke from his father. And this flashback also simultaneously fixes a minor continuity flub with Rapp's previous episode. Apple Bloom didn't appear at all in the flashbacks in Where the Apple Lies, so it was unclear whether or not she even existed, which was confusing given that the Apple parents were also absent. But here we get to see Pear with baby Apple Bloom before those events, so now we know the complete timeline. I can't tell you guys how much I appreciate an episode actually fixing a continuity mistake for once instead of just creating new ones.

But that isn't to imply that this episode doesn't make mistakes, because it does.

For one thing, the confluence itself, besides being yet another big traditional event invented solely for this episode, also introduces some pretty confusing timeline shenanigans. Supposedly it comes every hundred moons? And the previous confluence took place when the Apple parents were alive and Applejack was a markless filly? So that's, what, ten years ago? So how are we supposed to square that with the Apple family reunions, which also take place every hundred moons, and which we had two of in just the first three seasons? I know that the writers like to keep the exact length of a "moon" intentionally vague so that they don't have to worry about keeping a strict timeline and contradicting themselves, but this is way too much variance to maintain plausible deniability.

I also wonder where the hell Sugar Belle is in all of this. Doesn't she live in Ponyville now? I would assume so, given that she has an apprenticeship with Mrs. Cake; bakers have to get up really early for work, so I doubt that she's commuting from Ourtown. So shouldn't she be here? Why isn't she helping with this? Given what a big thing the confluence is for the farm, and how they need all the help that they can get, and how overworked Big Mac is in particular, why wouldn't she? Unicorn magic can make a big difference in speeding up the harvest, and it's probably something that she's going to need to get used to if she wants to be a farmer's wife one day. Plus I'm sure that Big Mac would prefer Sugar Belle helping out to his elderly grandmother having to buck trees. But whatever. I guess that's not a plot hole exactly. More just a point of confusion.

Though, if this episode has one fatal flaw that I can't forgive, it's that it's yet another stolen comic idea. They fucking did it again.

Co-written and directed by Sam Hyde.

It's been remixed here, but Going to Seed is basically just the Applejack micro comic. It's set in summer instead of at Christmas, and it has Big Mac being a fake Great Seedling by accident instead of Granny Smith being a fake sass squatch deliberately, but other than that, it's pretty much the same. It even has them setting a bunch of traps. Don't get me wrong, Going to Seed does make a few original additions to the story, like the flashback scene and Goldie Delicious, but it still annoys me that the final ever Applejack episode wasn't even a wholly original story.

Honestly, though, despite hitting that pet peeve of mine, I'd say that Going to Seed is still probably the best episode of the season. It's not the one that I liked the most, but it probably does the least wrong, and that's gotta count for something.

Episode 11 - Student Counsel:

Student Counsel is an interesting episode, because it's like a window into the MLP that Josh Haber wished he was writing. I talked about the Starlight replacement plan in the introduction, but to recap, according to the leaks, Haber originally intended for Starlight and a new group of friends to take over from the mane six in season seven, and they were planning to do something similar to what we got in season eight, only with the Starlight six instead of the student six. I can only presume that this would've ended with the same implied usurpation of the Elements that we got in season eight, and maybe even a Princess Starlight ascension if Haber thought that he could swing it. I wouldn't put it past him, at least.

This episode is basically a microcosm of that vision. We have no mane six anywhere, Starlight is the main character, and her friends make up most of the episode's supporting cast. Trixie, Sunburst, and Maud provide an obvious starting point for our hypothetical Starlight six, Mudbriar naturally follows from Maud, and if we look back to Where and Back Again as the obvious proof of concept that it was, then we can also see how Thorax and/or Discord might have fit into this group. Notice what all of them have in common – they're all socially inept losers compared to the mane six. These are characters that it would make sense to put through friendship schooling. Or at least it would make more sense than them being teachers, anyway.

It's funny, though, because I genuinely can't tell if what we got instead was better or worse than this. Part of the reason why the final three seasons are so terrible is the lack of cohesive vision (again, the Disney Wars problem). If Haber had gotten his way, we probably wouldn't have had twelve utterly pointless new characters being introduced right before the end of the show, so we might have at least had a better balance of episode focus. And going by this episode, I don't think that it would've been completely terrible; some of the character interactions here were actually pretty fun.

But at the same time, nothing about phasing out or replacing the mane six sounds appealing to me, and the show probably would've been even worse without them. I mean, I prefer good non-mane six episodes like The Parent Map or The Hearth's Warming Club over bad mane six episodes like The End in Friend or Non-Compete Clause, but at the end of the day, the mane six are the characters that got me into this show, and they're the ones that I keep coming back to watch. Getting rid of them or pushing them into background roles doesn't sound like any kind of improvement to me, and I somehow doubt that it would've made the general writing quality any better.

And Jesus, if Starlight felt like a Mary Sue or a Poochie in seasons six or seven, I can only imagine how annoying she would've been if she had successfully usurped Twilight completely as the main character. I personally don't mind Starlight all that much anymore, but I really didn't like her for a long time, and going by the series' viewership ratings, I don't think that I was the only one.

That 2017 spike was the movie's release, in case you were wondering.

In my season eight review, I said that MLP pretty much peaked in 2012, but actually, no. I was wrong about that. It may have felt like that from inside the fandom at the time, what with all the post-Twilicorn drama, but actually, season four seems to have had the most consistently high viewership, and season five wasn't much of an initial drop, so greenlighting a movie at that time probably wasn't the worst idea. It's season six where it all goes to hell. The least viewed episodes of season five are on par with the most viewed of six. Season seven plummets even further, and by season eight they had apparently just stopped reporting their figures, because I can't find them after that.

Coincidentally, this drop in viewership, search interest, and the show's quality all coincides with a change in staff.

Season five featured the last regular episodes of many of the show's longest serving writers like M.A. Larson, Cindy Morrow, and Amy Keating Rogers, and season six saw off the final few, including Dave Polsky. Meghan McCarthy stayed on as a showrunner and executive producer, and was involved in the making of the movie, but season six was where she handed off story editing and continuity duties to Haber. And we also got a change of directors around this time. The first five seasons were variously directed by Jayson Thiessen, James Wootton, and Jim Miller. Wootton and Miller both had stints as solo directors, but also both spent time as co-directors with Thiessen, so there was a metaphorical unbroken line back to season one. Denny Lu took over halfway through season five, the first to break that line, and then stayed with the series until its end, sharing the job along the way with Tim Stuby for season six and Mike Myhre for seasons seven, eight, and nine.

Now, draw what conclusions you will from this. It's clear in any case that the transition from early to late-series MLP wasn't the fault of any one man so much as just a general result of this large-scale changing of the guard. We can debate all day about who had the most profound impact on things. Was it Denny Lu taking over as director, coinciding quite oddly with a drop in viewership in the back half of season five? Was it McCarthy and Jim Miller being promoted upstairs, splitting their attention between too many places to keep a proper hold on things? Was it the loss of the most experienced writers like Larson, just giving us less good episodes in the styles to which we had become accustomed? I don't know. Certainly, none of those things helped matters.

But personally, if I were to single out one person in all this mess who had the most obvious hand in everything that went wrong, I would say that it was Josh Haber.

Kimi Sparkle was actually a modern day prophet.

Now, I'm not doing this to pick on Haber. I'm really not. I don't hold any animosity towards the man, and my only interest in him is in the context of his writing for MLP. But it's hard to ignore his attitude towards this show. He was a relative latecomer to the series, has openly stated that he primarily writes for the money, consistently tried to replace the actual main characters with his own creations, makes frequent continuity mistakes even with his own previous episodes, and in the leaked emails when they were writing the finale, he had zero emotional investment in the end of the series that he had worked on for five years. He just doesn't seem to care in general. Given all of that information, do you really think that he was the best person to hand over creative control to for almost half the series?

In my season eight review, I said that Nicole Dubuc was probably the most to blame for MLP's decline in the last three seasons. I was hasty in that judgement. Certainly, the fact that she obviously knew nothing about the show before writing a season finale and immediately becoming an executive producer for it is troubling, but she had almost no hand in the production of season seven other than Shadow Play, so it's silly to blame her for that. What's more, I wasn't looking back far enough.

I started these reviews at season seven because season seven was the first season that I disliked as a whole, but in retrospect, it's obvious that season six was where the rot set in. That was the season where Haber became story editor and started conspiring on the Starlight replacement plan with Vogel. That was the season where continuity with old episodes and expanded universe stories went out the window, and terrible scripts like Times They Are a-Changeling started slipping through the cracks on a regular basis. Season seven had problems of its own, and Lewis and Songco didn't do a great job either, but for the most part, they were just inheriting season six's problems. And when Haber took back creative control, he was apparently all too happy to just keep on fucking up.

In short, I think that Josh Haber's impact on the show has been primarily a negative one, both creatively and financially, and it's probably a very good thing that he never got to follow through on his plans.

Anyway, that concludes my essay on Josh Haber, thank you all for... Wait, what's this over here? Student Counsel? What the fuck is that? Oh, right! Shit! I still have an episode to review! Uhh...! Okay, let's quickly run through the rest of Student Counsel, then.

So, on the whole, this episode isn't that bad. It's your standard Startrix episode, pretty much. The two of them have a fun dynamic, and it's super shippy, as their episodes usually are. They have a picnic, they have lovers' spats, they double-date, and Trixie gets really needy and jealous about Starlight doing her job instead of spending all day with her. All that good stuff.

BEST. FUCKING. FRIENDS.

Of course, it comes with its own slew of questionable logic. Trixie is impatient with Starlight because they're on a schedule and need to get things for a party that Maud is throwing, but I'm not sure why Maud couldn't have thrown it a day later once Starlight's off work. At a guess, I'd say that it's because it's a party specifically for the spring solstice, the same thing supposedly keeping the mane six busy in Canterlot. But if this episode takes place on the day of the solstice, and that's a holiday in Equestria, then why is the school still open, and why is Starlight still working? And actually, how is the school still open if the entire staff except Starlight are off in Canterlot?

By the way, "spring solstice" is an oxymoron, because spring doesn't have a solstice; it has an equinox. Man, the story editor really should've caught— Oh, right.

Then there's Silverstream, who has a minor role in this episode of exactly the kind that she could've used in season eight. She's going to Mt. Aris for the holiday, and has a project on... cockatrices... that she needs to finish at the last minute? Okay. Not sure what that has to do with friendship, but fine. So she decides to randomly go finish this project instead of catching her train home, and says that she lost track of time and forgot to tell anyone where she was going.

But that's okay, because after missing that one train, her entire kingdom immediately mounts a massive countrywide search for her, and her brother comes all the way back to Ponyville that same day to look for her personally. Jesus, a little premature, don't you think? How does he even know that she's missing in Ponyville and not just running late? Did he read the script or something?

Hey, what's that on the ground there? IS THAT THE SCRIPT?

This route crosses half a continent according to the official maps, and she was leaving after the school closed, so it'd be reasonable to assume that she'd be arriving fairly late in the day if that did happen. But apparently, instead of waiting to see if she was on a later train, Terramar immediately raised the alarm and took a cross-continent train ride of his own instead. It sure was lucky that he actually found her in Ponyville, and that she didn't arrive in Mt. Aris while he was going in the complete opposite direction, otherwise he would've looked pretty fucking stupid.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that Terramar is in this episode. I think that it's ridiculous that we had a whole episode in season eight about Silversteam's brother before we ever even got to know Silverstream, and then didn't even have the two of them interact. This goes at least some way towards fixing that. But him being here so fast is also another good reason why Maud's party should've been set a day later.

Wouldn't it have made a lot more sense if Starlight's last day of work and Silverstream going home had been one day, and then the next day she hears that Silverstream didn't arrive when she was supposed to? Shouldn't the hippogriffs at least wait the night for her to arrive on her own or send a message? Okay, sure, it'd be a little harder to justify Silverstream losing track of time that badly, but she's already a fucking idiot anyway for running off to the Everfree to complete her cockatrice homework instead of just going home when her family was expecting her. Does she not remember how she almost caused a war the last time she went missing?

I think that the same day disappearance and search party is just a way to link it more strongly to Starlight leaving work five minutes early and give her a reason to blame herself for it, because Lord knows we haven't seen enough of Starlight guilt-tripping herself in this series yet. I'm not even sure what she actually did wrong. It was already close to closing time when Silverstream came by. Wouldn't she have had to turn her away even if Trixie hadn't shown up? Starlight talks like she doesn't have set office hours until the end of the episode, but how can she not? She can't be available 24/7, can she? Does she not have days off for shit like baking cakes with Trixie?

Then there's the second half of the episode, when the supporting characters enter the story. I have to say, my favourite parts of the episode are when these five are together and interacting. There are a lot of funny moments with Maud and Mudbriar here, and making Mudbriar entertaining seems like an achievement in and of itself. He seems a little more self-aware and less annoying now, since he actually reads the room and shuts the fuck up a few times here. I wish that he and Sunburst had interacted more. And everything involving him becoming a statue was also great. Of all the bizarre fan theories and ideas that have become canon over the years, I was never expecting to see the show officially confirm that Maud literally has a rock fetish, but here we are.

Put that at #1 on my list of biggest surprises this season.

I do think that the forest search and the cockatrice chase scene went on for a bit too long, though. There's a long stretch of this episode where the characters are basically just running around in the woods, and it's just not that interesting. Like I said, I liked Mudbriar being petrified, but that was it. Nothing else came of this. It was all just one big excuse for the characters to go see the Treehouse of Harmony, so that we can say that it was technically important at least once after Uprooted.

But when you think about it, if Starlight already knew about the Treehouse, then we could've just skipped straight to it and not lost much narratively. Starlight lampshades it, but it really is bizarre to me that she correctly assumed that Silverstream ran off into the Everfree to fuck around with cockatrices, no matter how little sense that makes, while completely forgetting that she and the rest of the student six have a safe space in the middle of the Everfree that they like to go to. Even if she doesn't think that she's actually there, wouldn't it be a good place to start searching from?

Blagh. We'll leave it at that. Fun episode. Good character interactions. Doesn't make much sense. It's a Haber episode, alright.

Episode 12 - The Last Crusade:

So here we randomly have a Scootaloo episode from Nicole Dubuc. I mean, it's kind of a Crusaders episode, but Scootaloo is the most important one and the one who actually drives the plot. I'm not sure why Scootaloo gets a focus episode in the final season but Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle don't, but I guess that it's just part of this conception of season nine as wrapping up loose ends. And Scootaloo's lack of parents was a loose end, I guess?

...Yeah, I don't like this one.

Giving Scootaloo parents is a hell of a U-turn to make in the very last stretch of the series like this, and an utterly unnecessary one at that. It's in the same vein as the stupid Pillars backstory for the Tree of Harmony, fittingly enough also a Dubuc addition. It adds nothing to Scootaloo's story, and in fact, actively detracts from it, because it's a direct contradiction of everything else that we've seen of her. Admittedly, it was only ever a fan theory that Scootaloo was an orphan, but it had about as solid a foundation as Applejack being one. At the very least, it was always clear that even if she did have parents or guardians of some kind, they were pretty terrible.

Then this episode comes along and introduces both Scootaloo's temporary guardians and her actual parents all in one episode, and tries to make excuses for them and play them up like they're great, and not at all shitty and irresponsible. Scootaloo still totally idolises her parents, and the Crusaders still talk about how great her aunts are, even though they were never there for her before, and even though Scootaloo has consistently shown signs of being neglected at home.

The Last Crusade would have us believe that Scootaloo's aunts, Lofty and Holiday, were always there taking care of her and doing a great job of it, and if not them, some other babysitter. But from watching the rest of the series, we know that this blatantly isn't true. We never saw them supporting Scootaloo during any of the major events of her life. Where were they for all her school events like the talent show or the cart race? Where were they when the Crusaders were carrying the flag for Ponyville in the Equestria Games, or being the flower fillies for a princess in the royal wedding? Where were they when she got her cutie mark? Or all the times when she was in danger? Where were they when she joined the fucking Washouts?

Living out of town, that's where, because they finally move to Ponyville for good as the convenient solution to the episode's dilemma at the end. So that makes how many years now that Scootaloo has been living on her own in her parents' empty house, except for occasional visits from the absentee aunts and a rotating series of babysitters? Why didn't they move to Ponyville at the start of the series? Or why wasn't Scootaloo actually living with them in... wherever the fuck they live? It's no wonder that Rainbow Dash was the only one who was ever around for her. The people who were supposed to be looking after Scootaloo seemed to be avoiding her as much as they possibly could.

Then there's her parents, who are constantly talked up as being so cool and important that they had no choice but to run off and leave their daughter alone for years and years and years, until they finally come back in this episode and decide that now it's time for them to be parents. These two, if anything, are even worse than the aunts. Even if we accept at face value that their jobs really are that important, they're still shitty parents, because they're just as emotionally neglectful as they are physically absent.

No, but Scootaloo's family are great, you guys.

In Parental Glideance, Scootaloo wishes that she had parents like Dash's. At the time, I took that to mean that she didn't have any, but I guess that what she actually meant is that hers are just that shitty. This episode even supports that interpretation, because it's pretty clear that Snap Shutter and Mane Allgood know precisely fuck-all about their daughter's life. They say that they read all of her letters, but I think that that's just a polite lie, otherwise there's no way that they'd just barge in after years of being away with the sole intention of upending her life and tearing her away from all that she's ever known. The Cutie Mark Crusaders literally have ass-marks of destiny saying that they're meant to be together, and her dad writes it off like it's nothing. No, it's not nothing in ponyland, and he'd be well aware of that if he were paying even the slightest bit of attention.

And why are they doing this? For her safety, they say. Once again, Sombra's return in the premiere is the only big villain attack that matters, because now they want to drag her away to the other side of the world to get away from it all. Nevermind that they were apparently perfectly fine with leaving her in Ponyville after Nightmare Moon, Discord, Chrysalis, Tirek, and the Storm King all came and went. Nevermind that in Ponyville, Scootaloo is also close to all the big magical powerhouses who defeated those ancient evils, while her parents are the ones who chased a monster directly into a schoolhouse. And these people think that they can protect Scootaloo better from anything?

And besides all that, it's a little fucking late now, isn't it? If Scootaloo were still a blank-flanked filly, then that would be one thing, but she's already basically grown up without them, and she needs them less now than she ever did before. They left her to be raised by babysitters for most of her life; she's been apart from them for so long, she doesn't even share her family's accents. And now, after all that they've missed, and after Scootaloo has already become self-sufficient enough to be allowed to join a fucking professional stunt troupe on her own, now they have the gall to show up and try to unilaterally control her life.

...Yeah... No.

Fuck off and take your fake accents with you.

I wouldn't have even minded Scootaloo's family being terrible if it were at least done on purpose, but it very obviously wasn't. We're supposed to like these people. It's clear that all that Nicole Dubuc knew about Scootaloo was that her parents had never been depicted onscreen, so she tried to "fix" this by retconning in a loving and supportive family for her, not knowing that she was actually just breaking Scootaloo's story, because she doesn't know anything about this show or its characters.

It would've been a far more natural endpoint for her character arc to just confirm what they had already set up, and maybe have Scootaloo be officially adopted by someone who gave more of a shit about her. Bow and Windy would've been perfect for this. They liked being parents, they liked Scootaloo, Scootaloo liked them, and hey, it even would've made her Dash's sister for real, which would be a great pay-off for their relationship after nine seasons of development. Sure, maybe the idea has been overdone in the fandom, but that's because it makes sense for her and it works. Prior to season three, there were plenty of fanfics where Twilight became an alicorn too, because that was also a natural and intuitive development for her character, even if a lot of people didn't like how the show executed the idea.

But even if they hadn't gone with that, this episode premise still could've been salvaged if there had been any self-awareness to the writing. If someone had called out Scootaloo's parents or her aunts on how shitty and neglectful they'd been, or if they had realised on their own and taken steps to mend it instead of just fucking with Scootaloo's life, then that would've significantly improved matters. But we can't have that, because the whole point of all these new characters is that they're all so special and amazing.

In the case of Scootaloo's parents, they give them cool-sounding jobs which they insist are super important and that only they can do, have them fight a cragadile, and have Scootaloo idolise them and desperately seek their affection. This is probably an attempt to make the audience like them in spite of them neglecting their daughter for years until they return to screw up her life, but all that it really accomplishes is making them seem full of themselves and making Scootaloo's relationship with them look really unhealthy.

As for her aunts, Lofty and Holiday pretty much exist for the sole purpose of shoving some gay representation onto the screen for Pride Month, and I guess that it would kind of defeat the purpose to call out the only gay characters in the episode for being terrible people.

Not that they're exactly great representations even discounting all that. I mean, personally, I couldn't care less about gay representation in media; I'm too busy having gay sex for that. But even I can tell that this is pretty half-assed as far as LGBT pandering goes. I mean, they're going to all this trouble to show off how progressive they are, even scheduling the season so that the episode literally called The Last Crusade isn't the last Crusaders episode anymore, just to make sure that it airs in Pride Month... and they aren't even gonna make the characters explicitly gay except in after the fact social media posts?

I mean, I kind of figured after that one EG short which was just nine straight minutes of cunnilingus, but this is still pretty weak.

Yeah, sure, the intention is clear enough in the show, but somehow I doubt that this move was winning any accolades from the gay community. Most people who actually care about media representation in the Current Year aren't satisfied with this wishy-washy bullshit anymore. Who cares about your three second lesbian kiss in the background that you edit out for the Chinese release? And likewise, who cares about Lofty and Holiday? They're not exactly breaking any new ground here. Plenty of other animated shows like Korra, Steven Universe, and Adventure Time already beat them to the punch. This doesn't even compare well to previous seasons of this show. Lyra and Bon Bon were way more homo than this all the way back in season five, and they were just "BEST FRIENDS."

Like I said, I personally don't give a fuck. But if you're gonna do LGBT pandering, you may as well go all the way. Half-assing it just looks cowardly and hypocritical these days, like trying to have your cake and eat it too. It's not like that thin veneer of deniability is even worth anything anyway. I mean, do you really think that all of those old-school conservative Christian types are just gonna be totally fine with this so long as Holiday never actually says that she enjoys the taste of Lofty's vagina? They can still tell what's going on.

Also, while we're talking about the aunts, I just gotta say that Aunt Holiday has the worst Australian accent that I've ever heard in my fucking life. Australians, feel free to disagree with me if you've ever heard worse, but after I'm done with this review, I'm starting a petition to the UN to outlaw all Canadians from ever voicing Australian characters ever again, under penalty of torture.

Anyway, all that's just the high-level problems. Sure, the episode's characters and themes are all fucked up, but I haven't even started on the story details and continuity. I've said before that Nicole Dubuc obviously knows nothing about this show, and you can really see that in this episode. There's usually at least one major continuity mistake in every episode of season nine, but Dubuc's episodes in particular tend to have a laundry list of them.

Cheerilee has a line in this episode saying that the Cloudsdale weather factory produces sunshine. How the fuck does that work? What's the point of Celestia moving the sun if ponies produce artificial sunlight? The Crusaders also say that they've been together their whole lives. Their "whole lives" must've been a lot fucking shorter than we thought, considering that we saw them meet in season one. Scootaloo has a line where she implies that bugbears, plural, are a common species that her parents are already familiar with, and not a unique and rare monster that a special secret agency needed to shove in Tartarus. And the Crusaders also claim that they're the only ponies in Equestria with the same cutie mark, which is objectively untrue; Doctor Whooves and Minuette are both named characters with speaking roles, and they share a cutie mark too.

I could go on like this, but you get the point.

Where are my FUCKING SEDATIVES?

The story in general is also just very loose and insubstantial in the middle. It's bookended by these scenes that are supposed to be emotional, one with the Crusaders all crying because Scootaloo has to leave, and one where the town comes together to convince the parents to let her stay, but everything between those two scenes is just a series of dumb pointless tangents to fill time. The Crusaders come up with an elaborate fake monster deception plan which couldn't possibly be sustainable in the long term even if it had worked. Apple Bloom makes a potion that has no apparent reason to exist. They make photos of their cutie marks to show how similar they are, only for Snap Shutter to dismiss the obvious importance for no reason. Et cetera.

There's a lot of plot convenience here, too. Like how the whole reason why moving away is such a terrible thing is that there's only one train to Shire Lanka per month. How convenient that long distance travel is suddenly a problem now, when in every other episode the characters can cross the entire country in a matter of hours. Also convenient how the aunts are willing to move to Ponyville by the end of the episode after years of leaving Scootaloo to languish alone in that empty house of hers. And how the town was able to spontaneously organise this Cutie Mark Crusader Appreciation Day event on such short notice, complete with an appearance by an elite celebrity military unit and cameos from characters like Feather Bangs and Terramar, who live on opposite ends of the fucking continent.

And all this is in service to shit ending with a terrible lesson. When you really boil it down, this is an episode about Scootaloo's parents wanting to move her away despite her wishes. This is a really relatable conflict for a lot of kids, and if the episode had at least handled it in a realistic and mature fashion, like having her move away at the end anyway and having to learn to accept that, then I maybe could've forgiven some of this, even if I still would've hated Scootaloo's parents. I mean, it's the end of the series, so we don't have to keep the Crusaders together anymore by this point, and we know from the finale that the writers are not averse to breaking up the groups.

But no, instead, Scootaloo successfully convinces her parents to leave her behind by showing them that she's an important and valued member of the community. Yeah, I'm sure that this argument sways parents all the time in real life. Lots of kids have really important jobs that only they can do. Super relatable. And of course, the parents are still leaving for Shire Lanka anyway, because their fucking jobs are still more important to them having a relationship with their daughter. Remind me again why Scootaloo liked these people?

And then it's over. That's The Last Crusade, the final Cutie Mark Crusader episode (until the next one). What to even say about it? It's like the anti-Perfect Pear; it utterly shatters the audience's perceptions of Scootaloo's life and home situation, gives us four new characters and immediately makes us dislike all of them, and is a poorly written slog which completely fails to emotionally resonate with its audience. I'd say that I'm thankful that it wasn't really the final Crusaders episode, but the actual send-off honestly wasn't much better. But evaluating it as a send-off, it definitely fails.

Looking at it as a Crusaders episode, the CMC Appreciation Day event with all the cameos from all of the characters that they've helped over the years is a nice idea, and I might've even liked it if it were written better (and if Babs Seed's cutie mark didn't disappear from shot to shot). But the episode is too heavily weighted towards Scootaloo's story, pushing the other two into the background, so it doesn't work as a farewell episode for the group, which might be another reason why it's placed in the middle of the season like this despite having the perfect title for a final Crusaders episode.

And as a Scootaloo episode, it's even worse, because its attempts to tie up the loose ends of her storyline just make a mess of it instead. It contradicts and undoes everything that the preceding eight seasons had attempted to establish about her character for a badly written plot about fake Australians, and there was never any need to, because Scootaloo's parents were never important. Rainbow Dash is the only character who was ever consistently there for Scootaloo. Rainbow Dash was the one who Scootaloo always looked up to and thought of as family. Not her parents, and not the lesbian aunts. If they wanted to put a bow on Scootaloo's story, they should've ended it on her relationship with Rainbow Dash. That's the real missed opportunity of all this.

Fuck, are we done yet? Can I talk about another episode now? What's next? Oh no, not that one, ANYTHING BUT THAT ONE, JESUS CHRI—

Actually, this is significantly toned down compared to an average viewing of Dark and Dawn.

---

Continued in part three.

Comments

[Alondro]

Some people didn't like how Spike in Dragon Quest learned that other dragons are all awful and decided that he was more comfortable being like a pony. They read it as a story about rejecting your racial identity to adopt another, which, yeah, hot-button topic to say the least.

SJW ALERT!! SJW ALERT!!

Only NPCs programmed by COMMUNIST CHINA would interpret that episode this way! THEY MUST BE TORTURED UNTIL THEY REVEAL THEIR TIES TO WINNIE XI POOP!!!!

But really, the episode made the point that Garble & Crew were all TEENAGE dragons, and as we know, teens are all complete A-holes. I say this without remorse.

It also gave us Best Dragon, Crackle.

images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wixmp.com/f/42105fa2-04ea-42b6-a720-0957024d3b70/d4t9xrs-74caec7d-0ee7-446d-b593-b30fa595946a.jpg/v1/fill/w_970,h_824,q_75,strp/crackle_is_best_dragon_by_drjavi-d4t9xrs.jpg?token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJpc3MiOiJ1cm46YXBwOjdlMGQxODg5ODIyNjQzNzNhNWYwZDQxNWVhMGQyNmUwIiwic3ViIjoidXJuOmFwcDo3ZTBkMTg4OTgyMjY0MzczYTVmMGQ0MTVlYTBkMjZlMCIsImF1ZCI6WyJ1cm46c2VydmljZTppbWFnZS5vcGVyYXRpb25zIl0sIm9iaiI6W1t7InBhdGgiOiIvZi80MjEwNWZhMi0wNGVhLTQyYjYtYTcyMC0wOTU3MDI0ZDNiNzAvZDR0OXhycy03NGNhZWM3ZC0wZWU3LTQ0NmQtYjU5My1iMzBmYTU5NTk0NmEuanBnIiwid2lkdGgiOiI8PTk3MCIsImhlaWdodCI6Ijw9ODI0In1dXX0.F4VEJZ_zqML-BWFkpZT9fyB44Lvn71TDSTD3x0YbckU

[PresentPerfect]

Man, I really wish that I were watching Avatar right now instead.

Ugh, I know, right?

Then there's Chrysalis, who it has to be said, is a much less impressive villain as a crazy girl talking to herself in the woods instead of an actual queen with a real plan and an army behind her.

Okay, but let's be fair, she never had a real plan, at least not when it came to the wedding.

Chrysalis still talking to her log dildo

I am quite embarrassed to say I laughed a lot at this. I didn't have to share, but I did.

Supposedly it comes every hundred moons?

Oh god, don't talk to me about a hundred moons. >:| The more they used "a hundred moons" in the show, the more I figure it's either a colloquialism for "a really long time" or just "literally whenever we feel like it".

Kimi Sparkle was actually a modern day prophet.

Anyone who blames Josh Haber for anything and immedately makes a Kimi Sparkle reference is a friend of mine. :D

in retrospect, it's obvious that season six was where the rot set in.

I've been saying this for five years. :B

Oh boy, I'm looking forward to the next slate. :O Tomorrow, though.

[Alondro]

Gallus's voice bothers me. I know that this is an odd time to comment on it, but it really does. He's meant to be a kid or teenager like the rest of the student six, but he just doesn't sound like one at all. He sounds like an adult man. I've always thought so.

Gallus should have been voiced by someone innocent and child-like: Anthony Hopkins.

[DannyJ]

5421097

The more they used "a hundred moons" in the show, the more I figure it's either a colloquialism for "a really long time" or just "literally whenever we feel like it".

This makes more sense than any other explanation, I guess.

[Alondro]

In short, killing off Sombra in the premiere and keeping Cozy was a mistake. Sombra, Tirek, and Chrysalis are the iconic villains with power and legacy. Cozy is just an upstart who contributes nothing tangible to this team, and she has no business being here.

If they had killed Cozy Glow at the start of the season, I would have been obligated to rate it the best episode of the show. Especially if the ENTIRE EPISODE was dedicated to her slow, agonizing death.

[Alondro]

But we only have one world, and this is the one we're living in.

God help us all.

I have plenty of other worlds.

And, no, I shall not be helping any of you.

[Alondro]

My annoyance with "Going to Seed" is that the ponies doubt that such a creature as the Great Seedling could actually exist...

IN A WORLD WHERE THEY HAVE LITERAL WOLVES MADE OF WOOD!! A CHAOS GOD AS THEIR BESTEST BUDDY!! ALICORNS WHO RAISE THE SUN AND MOON!! SHAPE-SHIFTING BUG PONIES THAT EAT LOVE!! AND LITERAL PONY HELL, FILLED WITH MONSTERS, RIGHT NEXT DOOR!

See, doubting a mythical magical creature in world just doesn't make a damned shred of sense. It'd be like LoTR featuring a Frodo Baggins who questions the existence of Elves.

[DannyJ]

5421142

In fairness, Applejack eventually comes around to the idea even with only circumstantial evidence. I can see where you're coming from, though, because you're right, the Great Seedling wouldn't really be out of the ordinary for a world like Equestria. But even in a magical world, there must still be some fantastical creatures that don't exist, and the skepticism makes sense if the Great Seedling is something that's never actually been proven to exist. Like, given the scale of the universe, it's totally plausible for aliens to be real, and there are lots of people out there who claim to have had alien encounters, but it's still totally understandable why most people are skeptical of those kinds of stories.

[Alondro]

5421152 It's more like, if in our world we knew of Klingons, and Vulcans, and Cardassians, and the Borg... but then decided Romulans couldn't exist because we'd never seen one.

Keep in mind, NMM, the very first villain of all... came from a story book tale. Daring Do... yeah... that just KILLED any notion that ANYTHING could be fictional in their world anymore.

When you dump THAT MUCH thematic stuff into the entire world, it kinda yanks the rug out when you then decide that a relatively average topically-related thing is too unbelievable.

Now, if the Great Seedling was something that was STATED to have been made up by, say, AJ's parents, then you could kinda get away with it. And, delve a little into the parents' story with some clues where THEY'D come up with the story, so you then have foundation for both the disbelief AND the reveal that it could actually be a real creature.

But, ya know, that's just... writing.

[DannyJ]

5421167

I mean, the fact that nothing in MLP is allowed to be explicitly fictional is one of those world-building details that annoys me the most about it, so maybe I'm just glad to see them draw the line anywhere, but I grant you that Applejack personally has seen enough shit that nothing should phase her anymore.

[Oliver]

On the other hand, I do not like the way that Yona tries to become a pony for this dance. It’s yet another “just be yourself” episode, which is already unoriginal enough on its own, but this time it’s also laden with all of this uncomfortable subtext.

Side observation: most people whom this lesson is directed at actually have a different problem: determining and accepting who that yourself even is.

I know that Sandbar’s hatred for Imperial Japan is well-established by this point, but the way that he praised the Japanese American internment camps in World War Two crosses a line, and the sheer number of racial slurs in the scene was unnecessary and, frankly, gratuitous.

Are you putting this in to see how many people actually read that far?

By the way, “spring solstice” is an oxymoron, because spring doesn’t have a solstice; it has an equinox. Man, the story editor really should’ve caught— Oh, right.

Considering the manual control of the sun, it’s an open question why should there be a solstice at all.

Scootaloo has a line where she implies that bugbears, plural, are a common species that her parents are already familiar with, and not a unique and rare monster that a special secret agency needed to shove in Tartarus.

There’s also that entire “Bugbear territory” on the map, which was there already. We can only conclude that this particular bugbear knew too much.

[Impossible Numbers]

The "Frenemies" episode I was keen to see you tackle, because I myself found it enjoyable (I wrote a whole blog post about it, though half of that was just relief at the fact that the show was using a completely different POV cast for a change), and wondered what possible objections you'd have to it. And... I see they overlap strongly with mine. I am somehow feeling very vindicated by this.

Also, the bull-snake thing is an Ophiotaurus, the entrails of which are said to bring people godlike powers. I don't know if that's overblown coincidence, or if someone on the show wanted us to spot the comparison to Grogar's bell, or what.

I liked A Hearth's Warming Tail

I beg to differ, myself. Once I realized it was a confused rehash of "The Cutie Re-Mark" (the episode I hate beyond all others in this series), my enthusiasm for it dropped like a stone. The resultant attempt to make "A Christmas Carol, but with a hardcore apocalypse" takes the passable moral-based logic of the original Hearth's Warming Eve pageant (where it felt better integrated into the anti-hate theme) and dives headfirst into a tangle of weird implications. Like... wanting to work over the holidays for the betterment of all makes you a hate-filled bastard? Stopping people from having fun results in the extinction of all life? One person can legitimately destroy a traditional holiday overnight? This is some screwy "logic".

Luna's song was awesome. That's about all I can remember from it positively.

Spice Up Your Life, Stranger Than Fan Fiction

In my opinion, do not belong in the same sentence as "Cart Before the Ponies". They were flawed, yes, but mostly just forgivable dents and bruises. "Cart Before the Ponies" was twisted and bent into a horrible, unpleasant shape.

Man, I really wish that I were watching Avatar right now instead.

One of my favourites! Although the beach episode was merely OK, if fun (entirely because of the characters). So much info-dumping near the end, and for stuff I'd rather see shown than told.

The other mistake, and in my opinion the worse one, is that the Legion of Doom had terrible team composition.

Like I said elsewhere, I'd have been more enthusiastic for it if they'd found some way to get a huge swathe of classic villains together for one last hurrah (yes, including Nightmare Moon, old Discord, and the Pony of Shadows, if it could be done). The series was never going to work coherently by this point, so the other option is to go all-out crazy with spectacle. If you're going out, go out with a bang, I say.

Agreed heartily that Cozy was a stillborn character concept; even in this episode, she's only entertaining as a mediator between Tirek and Chrysalis in the early going, a role that doesn't need someone like her around. She's pathetic otherwise, and clearly out of place.

if we'd actually had a changeling civil war arc in season seven instead of just teasing one in dialogue and then resolving it offscreen. Hell, any interaction between Thorax and Chrysalis after Where and Back Again would've been better than none.

Stop throwing out cool ideas. Someone might steal them for a massive Alternate Universe fic, and then I'd have to like it.

To my mind, it's definitive proof that the two of them, at least, are capable of reforming, even if they're resisting it for the time being.

I don't think we should go that far, and not just because I dislike the repetitive redemption thing this show can't leave well alone, or do all that well anyway. I'd say this at least makes them more interesting villains, and introduces a better fleshed-out character dynamic, but not in a definitively moral dimension. After all, having a villainous friendship is not the same as being redemption-worthy.

That's part of the reason I like the episode, actually. It found a way to develop two black-as-midnight villains without going so far as to pretend they're not villains anymore.

I think that it was a dumb idea to make changelings into omni-shapeshifters that can become literally anything, complete with abilities, rather than just being able to convincingly mimic ponies. But if you're gonna give the changelings that kind of power, you have to really think about all of the possibilities that it opens up.

You know my thoughts on changeling shapeshifting already (for everyone else: making them a tribe of Dittos was a very bad idea and another reason I tend to disregard the second half of the show), but I think some saving grace could have been maintained if there was some kind of limitation to the ability, like it drains the changeling's energy each time they switch/maintain forms, or it's tied to power tiers, or limited to living creatures they have to witness first-hand. Shapeshifting entities have been written well enough in other media that the new idea from Season Six could still be salvaged as an interesting mechanic.

it informs much of the rest of the Legion of Doom's arc

I took it in isolation, which is probably the reason why I'm more favourably disposed towards it than you are.

---

and going by the series' viewership ratings,

Oh my gosh, where did you get that graph? I want more!

Don't have much to add to your examination of the viewership and the change in staff, other than the bit about Haber's role was the part where it suddenly clicked in my head and led to that epiphany-like comment I left in your Part Five here, only growing as I read on. It really needs to be better known - even common knowledge - what happened behind the scenes during these seasons, because for me, it explains so much about the sudden lurches during Five, Six, and Seven onwards.

Also, who's Kimi Sparkle?

Now, I'm not doing this to pick on Haber. I'm really not. I don't hold any animosity towards the man, and my only interest in him is in the context of his writing for MLP.

That's a valid disclaimer. We shouldn't get personal over entertainment and fiction, no matter how bad we think it is. I will, however, confess to not feeling particularly sympathetic to the guy for the attitude he openly expressed over this show. Combine that with the overall staff changes and system upheaval, it all prevented this show from achieving any further acclaim beyond its shrinking fandom and initial meteoric impact.

I started these reviews at season seven because season seven was the first season that I disliked as a whole, but in retrospect, it's obvious that season six was where the rot set in.

I'd go one back and say the rot set in during the Season Five finale, not coincidentally where Haber suddenly replaces McCarthy for two-parters. There's at least one major reason that two-parter collectively remains the Worst Episode of the Series in my eyes; even the later messes of Seasons Eight and Nine are more just depressing and predictably bad fare. Season Five's effort outright broke the show into two halves for me, and Season Six was never going to do better than damage control, ignoring the fact that it didn't even accomplish that low bar anyway (and, with "Every Little Thing She Does", made the inclusion infinitely more vile).

But anyway, we were talking about Season Nine...

By the way, "spring solstice" is an oxymoron, because spring doesn't have a solstice; it has an equinox.

This, for example. It would have taken five minutes on Google or Wikipedia to clear this up. And this is canon, now. It's not even an isolated example of sheer sloppiness. Why should I as a fanfic writer be shackled to this downgrade?

---

Episode 12 - The Last Crusade:

I really hate this episode, just for its pretzel attempts to twist a retconned family into Scootaloo's life. No, just no.

Redsquirrel456 wrote a blog review in which he was harsh on this episode, and to be blunt, I don't blame either of you. It's dead on arrival anyway, as far as I'm concerned, but it's the toxic attempt to pour "we're all fine" optimism over the whole thing that desecrates the corpse. Like, how dare you write parents this blatantly negligent and incompetent, and then pretend we're all friends here. I'm not falling for it. Especially when one of the parents is a Steve Irwin stand-in! With child endangerment! That's outright disrespectful.

The best-case scenario is that this was due to staff carelessness, and that's already a black mark in my book.

Also, if the aunts were brought in solely for the LGBTQ+ points, then I'm underwhelmed bordering on hostile, and not just because people make a less weak case for the Startrix stuff filling that niche already.

Who's impressed by this weaksauce stuff, anyway? If you don't have the guts to do it bluntly and make a challenging statement, then don't do it. Otherwise, it's just shallow queerbaiting for cheap points.

---

5421122

If they had killed Cozy Glow at the start of the season, I would have been obligated to rate it the best episode of the show.

I'll go one better and propose an episode wherein she gets unpersoned from the entire timeline. Family-friendly and more thorough.

But honestly, it would have been better if she'd never been introduced in the first place. She just doesn't fit in this series at all.

My annoyance with "Going to Seed" is that the ponies doubt that such a creature as the Great Seedling could actually exist...

I think you could make a case for it on evidential grounds. Timberwolves, Discord, the Princesses, Changelings, and Tartarus are observed fact in their lives, the equivalents of ordinary animals, big public figures, and famous landmarks in our world. There's presumably still scope for things that are apocryphal, or just don't exist despite the stories told about them. Their equivalent of Bigfoot, basically.

Still, it would help if the fictional pony world was actually allowed its own internal fiction, without so many of them turning out to be in-universe real. What, do ponies lack an imagination anymore?

5421254

Are you putting this in to see how many people actually read that far?

He did something similar in the Season Eight review posts too. I presume for the same reason.

[DannyJ]

5421254

Are you putting this in to see how many people actually read that far?

I just really like Raimiposting.

Considering the manual control of the sun, it’s an open question why should there be a solstice at all.

The explanation in the Borderworld is that the sun used to work normally before ponies controlled it, so the pony-controlled seasons and solstices and such are basically just attempts to replicate what used to be a natural process out of a sense of tradition.

5421354

The resultant attempt to make "A Christmas Carol, but with hardcore apocalypse" takes the passable moral-based logic of the original Hearth's Warming Eve pageant (where it felt better integrated into the anti-hate theme) and dives headfirst into a tangle of weird implications.

I can understand that. Though personally, I've seen so many Christmas Carol spoofs and adaptations by now, I don't mind the subversions of the moral message. At this point, I'm just glad to see any somewhat original take on the story. And hey, it was even in-universe fiction, the very thing that I frequently complain about this show lacking.

Oh my gosh, where did you get that graph?

That's actually a graph of search interest, not viewership, but it more or less correlates to the viewership figures, which are available on Wikipedia.

Also, who's Kimi Sparkle?

Only the best MLP reviewer on YouTube.

There's at least one major reason that two-parter collectively remains the Worst Episode of the Series in my eyes

This is probably one of our major points of disagreement, because Cutie Re-Mark was one of my favourite finales, even if it did lay the groundwork for the Habering.

Especially when one of the parents is a Steve Irwin stand-in! With child endangerment! That's outright disrespectful.

Yeah, that's one of the points I regret not finding a place to put into the review. Stevo deserved better than this.

Hell, Jane Goodall deserved better than this.

But honestly, it would have been better if she'd never been introduced in the first place. She just doesn't fit in this series at all.

This is my vote.