Once again, the wheel is ready, the burnt sacrifice has been made to the RNG, and we are ready for another go!

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…And it’s good ol’ 27! Fillies and gentlecolts, may I present to you, “Lesson Zero.”

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TECHNICAL SPECS:

Season: 2
Episode: 3
Written By: Meghan McCarthy
First Aired: October 15, 2011

SUMMARY:

It’s another fine morning in Ponyville, and Twilight Sparkle and Spike are out attending to her miles-long list of tasks. After massacring some cupcakes in order to make sure all her friends get the same amount of frosting at a picnic later in the day, the two return home, where Spike tells Twilight that he’s glad they didn’t have to send a letter to Princess Celestia this week. Unfortunately, this sends Twilight into a tailspin of panic and terror; today’s the day the letter is supposed to be due, and without it she’ll be TARDY! Spike tries to reassure her that Celestia won’t mind if she misses one little deadline, but Twilight is so certain that her mentor will send her back to Magic Kindergarten for failing that she trots off to find a friendship problem.

Unfortunately, none of her friends have any problems to solve. Rarity is throwing a hissy fit over a lost ribbon, but finds it as soon as Twilight offers to help. Rainbow is bashing one of Applejack’s barns, but when Twilight intervenes with psychiatry, Applejack reveals that Dash was just busting the barn down so she could set up a new one. This news is followed by a Sonic Rainnuke, blowing up the barn and burying Twilight under the debris. And finally, she goes to Fluttershy...only to find her beating the crap out of – and seemingly killing – a bear. Twilight, now completely disheveled from her stress, leaves just before Fluttershy can get to work on the rest of the bear’s massage.

Twilight retires to a park bench, where she had a heated argument with herself in a puddle, followed by a psychotic episode where she imagines three laughing fillies are actually nightmarish monsters pointing and laughing at her. Spike finally snaps her out of it and suggests that she just go to the picnic and relax. The rest of her friends are already there, with Rarity on her fainting couch and Pinkie’s balloons floating the basket away. When Twilight arrives, all five are completely shocked by just how bad she’s gotten. She tells him her plight, but to her horror they just laugh the problem off like it’s nothing and tell her to sit down and relax. Frustrated, Twilight teleports back to the library.

Now that her little train of logic has crashed into the ravine, Twilight decides to make a friendship problem. She takes her old doll, Smarty Pants, and telefrags the Crusaders’ beach ball so she can use it to create a sharing problem. Problem is, her doll is pretty ratty and beat-up, so the three actually start fighting over who has to play with it. In desperation, Twilight uses the “Want-It, Need-It” spell to make the three fall in love with Smarty Pants. The spell backfires, though, when the girls prove to be too tough to get the doll back from, and when a wandering Big Macintosh arrives to intervene, he is affected by the spell too. And in his haste to escape the CMC, he ends up showing the doll to almost the entire town, and Twilight can’t remove the spell without a clear, continuous shot.

By the time she’s reached her friends, all of Ponyville is at war with each other. Even worse, it’s sundown…and Celestia has just appeared overhead, glowing and bellowing with anger at Twilight’s actions. She instantly reverses the spell, causing the town to just sheepishly walk…except for Big Macintosh, who happily takes Smarty Pants and flees. With the damage reversed, Celestia orders Twilight back to the library for further scolding before flying there herself. Twilight tearfully says goodbye to the girls and tells them to visit her in Magic Kindergarten before leaving…which finally clues the five in to what’s going on.

Back at the library, Twilight explains that the only reason she did all this was so she could send the letter and not be a bad student. Celestia starts to reassure her, but is interrupted when Twilight’s friends barge in and tell her it’s their fault for not listening. With this new input, Celestia decides to forego Twilight’s punishment in exchange for all six now sending letters, but only when they actually have something to report. Before she leaves, however, Celestia tells Twilight that Spike was the one who told her what was going on, and that he is indeed a loyal friend. I guess being the new Rainbow Dash is rubbing off on him.

The episode ends with two morals. First, you should always take your friends’ problems seriously, even if it doesn’t sound like a big issue to you. Second, you shouldn’t allow your small problems to turn into something that endangers others. Spike tries to write in that he didn’t need to learn a lesson, but is shot down, and the episode ends with everypony laughing at his expense.

REVIEW:

This is actually the first proper Season Two episode (“Return of Harmony” was actually produced and finished during Season One), and as such “Lesson Zero” marks a significant change in the series. Most importantly, Twilight’s role as the Aesop delivery service is brought to a dramatic end, instead opening it up to the rest of the cast. In addition, the show’s focus has shifted away from straight exploration and discovery to a greater emphasis on the slice-of-life aspects of the series. The animation has been bumped up considerably, with the characters becoming a lot more expressive and, well, animated in their movements, as well as some angles and scenes that wouldn’t have worked with the first season’s budget

Unfortunately, this is also where Twilight’s Flanderization kicks in. The very first scene has her making a checklist of the things she’ll need to make a checklist of the things she’ll need to do by the end of the day. First item on that list: “Create a checklist of things I have to do by the end of the day.” The scroll rolls itself is about ten or fifteen feet long, and poor Spike has to keep track of the whole thing. The joke is funny, but it comes at expense of Twilight’s character from the first season. While she did keep an overly-specific schedule in “Winter Wrap-Up,” here it’s evolved into full-on OCD.

Next is the scene at Sugar Cube Corner. While mostly filler, it does add a few interesting wrinkles and builds onto some bits of Twilight’s character. Her obsession with how much frosting is on each cupcake is mostly her transforming into Adrian Monk, but after reviewing “Boast Busters” yesterday, it actually seems to strike me that she’s still afraid of losing her friends. And considering what happened in “Return of Harmony,” those old fears may be resurfacing. Still, the scene’s mostly there for comedy, plus to introduce us to Twilight’s “insane” face.

And now we get to the meat of the episode: Twilight obsessing over the letter. Let’s try following Twilight’s derailed train of logic, shall we? She is the student of Princess Celesta, the most powerful pony in all of Equestria. Her homework assignment is to send a letter about friendship to Celestia every week. If she doesn’t send that letter, she’ll be tardy. But because she’s Celestia’s student, she’ll be personally failing her ruler. Celestia will never forgive the insult, and will punish Twilight by sending her to Magic Kindergarten.

Naturally, none of this is logical reasoning, and even Spike calls her on this little nutcase exhibition. However, it’s not entirely without precedent. In the pilot, Twilight was devastated when Celestia seemingly laughed off her worries about Nightmare Moon. In “Swarm of the Century,” she drove herself crazy trying to set up for Princess Celestia’s visit, and snapped completely once the Parasprites got out of control. And in “A Bird in the Hoof,” she’s a nervous wreck throughout the party, and when Fluttershy kidnaps Philomena, she imagines that Celestia will banish her and then put in her in a dungeon in the place that she banishes her to. Here, though, it starts getting taken to very unsettling levels, which we’ll see soon.

Rarity’s scene pretty much sets up her entire character for the episode: she cries because she can’t find a specific ribbon, thrashes her shop looking for it, says a forced catchphrase, and finally levitates over a fainting couch so she can throw her tantrum in comfort. And then an instant later, she’s back to normal. It’s funny (although I think when she summoned the couch at the picnic is better), but again, it feels like it’s taking character traits a tad too far for the sake of comedy.

The scene with Rainbow Dash and Applejack is probably my favorite of these three. Dash taking enjoyment out of smashing an old barn is funny on its own, but when Twilight becomes starry-eyed over Dash hating AJ’s guts (and thus giving her a problem to solve), I start laughing my butt off for a good minute or two. I also loved RD’s “Huh?” expression when Twilight telekinetically grabs her tail, and of course, the psychiatrist scene is amusing. (Come on, you all know you want to rub Dash’s tummy there.) The Sonic Rainnuke…well, it’s not really upsetting to me, but I can see why people don’t like it. Still, it could just be Dash getting better at pulling the trick off now that she remembers how.

And then we have Fluttershy. This scene was just shocking the first time I saw it, and for a moment felt like complete character defilement. And then we get to the punchline…and I love it. I’m not sure if I liked Twilight immediately summing up Fluttershy as being weak and helpless enough to always need help, but I did like her stunned reaction to the Pegasus seemingly growing a spine on the worst possible day. (I also liked how she summed up every Fluttershy episode as her having some fear she has to get over. It’s already a meta episode, so just roll with it.)

The scene in the park, though, is when this episode changes from laughable comedy to straight-up Nightmare Fuel. Twilight’s stress has begun to erode to sanity, to the point where she actually hold an argument with her reflection in a water puddle. Her mane is frizzled, her eyes are twitching, and now she’s hallucinating and talking to herself. And then she sees three fillies laughing together…which quickly transforms into three silhouettes pointing and laughing at her in a dead, orange world. When I first saw this, I interpreted this as her being the subject of bullying as a filly, which then led to her becoming a socially-withdrawn bookworm. I did not like that, since it’s such a stock idea that implies that only people with tragedy in their backgrounds become loners. However, this idea has kind of gone on the wayside since “A Canterlot Wedding,” which reinforced the idea that Twilight always preferred reading and not having friends her own age.

We also get some more development for Spike here. Earlier on, he was pretty much being his usual snarky self, mocking Twilight’s fears and obsession with lists. But when he sees her like this, he shifts to being genuinely worried about Twilight’s mental well-being and encourages her to just go to the picnic and relax. And thus we get to the crux of the entire third act. Twilight tells her friends about the report, and they laugh off their obviously disheveled best friend’s worries as being no big deal. Which, as it turns out, it is. But Twilight’s reaction is like they had just told her that the universe exploding wasn’t a big deal; she gasps in horror, telespams the area, screams about being tardy, and says her entire life depends on the letter. And again, everypony laughs at her, which finally causes her to snap and just leave. And rather than, you know, look for her and see if she’s all right, her oh-so-wonderful friends decide to leave her be. You know, there’s a time when that’s appropriate, and then there’s a time when your friend is a psychotic wreck and needs help. This is the latter.

And now we delve into the world of sheer horror. Twilight’s ears are twitching, her mane is wrecked almost beyond repair, her teeth are bared, and her voice is suffering a wide range of inflections as she speaks. But with no friendship problems to solve, she sets out to make a friendship problem. Oh, and she apparently impales a bird. (Actually, I’m more inclined to say that the bird was startled and the animators didn’t bother to waste time and resources on what amounted to a background prop for that scene. If Spider-Man isn’t allowed to land on pigeons, I highly doubt My Little Pony would advocate bird murder.)

I like this little bit with the CMC playing. Again, it shows them just having fun as kids, rather than focusing everything on Cutie Marks. (I’ll get into that more once we get “Cutie Pox” or “Ponyville Confidential.”) And then Twilight teleports into the beach ball, causing it to expand until it bursts. And then she says one of the most iconic lines of the episode:

This is where I draw the line with this episode, and indeed psycho Twilight in general. Up to this point, her madness was humorous, scary, and rather sad. But now things have really gone too far. We’re entering “Ren and Stimpy” territory here. I like Sweetie Belle’s joke about the mane, as well as the three fighting so they won’t have to play with the ratty old doll, but then Twilight uses the “Want-It Need-It” spell and everything goes to Tartarus in a hoofbasket.

And you know what the worst part is? Twilight is only like this one other time, in “It’s About Time,” and even then her concerns are a lot more valid and lead to some positive outcomes. (No, “A Canterlot Wedding” does not count. There’s a big difference between what she does here and just being angry that nopony else notices that evil!Cadance is evil.) Every other time she appears in the series, she’s hardly changed from how she was in the first season. Compare that to someone like Pinkie Pie, who was completely altered (except for, ironically, two of her own episodes), and you can see my problem here. I’m not going to jump up and say that this shouldn’t be on a kids show (since that would be patronizing to future generations), but there needs to be a point where someone says, “Hey, do you think we should make the main character of our highly-successful series less of an evil monster?”

BTW, Faust approved of this episode’s script, so don’t go jumping down the staff’s throat by saying they’re violating Faust’s vision when she said it was okay.

Naturally, the spell goes out of control, and we get some amusing bits with Big Macintosh kicking flank and taking names. And strangely enough, the picnic is still going, despite it being several hours since Twilight left and almost nightfall. Even worse, her friends still don’t get why this letter is so bloody important…until Celestia appears.

Princess Celestia has a tendency to be…well, not cast in the most powerful light in the series. In the first season, she basically did nothing while Nightmare Moon tried to kill her student and her friends, and then just stood around and looked important whenever she appeared afterwards. And in the second season premiere, she was rendered completely ineffectual by Discord, and had to rely on the Mane 6 to save the day. But here? She shows up out of nowhere, the light from her body radiating with sheer power. She fixes the destruction Twilight caused without so much as a second’s glance; keep in mind that the reason Twilight couldn’t stop the spell was because she couldn’t get a clear shot for long enough. And then she lands right in front of Twilight, orders her back to the library, and flies off to wait.

This is the first time we get the idea that Celestia really is insanely powerful and not somepony to trifle with. And when combined with Twilight’s teary-eyed farewell, the other five finally realize that yeah, missing an assignment when your teacher’s practically a god is a big deal.

Fortunately, by the time we cut back to the library, things have begun to cool down. Twilight’s shock that the whole exercise was meaningless is both heartwarming and sad, and I loved Celestia telling her that she already knows she’s a wonderful student, even if she doesn’t get a letter every week. I also liked Spike’s worried expression as he watches from behind the bookshelves, especially when you factor in that he’s the one who sent for Celestia in the first place. It makes you wonder if he’s second-guessing that decision on some level.

And then the rest of the Mane 6 get there, and we finally get our happy ending. They acknowledge that they really should have been there for Twilight, rather than just laugh off her problems as not being anything to worry about. I adore the little nuzzle Pinkie gives Twilight; it’s just a brief background moment, but it’s incredibly heartwarming and makes me hate what they did to her this season even more. And Celestia’s face when she hears all this and then declares that all six will now send her friendship reports seems to imply that she’s glad an alternative solution came in. Now the burden is no longer Twilight’s alone to bear, but belongs to everypony. Even more importantly, she adds that they don’t have to send a letter every week, but only when there’s something to report. This eliminates what was causing the stress in the first place, thereby preventing it from ever happening again…well, except for time travel, but that’s designed to make anypony with intelligence cry.

The moral is a twofer, and I liked both. The first lesson (“Take your friend’s problems seriously”) ties into the first two acts, where Spike and the Mane 6 weren’t taking the reports as seriously as Twilight. And the second (“Don’t let a small problem become a big one”) is very much indicative of how things spiraled out of control for Twilight in the first place. And Spike’s attempt at propping up his own ego was also amusing.

CONCLUSION:

This is the most meta episode of the series yet. The entire story feels like the writers trying to find ways to fit in another moral, only to realize they can’t do it with Twilight alone anymore and need to expand. Throw in the removal of the E/I rating, and you have the production team changing things around to fit a wider range of episodes, many of which they couldn’t have done under the old system. At the same time, though, I think they let their newfound freedom get to their heads and just went crazy for the sake of crazy. I love the jokes, the ending, and the animation in this episode…but I hate what they did to Twilight just to facilitate the plot.

All in all, this episode is very divisive; some fans love it for the humor and character development, while others hate it for retooling the series and making Twilight out to be a monster. Me? I’m more on the “love it” side, even with my disgust at what they did to Twilight here. Unlike something like “Mare-Do-Well” and “Over a Barrel,” there was plenty to love here, with tons of great jokes, excellent animation, and a beautiful ending. I can see why others would wish death upon these thirty minutes, but for me, it works.

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Well, these comments will be an interesting bunch. I’ll see you guys in a few so you can scream at me.