"Road to Friendship" Review: The Greatest and Most Powerful Roadtrip!

After I was at a convention last weekend, I can finally write a review for "Road to Friendship" now! And I'm amazed by it how much we learned about Trixie in this episode!

First off, we already learned how much Trixie's caravan means to her, right at the beginning of the episode. She was very offended at the notion of trading it for another caravan and described it as "shelter, transportation and her only friend on the long and lonely nights on the road". And later even as her "best friend", despite her friendship with Starlight.
This shows that Trixie has a great appreciation for physical objects, which even got reinforced more later in the episode when she reacted similarly offended over Starlight's suggestion of throwing some of her magical items away to make room in her caravan and when she called them "junk".
Following that, we also learned that Trixie often feels lonely during long travels. She enjoys to visit new places as a travelling magician, but at the same time, doesn't like the loneliness she feels without anypony around to accompany her when she is on the road for weeks or even months between towns and settlements. And, as her appreciation for physical objects shows, said loneliness let her develop a very tight bond with her caravan and the things she possesses.
It isn't very common that someone has such a tight bond with physical objects that they even consider them friends, which makes this a unique and very interesting personality trait of Trixie. And it's one I can relate to because, even though I'm not a traveller like her, I also feel quite affectionate towards things such as furniture, certain devices or even just my bedsheets and have a hard time parting with things or throwing them away, because of the memories and feelings I connect with them. I still have and will always keep my digicam that kicked the bucket a few months ago, because it is the first digicam that I paid for myself and will always have a special place in my heart for that reason.
I was already interested in Trixie before, ever since she returned to Ponyville for her revenge on Twilight, and she completely grew on me when she met Starlight and became friends with her, but learning that I share this trait with her makes me like Trixie even much, much more now.
Trixie's loneliness during her travels also gives a nice and direct confirmation for something. With the emphasis she put on the loneliness she feels during her travels, it shows quite clearly that she is often on the road for much longer than just a few days before she reaches another town and sees other ponies again, as such a high level of loneliness would not be reached if one would know to be in company again after only two or three days of travelling.
Her heavy emphasis on feeling lonely on the road shows that it is, indeed, common to travel over Equestria's roads and through Equestria's wilderness for weeks or even months before reaching another settlement and before you see other ponies again when it isn't possible to use the train to get somewhere, as such timeframes are required to develop a serious feeling of loneliness and one that even makes you grow affection for physical objects as replacement for ponies.
It was never a real secret that this is probably the case, as we already know for a very long time that Equestria is a huge kingdom. But it is very exciting and interesting to see these distances between pony settlements so directly acknowledged and to learn about the effects they have on somepony who travels all over Equestria with a caravan.
This is something that makes me admire Equestria even more now, road trips must be so much more exciting and thrilling there than they are in this world, when you are on the road for months without meeting another pony, while you would need a few days at most to travel between two towns here on Earth and even faster if you drive a car. I have the urge to do a roadtrip in Equestria now.^^

Other than that, we also got an insight on how such travels usually go down for Trixie and how she experiences them. On the example of Somnambula, a place Trixie has apparently went to quite a few times already to perform, we learned that she is often short on money during her travels, which is an indicator that her magic shows don't pay off as well as she would like, where she likes to eat and that she, despite having an own caravan to sleep in, still enjoys a good night's rest in a comfortable room inside an inn here and there if she can afford this.
I was always quite a bit curious to see Trixie during her travels, so I'm very happy that this episode finally let us see a bit of that. I still wouldn't mind another one, though, Trixie lives an exciting life and there is definitely so much more to see of her adventures and travels!
I also enjoyed seeing the town of Somnambula again and learning a little bit more about its culture with the Glopaz Festival. If we would see more of Trixie's travels, we would also get to see a lot more of Equestria and maybe the lands beyond, on a regular basis, so I definitely wouldn't mind an entire spin-off centered around Trixie and her adventures in the world. :D

Trixie's role in this episode is a very interesting one, and what I like most about it, but of course we can't forget Starlight. It was interesting to see her trading away Trixie's caravan. Even though this was obviously not a good move on her part, as she didn't take into consideration that her caravan probably means a lot to Trixie, she did it with the right intentions, as the little space in the caravan and the fact that it was too small for both of them was the source of their fights and the growing tension between them.
It was an attempt to save their friendship and to make them stop fighting during the journey by removing what caused the conflicts between them and, even though this turned out to jeopardize their friendship even more, it shows how Starlight is actively trying to become a better friend. She analyzed the situation very well while Trixie was gone for the night and did a honest effort to fix what caused the trouble between them. This also showed in her angry reaction later, when Trixie didn't seem to appreciate what she tried to do and even called her caravan a better friend than her.
But, of course, this demonstrated that Starlight still has to learn a lot about the finer aspects of friendship. When Twilight ler her graduate at the start of last season, I was saying that Twilight made a mistake with that, that it is too early for Starlight because her insecurities still persist. Which is why I was glad that Starlight did stay in Ponyville, so that Twilight can continue to keep an eye on her in case anything should go wrong.
What we've seen in this episode confirmed my worries I had last year, as we've seen that there is still the occasional mishap happening to Starlight. But she is working hard to truly understand friendship and she will learn everything through experience and her mistakes.

Something else that makes this episode unique, are the two delivery ponies Starlight and Trixie met during their journey. We have seen them fighting with each other after something went wrong during their delivery and when Starlight made her way back to Ponyville, she met them again and they told her how much the song she and Trixie sung inspired them. And when one of them said travelling can sometimes be hard, it reminded Starlight on it that she shouldn't give up just because a few things went wrong and so she returned to Trixie.
This was an interesting dynamic, seeing how Starlight and Trixie inspired these two delivery ponies and how they inspired Starlight in return, and it's not happening often that two background ponies have such an important role in an episode. It was refreshing to see that.^^

Lastly, I was happy to finally see Flurry Heart again! Prior to this episode, I was already wondering if she will be in this season at all, so I'm delighted that she finally had an appearance! And for her short screentime, we still learned a few new things about her. Her huge wings allow her to even cover her eyes with them by stretching them over her head and down on her face and, more interestingly than that, she sported a really unhappy expression when Cadance and Twilight started to do their friendship chant.
For some reason, she doesn't seem to like their friendship chant, I wonder why.

This episode made me happy a lot; with the exciting roadtrip, the smell of adventure, the reappearance of Somnambula and especially with all the things we learned about Trixie and her life as a travelling magician!
Now we're already pretty close to the end of the season again (the time really flies this season), but this episode gave me so many things to enjoy and look back to, that I look forward to the rest of Season 8 even more, especially to next weekend's episode, so I'm eagerly anticipating what's to come rather than feeling sad over Season 8 ending soon.
MLP: FiM is still getting better and better and I can't wait to see what's in store next!

Some Interesting Background Details

- Have you seen the long line of ponies in front of Starlight's office? After a rough start, she finally has something to do at Twilight's school and gets a lot of ponies who are in need of counselling!

- When Starlight showed Trixie what she brought for their roadtrip, she had her "favourite campfire spices" with her. In "The Mean Six", we have seen that Starlight didn't like camping very much. But seeing how she has her own camping equipment now, it looks like she got used to camping in the meantime and came to enjoy it!

- We apparently know the location of two small villages in Equestria now! When Starlight was holding up a map in front of Trixie, we could see that she had marked where inns in which they can spend the night are located. Two of these markings are at places where, according to the official map of Equestria, there are no towns, yet there are inns anyway.
This can only mean one thing, that there are villages at these places that are so small that they aren't charted on maps of Equestria. I'm very intrigued by this and would like to see these two villages now!