The Season 5 Finale: A Major Plot Point Was Botched and I Don't Care · 2:30pm Feb 23rd, 2016
Also titled: Why the Season 5 Finale Was Subjectively Amazing Despite Being Objectively Terrible
"No friendship is that important!!"
...said the mare who dedicated her life to stripping ponies of their cutie marks and then crippled Equestria's future many times over after her manipulatively dictatorial coping mechanism was foiled, all because a friend of hers moved away when she was a filly.
Yes, yes, perhaps the single most important plot point for the finale — the reason the most destructive, most diabolical, and most magically powerful villain in the show so far was so evil — was immensely disappointing… for me at least. I can't speak for everyone.
And yes, the whole instant-repentance, instant-forgiveness, suddenly-friendship thing was a tad rushed. But then again, episodes are short. They only have 44 minutes total to tell the story.
And yet, despite these two things, the season 5 finale still manages to be one(two?) of my favorite episodes in the entire series.
Why? Well...
First and foremost, because those two issues with the storyline were a mere 8 minutes of the allotted 44. These issues were the least focused on parts of the story. Not only that, but despite the fact that the core ideas were weak, the execution was actually fantastically done and the presentation really quite enjoyable.
Why is this important? Well, to make my point, of course! ;P
Sometimes, we measure the quality or enjoyability of something by the things we feel they hinge on, instead of by how much of the content presented was actually really enjoyable.
If we look at all the things that happened in the episodes, there hasn't been a single other plot line in the entire series that has made me actually made me frustrated and perhaps angry with the villain. She performed extremely dangerous and world changing magic, predicted Twilight's (almost) every move and was able to even use Twilight's own tools against her.
She solves Fluttershy's bully problem. What's Twilight going to do? Tell the bullies to bully Fluttershy? Advocate bullying in the name of… friendship? Then Starlight gives a small speech about her cultist ideals in a way that makes it sound like it's about friendship. What's Twilight going to say? That friendship is wrong? What could she do?
Twilight couldn't do squat! That's what!
She bests Twilight — the element of magic; the mare whose special talent is magic and has studied magic under the (debatably) most powerful magical being in Equestria pretty much her entire life — Starlight bests her in every magic duel.
At one point she got Twilight to shoot Rainbow Dash with potentially deadly magic, and then rubbed it in her face with a clap and a smile.
She made Twilight look like a fool in every single one of their encounters at that pivotal point in time (except the last one of course, 'cause da good guys gotta win).
If it weren't for the fact that this was a "kids" show that had to have a happy and not super dark ending, Starlight would have ended Equestria and consequently the lives of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of ponies and other creatures. If the sociopathic master of time and space didn't suddenly open her heart at just-the-right time to the suddenly just-the-right words of Twilight Sparkle — if the deus that writes the machina could let it run the way it would without them — then this would have been a much darker (and perhaps much more intense and compelling) episode indeed.
Of all the villains, Starlight was the most dangerous, manipulative, and powerful.
Nightmare Moon? It's nighttime. Whoop. Discord? Silly time. Chrysalis? She would have… taken love?… by convincing ponies to voluntarily love her? Sombrero would have had the Crystal empire at most. And Tirek… just wonton destruction and power. All of them stopped by magic.
But Starlight? Oh, no. Magic couldn't do anything to stop her. The only thing that stopped her was that one moment of perfect star alignment on a blue moon where she was convinced to stop.
All of this not to mention the super cool alternate universes (alternate mane 6) we got to see. BA Dash (twice), epic war scenes, WWII in pony form, BA Zecora, more battle scenes, the death of a timber wolf, more NMM!, and so on and so forth.
There were just so many moments where I was engrossed in the newness and epicness of the moment, of those alternate universes. So many possibilities, so many questions, so many ideas, communicated in so little time and so effectively.
I loved it! I basked in it! I had to pause and rewind a few times just to make sure I absorbed every detail of the universes with so much potential, past, present, and future.
All of these things were utterly euphoric for someone like me.
Last but not least, that beautiful closing scene.
Just beotifo.
In conclusion, my feelings regarding the season 5 finale are immensely positive. It was compelling and awesome in a lot of different ways. Sure, there was that one tiny annoying thing that had to be done because time and "kids show", but otherwise, I absolutely loved it.
