Episode Analysis - Season 4, Episode 4 - Daring Don't · 11:00pm Dec 7th, 2013
WARNING: The following blog post contains spoilers. If you have not yet watched this episode, I would recommend watching it before you read this post. It spoils several plot elements, at least one of which is more effective if you aren't
Everyone gone who needs to be gone? Good.
Daring Don't centers around... well, honestly, absolutely nothing. The episode is a plain old adventure episode and, as is typical for such episodes, it was quite bad because in the end it didn't actually have anything that made it special or interesting.
The episode has ostensibly two possible morals - "everyone, no matter how awesome, needs help sometimes" and "don't let your heroes prevent you from being awesome on your own terms." The problem is that the episode doesn't really deliver very well on either moral - the first moral has already been done repeatedly by literally every season opener and closer, where teamwork ended up saving the day in far more interesting ways. The latter is a moral which would be better delivered via Scootaloo, or via Rainbow Dash and the Wonderbolts. But even ignoring the fact that there are better ways to tell the moral, the episode still fails to really deliver on either of them very well and breaks suspension of disbelief.
The episode starts with Rainbow Dash being anxious for the next book to come out. The book gets delayed by two months, so Rainbow Dash has Twilight track down the author. They get to her house, only to find it trashed before they got there; they are worried about the author, but she walks in behind them, only to retrieve a golden ring from a book and blow them off.
Moments later, after the Mane Six walk outside, a bunch of obvious bad guys show up and get into a fight with the author - who is not so secretly Daring Do - over the ring. At this point, we have the first real problem with the episode crop up: the mane six, heroes who have repeatedly sprung into action at the hint of danger... stand there and watch them fight. Why? This is horrendously out of character, especially for Rainbow Dash and Applejack. The only purpose of this is so that the bad guys can get away with the ring. It might have made sense had only Rainbow Dash been there, and Daring Do told her to stay out of it and Rainbow Dash assumed she would handle herself (or, heck, had she just been wanting to watch Daring Do in action for a bit, only to feel bad when Daring Do wasn't awesome enough to win the fight). But the whole group? No way.
After they make off with the ring, the group tries to help her but she brushes them off and tells them she works alone - she has to keep things secret. Clearly, this is why she writes books about everything she does; I almost missed this the first time I watched the episode because my eyeballs had rolled out of my head and I was fumbling for them on the floor.
Naturally, this dissuades them not a whit, and they run off after her, Rainbow Dash catching up far more quickly. Another fight ensues, and yet again Rainbow Dash oddly does not help, and indeed gets rather quickly captured by a guy who is, frankly, kind of a chump compared to a lot of things they've battled. And now, he can bring about EIGHT HUNDRED YEARS OF SWELTERING HEAT. Because, you know, they don't have a character who can control the sun in the setting.
After the fight ends and Daring Do is captured ("thanks" to Rainbow Dash momentarily distracting her), Rainbow Dash feels terrible and thinks she should give up... which is very strange and out of character. Time and again we've seen Rainbow Dash bash her head into a brick wall, and just leaving someone to be captured is pretty out of character for her.
And yet again, we have another very, very short turnaround on someone giving up, then getting back into it, an issue we had in the pilot as well. What is the point of this? We have no real dramatic tension here, and it is not as if we think she's really going to give up - and with so little time left in the episode, it is obvious to the audience that it is all going to be resolved very quickly. Honestly, this little scene didn't really work well at all, and it would have probably been better if Rainbow Dash had realized what she had to do, regardless of what Daring Do said, rather than having to have Twilight tell her - if she had to hesitate like that at all, which really didn't feel very in-character compared to her appearances in everything else.
Rainbow Dash flies into the temple to save Daring Do while the rest go and steal the ring from the big bad. They pry all the magical rings off the pillar and the temple crumbles to dust, and they smash the last ring by throwing it on the ground... which they could have done all along and saved themselves a lot of trouble.
In the end, we are given the moral that you shouldn't forget that you're awesome when you compare yourself to your heroes, and that everyone needs help. Daring Do's change of heart doesn't take very long at all, and just feels kind of arbitrary - and given that we have hardly seen any character established for her, it is hard for it to feel otherwise.
This summary seems like it is leaving out all the little golden moments that episodes possess... but it isn't. There aren't any. The dialogue is very utilitarian, and the only real "joke" after the very start is when Twilight Sparkle and Rainbow Dash argue over helping Daring Do and do a nerdy infodump argument. The problem is that while this is theoretically a funny joke, in the actual episode they are having an argument over REAL EVENTS, so rather than sounding like a funny nerd argument, it just becomes an infodump for no reason. It would have worked MUCH better had the whole thing NOT been real, or as it seemed, but it was. Thus, the only real joke in the episode fell flat for me.
I felt like the mane six being passive was a major break in immersion in addition to being terribly out of character - we see them being heroes repeatedly, so them standing by while something happens makes no sense. It is just terrible writing, and exists obviously only so that the bad guys can make off with the ring repeatedly. It pulled me out of the episode, and made me feel passive.
Indeed, the passivity really hurt the episode. The episode is passive for the first two-thirds of it, and the end of it is resolved via mediocre action sequence. There are no fun moments of characterization, no moments when we really feel like the characters are shining, and no moments when their personalities really come through to deliver the episode.
We have no reason to care about Daring Do, and the episode gives us no reason to care about Daring Do - like A Canterlot Wedding, the episode focuses heavily on a new character, but the new character has even less personality than Cadance does. She is just a generic "do it alone" hero who at the end admits that she needed help, but we really don't get any good feeling for her at all. There's no real personality beyond that.
The actual central conflict - Daring Do refuses to accept help - has been hit on time and again by the series, and in better episodes.
Rainbow Dash feels out of character, not when she fangirls out, but when she mopes and acts passive.
Daring Do's reveal is underplayed and could have been made far more dramatic - say, by her not being revealed until they went to help her and realized who she really was. The reveal as it wasn't terribly dramatic, and could have been played up more. It is supposed to be a shocking revelation... but it really isn't. A better disguise might have helped there, too.
The action sequences are tepid and uninteresting, and don't really do anything interesting with the characters. The show really needs to avoid these - they are uniformly boring. If you have the characters be themselves and do action in their own way, like the changeling fight or the manticore fight in the pilot, that's cool. But this was just a bunch of fairly boring fighting and conflict which didn't really show off the characters at all. Also, for an Indiana Jones parody, there just wasn't enough actual parodying of Indiana Jones scenes - a closer parody might have worked a bit better.
In a common trend to some of the weaker episodes, while the whole mane six tag along, they are utterly worthless in the episode - they don't actually DO anything for most of it. There's no reason for any of them other than Rainbow Dash and maybe Twilight to be there, and it would have been better if they hadn't been as it would have presented fewer difficulties with characterization and lack of believability.
The real trouble, though, is that there is nothing really redeeming in the episode - even things like SAYS and Equestria Girls had a few funny moments, but this episode really has none. Rainbow Dash fangirling out at the very start of the episode is the only part which is all that interesting, and even that segment ends with a weak cartoon gag. Pinkie Pie throwing random parties is a gag which has already been done, and while it is alright, it isn't funny on its own anymore. There just isn't any meat there. It was bland all the way through, without any real highs.
All in all, one of the worst episodes in the series; it just leaves me empty.
I think the writers need to reference this image more often when coming up with episodes:
I had much less problems with the "infodump" scene; I found it to be a cute little bit of interaction that a) shows off brainy/fangirl Dash. Overall the episode hit a lot of points that show Dash has not only accepted that reading is OK, not only is she willing to do it in public (like on Too Many Pinkies), but she's now an avid fan who keeps track of release dates and bugs her friends about it. The infodump was sort of a culimation of what had been presented along that line through the episode so far.
It was also one of the few scenes where the rest of the m6 were useful to the scene: Twi was obviously necessary for the scene, but having an audience who is mostly clueless about the exchange adds to the joke. Having Pinkie perfectly follow along was a nice little nod for Pinkie's personality, and made the scene overall fairly cute and believable for the group.
I agree fully that having the m6 sit around watching bad stuff go on was indeed pretty bad. However I also think they made a big failure with Daring Do for the reverse. She apparently didn't know who the Elements were, despite their being national heros several times over. She also didn't recognize a member of royalty, Twilight. Heck, she didn't even acknowlege some mysterious alicorn in her house. I mean, those are pretty commonplace, right? There are still only four in existence.
I think that for the most part, this would have been a much better episode if it was just Dash solo or Dash + Twilight. The rest of the group had little incentive to go meet this author, that was Dash's interest and to a lesser degree Twi's. Rarity, Fluttershy, and Applejack especially seemed like they would have preferred to stay at home.
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I think reasonable men can disagree on whether the infodump scene was funny or not; I personally found it to fall flat because it actually was an infodump of important information. Things like that are actually much funnier if you have absolutely no idea whatsoever what is going on; in other words, it made too much sense.
housepetscomic.com/comics/2009-03-20-impenetrable-wall-of-text.png
This is basically the same thing. The difference here is that we have no idea what the heck it is they're talking about, and that's the whole point - we don't have a clue, and it is two nerds talking. Impenetrability actually adds to the humor - we, as the audience, should feel left out, as that is the joke.
And yes, the fact that Daring Do didn't recognize any of them was rather silly. While it is understandable for most of them - she probably spends a lot of time out in the jungle or out of the country - Twilight DOES stick out like a sore thumb.
I distinctly remember not laughing at the infodump joke.
Or at any other time in the episode. While the fight-observation scene was actually bad (I seriously had no idea why any of them stood idly by; even Fluttershy will get physical when she's pressed to) the oddest thing about the episode was how neutral it was.
One bad moment. Just the one though.
But no good moments at all.