May
10th
2017
Points of Canon: S1x04 - Applebuck Season · 11:13pm May 10th, 2017
Might as well do another one while I’m on a roll.
- Applejack refers to the upcoming harvest as a “bumper crop,” indicating that this amount of apples is unusual, literally, “biggest I ever laid eyes on.”
- So how exactly did Big Mac get hurt? There’s that theory that he really didn’t want to be seen in a girdle which is referred to in Ticket Master, but I find it rather dubious, because Applejack didn’t finish competing with him that day, she was occupied with getting the ticket and dissuading Rainbow from doing same. Also, were he get hurt for that reason, Applejack’s response to “Biting off more than you can chew is just what I’m afraid of” would have to be entirely different.
- In the light of Where the Apple Lies, the phrase “Are you sayin’ my mouth is makin’ promises my legs can’t keep?” and the subsequent dialogue acquires a lot of interesting connotations.
- Big Mac lists the number of trees involved at “hundreds.”
- Applejack’s “Don’t you use your fancy mathematics to muddy the issue!” is probably the origin of the fanon that it’s Big Mac who does the bookkeeping on the farm. There are no canonical statements regarding who actually does it as far as I’m aware.
- The words “Applebuck Season” sound meaningful, but we see apples in these trees pretty much constantly, and AJ bucks them fresh almost every time she’s seen on the farm. So far, my best interpretation is that this is the last harvest of the year, when all apples have to come down in preparation for the upcoming winter, no matter how ripe they turned out to be. This is later corroborated by AJ referring to harvesting the “entire” Sweet Apple Acres. If there are any better interpretations, please voice them.
- That said, we don’t really know how long an Applebuck Season is, and further observations in this episode imply it took at least two weeks, possibly a bit longer.
- The vibration from the stampede gets an apple to fall right on Applejack’s head, indicating that at least this one was ripe enough with no bucking required.
- Notably, it’s Rainbow who notices the stampede and warns the town, and there’s not a single pony in the air when she does that. Most of the pegasus population are probably busy with something else, I wonder what.
- One of the ponies – Berry Punch, probably – closes the shutters on the windows by pulling a rope, which is not a mechanism I’ve seen on shutters anywhere else. A rare case of things actually optimized for ponies.
- Lemon Hearts and Lyra run past the camera. Multiple times in different directions. These girls are everywhere.
- At least two ponies run by wearing saddles, one of them Amethyst Star.
- The fact that Applejack knows exactly how to stop a stampede – and more importantly, that Winona does, because simply explaining it to her on the off chance that she might need to in the future probably wouldn’t work – implies this is not the first time this happens and not the first time Applejack had to redirect it.
- Pinkie comments that “This is the best rodeo show I’ve ever seen,” further implying that this is something they do on rodeos. For some reason, Pinkie is more interested in eating popcorn than watching, though.
- Pinkie’s comment explains where did Applejack and Winona learn this, even if this never happened in Ponyville before – but if it never did, how did Rainbow recognize the stampede for what it is from so far away, when the cows have yet to cross the horizon, even when seen from her position in the air? See also the bunny stampede later in the episode.
- The herd contains ~40 cows.
- Is it just me, or when the cow starts her answer with a moo, it’s like she forgot she needs to speak Equish?
- The cows, while obviously sapient enough for speech, (and as we later find out, economically active at least to a certain degree) are clearly unable to fight the herding instinct, even though they think they should, and Applejack doesn’t even think to blame them for it – all she asks is that they stampede in some other direction next time.
- Fluttershy turns up in the crowd next to the rest of the Mane 6 quite unexpectedly.
- Rarity is able to hoist a banner that, going by the size and assuming an average cloth, has to weigh something like 20kg. Which is less than the expected weight of her bags, but she raises it to an altitude of some twenty meters while standing at least ten more meters away, establishing minimum distance limits for the application of this ability. That said, Rarity is unusually skilled specifically in this magic.
- Rainbow comments she hasn’t seen Applejack all week, and Pinkie further says “not since the stampede,” so exactly a week has to have passed.
- Rainbow says that “Applejack is never late.” Just how many opportunities in the past did she have to experience Applejack coming on time? If this episode happens in the late autumn of the first year, lots, they spent between five and four months hanging out together. If it’s actually the fourth?
- Twilight’s stack of cards is about four times (!) thicker than the stack of cards she prepared for the lecture in The Cutie Re-Mark. Just what did she expect to talk about? Or did she learn some kind of shorthand since?
- Pinkie gets to “run” Sugarcube Corner for the first time, which, as later comments from Mrs. Cake indicate, includes baking the muffins and a full afternoon shift.
- Fluttershy is involved in the official bunny census. This has to be part of her job, because if she were to somehow volunteer for it, Applejack wouldn’t be “helping,” but rather, volunteering with her. Later on, Fluttershy explicitly says “it’s my job to…”
- The bunny census requires counting the bunnies born this season. In our world, rabbits will mate constantly between February and October, subject to resource availability and weather, so counting rabbits before they usually stop doing that would inevitably introduce errors – one female can produce up to ~84 offspring a year, and environmental changes late in the mating period can wildly skew the result. This, therefore, has to be autumn.
- So why exactly do ponies find it useful to know the exact rabbit population? Because humans would do a mark-and-recapture and get a result close enough for all practical purposes. Could it be that Fluttershy is secretly pedantic about it, while everywhere else they do mark-and-recapture instead?
- Minuette is standing right in front of Twilight in the crowd listening to her attempting to get a speech off the ground and failing.
- Pony of Ponyville Award is a thing. Unfortunately, we never hear of this thing again.
- Applejack is so asleep that it never even occurred to her to unload the apples before going all the way to the town hall.
- Rarity comments that Applejack’s mane was messy, giving us more information on the limits of cartoon resolution – to us, it looks exactly the same.
- Twilight teleports about 20 meters when there really wasn’t any need to do this, and repeatedly teleports in quick succession with no sign of being tired by this.
- Applejacks refers to the Apples Twilight saw in Friendship is Magic saying “They were just here for the Apple family reunion.” Which indirectly produces the shortest estimate of the length of a moon due to a collision with Apple Family Reunion, the only way out of which is to assume that some reunions are more reunions than others.
- Rainbow is planning a stunt based on a catapulting start. Don’t ever let Rainbow get her hooves on a JATO booster. Yes, she never goes back to the idea. Still, don’t.
- Applejack survives multiple drops from somewhere between 7 and 10 meters with no broken bones, establishing limits on the impact resistance of an earth pony, though I do wonder just how does she climb the tower, repeatedly, in a half-asleep state, when it has no obvious ladder. Does Rainbow airlift her there every time?
- Notably, Rainbow gets vertigo from dropping chin first from at most two meters. I suspect this is mostly because she never expected the impact, because she has been known to suffer much worse with no ill effects at all.
- I just noticed that right underneath Twilight’s top balcony, a wasp nest is hanging off a branch. I need to compare if the thing is always there, but most likely it is.
- Dropping from a much higher altitude onto said balcony, Rainbow does not suffer from vertigo, and notably, she isn’t even hurt, just winded and tired.
- Applejack’s misheard words include beanstalks, celery stalks, and a zoo. I think that’s the earliest canonical indication the latter exist. She also mentions kelp and states she doesn’t like seaweed – giving us that other ponies do eat it and that it is available enough that she had a chance to try it.
- Ingredients mentioned include sugar, eggs and chocolate chips. Sugar can come from a variety of crops, and we know where eggs come from, though I don’t think we have seen anyone but Fluttershy keeping chickens. Where exactly does Equestria get all the cocoa?
- Pinkie mentions baking soda, which is a thing, but Applejack misunderstands it as a term for carbonated drinks. Carbonated drinks are a thing! We don’t usually see them, but cartoon resolution does not really let us see the bubbles anyway. Other interesting substitutes include lemons, which would need a greenhouse to grow, unless earth ponies are also capable of making plants ignore temperatures entirely.
- How exactly did Pinkie miss the wriggling earthworms is anyone’s guess.
- The entire Canterlot Friends crowd turns up to taste the Baked Bads, together with Derpy and Amethyst Star. Of them, Lemon Hearts and Twinkleshine end up among the sufferers of the poisoning.
- This is the first episode where we see Nurse Redheart.
- Notably, the victims are in a tent, rather than at the hospital. Why? Also, why did they call Twilight for help? Did they expect her to offer a magical solution? We never see what did she do, if anything, because the episode cuts away immediately as Twilight establishes Applejack as the source. Later Twilight refers to this with “I just came back from Ponyville urgent care,” but still doesn’t say what, if anything, she did.
- I suspect the real reason for the poisoning is that they didn’t finish baking properly, because some of the worms are still alive.
- The rather unambiguous bucket next to Pinkie’s bed gives us that ponies, unlike horses, can vomit. And ponies are rather literal about being green in the face.
- The first joke wherein Twilight says “This pony is stubborn as a mule! No offense” occurs. The other is in Hurricane Fluttershy.
- Bucking apples is not solely the province of the earth ponies, because Rainbow is also doing this, though less effectively. We don’t see Fluttershy buck the tree, but by the way the apples fall into her baskets, she had to have done this too.
- Twilight is capable of harvesting ~24 apple trees simultaneously, with ~25 apples seen per tree, which involves lifting at least 100kg.
Side observations:
- Throughout Season 1, ponies almost exclusively drink with a straw and avoid holding the beverage container in hooves.
- This episode is probably a good example of the possible limits of physical abuse earth ponies and pegasi can withstand.
The length of Applebucking Season is further muddied in "Bats!" with AJ's joyous proclamation of "It's finally Applebucking Day!" I can only assume that that marks the first day of the season, and not that she's managed to compress more than a week of effort into a 24-hour span.
There was also a variant in "One Bad Apple". Diamond Tiara says "Too cool for mule, Babs." The mule standing nearby brays in response, and DT just ignores him.
Pre-cider-season harvest, to maximize income, as they always sell out? [which is kind of contradicted by there being any at all to crate up in "Where the Apple Lies"…]
Interestingly, hints at cows being a rung lower--they can communicate as [non-pony] animals, or as ponies. Or she's just stlil in instinct mode.
All times she's shown to float-many it's textiles.
Implies that RD is on time more than napping suggests.
It contains the arcane minutia she felt was interesting about AJ's greatness…and she hasn't yet learned to filter for her audience.
Seems like a "key to the city" situation…dumbed down.
[quibble]Observatory platform not count as a balcony[/quibble]?
1. too many to fit hospital
1b. these are the easy cases
2. new ailment that may be contagious to hospital patients
My favorite invocation is in FoME's The Unicorn's Frappucino.
4527913
That in itself would be very useful for chronology if we can hard lock Bats! to an autumn because of it.
4528195
Bunny census also fixes is to autumn, so it comes out to be the last anyway.
Good point.
Can you honestly tell which of them is which? :)
Considering that two of the sufferers shown are among the very first crowd to taste the Baked Bads, I find that doubtful.
Sort of plausible, but still strange. I find it more likely that they decided moving them is a problem…
So why do they drag Twilight in to “help?” It might be contagious to her too.
4528279
Your list autonumberer is showing.
Yes, but infecting a healthy pony is lower-risk than infecting someone already hospitalized; to the infirm it can easily be fatal.
Also of note: health professionals don't recognize this brand of food poisoning…? muffins. But Pinkie knows and tries to vocalize it.
http://imgur.com/a/LRjpe Top platform has telescope …wait, on the toy the telescope shows up on that side one. Hm. (Fimwiki asserts it's a beehive, but I'm not sure we can tell until Pinkie Keen.) Quibble was, there's a higher platform than you indicated.
Whle examining this asset, a few other htings popped out at me: the sun decoration/flower, the blue ringed planet ornament, and the lantern's design, though I suspect it's just a less-flat render of the tree motif in the windows.
4528300
Here’s a thing: The ingredients Applejack actually mixed are potato chips, a carbonated drink, lemon juice, earthworms, later supplemented by sugar and eggs from Pinkie.
This combination is highly unlikely to produce poisoning. It would probably result in unpalatable food, but none of the ingredients are by themselves poisonous or could react with each other to produce something unexpected.
There are only two possible sources remaining – salmonella from undercooked eggs and the earthworms… Cursory research on the dangers of earthworms suggests that parasites, rather than bacteria, would be the primary danger with those, and ponies, who constantly have to handle things with their hooves, are more likely than not to be naturally resistant, or they’d have died out by now. At the same time, at least some earthworms are alive after cooking, which means that salmonella bacterium also would be, and the symptoms do seem to match salmonellosis…
Which indicates that it’s Pinkie who’s the primary cause this time rather than Applejack, unless she left Applejack to watch the oven: if the “muffins” were properly baked, they probably wouldn’t be tasty, but salmonella bacterium would die off.
There’s no way the health professionals don’t recognize it, though.
The one Rainbow fell on is unambiguously the one closest to the right side.
Oh ok. :)
That could be considered the earliest indication of ponies knowing other planets, though, we can’t really be sure that is what they see in it.
4528336
It was an answer to
Pinkie wasn't supervising AJ's batch at all, I reckon, or things would have stopped sooner.
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I figured. As I’ve just explained, the only reasonable cause of poisoning remaining is unlikely to go unrecognized. Also, Redheart says “It was a mishap with some of the baked goods,” before Pinkie coins her “Baked Bads,” indicating that Redheart does know what caused the poisoning.
No, they had to have needed Twilight’s help with healing and/or care. If it’s the former, it suggests some form of healing magic exists (magical antibiotic? magical detoxifier?) and is a superior solution to more mundane medicine in this particular case…
If it’s care, I’m not sure why they seem to be happy to see Twilight turn up specifically.
Pinkie does say “I’ll get the sugar and the eggs,” though, so either she mixes these in herself or she hands said components to Applejack. But once she does this, what exactly is left for her to do? Most of the crowd is waiting for their promised free samples, so they probably aren’t buying anything until they’re ready…
Ponyville Hospital's urgent care ward was closed that week, due to fire damage. The fire was caused by faulty wiring, since electric lights are a new technology in Equestria and have not yet been perfected. As for why Twilight's help was needed, they were short-staffed due to some of their nurses, and maybe even doctors, being treated for electrical burns.
I just pulled that out of thin air. ^^'
4528336
I once took a food safety course, and I believe I can shed some light on this. If food is sufficiently contaminated, it doesn't matter how much you cook it, because the toxins created by the bacteria are still present. Of course, some of the worms are still alive, so...
At times like these, perhaps we must fall back on one of the standbys of the fantasy writer. My proposal: The few symptoms we see look like salmonella, but this is a different strain, which may have evolved due to the influence of this world's ambient magic.
This being the case, the cooks and bakers of Equestria must be very careful with food safety measures.
4528653
Now you have to write a medical drama about it. :)
If the food is sufficiently contaminated it would mean that the ingredients were contaminated to the point where they should not have been used at all, and Pinkie only used the ingredients found in that kitchen. In which case, the ones really at fault for this particular incident are the Cakes. :)
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Dang it, you're right. Imma just fall back on my "mutant salmonella" theory some more...
Those changelings sure do get around.