Episode Re-Review: Going to Seed · 4:02pm August 31st
It had been quite a while since we'd had an Apple Bloom episode. Her last time in the spotlight definitively was all the way back in Season 6 with "On Your Marks", which only proved that like Applejack Apple Bloom was incapable of holding the spotlight on her own. Technically, she was focused on in "The Perfect Pear", but that was only partially her episode (and only partially Applejack's episode). And the last time the two had been paired up together had been all the way back in "Somepony to Watch Over" in Season 4, which was absolutely horrendous in its portrayal of Applejack. Heck, Applejack's last focus episode before this one was the utterly atrocious "Non-Compete Clause" that saw her sink to a low you could've never imagined: Letting someone drown over the sake of a competition. Needless to say, a lot was already working against this episode. And this was to be the last episode that David "Dave" Rapp penned. His most recent outing had been "The Parent Map" in Season 8, the very definition of an episode made just to fill an episode slot and one reaking of wasted potential. This episode doesn't tend to get talked about much, even though it's the last time we focus directly on Applejack and Apple Bloom. Is there a reason for that? Well, let's find out.
The episode begins with what's more or less an "As you know" segment, albeit without the words "As you know". But it still falls into the same trap, because Applejack is explaining to her family about the "Confluence", an event where all the apples in the orchard turn ripe at the same time. And she only briefly mentions having gotten time off from Twilight's school to help her family with said confluence. Again, the golden rule of exposition is that it must only be natural, but the one expositing should be telling it to someone who doesn't already know. A good example of how this works is when the Wonderbolts exposit about the Wild Blue Yonder in "Grannies Gone Wild", Rainbow Dash is not in the know, and the exposition is about something we by extension do not know. Here, while we the audience don't know, in-universe the whole family should know about the confluence and what it is.
Anyway, help is still coming for the family in the form of Goldie Delicious. Upon her arrival, she mentions something about the Great Seedling, a magical creature who according to legend will bestow bountiful harvests on whoever catches it. Applejack scoffs at this and insists the Great Seedling doesn't exist. During this conversation there's a mention of Apple Bloom once having believed in the creature, and this is treated like it was always a thing in-universe even though it was never even eluded to before. So this is basically like when "Crusaders of the Lost Mark" treated the existence of Spoiled Rich as if it were common knowledge even though it was the first time we the audience ever even heard of her.
And apparently, hearing Goldie Delicious talk about the Great Seedling again is enough to rekindle Apple Bloom's interest in it, much to Applejack's dismay. Applejack is not too happy about this because she fears Apple Bloom won't be of any help during the harvesting since Big Macintosh is sleep deprived from having stayed up all night to plan for the confluence, but Granny Smith and Goldie Delicious both insist they'll be fine and that Apple Bloom should be allowed to have her fun. But soon, Goldie Delicious is seen having trouble due to her old age, and Applejack tells Big Mac to readjust the schedule to take account of Apple Bloom wanting to have fun hunting for the Great Seedling. Then, the next day, completely out of the blue, Applejack starts to micromanage the whole thing just like she did in "Apple Family Reunion". She does have more of a reason to do it this time, but it is still yet another case of exaggerating her flaws and treating her more like Twilight for the sake of making her into a control freak.
Meanwhile, Apple Bloom finds what she believes are tracks left by the Great Seedling. Applejack accuses Granny Smith and Goldie Delicious of creating the tracks themselves, but they deny this and insist it really is the Great Seedling. But Applejack refuses to believe it, and Big Macintosh is just more sleep deprived from having to plan. It makes you wonder why, if Applejack is so fixated on harvesting every apple during the confluence, why she doesn't just plan it herself from start to finish, seeing as that's the one thing she doesn't do. And she never says anything to Apple Bloom's face about this, she just grumbles and complains whenever Apple Bloom is already off doing her own thing. However, Applejack then approaches Apple Bloom in the barn and makes a deal with her: If Apple Bloom helps with the confluence during the day, Applejack will let her set up traps for the Great Seedling by night. And Apple Bloom agrees, even as Applejack tries to temper her enthusiasm and say that the Great Seedling is just something made up to make the confluence more fun for children. So it's the pony equivalent of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy.
But why is Applejack so insistent on spoiling Apple Bloom's fun? Well, Granny Smith reveals in a flashback a time when Applejack was younger and actually believed in the Great Seedling. Because of this, she ran away to check on her traps and fell into a hole in the orchard, missing out on helping her family since Granny Smith didn't find her and her parents were too busy working with Big Macintosh and Apple Bloom. However, the animators screwed up here, because they use Granny Smith's younger model from "The Perfect Pear", and Applejack and Big Macintosh look considerably younger than they did in "Where the Apple Lies". But during this flashback we see not only Bright Mac and Buttercup, but also a baby Apple Bloom. So it just further confuses the time line by raising the question of where they heck they all were during "Where the Apple Lies". And keep in mind, in that episode Spoiled Rich was just Filthy Rich's fiance, so unless she was already secretly pregnant Diamond Tiara hadn't been born yet. And Diamond Tiara and Apple Bloom appear to be about the same age since they attend the same class. The animators knew people wanted to Bright Mac and Buttercup, but they reused the wrong models and confused the time line as a result.
Also, the flashback story is pretty weak. Applejack stopped believing in the Great Seedling just because she fell into a hole and her family didn't find her right away? A fan comic proposed a much better way for this to work out: Applejack catching her parents in one of the traps and believing they were the Great Seedling as a result. It'd be not unlike children who catch their parents pretending to be Santa or the Tooth Fairy, and stop believing in them as a result. Maybe this was meant to be more in line with Applejack's work before play attitude, but even so it feels like a stretch and an afterthought. Yet within the span of a day, Applejack starts to find that hunting for the Great Seedling is fun, and that the Great Seedling is indeed real, especially once every trap is sprung without anything being caught in it, and there being no logical explanation for it. So she decides to completely disregard her earlier complaints and spend all her time helping Apple Bloom rather than work on the confluence, leaving a very sleep deprived Big Mac to cover for the both of them.
Later that day, some of the trees that were supposed to be harvested have already been bucked clean of every apple, and Goldie Delicious says it means the Great Seedling is close to being caught. So Applejack and Apple Bloom stage a stakeout at night, camping out in some of the trees that have yet to be harvested. They share a brief bonding moment during this point, then they see a shadowy figure and begin to think that the Great Seedling might actually be hunting them instead. But nope, it's just Big Macintosh sleepwalking and sleepbucking. Fortunately, that means the confluence is completed ahead of schedule. But Apple Bloom is sad that that means there is indeed no such thing as the Great Seedling. However, Applejack says that you're never too old to outgrow having fun, right before she and Apple Bloom spot more mysterious tracks and assume that maybe the Great Seedling is in fact real after all.
And that's the story, so what do I think of the episode? Well, honestly, this episode is just average. It doesn't really seem like it tries to do much of anything, aside from make Applejack a control freak yet again and get in some laughs at Big Macintosh's expense. When a single conversation is all it takes to solve Applejack's problem with Apple Bloom's behavior, the episode itself really doesn't have anything to sustain itself. The big problem though is that Apple Bloom's belief in the Great Seedling is treated like something that always existed, rather than something that came into being for just this episode. And Applejack spends the first two acts being a wet blanket to Apple Bloom for no reason other than because of an incident in her youth during a previous confluence. Yet Applejack completely flip flops after just one night of helping Apple Bloom set up traps. The moral is a good one (as the saying goes "It's good to grow up, but it's wrong to forget what it was like to be a child."), but there had to be a better way to go about the execution of it than this. Why not start off the episode with Apple Bloom finding tracks and go from there? The flashback also needed to be reworked because the animators used the wrong models, had they reused Applejack and Big Macintosh (and Granny Smith)'s models from "Where the Apple Lies" there would be no confusion about the timeline. It's not the last time the animators would get lazy or make such careless mistakes in Season 9, just two episodes later they would forget about Babs' cutie mark. And in "The Last Problem", they wouldn't bother to have everyone dress up for Twilight's coronation. I can only assume they did it because they knew it was the last season and just wanted to be done with the project, but mistakes like this should still have been avoided. Ultimately, though, there's nothing offensively wrong with this episode. Another reviewer, however, stated back in 2019 that this felt like an Apple Bloom episode retooled into an Applejack episode last minute. Not the best way to go out for either of them for focus episodes, even if it was a better showing of their sibling bond than "Somepony to Watch Over Me". So ultimately, this episode gets a C-.
Well, now we're gonna jump ahead a few episodes, seeing as I covered the next three in a row back in 2021. So next week we reach the halfway point of Season 9 with "Between Dark and Dawn", a royal sisters episode and also a mane six episode.
Shame this didn't turn out better, given this was Applejack's last focus episode in the series.
5801435 That makes it all the more disappointing. Applejack, the character so often derided as just a background pony, goes out not with a bang but with a whimper.
Generation 4 was notorious for doing this, dropping plot elements and big things without warning (one good example apart from this episode being Scootaloo's parents). Sadly, it seems to have carried over somewhat to G5 (looking at you, Sunny's mother).
5801437
Admitedly that might just be a thing for long runner shows in general. Even looking at the more continuity driven ones, Adventure Time and Regular Show (which did run almost as long as MLP and debuted in 2010 as influential cartoons that kickstarted a 2010s TV animation renaissance) had their moments of this too.
5801439
True that. Thomas and Friends also had a tendancy to do it in its middling years, which is partly why the writers started parodying the trope later on.
Which specific episode did that occur in, exactly?
5801441 "The Last Crusade" during CMC Appreciation Day. Babs Seed made a cameo appearance, but she didn't have her cutie mark that was shown in the letter she sent to the CMC back in "Bloom and Gloom".
5801436
I wonder, any plan for Going to Seed to get rewritten next at some point? Or if it's an episode you can't save, still giving Applejack a different episode plot (since without Going to Seed, Applejack would have no focus episodes at all in season 9) in its place?
5801445 Probably yes. I had thought of doing it in the most recent volume when I realized I had an episode slot open, but ultimately decided on "A Health of Information" instead when the inspiration came to me.
5801444
I was wondering about that. It’s been so long since I saw “The Last Crusade” that I’ve forgotten the majority of silent cameos it had.
Frankly, I’m not the least bit surprised now by the fact that Babs didn’t have a cutie mark in “The Last Crusade” despite Season 5 revealing that she got one. From my perspective, Seasons 8 & 9 disregarded the continuity laid out by Seasons 1-7, and the 2017 MLP film, way too much. It’s particularly to the point of where it’s hard to see how they’re officially canon, even despite their acknowledgments of various events depicted in their successors.
The only exceptions I can frequently think of in terms of canonically acceptable episodes from all two seasons are “The Parent Map”, “Sounds of Silence”, and “Common Ground”, and that’s mainly because they don’t give me any reason to question their place in the series. That, and it’s easy for me to classify them as prequels to the 2017 film.
I think this episode is decent, but it's biggest issue for me is that it's kinda boring
5801458 Seems about right, and boring is sadly par for the course for most Applejack focus episodes where she ain't horrendously out of character.
5801463
An unfortunate side effect of her basically being the straight mare of the group
In spite of its flaws, this episode is Sisterhooves Social compared to Somepony to Watch Over Me.
Also, it's once again time to share a character's first and last speaking lines. In this case, Goldie Delicious.
5801444
Admitedly, that sort of animation error has been a thing in every season, not just season 9.
5801463
Kinda wonder if there are other shows that managed to give some good episodes focusing on straight man characters. In general, straight man characters can be hard to write for in having to still give them some flaws or quirks to prevent them from coming off as completely boring.
5801507 But it's especially glaring in Season 9.