The End in Friend S8E17 Review · 2:31pm Aug 18th, 2018
Saw this earlier in the week and had my thoughts ready.
This was fine. I thought it was funny how Rarity and Rainbow both refused to read the books, the obviousness that it was Twilight who had Spike steal the amulet was kinda funny in its own way, and the two cooperated well after enough time. The unexpected highlight of the episode was that frog thing, it was such a unique and interesting design, and it was sapient, how long has it been since we got a monster that could talk?
Where the episode didn't work for me was three things. One, the "we have nothing in common but we're still friends" thing was done better last season with Starlight and Sunburst, and I'm pretty sure that wasn't the first time anyway. Two, haven't we had morals and episodes in the past about not artificially manufacturing friendship moments? And three - the episode was kinda boring. The amulet plot took up a full half of the episode and was obviously a fake-out from the start, and up to that point we were watching Rarity and Rainbow get on each other's nerves by having their most conflicting personality traits emphasized.
Aside from a neat new creature and some shipping fuel for the S.S. Raribow, not much to see here.
PS - the toes of Rarity's boots kept seeming to point the wrong way and made her hoof movements distracting. It also called attention to the fact that ponies don't have toes.
PPS - Twilight uses her best friends as examples to her class for how friendships can work in spite of differences, Starlight tries to mend their friendship over overlapping interests in books. Twilight sees friendship as a subject to be examined, Starlight looks for a way for them to bond. Starlight best Princess of Friendship. 
@PPS: and then Twilight orchestrates an actual bonding moment when Starlight's fails (because Rarity and Rainbow, while their tempers were still hot, didn't bother reading each other's books). "Some things you just can't teach with books" indeed.
I thought the episode was fun, Rarity and Rainbow aren't really a pairing we see very often (for good reason) but it is something that's fun to see once in a while.
I think the biggest problem for this episode was that Rarity and Rainbow Dash were being used as an example of friendship, but isn't the whole point of friendship that it's not something you can teach? I thought the purpose of the school was to teach the values of friendship, not friendship itself. And it seems to again make the school concept look weak.
The hunt for the stolen amulet was much better, and honestly it should've been the plot from the start. Twilight orchestrating the whole thing to get Rarity and Rainbow Dash to demonstrate compromise in friendships. The first two acts or so almost felt like a rehash of "Non-Compete Clause" and then Berrow realized that was a bad idea and discarded it.
4921866
You can totally teach friendship or to be more specific aspects of friendship. In this case, she is trying to teach compromise which is super important in any kind of relationship.
This episode was garbage.
Best part was when RD called Rarity a horse.
I'm willing to bet the boot toes are a Flash artifact, and it fell into the category of "It's annoying, but not important enough to go back and re-do fifty scenes unless we had something else that needed changed too, so let it ride."
"Twilight sees friendship as a subject to be examined, Starlight looks for a way for them to bond." That can be taken another way that works just fine with their characters: Twilight sees a situation and wants to learn all about it, Starlight sees something she doesn't like and tries to fix it (normally with magic but she's getting better about that).
Starlight: See, Twilight. They're friends again.
(in chorus) Yes, Twilight. We are both friends again. We are good friends.
Twilight: (headhoof) We talked about this!!
I didn't like it, but it didn't make me mad. I just clocked out when the "can people be friends if they're different?" thing came up and didn't really pay attention to the rest. Because fuck's sake, didn't Discord learn that back in S4?
4922021
I'll raise you "didn't Twilight learn that back in the rest of the entire show?"
4922040
I mean, that's just been everything since about S6. :B
4922217
ouch