A Series of Blogs About Leaked Season 8 Episodes and Gen 5: Part 2

So, here's where things get crazy.

Season 8 EP13 "The Mean Six"

This is the episode where Chrysalis comes back, and it's awful. It's also boring. It's extremely, insufferably boring. Absolutely nothing important happens in it at all. There is no character development. There is no suspense. There is no action. There is no conflict. There is no heartwarming moment of slice-of-life character building.

In fact, it can be summed up as "everyone is lost in the woods and annoys the piss out of each other, the episode."

The gist is that Chrysalis has finally come to enact her master plan for revenge, which involves creating evil clones of the mane six (but not Starlight for some idiotic reason) and then using them to claim the Elements of Harmony for themselves. Her reasoning is that, uhhh... well, there is no reasoning. She just kinda hopes that it'll work out, and that she'll be able to turn Starlight to paste in person. Using their hair and some wood, she conjures up, surprise surprise, literally the Discorded versions of the mane six from season 2.

Let me repeat that. All these clones are is a repeat of Discord's inversion of their elements. They have no personality. No real depth or purpose. They just act like evil clones. Fluttershy is mean, Rarity shrieks "MINE" every five seconds, Twilight is snarky, etc. They're all just mustache-twirling cardboard cutouts of villains who are not at all interesting in any way whatsoever.

Chrysalis then reveals she knows the Tree of Harmony is in "this forest." So they go into the forest to find it, without any real plan besides walking around said forest until they bump into the Tree.

Yeah... the Tree. In the middle of the forest.

Chrysalis is annoyed because the evil clones are, well, evil, and hate her guts because they hate all living things except themselves. They annoy her, and annoy each other, and when they start bumping into the mane six, they annoy them too.

The mane six, see, are going on a camping trip to the Tree of Harmony as well for no goddamn reason. As both parties run around in the woods doing FUCKING NOTHING, they occasionally get separated, and some of the good ponies run into the clones, who also are separated from their group. But here's the best part: the episode tries to provide some "suspense" by having none of the clones bump into their opposites, i.e. evil Twilight never runs into good Twilight, so none of them ever realize who they're actually talking to.

Am I making this clear enough? When one of the good!Six bump into a clone, nopony realizes they're talking to an evil clone, and the evil clones don't seem to understand they are talking to the real mane six. Even though they're all different colors, their cutie marks look different, and their mannerisms are literally the opposite of what they were just displaying a few seconds ago. Everypony just bumps into each other, there's a personality clash, and good!Rarity or whoever goes "GOSH why are you being so MEAN when just TEN SECONDS AGO you were NICE? MAN WHAT A WEIRD DAY THIS IS."

And then they all just go their separate ways until they bump into each other again. Lather, rinse, repeat.

And that's it.

That's all there is.

Nothing else happens.

They just keep getting conveniently separated, run into each other, and annoy the shit out of each other. For the entire episode. Since nopony realizes what's going on, the mane six never realize Chrysalis is nearby, and Chrysalis never realizes her mortal enemies are right around the corner. Ever. It's not even funny. None of the jokes are funny. It just goes on, and on, and on.

So then Chrysalis and the evil clones just... stumble onto the Tree of Harmony. Just bump right into it. Oh there it is. And the evil clones run up and start kicking the shit out of the Tree to try and force it to give up the Elements.

Then the Tree melts them.

I'm not kidding.

That actually happens.

So the clones are dead now, never to return after doing nothing with their lives. And Chrysalis goes "Ahhhh how did I not realize this was a terrible idea grrrr I'll get you next time ponies."

And the ponies show up at their campsite and go "Wow what a weird day ha ha I wonder why we were all assholes to each other for no reason ha ha oh well guess we're still friends though lolololololol"

The end.

You were expecting more? So was I. Too bad.

Season 8 EP7 Horse Play

I find it funny that Celestia's foalhood dream was to be in a play, because that's the set-up for this episode about learning to... not... do stuff outside your comfort zone? Not be dishonest to your friends? Not... make plays because they'll always go bad?

So yeah, turns out in the thousands of years Celestia has been alive, she never once, in all that time, found out how to star in a play, or get acting lessons. Except as a Princess of a large country who has faced existential threats and tutored volatile demigod children, wouldn't she in fact be well acquainted with saying and doing things she doesn't actually mean, and emoting what she does not actually feel? Commonly known as, oh, I don't know... acting?

But that's just one of many leaps of logic we're expected to take in this episode. Not only did Celestia never learn to act, she is bad at acting in general with no talent for it at all. No, it's not a joke. She is actually, legitimately bad at acting. Twilight is upset by this, because in the play she wrote, Celestia is the star. But Twilight wants Celestia's dream to come true, so she hides her true feelings on the matter and pushes forward with the play anyway.

The "humor" is supposed to come from how Celestia is both awful and enthusiastic about acting, but it's just a few chuckles and reaction gifs here and there, nothing special. The conflict, such as it is, is Twilight getting more stressed out because things keep going wrong with the play, and no matter how many lessons she sends Celestia to, her acting remains awful. Over 22 minutes we watch Twilight get increasingly flustered until she finally snaps, and yells at everypony about how the play is all wrong, and Celestia's acting is bad. This causes Celestia to run away in a huff because Twilight freaking lied to her.

Also the implication is that if everything else went right with the play, Twilight would have allowed Celestia to go on-stage and completely embarrass herself.

But it's okay because Twilight apologizes, and then Princess Celestia shows off her real talent: delegating!

Yeah, she basically just stays behind the curtain telling everypony what to do. That's her huge revelation. The Princess is really good at... being a Princess. She goes from princess to actress and then princess again, and... what?

I don't get what this episode was going for here. Celestia just kinda goes... nowhere? She learns she was good at... doing the job she was already doing? Twilight learns that LYING IS BAD, with the extra wrinkle you shouldn't lie even to protect someone's feelings. But that's an extremely basic lesson, and it's attached to such a miserably boring and nonsensical story I don't see it sticking. Also I'm pretty sure this lesson has already been in like... pretty much the entire show already, in some form or other, or at least attached as a corollary to other lessons.

The only semi-interesting part here is the potential for uh... "lore." But we already knew the lore, so that's a bust. The play is about how Starswirl and other unicorns kept having to raise the sun, but when they did, everyone except Starswirl (for no fucking reason except he's special I guess) would lose their magic forever. They were running out of unicorns which is a problem. Then Celestia came along and boop! Everything was fine forever.

Except, who was raising the sun before the unicorns took up the job? If the unicorns used all their magic, and they needed to do it every day, and the show explicitly states they did it so much they almost had no unicorns with any magic left whatsoever, how long did they have to keep doing it? Is there a story about the tragic "Magicless Generation" of unicorns that were just oh well unlucky enough to be born before Celestia swooped in?

I dunno. I find it so hard to be invested in these episodes writing this has been a real chore. At least we're almost done, and these were undoubtedly the worst.

Comments

[Petrichord]

you do realize, of course, that the season 8 finale is probably going to be about all the spirits of these magic-less unicorns rising up as a single "nega-corn" that drains all of the magic power of the hundreds of named characters in the show to, i dunno, probably turn celestia into a statue again or something

but then starlight glimmer will get the idea to reform the sentient goo-puddles at the base of the tree of harmony and teach them about friendship, which will turn them into good clones instead, and they'll use their *own* version of the elements of harmony to defeat the negacorn, because the show didn't have enough magic nukes on the side of the forces of good and we needed more of those, and i guess we probably need yet another handful of one-dimensional characters with QUIRKY TRAITZ as well

Rainbow Dash will probably say something about how awesome she is, too. We all love Rainbow Dash, right?

[Telaros]

Well, they where more absorbed than killed. They managed to taint the elements and the true finale will involve Chrysalis being semi-reformed as she helps the mane 6 beat these returned mean 6.

Possibly. I doubt we'll see the end. We need to see how they turn the elements into one stupid looking shield you'd expect to see in a Nyx fanfic. No offense to any Nyx writers.

They missed out on making such a great mesh of evil versions of the mane 6. This just implies the ponies are their elements and not their own pony. It's stupid. Clones made of dna from manes and trees. I think I laughed out loud when Chrysalis essentially turns to address the audience, like for example my rant back when they first showed that animatic teaser I posted on eqd lol, and proceeds to explain to us that the writers totally didn't ignore s7 finale~ oh no~ they would NEVER do THAT!

No, Chrysalis essentially explains her plan is exactly to break Starlight using terrible acting clones. So dumb lol this is only reinforced later as another inserted scene has to explain if she didn't forget about Starlight then why didn't she grab HER mane hair too? Or you know, FINISH OFF THE PONIES.

Such terrible writing. The whole "Show, Don't Tell." was absent that episode.

To be honest, I have been avoiding the Celestia episode. I'll wait to cringe when it's properly release. Yeah, I'm quite the hippogryph. I mean, hypocrite.