Well, it’s time for another episode! Let’s see what fate has lined up…

…

And it’s #31, “May the Best Pet Win!”

---

TECHNICAL SPECS:

Season: 2
Episode: 7
Written By: Charlotte Fullerton
First Aired: November 19, 2011

SUMMARY:

It’s another typical happy day, and Rainbow Dash is flying around and racing Owlowiscious…until the owl suddenly transforms into a horrid monster and awakens her from her dream. In reality, she was sleeping on a tree branch in the same park where the rest of the Mane 6 have their usual Pony Pet-Playdate, an event that Rainbow Dash has never been invited to because she doesn’t have a pet. At first she writes this off, but after listening to them all have fun for a few seconds she decides that she should have a pet of her own. This news causes Fluttershy to orgasm with joy, and she excitedly carries her off to her cottage to look over all the animals.

During the trip, Rainbow Dash outlines her qualifications for a pet: speed, agility, guts, style, coolness, awesomeness and radicalness. Above all else, though, it has to be able to fly. Her search yields several possibilities, so to narrow it down she decides to hold a contest for all interested animals to participate in, without whoever winning becoming her pet. Unfortunately, she’s attracted the attention of a [strike]tutle[/strike] tortoise, and at Fluttershy’s insistence, Dash reluctantly allows him to compete.

Over the course of the contests, the various competitors get gradually weeded out, until only a falcon, an owl, a bat, and an eagle remain. Unfortunately for the tortoise, he scores last in every event, and Dash finally tries to tell him to leave. Nonetheless, he joins in on the last event: a race through Ghastly Gorge, a death course complete with thorns, dark passages, and Quarray Eels. The rules are that since Dash will (obviously) beat them all, whoever crosses the finish line with her wins the right to be her pet. The pets desperately try to keep up to Dash, who sprints off ahead to taunt them some more. Unfortunately for her, she ends up crashing into the side, causing a rockslide that pins her wing. The racers are too focused on winning to notice her, leaving her to die a slow, lingering death…or until her friends save her, whatever comes first.

Just as she’s given up all hope, the tortoise comes along and starts digging under the rock to lever his head down there. Meanwhile, the Mane 6 are at the finish line, and finally notice what’s happened when everyone but Dash shows up. Fortunately, the Pegasus soon turns up, riding on the back of the tortoise (who’s also skilled in first aid, apparently). The falcon, who won the contest, is ready to be declared her pet, but since the tortoise crossed the line with her (and stayed behind to help her), she gives the right to him. The falcon, for his part, accepts defeat and walks away, while Rainbow Dash gets ready for her first Pony-Pet Play Date with her new pet, Tank. (After getting him hooked up with a propeller, of course.)

REVIEW:

“May the Best Pet Win!” got a lot of backlash when the synopsis was released. This was still early in Season Two, and while most of the early episodes were pretty good, there was still a pretty sizeable fear over Faust leaving and just how much product placement Hasbro wanted to shove into the show without Saint Lauren to stop them. Nevertheless, one of the show’s biggest strengths is its ability to promote the merchandise while also creating interesting stories and characters. The problem with this episode, though, does not lie in its merchandising roots, but rather in just how anemic the story is here. This is a very simple episode overall, which is both a strength and weakness.

The opening dream is a nice little bit of surrealism, coupled with the need to reintroduce the pets after a long absence. Even in her dreams, Dash is obsessed with flying, and her reaction to Owlowiscious mutating into a bunny-alligator hybrid with a cat version of that tongue from Alien is a nice, freaky touch. And like all dreams, it ends in crushing disappointment as she falls to her death, only to wake up on the tree branch. (I do have to say, though, that a tree branch doesn’t seem to be the most comfortable place for a nap. Hopefully Dash doesn’t turn in her sleep…)

When I first heard the words “Pony-Pet Play Date” back when the Hub released the first trailer clips for this episode, I cringed. It felt like such a forced, cheesy term that it started to sour my mood for the episode pretty quickly. It didn’t help that said clip also included Pinkie being a jerk again, putting together why everypony didn’t invite Rainbow in the rudest, most insensitively direct way possible. (It didn’t help that Applejack dismissed her immediately afterwards so they could return to playing with their animal companions.) Still, I liked Pinkie nodding Fluttershy’s head (and said head continuing to bob afterwards), and I loved Gummy sticking to the side of Pinkie’s skull like a parasite. This is further proof that Gummy is the best pet in the entire series.

And then there’s Fluttershy’s reaction to Dash suddenly suggesting that she wants a pet. A few people I’ve found online have complained that her reacting this way was out of character, but I honestly don’t see it. Animals are her passion, her special talent is being able to communicate with them on a higher level, and thus it only makes sense that she’d practically squee when one of her best friends brings up the idea of having one of their own. I also loved her dragging Dash along the ground (with Angel riding her tail) until Dash has to flap her own wings to float a little higher.

This leads us to the first song of Season Two, and…it’s not very good. The biggest problem is that it’s not really a song; the characters are simply talking over the music, and while the lyrics rhyme, there’s no rhythm to their words. It doesn’t help that the melody itself is rather dull and uninspired. All that together makes this my least favorite song of the second season, and a rather dark blemish on the otherwise excellent musical numbers we got throughout these twenty-six episodes. While some of the animals make up a nice in-joke (most of them, like the cat and squirrel, were packaged with a Rainbow Dash figure at some point), for the most part it’s just Fluttershy misinterpreting Dash’s intentions until she flat-out tells her what she wants. About the only thing that really matters here is that Dash wants a pet that can fly and keep up with her, while a tortoise keeps popping up as an obvious bit of foreshadowing. (I do like the little sunglasses it pulls out of its shell, though.) Oh, and Derpy’s in the chicken coop for some reason.

This leads us into the contest, which pretty much swallows up the entire second act. The lineup of contestants is pretty enjoyable, and I like how the ladybug backed out almost immediately. We again see Dash in her drill sergeant/coach role, which I do like. One bit that might have been done away with, though, was Applejack and Twilight pretty much spoiling the moral and ending; Winona licking Twilight’s face was cute.

And then we get the tortoise. The turtle/tortoise joke is okay, but otherwise this helps to make the episode even more predictable. Right from the song, it’s obvious who the pet is going to be. (It’s also obvious if you know the toys, since the only one of these animals Dash ever had in the toyline was the tortoise.) Contrary to popular belief, however, I have no qualms with Dash’s attitude. She said she wanted a pet that could fly, and a tortoise has no way to keep up. It doesn’t meet any of her qualifications, and has no chance of winning. Still, she gives in and allows him the chance, if only to keep Fluttershy happy.

Dash outlining the contest is a generally impressive scene…except for one very obvious, very distracting error. Watch and see if you can find it:

If you didn’t catch it, here’s the answer. When Dash is returning after showing agility, she passes behind the duck. And when she takes off, the same thing happens. While the show has always had animation flubs such as manes disappearing, Cutie Marks vanishing, or characters teleporting between shots, this one stands out because of how long it’s on the screen, as well as how it completely disrupts the mood the scene is trying to set. Still, it ends on a funny little bit:

The actual contest itself is basically a series of little scenes, with Dash repeating the same verbal gag for each one. We also see Tank failing miserably every time, while Dash puts him down for wasting her time. I can’t say I approve, but it’s in her character, so I can’t really complaint about that. One thing I do find interesting, though, is that it bucks the usual cartoon trend when it comes to the winners. Usually in these things, the ones who are destined to be in the final lineup are the only ones to win the initial events. Here, we have two animals win one of the contests, but fail to make it to the finals; the hummingbird wins agility, and the monarch butterfly pulls off a rather inventive trick to get Opal’s favorite toy and prove its guts. (I also loved Tank here; he actually had a good idea to drop the cage on Opal, but was too slow to pull it off. It also foreshadows his head and neck strength.)

The actual events are pretty standard, with only two really standing out for me. The first is style, especially given the kind of pony Rainbow Dash was in G3. (Think Rarity, only radically simplified and stripped of any sort of personality.) I liked some of the visual motifs here, like the sweater and library for the owl and the eagle playing curling with her. And lastly, we have the radicalness competition, which none of the animals win. I liked the wasp pulling off some pretty complex shadow puppets, and of course, the bat doing something awesome (but losing because it’s the wrong contest) was a nice gag. Still, the important part here is the end, where the tortoise fails again and Dash flat-out tells him to go home.

The setup for the Ghastly Gorge race is also pretty funny, with Dash pausing for dramatic effect and flying out of the background to offer the eagle a handkerchief. The actual race is the visual and auditory highlight of the episode, with “Ride of the Valkyries” blaring in the background while the animals are all maimed, twisted, beaten, and otherwise slammed around. This also ties into the earlier conversation between AJ and Twi, where Dash was placing all her emphasis on a cool pet rather than one that loved her.

And then we get to Dash getting pinned in the rockslide. This part of the episode is….not exactly the most severe danger out there. Her friends find out about the rockslide soon after, and would have been able to help her. She really wasn’t in any mortal danger, and her freak out was more an overreaction than anything else. Still, Dash starting to cry after being abandoned was fairly heartbreaking, and the tortoise finally coming to the rescue was a predictable, but still good, ending to the story. The team moving the finish line to speed up their return was also cute, as was Fluttershy getting in on the turtle/tortoise running gag.

The ending, of course, is pretty standard. The falcon is the clear winner, and is all proud of being a pet, but Dash pulls the rug out from under it by repeating her exact words and choosing the tortoise (who she names “Tank”). The falcon leaves gracefully, even if you can tell it’s clearly not happy about what happened. The poor thing went through hell, and gets turned down at the last minute because the pony running the contest changed her mind and exploited a loophole. The actual moral is just okay, although I like the bit where he succeeds in taking Opal’s toy. And Tank’s flying contraption at the end was hilariously awesome.

CONCLUSION:

The biggest thing holding this episode back is just how predictable the ending is. We know from the first act that the tortoise will win, and the episode does little to deviate from that path. It also doesn’t help that much of the story is spent on the various contests, which doesn’t exactly make this an episode you watch for any sort of exciting narrative. Still, there are some great visuals here, some of the jokes work, and the contests have some creativity to them. In the end, it all pretty much averages out.

---

And that’s another episode down. Let’s see what’s next…

…

Well, this is gonna be a long one. See you then!