Time to roll the bones and find us another episode to review!

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And it’s #42, “A Friend in Deed.”

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TECHNICAL SPECS:

Season: 2
Episode: 18
Written By: Amy Keating Rogers
First Aired: February 18, 2012

SUMMARY:

It’s another typical day for Pinkie Pie. She wakes up in the morning, throws on a garish exercise outfit from the neighties, and does her morning stretches while entertaining Pound and Pumpkin. She then wanders around the town, making friendly conversation with everypony she meets, knowing exactly everything about everypony down to their birthdays so she can make them all smile. She even stops to wish a donkey, Matilda, a very premature happy birthday. All of this leads to a massive song where she expresses her desire to make everypony happy…until she runs into Eeyore’s second cousin and town newcomer, Cranky Doodle Donkey. Despite his grumpiness, Pinkie still tries to make friends with him, but ends up angering him so much that he just walks past without becoming her friend. This travesty shall not stand!

Pinkie ambushes Cranky again later on, and despite his requests that she leave him alone, she decides to jump into his wagon and start messing with his stuff. Once that fails to make him her friend, she rolls out her literal Welcome Wagon, a machine that plays an annoying little ditty before firing confetti and giving Ponyville’s new resident a cake. Unfortunately, Pinkie loaded the machine wrong, and the confetti bursts out and blows off Cranky’s wig, while the cake simply splatters over the both of them. And then Pinkie decides to “help” by loudly announcing to the ENTIRE TOWN that Cranky is bald. Humiliated, Cranky starts to leave, but Pinkie pushes him to the spa, where his old coat is fixed up. She even gives him a new, better toupee. He actually seems appreciative of this, but it still doesn’t make him Pinkie’s friend.

Undeterred, the pony follows him to his house, where she once again goes through his stuff, including an old scrapbook. One of the entries, however, catches her eye, but when she turns to ask Cranky about it, a loose plank shoots up under her, causing a chain reaction that ends with a lantern falling onto the book and destroying it. This is the final straw, and Cranky throws Pinkie out of his house, telling her that he’ll never be her friend.

A distraught Pinkie goes to Twilight’s library (where Dash is reading one of the Daring-Do books) for sympathy, but both Twilight and Dash tell her to just give Cranky his space. A sad Pinkie agrees…but not before he accepts her apology. When she returns to his house, Cranky runs in terror, but no matter where he goes, Pinkie is already there to apologize. When he finally goes back to his house and barricades the door, Pinkie tries to get in again, but he tells her to leave because she destroyed the one thing he had to remember her by. This is the final clue Pinkie needed to put the pieces together.

A short while later, Pinkie returns. She says that she knows Cranky doesn’t want to be her friend, but she still wants him to meet someone. The donkey tells her to leave, but opens the door when he hears Matilda’s voice. The pony explains that she saw some memorabilia from the Grand Galloping Gala in the scrapbook, and remembered seeing something similar belonging to Matilda before. The two donkeys tell the tale of how they met at the Gala and planned to meet again the next day, but a misplaced note caused Cranky to think he missed her. So he set out wandering Equestria for years, searching for her, but when he found nothing, he decided to live out his last few years in Ponyville.

Cranky is so happy about meeting his true love after such a long time that he forgives Pinkie and becomes her friend. She’s natural excited, but when the two ask for some alone time, she finally gives it to them, all while narrating the episode’s moral that some ponies are not as outgoing as her, but that doesn’t mean she can’t be friends with them.

REVIEW:

Okay, let’s get this out of the way. I have never exactly been subtle with my opinion of this episode. I rated it as one of my least favorite episodes of Season Two, I pointed it out as one of the reasons I disliked Season Two Pinkie Pie, and I have made it clear that I wasn’t looking forward to reviewing it. At the same time, however, I know that a lot of the people who bother to read these pointless diatribes are fans of this episode, or just think I’m overstating the negative and that it isn’t as bad as I say it is. So keep in mind that this is just my opinion, and please read through before you write essay-length posts pointing out how everything’s supposed to be funny and I shouldn’t find Pinkie’s antics here aggravating.

The prologue is nice for a couple of reasons. First, Pinkie dressing up like something from a long-abandoned step aerobics tape is funny by itself, as are the various ways she mugs the camera. And then we get the reveal that she’s in the nursery, trying to entertain an uninterested Pound and Pumpkin Cake. This is the first continuity nod in the episode, and I’m glad that the production team seems more committed to making references to older episodes to tie everything together better. Of course, the babies are babies, and thus are entertained only by the suffering of others, so Pinkie only succeeds when she sits on some jacks (WHY ARE THESE IN A ROOM WITH BABIES?!), goes flying into the ceiling fan, and finally crashes into the corner and gets pelted by plush toys. This is pretty much the humor we’re going for this episode, so get used to it.

The first act is also pretty solid, which is why what happens in the rest of the episode pisses me off. Pinkie’s character is expanded upon considerably here, and in a good way. Previous episodes have said that she knows everypony in Ponyville, and this one shows just how much she does know. She knows that a cow wants cookies to go with her milk (even though grown cows don’t drink their own milk), and compliments Roseluck on her flowers. She also knows everypony’s birthdays, down to exactly how many days there are left to go. And all of this is topped off with one of the best songs in the series:

I have only one complaint about the song: its length. At over three minutes, it swallows up a considerable amount of episode time to show things we already know about Pinkie. However, it also exemplifies everything that is good about her. She wants to make everypony happy, and is willing to go the extra mile to do so. She’ll even defy the laws of physics and make a jump rope swing itself if that’s what it takes! The animation here is truly stellar as well, especially when Pinkie pulls a version of herself out of the darkness. Given her backstory, this is both heartwarmingly beautiful and absolutely tragic. And that ending is epic.

Oh, and just before the song, we’re introduced to Matilda. I’ll save my discussion on her for later.

The song ends with Pinkie running right into Cranky Doodle Donkey. And I was actually pleasantly surprised the first time I saw him. Rather than make him a generic jerk that rejects Pinkie’s friendship offer out of spite, he’s actually a grumpy old guy who wants some peace and quiet, but alas, he has chosen exactly the wrong place for such a lifestyle. He isn’t rude or a jerk to Pinkie; he just wants her to leave him alone, and only snaps towards the end when she crosses one line too many. And for her part, Pinkie isn’t exactly annoying here, either. She’s still the pony I loved back in the first season, being overly cheerful and friendly and wanting only to be friends.

Of course, Crank rejects her, and we get one of the nicest surprised of the episode: a stop-motion felt segment reflecting Pinkie’s mind. Besides the unusual animation, it lampshades her very simple thought process for how making friends works, and ends with her pulling a felt check mark out of nowhere. Unfortunately, everything after this point is where the episode starts falling apart for me.

Pinkie ambushes Cranky again, only this time she starts going through his stuff. The donkey is rightfully upset at this, as well as fearful as Pinkie handles all of the highly fragile items in his wagon with all the grace of a three-year-old. The problem here isn’t so much that Pinkie went into the wagon – I could definitely see her doing something like that – but rather that she kept going even after he asked her to stop. To put it frankly, she tows a very fine line this episode, and I find her antics here more enraging than amusing. That may not have been their intention when making the episode, but unfortunately, I can only draw conclusions based on what I see and feel, and I don’t care much for her actions here.

The Welcome Wagon, however, is something that makes perfect sense. The song is infuriatingly catchy, like most Pinkie Pie songs, and it feels obvious that Pinkie would automate the welcome process, if only to make it easier to welcome multiple ponies at once. I even liked the cake splattering on them and the confetti blowing the toupee off Cranky’s head. And I could even take her smashing the toupee like a spider; after all, it was a pretty poor-quality hairpiece, and she makes up for it a bit later.

But the next part is where I start getting angry. Pinkie loudly announces to all of Ponyville that Cranky is really, really bald, over and over and over again. This is reaching “You Gotta Share” levels of stupidity. Not only is this scene a pain to watch, but it showcases my major gripe with Pinkie this entire season. She has always been shown to be a little insensitive at times, and perhaps a bit out of it, and I would have tolerated this episode better if it was an isolated incident. But no, this entire season has been filled with Pinkie behaving like a rabid psychopath. She turns the entire town against Luna in “Luna Eclipsed.” She puts words in her friends’ mouths in “May the Best Pet Win!” She buys dozens of mugs of cider and then rubs it into Dash’s face when she doesn’t get any in “SSCS6K.” In fact, the only times that she’s been likeable at all were, ironically, when she was starring in an episode, like in “Baby Cakes” and “MMMMystery on the Friendship Express.” At least in those two she was funny. This…isn’t. At all.

Cranky, naturally, decides he’s had enough and tries to leave, but is stopped when Pinkie finally stops being a fl- screw it, an asshole. The spa scene is a fairly nice bit, and I really like Pinkie giving him the new toupee at the end. All these moments, though, just heighten my frustration with the rest of the episode. The moments where Pinkie’s acting decent are so few and far between, and the bits of her being a jackass are so massively disproportional to her character, that it makes watching this a slog.

The scene at Cranky’s house is mostly Pinkie continuing her usual trend of being cluelessly destructive, but it has some decent moments. Derpy being in the snow globe was probably my favorite “Where’s Derpy?” moment of the season, next to her hiding in the chicken coop in “May the Best Pet Win!” Cranky actually being a bit more welcoming was also nice, even if it’s obvious he still doesn’t consider Pinkie a friend. And this time, the accident with the book is more because of the house’s shoddy construction than anything Pinkie does, even if she shouldn’t have been looking through his stuff in the first place. We also get more hints as to why Cranky was wandering Equestria to begin with; namely, it had to do with a girl.

Of course, Cranky’s reaction to the impromptu book burning is understandable, as is his throwing Pinkie out. All this leads to the scene at the library, where Pinkie is fishing for sympathy but finds little. It’s nice to have Dash still reading, and while her words are harsh, they’re pretty much the truth. Even if you excuse the book burning, the fact is that Cranky’s made it clear he doesn’t want to be friends with Pinkie, and as Twilight points out, she’ll just have to accept that. And for a moment, Pinkie seems to…

And then she turns it right around and tries to get him to accept her apology. Okay, this is where the episode REALLY REALLY REALLY loses me. The chase scene has some good animation and visual jokes, like Pinkie’s eyes popping out beneath the bridge and her replacing a statue of Princess Celestia, but otherwise, it’s just…astounding how DUMB Pinkie is here, to the point where I couldn’t even crack a smile during the entire segment. (Okay, I got a tiny grin when she popped out of the chimney, but that’s it.)

But it gets better. Cranky says that the book was all she had to remember his “special friend” by, and Pinkie finally realizes what’s going on. And thus we have the entire reason for Matilda’s existence: to serve as a cheap plot device to get Cranky to like Pinkie.

Okay, let’s get the good part of the ending out of the way first. I like how this builds up on what we’ve seen of Pinkie so far. We know from the beginning that she has a near-perfect memory and can recognize exactly what it’ll take to make others happy. Here, she uses actual reasoning to put all the pieces together with only the most minor of evidence. I loved the visual gag with her spouting two new legs, as well as her exploding like fireworks.

In addition, I found the story of Cranky and Matilda heartwarmingly tragic. The two were separated for so long because of a misunderstanding, but neither one gave up on the other. And finally, in their twilight years, they have been reunited and can continue where they left off. It’s a lovely little story.

It’s just a shame that the entire ending sucks.

The problem with Matilda was that she had zero point in the story other than to serve as a means to get Pinkie off the hook. Otherwise, the episode would have actually ended with Pinkie in the wrong, and we can’t have that, now can we? It would have worked considerably better if Matilda had made at least another appearance before this, perhaps just barely missing all the chaos going on, or if we saw Pinkie look through Matilda’s stuff earlier and see the evidence she needed to connect the two. Either way, her being there is just a way to absolve the plot in a cheap, undignified way. And really, this was a lot more interesting than the story of Pinkie torturing a donkey over and over again because she cannot accept that somepony doesn’t want to be friends with her.

And then there’s the horrible moral. The idea that people can be introverted or extroverted, but still be friends with each other, is a great lesson, but the episode never has anything to do with this. Cranky doesn’t reject Pinkie because he’s a loner; he’s just a grumpy old donkey who’s getting harassed by an overgrown foal. Likewise, Pinkie did nothing to learn the lesson; she just hooked him up with his long-lost girlfriend and made friends that way. In fact, the only scene that has anything to do with that lesson is the library scene, and Pinkie outright rejects the lesson there in favor of torturing Cranky some more. It feels like the moral was just an afterthought, and in that case, the episode would have been stronger without it.

CONCLUSION:

I am a very forgiving guy for the most part, and I’m always willing to give things a shot at least once. There are plenty of things I’ve stated my dislike for, only to turn around once they got better or after a fresh re-viewing allowed me to appreciate them more. “A Friend in Deed” is not one of those things. I cannot find it within myself to like this episode at all. If you love this one, then more power to you. But at the end of the day, I just don’t find this episode funny or enjoyable, despite having a great song and some good character bits.

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I look forward to your replies.

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(Oh, and the guy who voiced Cranky apparently also did this guy:)

(He also apparently voiced some guy from Beast Wars, but I never saw that show. Feel free to kill me for that, too.)