IDW's My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic #21: Manehattan Mysteries, Part 1 · 2:57am Apr 28th, 2016
In today's issue, we're going home. Forget Ponyville, forget Dimondia, forget... I dunno, Canterlot or the Crystal Empire or Cloudsdale or whatever other place the other comics go to. No, we're heading to the City that Never Sleeps...
If I can make it there, I can make it anywhere
It's up to you, Neigh York, Neigh York!
We open with Fluttershy, Rarity, Applejack, Apple Bloom and Babs Seed, arriving at Carneighie Hall all dressed up for the occasion.
Okay, that joke was too easy.
Fluttershy asks Rarity why she isn't wearing the necklace to go with her outfit, and Rarity replies that there's been a rash of jewel thefts in Manehattan and she doesn't want to become a target. This will probably not be important in any way.
They take their seats, and the unseen emcee announces,
"Fillies and gentlecolts! Carneighie Hall is proud to present the legendary magician—and former Queen of Diamondia—the Great and Powerful Trixie!"
Wait, wasn't it spelled "Dimondia" before?
And the curtain parts as Trixie makes the obligatory smokescreen entrance, with two new pegasus assistants behind her. The crowd cheers. Apple Bloom looks awed. Applejack is unamused.
Trixie goes through a pretty standard magician routine, pick-a-card, knife throwing, straitjacket escape while dangling over a pit of bears, box that makes it look like a person's body parts are in different places, you know.
Then she moves on to the real show.
"Behold: The famous Ostlerheimer Diamond! Trixie will make this diamond disappear, without touching it—while blindfolded—tied up and suspended upside-down with a burning rope—over a vat of pudding!"
Rarity is shocked. Fluttershy is frightened. Babs is alarmed. Apple Bloom is intrigued. Applejack is unamused. Seriously, you were excited about this a few pages ago, can we get some emotion other than "grumpy cat" from you? Or... are you concentrating on trying to figure out how the trick works? You're not going to be able to do it, AJ, there is literal unicorn magic involved.
Rarity and Fluttershy cling to each other, trembling, because clearly this vat-of-pudding rope escape is way more gripping than the pit-of-bears straitjacket escape earlier. The candle placed under the rope burns all the way through it, Trixie falls, and...
She reveals that, as promised, the Oscarmeyer Diamond has disappeared. But fear not! For Trixie is keeping it in the safest of places... under her hat!
...
This finally succeeds at getting a surprised reaction out of Applejack. So that's good. Apple Bloom isn't sure what's going on and Babs is clearly dismayed.
The police swarm into the theater. Deciding that this is a bad sign, AJ's party heads up onstage to check on Trixie, who is visibly trembling... with laughter. She declares that her cunning plan has succeeded!
Before she can elaborate, the chief of police joins them. He asks if Trixie is alright, then who the others are.
Three Element bearers. Saviors of Equestria—let's see, this was published in July 2014, so—no fewer than seven times over by now. And they need Trixie to vouch for them. Just how much clout does she have?
Of course, this is the same town where a literal princess can't get a taxi, so that might have something to do with it.
Stablemaker explains that Trixie is helping the police. They've been having no luck tracking down the notorious jewel thief Rough Diamond, so they asked Trixie to help, since she's... er... I don't know? Look, I maintain that Trixie is more powerful than the fandom gives her credit for, but she's not that much more powerful, and Trixie said this was her plan, so they presumably didn't approach her because they needed a stage performer.
Anyway, the plan was to use a fake Awesomepossum Diamond with a tracking chip in it for the show. With a famous diamond apparently in an unsecured location, the thief would undoubtedly strike, and the stolen diamond would lead the police right to the crook.
The theater is sealed off, so Stablemaker asks Trixie to cast the tracking spell.
The diamond turns up inside Applejack's hat, and Rarity, with her particular expertise, verifies that it is, indeed, the fake.
Now, ordinarily, this would get AJ arrested on the spot, with questioning to follow at the police station, but before everything can get sorted out, this happens.
I'm a bit concerned about the fact that all the officers have dead eyes.
The police, Trixie, and the Ponyville gang head for the office of Director Clyde Giddyap, even though this should be a police-only scene. The director explains that he's found signs of tampering on his door—scratches around the keyhole that weren't there before, though that happens to lots of doors—and they open it up.
Officer Fluffles warns everyone that the thief could have left booby traps, so she and Trotter go in by themselves. The director tells them where the safe with the diamond is, and gives them the combination. They open it slowly, carefully...
...and the room fills with smoke. When it clears, the safe stands open to reveal that the diamond is gone.
Trixie is furious at having been eluded by the thief, but Stablemaker says he put a tracking chip on the real diamond... and this time, he asks Trotter to cast the spell. And, unexpectedly...
The real diamond was under Trixie's hat. She protests that the thief must have planted it there, but Stablemaker is convinced that Trixie is the thief. What's more, he assumes that the others are all her accomplices.
This is, frankly, a ludicrous assumption. There's no way that, in a venue full of police officers, with the chief right there in the room, in a world where on-the-spot strip searches wouldn't even be considered especially degrading, the thief would keep the diamond not only on her person, but under a hat of all things. That would just be begging to be caught, even if she didn't know about the tracking chips.
Yet Stablemaker isn't interested in things like "listening to formerly trusted allies", and he tells the officers to "get 'em". At that moment, Trixie does the only thing she can do; she throws down a smoke bomb and leaps out the window into the alley below, using a rope to grab the others and tow them behind her.
...why does a theater director's office have a window facing an alley?
Applejack is indignant about being pulled along with Trixie's escape. Trixie insists she didn't steal the diamond, until Rarity points out that in the confusion, she actually did keep it in her hat. Apple Bloom, channeling herself from Super Speedy Cider Squeezy 6000, assumes this is a plot to make Applejack look like Trixie's accomplice, but AJ tells her to calm down and asks Trixie one more time whether this is some kind of trick.
Applejack then declares that if the police think Trixie is the thief, then to clear their names they've got to catch the real thief. She exchanges the fake diamond from earlier with the real one, and drops the real diamond in a trash can, saying that if the police try to track it, they'll get it back, but it will distract them from their pursuit.
Moments later, the police burst out into the alley, and Stablemaker declares that Trixie and her companions are under arrest. They run for their lives, and Babs directs them to the subway.
I like how dumbfounded the ticketing colt looks. Ponies in a hurry on a Manehattan subway? Impossible!
They get inside the train, and the doors close just in time. Before the police can do anything about it, they're speeding off toward Hooflyn, where Babs and her sister live. Babs and Trixie properly introduce themselves to each other, and the group contemplates their next move. They can't determine what jewel will be Rough Diamond's next target, but Applejack is more interested in figuring out who Rough Diamond really is.
She points out that Rough Diamond must have been close to Trixie at some point after the diamond was stolen, and Apple Bloom continues that this must mean she was in the theater, in disguise.
While, yes, that would also be true if she had not framed Trixie for it, this is still... information. Fluttershy, however, says that there were lots of ponies there, and even though they know one of them was the thief, they still don't know who. Rarity suggests that it could have been one of Trixie's assistants, but Trixie dismisses that, saying they don't have the skill.
Despite Fluttershy's pessimism, she brings up the only ponies who were close to Trixie after the fake diamond disappeared, the police and the theater director. Babs realizes that the director could have taken the real diamond out of the safe at any time. AJ has another question, then; why leave the smoke bomb in the safe?
While everyone is deliberating, Babs notices something in Trixie's mane that wasn't there in any previous panels.
"Roof slant"? "Woof giant"? "Spoof pant"?
Babs recognizes it as a piece of a map from the Manehattan Museum of Art. Fluttershy thinks Rough Diamond must have dropped it when she put the diamond under Trixie's hat, which is just... super contrived. This is made worse when Trixie and Rarity decide that it must mean that the museum is Rough Diamond's next target. And so the plan is set.
Wait a second... Rough Diamond... Rrrrrough Dddddiamond, Rrruh Dddi, RD... the thief is Rainbow Dash and this is all an elaborate method of asking Trixie on a date!
This issue is a little rocky and unpolished sometimes, like that gem of a contrivance I just talked about, or the fact that they totally glossed over how Trixie actually came to be helping the police in the first place. Those are small problems, though, and putting Trixie in a battle of wits makes for some great action.
It was interesting to me that Fluttershy was actually the quickest to defend Trixie most of the time, and never really seemed to doubt her at all. Applejack was less cool about that, but overall pretty reasonable. One thing that IDW has over the show is that the writers have more fandom-level insights—if people spotted that something in the show is messed up, like the way Trixie was treated, IDW is less likely to repeat those mistakes than the show is.
Overall, a good start to this adventure for Trixie. Let's see if it stays that way all the way through.
Good review. :) And yeah, this one's not too bad overall. A few things here and there, but I've seen worse.
Wait, unless I missed something, there's no way Trixie considers Applejack and Rarity friends, so that's weird.
I do agree that Trixie is more powerful than a lot of people give her credit for but that there's no reason for the police to seek her help. All her intro episode establishes is that she's A) arguably better at weather magic than Rainbow Dash of all people, and B) less powerful than Twilight Sparkle. Being less powerful than Twilight Sparkle at magic is like saying you're "not as good at riding bicycles as Lance Armstrong." It's essentially meaningless, which leaves us with her feats of storm summoning and tying up Rainbow with a rainbow, which seems above average for the show's unicorns.
Well, there was a lot of hugging last time they were together.