DANNYJ REVIEWS: MLP SEASON 9 PART 5 · 8:36pm Dec 23rd, 2020
Episode 24 & 25 - The Ending of the End:
The Ending of the End is the ultimate culmination of every terrible idea that season nine set up until this point. It's difficult to put into words just how fucking abysmal it is at every conceivable level. It's almost impressive, in a way. There's a lot to untangle with this one, with so many stupid mistakes and baffling creative decisions to talk about. I'm honestly not sure where to begin. The only way that makes sense to me is to go through the whole thing in order, but since not a second goes by in The Ending of the End without something excruciatingly horrible happening, this is probably going to take a while. So like I did for School Raze last time, we're going to have to split this bitch into subsections to get through it all.
So let's kick it off right now with:
Part 1: A Big Cosmic "Fuck You"
Yup. Definitely going to need this in a minute.
The episode begins on Chrysalis stirring the shit-pot, but since the consequences of that won't manifest themselves for a while, let's start off instead by talking about the scene immediately after that, where she returns to the Legion of Doom's lair to confer with her co-conspirators. She's not the only one who's been fostering tensions either, as Cozy also claims to have been doing her part to rile up the pegasi, however the hell she's been accomplishing that, because they still have to make Cozy useful somehow, no matter how little sense it makes.
Meanwhile, Tirek has been doing the actual work of researching the Bewitching Bell, because as you know, the three of them have been plotting a coup against Grogar ever since Frenemies, and he finally has it figured out. Turns out that the bell can steal magic from others and store it inside, so that they can take that magic for themselves. So basically... it just does what Tirek already does. Pretty fucking lame, guys. Tirek could've taken down Grogar on his own all along. But I suppose that the magic already stored inside the bell is the real prize here, because it empowers the three of them once they unlock it together, which is yet another really big show of trust on their parts.
So they all power up and transform, and I have no idea what's going on with them here. Tirek's final form makes sense, since powering up through eating magic is his whole deal, and he just looks the same as he did at the end of Twilight's Kingdom. But I don't know why Chrysalis and Cozy change. Chrysalis is a changeling, so she can look however she wants I guess, but the vomit changelings are the only precedent we have for them altering their base appearance. There's no reason why having more magic should make her look any different this time. She was supposed to be powered up way more than usual in A Canterlot Wedding too, but that never affected her appearance. And as for Cozy Glow, she becomes an alicorn? Just, outright? That's all it takes?
At least the show until this point pretended that Twilight and Cadance's ascensions had some special cosmic significance tied to understanding friendship and love and all that crap, since they both automatically travelled to that weird astral plane after achieving their great feats. But no, apparently, ponies just become alicorns when you feed them enough magic, even if they're little shits, and it doesn't even seem to matter whose it is or where it comes from like it does for the demons in Equestria Girls. So theoretically I guess that anyone can be an alicorn then. It's not special. Boy, that's sure gonna have some implications down the line.
To think, all this just to make Cozy a credible physical threat to the alicorns, when we could've just had Sombra in her place instead.
So now empowered, they launch their coup, and despite "Grogar" having actual scrying magic, and these three frequently talking openly about their plans in his own home, he somehow doesn't seem to be aware of their plot. So they actually catch him off-guard and drain his magic, stripping his disguise away, and revealing that he was actually Dr. Caballeron all along, and that the Legion of Doom was all an elaborate scheme to ruin Daring Do's reputation!
OH MY GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD!
Nah, but he's actually Discord, and after confirming that he has no magic, he flees from sight, and they don't bother pursuing him because they say that without magic, he's no threat to them. This seems extraordinarily short-sighted on their part, because both Chrysalis and Tirek have been screwed over at the last minute before by people who didn't have any magic at the time, and funnily enough, Discord was involved both times. You guys sure that you just wanna let him get away? Wouldn't it be safer to... I don't know... snap his fucking neck? Just a thought?
Cut to Canterlot, where Twilight is getting ready for her coronation. The triumvirate of Haber, Vogel, and Dubuc suck each other off some more over how much character development Twilight has had this season, while the mane six walk about the deserted streets of Canterlot and see how everyone's on edge, avoiding going out in public, and regarding each other with suspicion and fear. Gee, is all of this biting social commentary supposed to be about racism, or coronavirus? I can't tell!
Of course, the mane six think that everyone's worrying about Twilight taking power, since this is the first time that there's been a transfer of power like this in living memory. Yeah, you'd think, wouldn't you? If I were a resident of Equestria, I sure wouldn't be positive about this change. In fact, with mind control magic and the changelings being a thing, the average citizen probably can't even be one hundred percent sure that this isn't a coup. But don't think about that. I'm sure that the rule of this new untested princess will be just as peaceful and prosperous as Celestia's, once we get past that whole near-collapse of Equestria business.
So then Discord finally arrives to confess what he did as Grogar, and to explain that it was all one big dumbass plan to build Twilight's confidence.
Thank you, Discord. Very nice. You can fuck off forever now.
Told you I'd need it.
Being a Discordfag in season nine is suffering. He's my favourite character bar none, and even I want to kick his fucking ass for this. Return of Harmony was the first new episode that I saw after joining this fandom, and I've been an ardent defender of Discord's reformation arc since day one, but even I can't defend what he does in season nine. Late-series MLP had a lot of backsliding and character regression, and in my opinion, Discord got it the worst of any of them. He caused more lasting harm in season nine while supposedly trying to "help" than he did in either of his stints as an actual out-and-out villain.
Think of everything that went wrong because of him, all of the shit that can be laid directly at Discord's doorstep. He resurrected Sombra, and then just let him leave to conquer and enslave the Crystal Empire again, the nation that he terrorised so badly a thousand years ago that he gave the entire kingdom PTSD. He let Sombra destroy the Tree of Harmony, nearly killing it and unleashing the Everfree upon Ponyville again, apparently just because Twilight used the Elements to defeat Sombra the first time, and Discord doesn't regard that as "handling things on their own," however the fuck he expected them to handle fucking Sombra without a big blast of magic. And then he let Sombra enslave Canterlot and Ponyville just like he did the Crystal Empire, and let it go on for hours while he just sat back and watched. That's all on him.
But it's all okay, because it was all to teach Twilight to be confident! I can't believe that he actually says this with a straight face. This is the shittiest excuse for a motivation that I think I've ever heard. Twilight's fucking confidence? Discord resurrected history's greatest monster, let two kingdoms fall, enabled mass slavery, and was complicit in the attempted murder of Equestria's oldest and most powerful defender, all to emotionally manipulate one mare? Fuck off.
On top of all that, if Discord is telling the truth, he's also a fucking dumbass. He knows from personal experience how dangerous the Legion of Doom are. Chrysalis and Tirek each already beat him once before, so he should really know better than to fuck around with them, but instead he tries to make them even more dangerous by teaching them to work together and sending them after the Bewitching Bell.
This is why I actually think that Frenemies is a terrible episode, because it's really the story that breaks the entire Grogar plot once you put it into context. Discord sends the Legion of Doom after a magic bell that can overpower even him, on the premise of getting them to learn to work together. He can fucking observe them invisibly or from a distance the whole time, but he doesn't. He just trusts them to retrieve this artefact and hand it over to him, even though at the beginning of the episode the three of them don't even want to work with each other, much less him. Then when they come crawling back claiming to have failed, he just takes them at their word and doesn't investigate, and then later has the gall to act shocked when he finds out that they lied to him.
Let me repeat that: Fucking Discord seriously never considered the possibility THAT THESE THREE SOCIOPATHS MIGHT LIE TO HIM.
And why, for the love of all that's holy, would he send them after the real Bewitching Bell, one of the most dangerous artefacts in Equestria, if this is all just meant to be a test for Twilight? Aren't all of the most powerful villains in Equestria plus himself as Grogar working together already enough? How the hell is he supposed to be their safety net like he claims if he's putting them up against a threat more powerful than he is? This is stacking the odds so heavily against Twilight and the others that his stated excuse just isn't believable anymore. If he really did have good intentions, and it was all just a test for Twilight like he claims, then there's no reason to bring the bell into this! All of this only makes sense if Discord is actually evil and this is all a real coup! More on that later.
And it's all the worse because I know how this ends, and I know that he gets away with it all.
Part 2: Big Brain Time
So Twilight starts drawing up plans for how to deal with all of the fuckery that Discord has unleashed upon them, and meanwhile the Legion of Doom are arguing over what to do with Discord's magic.
The episode makes a big deal about this several times, as Tirek repeatedly claims that none of them would be able to control it, but Tirek has consumed Discord's magic before, and it didn't do anything to him. It just made him a bit taller, and maybe a bit angrier. I mean, he started smashing some trees for no reason, but that was it. Hardly anything comparable to what it does to Cozy Glow, who speaking of which betrays the other two immediately after they give her the chaos magic. She asks them to use the bell on her to take it back when she can't control it, so they do, but for some reason they then let her keep the rest of her stolen magic after that. Absolutely no idea why. If this filly isn't even going to honour the pact, then isn't she just a liability?
But whatever. They resolve their differences, and each head out to pursue their own objectives. For some reason, Cozy attacks the palace on her own first without even waiting for Tirek or Chrysalis's support, Tirek has to go the long way around and fight through the Pillars, and Chrysalis doesn't care about their main objective at all and just wants to go hate-fuck Starlight first.
Well, none of this makes much sense to me strategically, but hey, at least we get to see Star Swirl face off with Tirek one last time! This ought to be interesting, considering their mutual history and everything that happened with Scorpan. I wonder what they'll say to each other? I wonder if Tirek will recognise the rest of the Pillars, or if Star Swirl fought him alone? If nothing else, the battle should be cool, seeing all these old legendary heroes finally doing something at last after two seasons of nothing. R-Right?
Tirek... Tirek no... TIREK! DON'T YOU WALK AWAY, YOU BIG RED MOTHERFUCKER!
I hate this show so fucking much.
You know what? Fuck the Pillars. Fuck them right in their asses. I hate them and everything to do with them. This scene just proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that these characters were all ultimately pointless and that we never needed them. Tirek steamrolls them in like thirty seconds, they serve no purpose whatsoever to the story, and none of Star Swirl's history with Tirek is ever important or even so much as referenced. They're just here because they exist, and because they're just barely important enough to the lore that the writers couldn't justify ignoring them.
In retrospect, everything about the entire Pillars arc was ill-conceived. The writers introduced six new lore-important characters that they had no ideas for. Rockhoof and a Hard Place was as close as they came, and it was terrible. In the three seasons that he was around, we didn't get even one proper Star Swirl episode, just one where he was a side character who got duped and upstaged by fucking Flim and Flam, and yet we somehow found time for two buckball episodes in all this. How the hell do you waste Star Swirl that badly?
And why did the Pillars even have to exist in the first place? To introduce new lore? But this show doesn't give a shit about lore! Both Star Swirl and the Tree of Harmony already had existing lore around them, and Shadow Play and now season nine both shit all over it.
The Tree of Harmony being planted by ponies isn't an inherently unworkable idea, but making it a creation of Star Swirl and his friends was dumb as fuck. The whole reason that Star Swirl's final spell was incomplete and needed Twilight to fix it was that he didn't understand friendship. That was supposedly the key difference between him and Twilight that made her worthy of ascension and not him. Understanding friendship was what set Twilight above and beyond the greatest wizard of all time. And yet, apparently, he did have friends, and they were the basis of the infinite well of friendship magic that Twilight and her friends were drawing from all along.
What the fuck kind of sense does that make, especially given the context of how the Pillars treated Stygian? If a friendship that bad, between people who were that shitty, was enough to grow an awesomely powerful friendship tree that can bitchslap Discord himself, if the Elements of Harmony are something that complete assholes can create by accident, then why the fuck is that stupid crystal tree the only one of its kind? Equestria should be dominated by forests full of these fuckers.
Not to mention, adding this new backstory for the Tree just de-canonised Journal of the Two Sisters and basically every other story that we had until that point with any information on Star Swirl. And frankly, the trade was not worth it. Everything that the show did with the Tree of Harmony after season seven ended up being pointless, the other Pillars were never important again, and the show's version of Star Swirl is far lamer than his old expanded universe counterpart, who actually had stories about him, where he did things. Even stupid shit like Ted Anderson's Dazzlings issue of FIENDship is Magic was better than this. Star Swirl inventing rap music was fucking dumb, but at least it was interestingly dumb, and it was still cooler than anything that Pillar Star Swirl ever did.
I put a lot more effort into these joke images than I probably should.
Of course, despite how badly they butchered Star Swirl, forgot all of his lore, and wasted him in this episode, the writers still remember Chrysalis's grudge against Starlight! And of course Starlight puts up a much better fight than all of the Pillars combined, complete with snarky Marvel quips, smug memefaces, and an actual fucking slow walk away at the end, despite Chrysalis being at the height of her power here. Starlight kind of grew on me a bit over the last few seasons, but this scene reminded me all over again why I used to hate her; she really is a Mary Sue through and through.
As for Cozy, her alicorn transformation apparently came with an instant understanding of how to cast complex spells like portals, because she takes out the Royal Guards with one. Then she also trounces Celestia and Luna immediately with the Bewitching Bell, because of course she does. The writers love to joke about how often Celestia and Luna are no help in a crisis, but when it comes time for them to actually step up and do something, they're not allowed to be competent, not even when fighting a literal child. They're just a pair of broken old mares who belong in a home. And then after deliberately writing the Royal Sisters as idiots for three seasons, the writers rub salt in the wound with Cozy's line about them depending so much on their power that they forget to use their brains, which is fucking ironic coming from the filly who couldn't outsmart the buckethead pony.
What's most hilarious to me about Cozy Glow is that she was obviously conceived as a physically disadvantaged but smart villain from the way that she makes everyone dance on her puppet strings in season eight, but as a part of the Legion of Doom, she's worse than useless, because even at their dumbest, the other two characters aren't stupid enough to justify making a child the brains of the operation. So Tirek's the one who does all the book research on the bell, and Chrysalis is the one who makes all the major decisions, while Little Miss Smarty Pants is just the dumb brute who takes down the princesses with sheer magical force while crowing about how smart she is.
This is aptly demonstrated after the other villains arrive. They take a few minutes to gloat, Tirek casually destroys the castle, and they look like they're just about to execute Twilight until Rarity does something useful and saves her. Then they hide behind this big piece of rubble, which for some reason is strong enough stand up to all three villains' force beams when the entire rest of the castle couldn't, but instead of just moving around this piece of rubble to attack them, Cozy Glow the genius keeps on uselessly blasting it with the others, giving Twilight time to escape. Yeah, real 200 IQ move right there.
So next we have to sit through what may possibly be the dumbest scene in this entire series. First question, before we deal with anything else:
WHY ARE THESE FUCKING PONIES NOT IN PODS?
We have the mane six, the Royal Sisters, Starlight, Discord, and the Pillars here, basically all of the people who are the most dangerous to the Legion of Doom's plans aside from Twilight, and they're keeping them all awake and with free movement of their limbs in a bunch of cages? Slimy cages? When they have a far better option that they've used on all of these characters before? Chrysalis, PUT THEM IN PODS, FOR FUCK'S SAKE.
I can do this all day.
And that's bad enough before they explain that they're also using the shards of Chrysalis's throne to disable their magic. That's even worse! They're not just putting them in slimy cages instead of pods. They're putting them in slimy cages surrounded by magic-cancelling shards that nullify even their own powers, instead of just draining their fucking magic! The Legion of Doom can't even approach their own cages to remove the prisoners without leaving themselves helpless! These three are begging to have this turned on them!
By the way, great job on that castle security again, Shining. The giant fans on every roof and the anti-magic field did an excellent job of stopping Cozy from just flying in and blasting everyone.
Chrysalis has the stupidest lines in this scene as well. She starts off by calling Tirek a minotaur, not even as an insult, but apparently just as a mistake that nobody even corrects her on, which is especially bizarre considering that Discord calls him a centaur later in this same scene. And she does this while mocking Tirek for thinking that they should go after Twilight Sparkle and stop her just to be safe. Yeah, because Twilight Sparkle on her own is no threat at all, right? I mean, what's she even doing right now? Hiding up in the Crystal Empire with Shining and Cadance? Twilight, Shining, and Cadance could never find some way to come back and screw up all of Chrysalis's plans at the last minute. That has never happened before.
Then Cozy tries to betray the group again, once more proving that Tirek and Chrysalis should have never cut her in on this deal, and they all start arguing. Tirek brings up chaos magic again, and Discord tricks them into accidentally releasing Starlight by pretending he'll tell them how to use it, and then mouthing off to Tirek about his father, King Vorak, until he blasts him.
Ooooh! A comic reference in the finale! See guys? They really do care!
Yeah, the writers can fuck right off with this one. Now they want to reference the comics? Fucking now? After they've been ignoring them and retconning them and using them as a free idea bin for the past four seasons? They had Tirek face Star Swirl earlier and didn't even mention their shared history, and now they want to throw in a reference to Tirek's comic backstory? You can tell that this was meant to be a big fanservice moment by the way that Discord's line is emphasised in the scene with a close-up on his face as he says it, but instead it just pisses me off more.
So Starlight is loose again, and it's as fucking dumb as you'd expect. Naturally Tirek didn't drain her magic after Chrysalis brought her back, so she teleports around the room, just barely evading their attacks every time. But she still gets to stand still next to the mane six's cage for ten uninterrupted seconds to talk to them and cast a spell to break the slime. And yes, of course Starlight's magic works through the anti-magic throne shards. Why wouldn't it? She's the writers' favourite character.
Oh wait, my mistake. Celestia and Luna are also able to fly around to distract the Legion of Doom while the mane six escape, despite not having any magic, so clearly Starlight isn't the only one who can casually break the rules of magic in this episode. Nevermind. Carry on.
Part 3: RACE WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAR!
If you thought that the first two parts were bad, you ain't seen nothing yet.
So finally we come back to the race war stuff, which has been building since the first scene of the episode. Chrysalis and Cozy have supposedly been running around Equestria recruiting for the NeighNeighNeigh ever since The Summer Sun Setback, and apparently turning ponies racist is super easy to do, because pretty much all of Equestria has turned by now. The unicorns at CSGU have barricaded themselves inside, the earth ponies in Ponyville are forming angry mobs, the pegasi are sealing off the clouds, possibly in anticipation of megaspell annihilation, and even the Royal Guards and palace staff in Canterlot are racist now, going by the beginning of the episode. It's really quite outstanding how quickly the entire nation turned against each other.
I still almost can't believe that the triumvirate actually wrote all this. The entire concept of this subplot is so antithetical to MLP's themes and setting, I don't know how it even made it beyond the initial pitch. Even Neighsay's racism against non-ponies in season eight felt extremely out of place in the world of Equestria, and he was just one guy. The fact that season nine not only kept going with the racism themes but actually doubled down on them is fucking crazy to me.
I mean, I get why they did it. Racism is topical right now, and everyone wants to talk about it. But as much as I just love Current Year American politics being shoved into fucking everything nowadays, it's not always a good fit for the story that you're telling, and it's especially not a good fit for Equestria. I said this in my season eight review while discussing Neighsay, but Equestria is meant to be a socially enlightened fantasy land that runs on the magic of friendship. The kingdom's foundational myth is a cautionary tale against racism. Unity and getting along despite differences are Equestria's core values as a nation. Hearth's Warming Eve looks like Christmas, but it's actually more like Independence Day to them in what it represents.
Which is what makes season nine's actual fucking race war subplot so fucking absurd. America's racial tensions today are rooted in centuries of slavery and segregation, but Equestria doesn't seem to need any of that historical context, because ponies will apparently turn into massive racists at the slightest excuse regardless. Even after a thousand years of peace, progress, and harmony under Celestia, Equestria is still a fucking house of cards, and all it took to cause massive civil unrest across the entire nation was Chrysalis running propaganda for a few weeks. This is what I meant in the season eight review when I talked about how cynical and ugly Haber's version of Equestria is. It's presented as the same idealistic fantasy land that we knew, but underneath, it's just as depressing and fucked up as our real world is.
This is not what Equestria is supposed to be, and this is not Friendship is Magic anymore. This is Star Trek: Picard with ponies.
I hope that I don't go to Equestria when I die. It seems like a shithole.
So I've already lost all my investment in this plot by the time the mane six reach the Crystal Empire, just because it's completely clear to me by now that this is no longer the Equestria that I knew. It was actually funny to me when the windigoes suddenly showed up shortly afterwards, because they're the only part of this whole story that makes any sense in the context of this world. Yes, of course the windigoes were going to show up again when Equestria regressed back into warring tribes. That's what they do. They show up here as an unintended consequence of all these dumbasses doing their own things, because that's the theme of this entire episode – dumbasses making dumbass plans that go awry in dumbass ways. Stupid actions have stupid consequences.
Here are some windigoes, Equestria. You get what you fucking deserve.
Meanwhile, Twilight is fucking moping around in this study in Shining and Cadance's castle. She's lost confidence in herself. She's whining that they don't have the Elements of Harmony anymore. She needs her friends to give her a pep-talk, because otherwise she's too depressed to bother doing anything. This is basically just the season premiere all over again! How many times this season have the writers jerked themselves off over how much progress Twilight has made as a character? But look at this scene! She's made zero character progress! She's back at square one again!
CELESTIA, LUNA, TWILIGHT WAS NOT A GOOD CHOICE OF REPLACEMENT. YOU NEED TO HAND THE KINGDOM OVER TO CADANCE. CADANCE.
She's literally the only sane and well-adjusted princess there is.
Well, whatever. As much as I agree with Twilight that she's probably going to be a terrible ruler, the Legion of Doom are still out there, and there's nobody else left to fight them, so this story's pretty much only going to go one way from here. So they go out to confront them.
Part 4: Dread It, Run From It, the Shitty Ending Still Arrives
So for the final battle of the series, the mane six and Spike decide to just fight the Legion of Doom head-on and try to take the Bewitching Bell from them. Odd choice, in my opinion. Personally, I would've opened with blasting them with friendship lasers. You know, like they did to Sombra? Because if the friendship lasers can't beat the three of them and their bell, then nothing else is gonna work anyway. But that wouldn't be epic enough I guess, so instead we get this whole big fight scene where every character in the series shows up halfway through, Avengers: Endgame style.
Admittedly, the smorgasboard of cameos in this scene is about the only thing that I actually liked about this episode. Not all of them really make a lot of sense being here, but for a series allegedly about friendship, it's good to see so many familiar faces here for the final episode. Some of these characters would've had pretty much zero resolution to their arcs otherwise. Flim and Flam never got reformed, but at least they're here helping now. Tempest never got a speaking role on the show, but at least we see her again. Neighsay was never important again after season eight, but I'm still glad that he came back for this at least. Even Gilda and Autumn Blaze are here.
I like the implication that Neighsay lets Twilight fucking die at the end.
Oh, but don't go thinking that I'm not going to criticise this too. For one thing, let's consider a major discrepancy in who didn't show up for this. All of the student six went back to their homelands and preached the magic of friendship to get volunteers from every nation to show up and help, including the dragons, and yet Ember doesn't bring even a single grown adult dragon to the battle, when that could have made a bigger difference than all of the rest of these characters combined.
Look at how much the Legion of Doom struggles to defeat just six ponies and Spike. Do you think that they could have taken Torch? Even that smoky snoring red dragon from season one could have wiped the floor with Cozy or Chrysalis. It pisses me off that this show seemed to totally forget that dragons bigger than Garble exist after Gauntlet of Fire, and it pisses me off even more in this finale because we actually do see the big dragons here for once. They appear in the background when we see Smolder in the Dragon Lands, and then later they appear again at Twilight's coronation, but they still don't do anything.
Speaking of Smolder, the student six are our big resolution to the race war subplot. Well, Sandbar is, at least. Him and two other no-names, because they needed a unicorn and a pegasus student for these scenes, but they never actually bothered to develop any in the series. They're the ones who preach to the other ponies all around Equestria about how the windigoes are feeding on their hatred and division and blah, blah, blah, magic of friendship, thus curing racism forever.
I really find it absolutely fucking appalling that Sandbar and other School of Friendship ponies are the only ones in Equestria who remember how windigoes work. Ponies put on a traditional play about the windigoes for the holidays every year. I find it hard to believe that anybody in Equestria wouldn't be familiar with the story by now. But then when the windigoes actually show up, what happens? Everybody's like "Oh no, these ancient mythical beings that are said to feed on racism turned out to be real! They just showed up after we were all being super racist to each other! How terrible! Huh? What do you mean that the myths said to stop being racist to defeat them? That will never work! Come on, everyone! We need to keep being racist!"
I don't think that there's a single character in season nine whose IQ is higher than their shoe size.
All of this is just one last desperate attempt to justify the existence of the friendship school. It was an awful idea from the start, and the writers damn well know it, but the sunk cost fallacy compels them to keep on telling us that it all meant something anyway. That's what all of this is. Equestria never had a problem with racism before Twilight's school, and ponies have been peacefully and happily coexisting with non-ponies ever since season one, but if the writers hadn't invented a problem, then the School of Friendship wouldn't have had one to solve. In a meta sense, I guess that Twilight's school is just like every other corrupt institution; it perpetuates the problems to which it is the solution.
So Twilight gives a speech, and we get the final ever friendship laser in the series, this time with the combined powers of the mane six, the student six, and the Pillars, all of the characters to ever wield the Elements of Harmony all at once! Except for Celestia and Luna, of course, because they're just chopped liver, I guess. Thematically, it's the closest that any of these side characters ever get to having a point in this series. I appreciate the attempt, at least. But it still doesn't actually have any point at all, because they don't contribute to making this particular harmony blast any notably stronger or more impressive than any other.
In fact, it's probably the weakest of any of the friendship lasers to date, oddly enough. It strips away the Legion of Doom's powers, but it still doesn't actually defeat them. Every other villain who ever took a direct hit from the Elements was pretty much finished, with the odd exception of Sombra, but the Legion of Doom are all still standing afterwards. And I notice that the blast didn't destroy Grogar's bell, either, or even automatically return the magic that it stole. Remember back in season four, when the Rainbow Power returned all of the magic that Tirek stole to everyone that he stole it from all at once? Yeah, kind of a step down from that, huh?
You can laugh, but these designs are still less stupid than how they looked in the epilogue.
I just find late-series MLP's take on the friendship blasts really weird and inconsistent in general. I mean, for a start, why did they even go back to taking the physical Elements of Harmony out of the Tree to use them when Rainbow Power was already a thing? And what even is this power that they're using now? It works exactly like Rainbow Power, effectively using the Elements without the Elements, but now it looks different? In both this episode and the premiere, Twilight seemed to be saying that the power was inside of them all along, which... yeah, friendship is a tangible force in this world, I get it, and Shining and Cadance did something similar back in season two, but if the power was inside them all along, then what were they taking from the Tree of Harmony?
Did the Tree ever have a purpose, or was it all a lie? Were they borrowing power from the Tree, or weren't they? Were they using their own friendship power plus the Tree's? Are they still using the Tree's now and just don't know it, or were they actually cut off from it after its not-death? That would explain why this most recent friendship blast was so pathetic compared to the Elements, but then how do we explain the non-Elements in the premiere defeating Sombra for good when not even the actual Elements could? Were the mane six just not using their full power against Sombra the first time? Did they deplete their power defeating Sombra for good, and that's why they're weaker in this episode? If so, that would be the first indication that we've ever seen of the power of friendship having a tangible limit.
Could we theoretically work out from this event exactly how much power of friendship Twilight and her friends expended? How many kilojoules of friendship magic have the mane six got left? What's the rate of recharge? How many more villains can they take down before they just run out? Four, or... maybe five, or six? Lucky villain number seven's gonna be a mathematician, isn't he? He's gonna be a reedy little dork, but he'll have run the numbers, so he'll know that the mane six are exhausted and can't stop him. He'll just walk straight up to Twilight and punch her straight in the face, and that'll be it. Equestria conquered.
So anyway, the villains are defeated, and Grogar's bell is recovered, giving us a brief scene where Discord's chaos magic is passed to Pinkie and she goes a little crazy for a one-off gag before he takes his magic back. Just to prove to you that there's not a single frame of this finale that I cannot bitch about, this is yet another idea stolen from the comics. Pinkie usurping Discord's power was the premise of Friendship is Magic issue #57, a direct tie-in to Discordant Harmony, meaning it's even worse than usual, because now the show is stealing from the recent comics which were meant to be 100% in-continuity. And the episode contradicts that issue to boot, because Chaos Pinkie becomes a giant here, while in the comic she became an alicorn.
Finally we come to the stoning scene, in my opinion the worst scene in the series, just narrowly beating out the Cozy in Tartarus scene in School Raze. I still struggle to describe just how much I hate this. It's Celestia, Luna, and Discord publicly executing a child to a cheering crowd. You don't really get much more antithetical to the show's themes than that, except maybe with the race war earlier. I know that I've been saying this a lot lately, but I seriously cannot believe that writers actually did this. Sending Cozy to Tartarus in season eight was already shockingly cruel and came off as disgustingly sociopathic on Celestia's part, but then they actually took it even further.
Studies suggest that most people are not in favour of killing children.
I mean, okay, fine, I get it. Everyone got mad at Starlight's rushed redemption at the end of season five, and they all cheered when Chrysalis rejected it at the end of season six, but I really think that the writers took all of the wrong lessons from this. It's not redeeming villains that people hated. It's redeeming them badly like Starlight at the end of Cutie Re-Mark. And even then, I'd take excessive forgiveness over excessive cruelty any day of the week. Seasons eight and nine made me miss when main villains were given rushed last-minute redemptions, because at least back when the show was doing that, the princesses weren't tyrants and child abusers.
And fine. If you don't want to redeem all of the villains, and you just want the mane six to defeat a bad guy for once, that's fine. But for fuck's sake, pick the right villains for it, and actually have them deserve it! If season eight or nine had revealed that Cozy Glow really wasn't a child after all, and that she was actually the real Grogar all along, then great! I'm onboard to see her get her ass kicked! Or if Cozy hadn't even been on this team, and it was Sombra getting stoned in her place, then that's also great! I'm sold! But you can't give a last-minute reformation to Ahui-fucking-zotl one episode, and then give a literal, actual child a public execution in another!
Even worse, they did all this after showing that the Legion of Doom were capable of friendship and could reform! Frenemies proved that it was possible for them, even if they were in denial about it, and sure enough, the original drafts of the season nine villain arc did end with them discovering the magic of friendship too. For once in this show's entire run, we could have had a villain reformation arc that didn't come completely out of nowhere at the last minute, but instead they changed it to this, supposedly as a "compromise." Well, I don't know who they were "compromising" with exactly, but they sound like an absolute psychopath to me. The road to a happy ending was right there, but they deliberately chose not to take it in favour of child execution.
And yes, I am going to keep calling it that, because this is an execution. Let's not kid ourselves. If the villains are unconscious and unable to move forever, then what's the practical difference between petrification and death? And if they are conscious, then that's even worse, because then it's not execution, but torture. I've heard people try whitewash or soften this ending by saying that they can always be released and reformed later like Discord was, so maybe it's not permanent, but much like Cozy not really being a child, that's just an unsupported headcanon that people made up to try to make this horrible ending more palatable, and it's directly contradicted by the text. Discord outright says that they'll be "together forever," which sounds pretty definitive to me.
Besides, it's not like reformation always follows petrification anyway, so why would we assume that it would in this case? Celestia wasn't waiting for the right opportunity to reform Discord all those years. In Return of Harmony, she said that his imprisonment was meant to be permanent. I always got the impression that she only ever decided to have him reformed at all because it was clear that petrification was at best a temporary solution when he can still absorb chaos through his statue. Theoretically, I guess that Chrysalis might be able to escape the same way if her statue were exposed to enough love, and maybe Tirek would just need magic in general, but Cozy is definitely fucked. And we all know that if Twilight or the other princesses had any real intention of reforming these three, then there's no reason why they couldn't have begun immediately.
So yes, I feel justified in calling the petrification of the Legion of Doom a public execution, because that's what it was written as. It's one thing for the Elements of Harmony to do it to Discord when he's actively fucking up the world; that's basically just like killing in self-defense. But the Legion of Doom were defeated and at Celestia and Luna's mercy, and then they chose to finish them while they were down, apparently just because they felt like it. Sunset Shimmer was in this exact same situation at the end of Equestria Girls when Twilight reached a hand down to help her out of the crater. Good thing that Discord wasn't there at the time, or he would have suggested that Twilight grab Sunset's sledgehammer and smash her head in with it.
And why was turning them to stone necessary, exactly? The mane six and the princesses didn't turn Discord to stone just because he was a meany-pants who deserved it. They did it because he was an apocalyptically powerful and dangerous monster who would only keep hurting people if he was allowed to go free. None of that is true of the Legion of Doom. Tirek is pretty much helpless in his old man form. Chrysalis might still be dangerous, but everybody just let her go at the end of Where and Back Again, so clearly the princesses don't think that she's that much of a threat alone. And Cozy Glow is, again, an actual fucking child, who Celestia and Luna have no reason to enact this harsh a punishment on, except perhaps to soothe their own bruised egos after she kicked their asses earlier.
I went over this at the end of my season eight review, but it bears repeating. Cozy has no powers. She is a small filly who was only ever dangerous in the first place because Twilight before and Discord this time both stupidly allowed her access to dangerously powerful magic. Stick her in juvie, and give her a criminal record, and theoretically, she should never be a danger to society again. But instead they locked her up next to her partner in crime in the harshest conditions possible, and then publicly executed her, both times without a trial, because Equestria is a dystopian nightmare world with no justice system, where the princesses are judge, jury, and executioners all, and the only sentences are death, torture, or a royal pardon, so Faust fucking help you if you embarass the powers that be.
"Fun isn't something one considers when performing capital punishment, but this does put a smile on my face."
Part 5: Chaos Theory
But possibly the worst part about this whole thing is the sheer hypocrisy of Discord being the one to suggest their punishment. Mr. "I Don't Turn Ponies Into Stone" happily helps Celestia and Luna to turn three other villains into stone because of all the trouble that they caused, when they were only ever a problem in the first place because of him. In fact, that's probably why he wanted the Legion of Doom dead, because if any of them ever did get a fair trial, then all of Equestria would have found out that this was all his fault.
And seriously, just think about what exactly Discord did to these three. The Legion of Doom were all basically harmless on their own, either stuck in prison, or in Chrysalis's case slowly going crazy in the woods while hatching completely ineffectual schemes. Then Discord brought them all together, threatened them into working for him, reinforced their delusions and desire for revenge, directed them towards a powerful magical artefact that could give them everything that they ever wanted, and then left them all unsupervised in each other's company. Then he has the gall to act surprised when this ends badly, and thinks that they should be punished more harshly for this?
This is textbook entrapment. What Discord did to the Legion of Doom here was the equivalent of breaking a mentally ill person out of an asylum, handing them a gun, telling them to go shoot up a liquor store, and then calling the cops on them after they kill someone. It's by far the most evil thing that Discord has ever done on this show. He took three individuals who were all hurting no-one on their own and provably capable of changing for the better, made them dangerous again, and then took their chance for redemption away from them. If Starlight or Tempest had still been evil at the time that Discord came up with this plan, then they would probably be statues now too. As a supposedly reformed villain himself, how can he do that?
Well, he can do it because he's not reformed. This is Discord's Trivial Pursuit, his Non-Compete Clause. Every other character in the series suffered extreme character regression, and it was naive of me to ever hope that Discord would be the exception. Everything that he did this season, whether good-intentioned or otherwise, was more horrifying to me than anything that he ever did while actually a villain. Discord is so fucking evil in season nine that Return of Harmony and Twilight's Kingdom both pale in comparison.
And this makes sense, because guess what? He was originally written as a villain in the early drafts of season nine! In fact, in the original version of the finale, instead of going to warn Twilight after the Grogar reveal, he corrupts her to become some pony version of Midnight Sparkle instead, to make everything even worse! In fact, he makes it so much worse that their synopsis for part two of the finale at this stage was just "SOMEHOW, the good guys win." Discord fucks them so badly that even the writers didn't know how they were supposed to come back from it!
>What did he mean by this?
See, season nine was always planned to end with Celestia and Luna retiring and Twilight taking the throne, but it was supposed to be involuntary. According to the leaks, the original plan was that the Tree of Harmony was dying on its own because of some cosmic imbalance, so Celestia, Luna, and Discord were all expected to sacrifice themselves by ascending to some higher plane to fix it. But Discord doesn't want to go because he likes being in Equestria with Fluttershy, so he impersonates Grogar, assembles the Legion of Doom, gives them his Elements of Disharmony, and then later does the Midnight Sparkle thing, all in an effort to put it off as long as possible, basically.
Now personally, I think that this all sounds terrible, but you can at least see how this makes a lot more sense than what we eventually got. The princesses sacrificing themselves to achieve cosmic balance is a hell of a lot more fitting for their characters than them just wanting to retire because they're bored of their jobs. Between Dark and Dawn makes a lot more sense when you look at it as the princesses checking off their bucket lists instead of going on a pre-retirement holiday. And even if it still shits all over his reformation arc, not wanting to die is at least a much better motivation for Discord to do all of this than "building Twilight's confidence."
I almost would've preferred all this over what we actually got. Because sure, it would be a shitty ending for Discord, but this is already a shitty ending for Discord, so they may as well have just done it anyway and at least given him a shitty ending that makes sense.
Because, fundamentally, Discord's arc in season nine doesn't make sense if we take it at face value. He swears up and down that he had good intentions, but I don't believe him, because his actions don't bear that out. Again, why would he ever need to go after the real Grogar's bell if this was all just meant to be a test for Twilight? It's complete overkill for a fake threat. And look at all of the consequences of his "test." The Tree of Harmony was destroyed because of Discord. That's his fault. He did that. Two entire cities were enslaved because of him. The windigoes came back because of him. Discord fucks up Equestria so much that it makes more sense to attribute it to malevolence than ignorance. More likely, the whole Grogar thing was an actual evil plan that just went awry, and Discord warning the others was just damage control to spin this in his favour so that he wouldn't get stoned to fuck along with his minions.
And apparently it worked, because somehow, even after all of this bullshit, Discord is the only one who ends up better off than when he started.
...You know, this all reminds me of a fanfic, actually. It was called Strings, and it was a very rare post-reformation evil Discord fic, in which he (get this) resurrects Sombra and unleashes him on the Crystal Empire. In the fic, Discord is stifling under all of the restrictions that he's been under ever since the Tirek incident, so to shake things up, he secretly resurrects Sombra (without revealing his identity to him, of course), and Sombra proceeds to carve a path of death and destruction across Equestria. Discord of course plays his part in trying to defeat him, making himself look like a hero, and in doing so he puts himself in a position of power and trust where he can do whatever evil shit he wants while none of his supposed friends are any the wiser.
Incidentally, I do recommend Strings. It was the author's first fic, and it's a little rough in places, but it had a fucking fantastic Sombra.
You might see some similarities in that premise with season nine's plot. In fact, if I didn't know any better, I could almost believe that it was an inspiration, because if you look at Discord's actions in season nine through a similar lens, they almost start to make sense. More sense than taking his claims at face value, anyway.
Seriously, did anyone ever even notice how Discord somehow successfully positioned himself as the sole remaining power in Equestria by the finale? Sombra achieved his long-standing goal of killing the Tree of Harmony for him. The Royal Sisters are senile and impotent, and have left their royal duties behind to go spend the rest of their days screaming at each other from across the nursing home. As their last act before retiring, they executed Tirek and Chrysalis at Discord's suggestion, permanently removing the only two villains who were ever a threat to him before. And as for Twilight and the Elements of Harmony, he has them wrapped around his little finger, even though they all know that he was responsible for everything. And nobody ever once questioned if he might've had any genuinely malevolent intentions at any point.
And let's also not forget that Discord had the villains retrieve Grogar's bell for him, which for some reason was never destroyed in the final Harmony blast. So if Discord ever had any specific evil intentions for that bell, it's still up for the taking.
This all becomes even worse if we consider the possibility that Discord may have been faking more than just his motivations. I mean, he's a known liar, so what else might he have been lying about? Like isn't it convenient how Sombra killed the Tree of Harmony, and then Twilight and her friends immediately discovered a comparable source of power pulled from seemingly nowhere to defeat him with, at Discord's prompting, in a battle that Discord faked losing? And what about how the Tree mysteriously came back to life in a completely altered form in the very next episode, and then proceeded to never do anything again?
What if it's all bullshit? What if the Tree is dead for real, and all the Harmony powers are dead for real, and Discord just faked it all? I mean sure, there was the final friendship blast in the finale, when Discord was supposedly powerless, but we know from Return of Harmony that he's fed by chaos and conflict, and Equestria in this episode was in the midst of a race war bad enough to bring the windigoes back, so it's not a stretch to think that he secretly regained some level of power during all of that. Not to mention how that nineteen-person combined final attack conspicuously failed to finish off either the bell or the villains.
Hey, it makes sense, doesn't it? I mean, he did say that he wanted to build Twilight's confidence. Maybe he wanted her overconfident, thinking that she still had some power of Harmony left to call upon, when in reality he's all that's left? Maybe he's just biding his time, and as soon as Fluttershy's either dead or gone completely mad, he'll go right back to being evil? The student six will step up, prepare to blast him, but then nothing happens. Discord laughs. There are no Elements, he tells them. Their stupid treehouse was a corpse all along. It was always him. He turns them all into pineapples, and now Twilight is the only one left who can stop him. But Twilight is the new Celestia now, so that means that she gets Worfed just like Celestia. Discord casually pulls out Grogar's bell, and whoop! She's done.
And that's it. Chaos reigns.
Discord's arc ends as it began. With him kicking everyone's asses.
Episode 26 - The Last Problem:
But Friendship is Magic doesn't actually end there. It ends with an epilogue episode, which I find that I like more in concept than in execution.
On paper, it sounds fine. It's a slice of life episode, which is a more fitting end for the series than a big flashy finale. It spends some time with each of the mane six, and shows them all doing their things. It calls back to The Best Night Ever with the coronation ending in disaster, and a message about how things don't always go the way that we want them to, in friendships as in life. It has a big emotional goodbye scene, and a song. And it even bookends the series, both figuratively by having Twilight send off a student to Ponyville just like Celestia sent her off, and literally by having the episode actually end on closing the same book which episode one opened on.
But even if the episode has some nice ideas, it's still fucking stupid, because it's still written by the brain trust that just gave us the Equestrian race war storyline and the worst scene in the entire series. So allow me to explain to you all my problems with The Final Solution.
There's an awful lot of Hitler in this review, isn't there?
For a start, what the fuck is this conflict even about in the flashback sequences? Twilight is sad because she has to move to Canterlot to be a princess. All of her friends have to travel to Canterlot to accommodate this. She has to leave behind her magical crystal castle that was grown especially for her and her friends to do this. And move into... what, exactly? CANTERLOT CASTLE WAS FUCKING DESTROYED. So she just puts off the coronation until the whole thing is rebuilt just so that she can still angst about having to move into it? Twilight is now the head of state, already has a functioning castle in Ponyville where she and all of her chosen co-rulers are already based, and the previous rulers' castle is now gone. Just move the capital. There's no need for any of this. This is a dumb fucking conflict, and Twilight is literally making a problem for herself that she doesn't have to.
Honestly, the fact that Twilight feels pressured to do all of this is probably the most infuriating thing about the entire season nine retirement arc, even worse than how it ruins Celestia and Luna's characterisation. It reminds me of how mad the fandom were back when Magical Mystery Cure first aired, because everyone had all these misconceptions about what becoming a princess actually meant for Twilight. They thought that it was forced on her, that she wouldn't be happy with the responsibilities of being a princess, and that she'd be forced to move to Canterlot and leave her friends for her royal duties. Then season four came along and calmed everyone down by showing that Twilight's life didn't actually change that much, that she was happy enough with her promotion, that she still had autonomy, and that she still got to stay in Ponyville with her friends.
And then along comes season nine to fulfill all those old fears from season three after all. Twilight's body changes in an even more drastic and jarring way than just gaining wings. She has to move away from Ponyville and her friends after all, even though there's no logical reason to. And this time, she doesn't get a choice in the matter. The Royal Sisters just announce that they're retiring, and that Twilight's going to have to give up her dream of running a school to step up and replace them, and the role is essentially forced on her by peer pressure, even though she doesn't want it and clearly isn't ready. It all puts a rather darker spin on Magical Mystery Cure in retrospect, if you watch it back now assuming that this was always Celestia's intention. Like Twilight's ascension was never really about her own accomplishments. It was all just a formality. Celestia just wanted out, and Twilight was just her ticket to that. She never really cared about her at all.
As for the future segments, they're full of stupid shit too, starting with the future mane six.
Unironically, the Rainbow Power designs looked better.
This may be a matter of personal taste, but so is this whole review, so I'm just gonna say it. These look fucking stupid. Some of them are okay, like Applejack is just wearing Granny Smith's scarf now, and Rarity has a grey streak and an outfit on. Fluttershy is also basically okay. But the others look fucking ridiculous. Dash with Spitfire's manestyle looks like she's having a midlife crisis. It does not suit her at all. Bulky Spike looks weird and jarring, and I hate the continued trend of adult anthro dragons instead of real dragons. Tall Twilight looks horrible and makes no sense. If all alicorns eventually grow to Celestia proportions, then why didn't Luna? And Pinkie looks absolutely fucking atrocious. How do you show Pinkie Pie looking older? Oh yeah, just have bits of old food and random shit stuck in her hair like she's a crazy homeless woman who doesn't wash. Obviously.
And how fucking old are they meant to be in this episode? They all have wrinkles and grey streaks like they're already approaching old age, but the Crusaders and the Cake twins show up looking about the same age that the mane six did during the rest of the series, and Pinkie and Big Mac both have young children still, not full grown sons or daughters. Even if Pinkie and Cheese waited until their mid thirties to have kids, Rarity shouldn't already be going grey, surely? Just when does this episode take place?
The epilogue also raises a lot of questions for me about the nature of Twilight's rule. Like for one thing, she's also taken over running Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns, which season nine continues to refer to as the "School of Magic" for some reason. But why? I know that Celestia ran both the school and the country, but is running the school an actual royal duty that Twilight is obligated to do as well? Did Luna ever take part in running the school? And if Twilight can handle running both a school and a kingdom at the same time after all, then why didn't she just keep running her own school instead, and let someone better qualified take over CSGU? The last time that Twilight tried to run a school to EEA standards, she completely failed at it. And when she tried to run a school to her own standards, she nearly caused the anti-magic apocalypse.
I'm also not super clear about the purpose of the Council of Friendship, which even Luster Dawn doesn't seem to be familiar with at all. The mane six throughout season nine all certainly talk like they're all going to rule together once Twilight takes over, but we never actually see anybody but Twilight really training for any particular roles. Pretty much the entire extent of the mane six's preparation for ruling the country is helping Twilight to organise a few royal events, so I have to assume that they're still not actually qualified for any government positions. Which leaves me perplexed as to what their actual purposes are in Twilight's government.
I mean, what do the mane six do, exactly? Is this just an advisory council, or do they actually have executive power and duties like Spike? Is it just for friendship matters and defeating villains, or do they also get a say when Twilight draws up the federal budget each year? Is being on the Council of Friendship a generic position, or do they actually have specialised roles? Like, Dash is part of the Wonderbolts, and they're a military unit, so is she supposed to be like Twilight's Secretary of Defence or something? Is Applejack her agricultural advisor? Is Pinkie in charge of public events? Because if so, that sounds an awful lot like the ministries from Fallout: Equestria, and we all know how Fallout: Equestria ended.
Beautiful.
Here's another question about the Council of Friendship: Why are none of them alicorns? We just established with Cozy Glow in the previous episode that all you need to make a pony into an alicorn is extra magic, and there was a lot of extra magic in the Bewitching Bell, which was still intact by the end of the episode. Shouldn't that mean that Twilight can grant alicorn ascension at will now, at least to a select few? Why hasn't she done that? Some of them sure look like they could use it. I mean, I can understand why some of them might turn it down, like Pinkie probably wouldn't want to be immortal if her husband and children weren't as well, but surely Rarity would want it for vanity's sake, if nothing else? And are you sure it'd be a good idea to let Fluttershy die, Twilight? 'Cause, uh... I wouldn't exactly trust Discord to take it well, if you know what I mean...
And speaking of the mane six's relationships, I object to the writers pushing their disgusting normie ships like Appledash on us. Where's the episode about Bright Mac, trans Moondancer, a humanised Tank, and R63 Discord in a four-way polyamorous relationship, you cowards? You go big or you go home. I have no time for this trash.
No, but for real, though. Appledash? That's what we're going with? I know that Ashleigh Ball wanted her characters to get married, and it's nice that they honoured the request I guess, but this is a very strange narrative choice to me. I mean, some people complain that Korrasami in Legend of Korra was sudden and out of nowhere, but at least Korra and Asami had good chemistry, and at least they spent a lot of time together through the final couple seasons, and had moments that you could conceivably view as romantic if you tilt your head.
Appledash has none of that. They haven't had any real shippy-type moments since... what, season three? The only times that we've ever really seen them interact in the past few seasons, they've always been fighting. You look over to Equestria Girls, particularly Rollercoaster of Friendship, and I get a very clear Rarijack vibe from it. Even looking to this show, Starlight and Trixie have had plenty of moments together that could be interpreted as romantic, and even Discord and Fluttershy had hints of something in Discordant Harmony, not to mention Angel's line in She Talks to Angel. But I look back at Non-Compete Clause, the major Dash and Applejack episode of the past few seasons, and I see none of that. If anything, I get the impression that they would be really bad for each other.
Finally, we come to the ending as Twilight takes Luster Dawn to Ponyville, bringing the series full circle. We get a montage set to a fairly decent-sounding song, showing off all of the side characters of the series one last time, even Sunset Shimmer, and we also get to see what all of the other main characters are up to in the future. Except for the other princesses, of course, because then they'd have to make Cadance tall too. Plus Celestia and Luna were originally supposed to be dead at this point in the story. Maybe they still are? I like to think that Cozy Glow's mom was their nurse at the retirement home, and that she smothered them both to death in their sleep at some point.
Maybe this was a happy ending after all?
And you would think that surely here, by the very last frames of the series, I would have nothing left to complain about, but no! This future sequence in Ponyville is inadvertently the final proof that Luster Dawn is right, and that the friendship school is a huge waste of time!
Gallus is working for the Royal Guard in the final episode! Yona and Sandbar are working in Rarity's boutique! What do these jobs have to do with friendship? Friendship school composed the entirety of these kids' education, and all that they learned was how to get jobs working for people that they know. That's just nepotism! They went to school for three years to learn how nepotism works! And the rest of the student six are all just seen around the friendship school, so do they work there now too? Then I was right! This is every bit the scam that Flim and Flam's university was! You just attend school for three years to learn nothing and get a useless degree! The only thing that graduating from friendship school qualifies you for is teaching in a friendship school! This is a fucking government-funded pyramid scheme! The Equestrian economy must be so fucked.
CELESTIA, LUNA, THIS IS WHY YOU SHOULD HAVE PICKED CADANCE.
I don't know, Twi. I'm still trying to work it out myself.
Final thoughts:
And finally we're done. Just like that, it's over.
Well... no, not really. Nothing's ever really over. After this there were the clip shows, and then Pony Life, and then the IDW comics started calling themselves season ten, and aggggghhhhhhhhh...
This is what the absence of God looks like.
I could keep going from here if I wanted, but I'm honestly beyond caring at this point, because nothing about the future of this franchise interests me in the slightest. If not even the main show could maintain a consistent quality to the end, then why in the fuck would I ever give the knock-off Teen Titans, GO! version a chance? I know that I probably shouldn't be judging a book by its cover, but fucking look at this shit. Season nine's memefaces already looked fucking horrible to me, so this looks like the least appealing thing that I've ever seen on television. And even if it's just as good as late-series MLP was, that's still a damning indictment. So no, I think that I'm done with this shit now.
So where do I rate season nine, personally? Well, judging the seasons as a whole, that's easy. For me, it goes 5 > 2 > 4 > 1 > 3 > 6 > 7 > 8 > 9. And funnily enough, this aligns quite well with my personal ranking of the season finales as well, which go Twilight's Kingdom/Cutie Re-Mark > Canterlot Wedding > Best Night Ever > Magical Mystery Cure > Stepping in dogshit > Where and Back Again > Shadow Play > Dying slowly of a wasting illness only to learn afterwards that Hell is real and that Satan is now going to stab me repeatedly in the dick for all eternity because of all those cocks that I sucked > School Raze > This fucking shit.
I'm no Faust purist. I thought that the first five or six seasons all had their ups and downs, with my personal favourite episodes scattered quite evenly around them, with season three in my opinion being a rare misstep as a whole, at least in part because of its unusually short length. But I have no reservations in saying that the Haber/Lewis/Songco era of late-series MLP started at a low point and only got worse over time. As more and more old writers left, and more creative control was handed over to people like Haber and Vogel who openly did not care about MLP's themes or characters and just wanted to push their own ideas, the quality just took a nosedive, and it never recovered. Season nine as a whole, and The Ending of the End in particular, was the absolute nadir of the entire series for me, and I can't think of a sadder way for the show to have gone out.
It's a shame, because to me, MLP:FiM was always a world which sparked my imagination and gave me a creative outlet, as the length of this review should attest to. For six seasons, it was a good show that I enjoyed watching, and with that enjoyment came the desire to write about it. But I knew as soon as I saw Shadow Play for the first time that canon was no longer the universe that I wanted to write about anymore. That's why all of my fanfics now take place in their own AU. Because for the final three seasons, MLP became a show that I used to enjoy. Late-series MLP just doesn't inspire me the same way, because every single episode is full of stupid bullshit that keeps pulling me out of the world and the story.
Watching MLP just stopped being something that I enjoyed after a while. It became more like a morbid fixation, like watching a slow-motion car wreck. I knew that it was going to end in tragedy, but I couldn't look away, because I had to see it through, and on some level maybe I kept vainly hoping that they would turn it around at the last second. I kept holding out for those few sparkling gems like Perfect Pear or The Parent Map that would make wading through all of the muck worth it, but the further the series progressed, the rarer and rarer they became, until season nine had almost nothing in the way of actual good episodes. Going to Seed and The Big Mac Question were mostly decent, but even then, I still had reservations about them.
So yes, on the whole, I don't enjoy nu-MLP, I don't care about nu-MLP, and I'm mostly just glad to be done with it all now. At the time of this writing, G5 is still on the horizon, and at this point who even knows what it will bring? But personally, I'm not optimistic after this trash fire, and I probably won't be watching it. I expect I'll stick around the fandom for a good while longer; I've still got a lot of fics to write, and a long reading list to get through. But as for the official material? No, I'm pretty much done.
And with that, I'm also done with this review. It's been a long ride getting here. Just shy of seventy thousand words long, nearly a hundred and fifty thousand words total just talking about how bad the final three seasons were, but I think that I've finally gotten the last of the bile out of my system now. It wasn't easy during those first few weeks just after the finale aired. The fandom was having an emotional moment, and I had to keep my opinion to myself for a long while, because I didn't want to be that guy ruining the mood for everyone else. But now that I've finally gotten this out? God, it feels so fucking cathartic.
And I hope that you all enjoyed it too! Whether you felt validated by seeing someone agree with you, were interested in seeing a critical analysis from someone else's perspective, or even just got a laugh out of how absurd it is that I did all of this. I hope that reading this was worth it to you, and I can't tell you all how much I appreciate it that you guys have put up with my bullshit for as long as you have. It's a special feeling to have people enjoy and engage with your work, and it's a feeling that I don't really get anywhere else. And that's what this fandom really is to me. It's not about the show, or all the drama, or even about the friends that we make along the way.
It's about MY EGO.
GIVE ME EMOTIONAL VALIDATION, YOU FUCKERS.
Nah, but for real, here's to you guys. Happy Christmas.
Acknowledgements:
I'd like to give a huge, huge thanks to Posh, whose dick I really twisted to get this thing edited and proofread in time for Christmas, and who has yet to even tell me to fuck off for it.
Special thanks as well to Oliver, whose insights also contributed to the quality of this review, and Scampy, for photoshopping Josh Haber's face onto the grim reaper. I didn't even ask her to do that. She just did it.
Thanks again to Spifffy, FanOfMostEverything, Fylifa, and the Pony Canon Research Society for letting me bitch incessantly about season nine in their blog comments or Discord chats until I could stitch it all together into this.
Thank you to Present Perfect and DWK, and yeah, let's be honest, Red Letter Media, for being my primary stylistic influences in the realm of lengthy rant-reviews.
Thanks as well to AaronMk, Kaikururu, AnontheAnon, InuHoshi-to-DarkPen, KanashiiPanda, Liggliluff, rigamortis_man, SugarberryArt, Louvely, Az-Pekt, and Shinodage, who I hope don't mind too much that I "borrowed" their art for this review. Please, go check them all out on their respective platforms, because they're all fantastic artists.
And a final thank you again to all of you, for joining me for the final instalment of my season reviews. You're what really makes this all worth it. Merry Christmas to all of you, happy holidays, and I wish you all the best in the new year to come. Lord knows you deserve it.
See you out there.
—DannyJ
So. Feel better now?
If nothing else, I'm glad the front half of the series continues to inspire you, and that you didn't let what came afterwards spoil the parts you enjoyed. I'm also glad I could provide a medium for you to sort out your raw initial reactions. Most of all, I hope this catharsis helped.
(And for the record, I can barely tolerate much of Pony Life. You're better off steering clear of it.)
5420758
Goddamn you're a fast reader.
And... just finished.
I think my opinion of Season Nine has nosedived, quite an achievement considering it was already at the bottom of my personal rankings, and I only managed to watch a handful of its episodes before giving up out of complete apathy.
Especially upon reading about some of these backstage shenanigans (the pathetic cheat sheets, Dubuc and Haber being exactly the sort of unqualified people who should not have any control over a project like this, the sneak peeks at behind-the-scenes concepts that left scars in the finished episodes, the overall sense of careless laziness), I really have no time for a section of this show where the new people making it cared far less about it than the average fanficker, only with the added insult that now they canonized their subpar work and then got paid for it.
I was cagey about saying so before, because a lot of people seemed to like the show fine and I don't want to be the grump at other people's parties either, but: the last two seasons are officially dead to me by now.
Even liking a tiny number of episodes doesn't inspire me to want to associate with the seasons as a whole. Seasons Six and Seven I'll give a restricted pass to, since there are bits of them I can roughly square with prior canon (more Six than Seven, this), but even on a purely entertainment level, Seven was as clear a sign as any to me that it was the point to bow out. And even then, mostly because "The Perfect Pear" is totally worth salvaging.
Oh, I was entertained reading these blog posts you made, no question, but it's also made it clear to me just how much contempt I actually have for what happened to the second half of the show.
Thing is, it would have been damn easy for me, once upon a time, to compare it to someone's fanfiction. Except I've written fanfiction, seen people write amazing fanfiction, actually been impressed by fanfiction enough to have my views changed on it. And the realization of the difference between a bunch of people who care about a show that had such a big impact to so many, and a bunch of people who slapped stuff together last-minute for a paycheque...
I mean, wow, just wow, what do you even say to the result at this point? What do you say to the disillusioning implications?
The show was never perfect, but at least the early seasons were incredibly inspiring to me and felt like they meant something. To see its leftovers taken over like this makes me want to prune canon so badly. With a chainsaw.
Barring a handful of exceptions, the later seasons are disrespectful shit, and I refuse to acknowledge them anymore. I'm sticking to the half of the show I actually like and care about.
5421036
en.meming.world/images/en/5/55/Cheers_I'll_Drink_to_That_Bro.jpg
And that basically sums up my opinion of S9.
I’m still sure she’s Haber’s isekai reincarnation.
Take one look at Berrow and tell me that nepotism isn’t what the show crew thinks friendship is.
Seriously, most of the show’s failings are easiest to explain as nepotism among the crew.
Amen.
And thank you for writing this.
You say this review is a monument to your autism, but it didn't have enough politics and Hitlers for that. "Human" was WAY more autistic than this, and you wrote that eight years ago.
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Glad you liked.
5421420
That's about the best summary of it I've ever come across... aside from my initial reaction: "It's like literary diarrhea caught cholera and spewed this out all over my TV screen."
Cozy Glow would've made WAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY the hell more sense if she'd been Chrysalis the whole time, trying to infiltrate the School back in Season 8. Would've given time to GIVE HER AND THE CHANGELINGS A GOD-DAMNED BACKSTORY THAT ACTUALLY WORKS IN THE SHOW!! (the comic explanation for them was crap, and ADDITIONALLY relied on an utterly unreliable narrator who could've been lying about the whole thing just to trick Twilight so they could escape) give Chrysalis more of a personality, expose her emotional weaknesses if they wanted to set up a potential reformation for her, or double down on her evil and have her reject every chance given to her in her lust for revenge on Starlight and the Mane 6. Have her twisting Ocellus the whole time... AND it gives credibility to her having the ability to use the magical artifacts, the motivation to use them, sets up a link between her and Tirek for use in Season 9 when Grogar would show up so it's already got the foundations for the villain team-up, and therefore Sombra could've been the most 'evil' one of the resulting trio who gleefully goes along with Grogar's wicked plans since he's a sadistic asshole without remorse or compassion for anything, while Tirek and Chrysalis could've begun to have remorse since they DID have things they cared about. Chrysalis especially, as she sees how happy the lings are now, and comes to understand how it was her own pride that was preventing them from ending their misery and starvation the entire time.
Heck, Sombra could've been Grogar's old henchpony, and he could have somehow mysteriously resurrected from his severed horn (foreshadowing like that works for this kind of thing... given Grogar is always assumed to have been a necromancer in the first place) and brought back Grogar, and then dragged Chryssabug and Tirek into the schemes... gathering up the ancient Elements of Disharmony which were the foundations of all Dark Magic and which had been used to summon Discord into the world... sheesh, coulda really put together an entire world timeline there that connected all the dots!
There was SO MUCH that could've been done had the writers not been total spazzes.
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There are so many better ways all of this season's plot points and storylines could've been done, yes. I've heard a dozen different people's ideas for alternate takes on the story so far, and I've yet to hear one worse than what we actually got.
And, as more evidence the writers of the show knew NOTHING about the show they were writing for: THEY GOT THIS UTTERLY WRONG!!
Twilight & Co DID NOT USE THE EOH AGAINST SOMBRA! In fact, THEY didn't stop him at all! It was SPIKE and CADANCE with the CRYSTAL HEART!! (Sheesh, these people would be so easy to beat in "Clue".)
Absolutely everything in the finale was WRONG. Absofuckinglutely wrong.
It is a simple fact that idiot writers can DECLARE one of their characters to be smarter than everyone else... but they can only accomplish this by rendering every other character mentally below Forrest Gump. Because, to put it bluntly, morons cannot write intelligence.
No no, it's a big-brain, dumb-high 189IQ move.
Hail Nux. Hail Billy.
The biggest and most obvious reason the insta-racist ponies make no bucking sense: the ponies have interbred for OVER ONE THOUSAND YEARS and have done so to such a degree that TWO EARTH PONIES SPAWNED A UNICORN AND PEGASUS PAIR OF FOALS!!!
There are no clear 'races' anymore. Just genetic traits that can emerge in any of them. The purest 'race' by default should be the pegasi... because unicorn or Earth-pony foals will tend to go splat if they're in Cloudsdale.
And, speaking of the racism problem in America... I don't know how many are aware, but it's kept alive primarily because it's very politically useful to a certain party who cannot go a single election without acting like the Civil War never took place.
You wanna talk about slavery and segregation being ignored? Look no further than THE ENTIRE FUCKING MIDDLE EAST AND ASIA, WHERE IT EXISTED FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS AND ONLY OFFICIALLY ENDED IN THE 1960'S!!! Where whole groups of people EXTERMINATED each other frequently! But yeah, let's just keep America-bashing so China can pretend like it's not genociding a million people RIGHT NOW!!!
Would've made MORE sense if the writers had planned ahead and explained at some point previously where the hell the windigoes had been hiding out all this time. It's FAR beyond a thousand years. At least 1200 or more, since the founding of Equestria. Gee, maybe instead of Celly and Loony looking pathetic up in the Frozen North holding back some cold weather, when SHINING ALONE could put up a MASSIVE SHIELD AND HOLD IT FOR WEEKS against SOMBRA AND THE COLD (Why isn't Shining an alicorn, for crying out loud)... how's about we find out a bunch of windigoes were hanging out up there and THEY were the reason the frozen North was perpetually frozen and stormy? Then we know they're still around and still a threat, and then no explanation is needed for how the suddenly appear in this episode!
THIS IS WHY GOOD WRITERS MAKE A TIME-LINE FOR THEIR STORIES!! Then you can easily check out what pieces you have that will fit into place, and where you need to add some bits for what comes later.
Technically, it was the Eoh that petrified Discord. Aaaaaand since the Tree is a conscious entity now, we can also assume it CHOSE to petrify him each time, versus blasting him to the Moon (like NMM) or stripping his powers away and shoving him into Tartarus (Tirek).
The petrifaction they use on the Trio of Doom was an entirely different spell.
It's also DAMNED lazy, since that's now THREE things that can turn ponies to stone: the EoH, a cockatrice, and now this spell.
LAAAAAAAZY.
Lol, this is almost verbatim how I described the sheer fuckery of awfulness that was Discord in this season. It really is the inescapable conclusion when one is being honest about how horrible a mess the whole plot was involving him.
Uhm, actually, that sounds even worse than what we got. It makes Discord so irredeemable and horrible, he would HAVE to die at the end. Preferably by being stabbed by a Vorpal Sword, god-damned jabberwocky that he is!
Yeah, started reading it, and then gave up cuz it was just MORE proof of why the show writers making Celestia retarded enough to randomly decide to reform Discord for no actual reason at all was one of the WORST writing failures in the entire series.
Season 1 and 2 Celestia would NEVER have let Discord out save for a situation where he was the LAST RESORT. Hell, if they knew Tirek was going to appear in Season 4, why not make HIM the reason to let Discord out? THEN Discord's instant betrayal of them WOULD MAKE SENSE!! And Tirek then betraying Discord WOULD MAKE SENSE!!! And Discord deciding to reform after being powerless and feeling truly helpless and in pain for the first time in his existence WOULD MAKE SENSE! It'd be, in fact, much like De Lancie's Q being 'reformed' after being made human!
Alondro just stares at the entire Western higher education system and says nothing... because he doesn't need to. It's all self-evident.
Alondro just has the creepiest smile on his face... so creepy.
h a h
omg
This is one of those deep underlying problems that I have never quite been able to put my finger on. When I tell people the show got worse over the course of its run, this is the kind of shit I was talking about. And the fact that anyone had the balls to say, "No, it didn't" really makes me wonder about the sort of people I associate with in this fandom.
Fucking oof.
Corporate logic at its finest.
I'm now regretting having written If I Did It. I might put in that second chapter now.
Hey now, let's not forget the earth-shattering judicial and/or legislative power wielded by the EEA, before whom the princesses are naught but helpless pawns.
Yeah, I... whew. Who made these decisions?
I really hope you're prepared to write all these fanfics you're teasing us with. >:V
YES V:<
Yeah, I feel this. The amount of time I spent complaining about the show to the extent that people very honestly suggested I stop watching it for my own benefit speaks to how train-wrecky it got for me.
Scampy works in mysterious ways. XD
Oh, that's high praise, I'm blush. :O
Also, I love how you linked to my season 5 retrospective, wherein I link to your season 8 review. XD It comes full circle!
Thanks for writing all of this up, it's been a blast to read for two days. :)
5421766
Story proposal: The EEA prosecutes Celestia and Luna for their crimes against both pony and God.
I'mma be real with you, chief. I have zero intention of writing anything set in late-series canon, because I can't write a story if even the setting doesn't make sense to me. You and everyone else are welcome to do whatever you like with this, though.
I look forward to inevitably being called out in your season nine retrospective.
5421776
Like hell am I retrospectiving past season seven. :B
Thank you for writing this! And happy too that I could contribute to the musings in one form or another!
Hearing about the behind the scenes stuff really is saddening though. It astounds me that MLP couldn't hold onto any talent from the earlier seasons. Even with new writers you'd think they do research. I guess if the direction from the top is. "Do like whatever, it's just ponies." It's hard to get people to care if the brass doesn't care :(
Funny how you bring up Star Wars because to me MLP has become a bit like that. Where the world and setting is so inspiring and open and full of potential, but the official stuff is just so so clumsy. Post-MLP. I sort of see it the same way. No amount of bungling on the official side of things will kill my love for pretty little horses and the stories that could be told. If Hasbro and the like won’t tell them, then by Celestia I’ll do it myself!
5422839
So does this mean you're finally going to finish Terms 2?
5423020
Why do you hurt me so, Danny
5423088
Fun, mostly.
I have for a while been head-canoning that most of the last two seasons were mostly an extended nightmare of Twilight brought on by incautiously eating Trixie's "extra-spicy Neigh Orleans gumbo [1], but reading this I think I might just go whole hog on season nine and relegate every episode to gastric distress dreams.
I've rather enjoyed this season nine retrospective (and surely not because it validated my own beliefs
), and I agree with a lot of it. I'd disagree with _all_ the Daring Do episodes being bad - the Quibble Pants episode greatly amused me - but I always felt it worked better as self-insert fanfic written by an older and more mature Rainbow Dash (the last episode being, of course, _worse_ fanfic written by someone who had read RD's fanfic but not the original novels).
Strongly agree the disappearance of large dragons and their replacement by shrimpy anthros was annoying: it often struck me that as the show progressed there was a tendency to "make things 20% uncooler" - the Worfing and infantilization of the Royal sisters, the diminution of dragons, the way they kept calling Ursas Minor Ursas Major (not to mention the notion of constantly making foreign nations and entire species little towns and villages in desperate need of Pony aid, although that was a problem well before season seven), turning the Tree of Harmony from a primordial force of Friendship into the Pillar's science project, and in the odd way Equestria in the last episode seems to shrink to only three cities inhabited by a relative handful of Ponies. Some people have suggested Equestria is no bigger than Ohio: in the finale it seemed no bigger than Liechenstein.
(Also - is it just me, or does Pinkie Pie seem to display her reality-bending powers less in the later seasons? I don't recall anything as weird as that time she inflated her head to float away from a boring lecture, for instance)
Of course the Mane Six-minus-one look old: the show writers want to show how mature and edgy they are by reminding the viewers that everyone except Twilight is going to age and die!
(None of that "Twilight will not outlive her friends" bullshit). More charitably, the level of detail in the cartooning makes it a bit tricky to show intermediary stages in aging between "adult" and "one foot in the grave", and an effort has to be made to show that considerable time has passed.
Thought: Pinkie's mane is such a mess because her powers have continued to dwindle - she can no longer magically store stuff in her mane, so she has to just stick candy and toys onto her hair with, um, stickyness.
(Instant fix-canon: the other five are now all immortal alicorns, [2] but they use shapechanging magic to make it seem like they're aging, otherwise everyone else in Equestria will demand horns and wings too, and there's only so much magic to go around).
Your reference to "rainbow magic" puzzled me a bit. After all, there never was such a thing as rainbow magic. Surely if it ever existed, someone would have mentioned it or the Mane Six would have used it after season four.
(It amused me at the time that after powering up and smashing Sombra sans nary an element in the season opener, the Mane Six seemed to have forgotten entirely they could do that by the season's end.)
Now I'm going to have to take a look at your reviews of seven and eight: I may assign more episodes to gumbo before I'm done!
[1] Yes, I do like that particular fanfic notion re her origins
[2] Save for Fluttershy, which now is a Secret Draconeqqus, having embraced madness at last. (Pun intended)
5444435
Me too. It's definitely not anywhere near as awful as the other Daring Do episodes I've covered in this review series. But I make a clear delineation between episodes that I enjoy and episodes that I think are good, and if I ever cared to make a season six review, I could probably poke just as many holes in that episode as I have in some of these. Like for example, did you ever notice that Quibble denounces everything in the Daring Do series after Ring of Destiny, despite Ring of Destiny being the most recent book in the series at the time, because it's the one that Daring wrote in season four which had Dash on the cover?
I remember a comic called Recall the Time of No Return which once interpreted that statement in a kind of morbidly hilarious way. It was about the mane five time-travelling (with Doctor Whooves, I think) to a far distant future to celebrate Twilight's thousand birthday with her or something, because she's immortal and shit. But the future Twilight is fucking terrified of them, because shortly after the time of the show, a witch told her this Macbeth-style prophecy that "Twilight will not outlive her friends." So when her friends eventually passed away naturally, she assumed that she'd beaten fate. But now her friends are here again, so she has to fucking kill them before they get her.
I should go back and read the rest of it one of these days. I never did see how it ended.
Which fanfic was that from? I swear I've heard of this headcanon before, but I can't for the life of me remember where.
5444446
Well, there's the Lunaverse series, for one.
5444577
Ah, that's what I was thinking of! I don't think I've ever actually read the series, but I'm familiar with it by reputation. I think some of it might be on my read later list.
5444446
Late, but if you haven't already do it. They nailed how FiM should have ended.
5525143
That definitely sounds promising. I'm even more interested now.
Also, looks like someone went through and downvoted all my comments and every other remotely season nine negative comment on my review blogs since last I was here. Guess I made somebody mad.
5525181
Given the calibre of some fans' judgement skills, that should count as an inevitable success on your part. 😈