(Yes, this is another bonus. Trust me, I just wanted to get this thing done with.)

Well, time for another glorious episode review. And after last time, I’m pumped. Perhaps it’ll be another episode I love, like “Suited for Success” or “Hearts-and-Hooves Day.” Or hey, maybe it’ll be one that’s fun to talk about, like “Party of One” or “Lesson Zero.” I’m open for anything…

…

And it’s…numb…er…32. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you…“The Mysterious Mare-Do-Well.”

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TECHNICAL SPECS:

Season: 2
Episode: 8
Written By: Merriweather Williams
First Aired: November 26, 2011

SUMMARY:

After secretly correcting the Rainbow Dash Fan Club on what adjective to use for her (don’t ask me to write it, it’s way too long), Dash is hanging about and doing her usual lazy thing…until she hears a filly caught in a well. In a flash, the Pegasus charges down the well and pulls the little filly to safety, earning her the cheers and adulation of the crowd. At first, Dash is more than a little overwhelmed, but after she stops a baby carriage from falling down a cliff – and – rescues some elderly ponies from a collapsing balcony, the sudden fame goes to her head, completely inflating her ego and making her into a glory-seeking show-off. Her friends, upset at her behavior, decide that they have to do something to get her back down to Equestria.

Later on, a pony’s hot air balloon springs a leak, sending her plummeting to certain doom. Dash, however, ignores her pleas so she could sign a few more autographs before taking off. Fortunately, however, a mysterious pony, clad in an identity-covering purple body suit, cape and hat, manages to make a diving save…while Dash crashes into the balloon and fails epically. The new hero vanishes as quickly as she appeared, and the Mayor decides to name her Mare-Do-Well.

Dash is upset at losing some of her fame, and things only get worse from there. She fails to stop a runaway carriage, only for Mare-Do-Well to buck the thing to a standstill. She tries to rescue ponies from a collapsing construction yard, but only manages to rescue one, while Mare-Do-Well manages to avoid everything and get the rest out safely in the same length of time. And when Dash tries to plug a hole in that hydroelectric dam they always had, I shut off the episode and walk away, only to have to come back so I can finish this review. She fails when she tries to pat herself on the back, causing a flood to race towards Ponyville. And of course, Mare-Do-Well is there, saving Dash before using magic to rebuild the dam. But hey, that means that Mare-Do-Well is a Unicorn, and Dash can still outfly her…until she comes zipping by with a pair of outstretched wings.

Completely devastated, Dash turns to her friends for comfort, only to learn that all of them are now huge fans of Mare-Do-Well and are singing her praises. Finally, Dash can take no more and sets off to reclaim her glory, but alas, there are no disasters in Ponyville. So Dash decides to find some minor problems to solve, like escorting unwilling old mares across the street, opening a jar of peanut butter, and mowing the lawn. All this does, however, is get her smacked in the face with a purse, shown up by a Unicorn, and earn her the disgust of the town.

With nowhere left to go, Dash goes to a big black cloud and starts bemoaning her loneliness, until Scootaloo comes back. Alas, her hopes of somepony still liking her are spat upon when her number one fan turns Judas and betrays her for her new hero, Mare-Do-Well. Now that she’s lost everything to the newcomer, however, Dash has found a new goal in life: REVENGE. During a parade to honor Mare-Do-Well, Rainbow Dash flies up and demands that she unmask herself. Rather than just reveal who she is and allow Dash some tiny shred of dignity, MDW runs.

Rainbow chases her through the streets of Ponyville, with the hero seemingly teleporting from one alley to another. Before long, though, she makes a mistake, and Dash is able to finally knock her over and pull her mask off, revealing Pinkie Pie. Soon after, the rest of the Mane 6 join the group, and the truth is revealed.

Turns out that after Dash began her descent into douchebaggery, the five decided that she needed to learn a lesson. So Rarity created the Mare-Do-Well costumes and gave everyone a copy. Each time a disaster struck, the appropriate pony for the job would show up to save the day. And the reason for all this? Because Dash needed to learn that having an inflated ego is a bad thing. And isn’t that worth utterly ruining Dash’s self-confidence, trampling her name into the dirt, and turning her into a social pariah?

REVIEW:

This episode has kind of undergone a revision in opinion as of late. After being drowned out by the sheer amount of bile being tossed about, more than a few fans have stepped up and expressed their love for this episode. And if you like this one, that’s perfectly fine. There are some good jokes in her, one really good character bit, and a few other moments that might make it worth your while. But remember that this is all my opinion.

And my opinion is that this episode sucks and I hate it.

MDW is one of the worst episodes of the entire show, jockeying with “Owl’s Well That Ends Well” as the one episode I despise more than anything. I hate “A Friend In Deed,” but that one at least had a memorable song. I hate “Secret of My Excess,” but that one gave us more insights into dragons, Twilight’s relationship with Spike, and had a great moment between the dragon and Rarity. There is none of that here. The few good bits are completely drowned out by the sheer amount of garbage that constitutes this episode’s very form.

Okay, let’s…try to start positive.

MDW is mostly built around parodying superheroes. While there’s some direct allusions to Batman: The Animated Series and Darkwing Duck, the episode seems to be poking fun at a lot of the clichés involved in the genre. And in a few instances, the jokes are kind of funny. I loved the signs from the parade, I really liked the design of MDW’s costume, and I even liked Dash’s frustration at the sheer number of dangers to strike Ponyville in a single day. The animation during these sequences is very impressive, and shows just how much the show’s look has evolved since the first season.

The Rainbow Dash Fan Club was kind of funny, and it makes perfect sense that Scootaloo would be President, but it really had little to do with the episode considering where it was placed. This is something that would have worked better if it was around the middle (showing just how much everypony loves Dash now), or at the end (to show that Dash’s reputation will recover). Still, the idea was cute, and the scene had some laughs, even if it had to remind me that Snips and Snails exist.

All Merriweather episodes have what I call “The Scene.” It’s a short moment where the cartoonish goofiness and cynical stylings of her episode stop for a moment and allow the characters to actually develop a little. It’s kind of like playing one of the “Ouendan” games, where everything’s ridiculously insane except for that one moment where everything is played straight, before jumping right back to rich insanity. Here, it was when Dash was on the cloud. The bit is brilliantly laid out, showing just how isolated and defeated our favorite speedster is, and when combined with the excellent voice acting, it just makes the entire episode sting that much worse. And thus, the positives are all gone.

(Allow me to be frank here. From this point on in the review, there is going to be a LOT of yelling, nitpicking, and complete and utter outrage at this episode. If that’s not your thing, feel free to skip down to the conclusion. I’m sorry, but there are a lot of things I need to say about this one.)

When Mare-Do-Well first appeared, the scheme was justified. After all, if she hadn’t shown up when that balloon crashed, Dash would have still missed and hit the balloon, which would have lead to some injuries of some kind. And even later on, I wasn’t completely turned off to Dash getting shown up. After all, most of the failures were because she was too busy posing and bragging to do her job right. The construction site one was…well, not so good, but it never really bugged me too much.

And then we have the infamous hydroelectric dam.

First, let’s discuss one of the biggest problems with this episode. In order to facilitate all these disasters, Williams had to completely redraw Ponyville’s geography, chance the level of technology, and utterly eviscerate several key bits of the setting. One of the biggest rules when writing an episode for any show? “Don’t completely screw with the setting just so your one joke can work.” Remember when I said I turned off the episode when the dam showed up? I wasn’t kidding. The first time I saw this episode, I switched it off and left after that. It’s not just that there’s an electricity-producing dam, however, but that all of these things are lazy clichés. You want to make fun of superheroes? As long as your name isn’t Mark Millar or Garth Ennis, that’s fine. But make the jokes fit the setting. Don’t change everything in existence for the sake of a single punchline.

And second, this is where my sympathy for MDW transfers to Dash. Sure, she screws up with plugging the hole, but when I saw that MDW was using magic, I could see where this episode was going. Not only does the aura give away her identity (and admittedly, it was a nice touch to give us clues about who she was), but it makes the character far too powerful. And when she flies by just to show up Dash, I realized that this episode was going to be more than a little painful.

Oh, and then we get to the best part. Dash goes to Sugar Cube Corner, where all her friends are currently hanging out. And instead of trying to help out Dash, they just talk on and on about how much better MDW is than her. Before we move on, let’s look at the scene from two perspectives.

The first is that you don’t know that the rest of the Mane 6 are MDW. There behavior is absolutely wretched here. One of their best friends, a pony who’s stood by them against two cosmic-level enemies, who has always been a loyal companion and ready to help them through anything, has just had her ego trampled on. You would think that they’d at least tell her that it’s not so bad, or just reassure her a little, but instead they act like dicks. And when Dash snaps and tells them that she’s still a better hero than MDW, they accuse her of being jealous, thereby driving Dash off.

Now let’s look at it with the ending in mind. This makes it even worse. Dash is still cocky, yes, but instead of trying to tell her that she should be a bit more humble and stop trying to compete with MDW, they just champion how much better they are compared to that snuck-up, egotistical Rainbow Dash. And when they tell Dash that she’s jealous, all they’re doing is egging her on so she’ll fall even further. This episode sucks.

And yeah, this scene ends with Dash running off to find disasters, finding none, and finally trying to do something, anything to get ponies to thank her or show some kind of basic gratitude. But nope, the entire town now seems to see her as a stuck-up, egotistical loser. And hey, remember how insecure Dash was in “Sonic Rainboom” over the very idea of failing? Her friends just rubbed total failure all over her face, made her into a laughingstock, and as we see later, made her biggest fan turn on her. But surely this is the only way to teach her humility!

The moral of the episode is “Don’t be arrogant and a bragger,” and it is delivered in a truly horrendous fashion. First, Dash doesn’t actually learn the lesson. The best Aesops are the ones that grow organically from a character overcoming their situation and emerging as a stronger pony. Here, Dash’s friends simply lecture her about what the lesson us until she finally says “Oh, okay,” and just goes with it. Heck, it's not even a good moral to begin with. It's just a reversal of the Aesop of "Boast Busters," only without any sort of intelligence or thought put into it.

Second, the last scene is filled with winks at the camera, as if we’re watching one of those old messages they’d stick at the end of an 80’s cartoon. It doesn’t fit here at all, and actually makes the lesson sound more than a little patronizing for the kids.

And lastly, that’s the reason they did this? Do any of these ponies have any idea of the torture they put Rainbow Dash through? Yeah, Dash needed to get her ego under control, but the way they handled things is so very much what you don’t do in this situation. This is your friend we’re talking about here, and you’re treating her like she’s some kind of horrible monster because she was getting arrogant? And the worst part? Nobody calls them on this. They don’t apologize at all for what they did. Dash barely even gets mad at the deception. If I was in that situation, I wouldn’t want anything to do with these flankholes ever again. Sweet Celestia, this episode sucks.

There’s a fairly common belief that this episode could have been salvaged if they had showed the rest of the cast asking Dash to tone it down, only for her to brush them off or insult the lot of them. While that might have made the reasoning behind MDW a little more justified, the fact remains that these ponies just sent their friend into an existential crisis so they could teach her a lesson. CR’s much better review said that the other five should have developed their own egos after the Sugar Cube Corner scene, with each of them showing up at the end in costume and getting into a fight over who was the best MDW. While that would be amusing, it still doesn’t solve the main problem: that the ponies were willing to screw with Dash for a relatively minor lesson.

Personally, I just don’t think this episode could have been saved, barring a complete rewrite. The characters are awful, the moral is hopelessly screwed up, the entire setting gets screwed over, and worst of all, this is the episode that kickstarts the “Rainbow Dash is a bad role model” theme that pervades throughout the season. Granted, she had some bad moments in “May the Best Pet Win!” but in there she still had a good heart at the end and showed her better characteristics. Here, Dash is portrayed as the episode’s villain when her only crime was having a swelled ego.

CONCLUSION:

I hate this episode. The entire script ruins itself just to fit in some outside references and force in a lesson that doesn’t work. The writing is lazy and downright awful, relying on clichés that simply don’t fit in the FiM universe. And worst of all, it utterly massacres every single character, reducing the dynamic from “six best friends who help each other” to “five bullies who ruin the life of their ‘friend’ without remorse.” Nobody leaves here with their dignity intact.

Merriweather Williams is a controversial figure within the community, but I actually like her other episodes much more. Sure, I’ll have things to gripe about, but there will be real merit to their existence. There is nothing that proves why this episode should exist. It contributes no understanding to the characters, since these aren’t the same characters we watch every week. We learn nothing new, because outside of the dam, everything this episode added geographically will be gone by the next episode. And even if every joke worked (and there are several that don’t), it wouldn’t be worth watching when the characters we love get reduced to cheap imitations just to facilitate a lazy moral.

This is a bad episode, and that’s the end of it. Good night.

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Wow, that was…harsh. Really, really harsh. But I had to get it off my chest. I just despise this episode. But on the plus side, the next review will be MUCH happier, no matter what.