"Father Knows Beast" Review: Sludge & the Dragon Hunters

So, in this episode, there's something that intrigues me and got me thinking the most, but I'll come to that later. First, the obvious elephant dragon in the room..... Sludge. Spike's dad, or, at least what he wanted to make Spike believe he is.
This episode hit me quite deep, as I didn't see any of this coming. I knew that the episode will introduce us to Spike's dad, because I ran into an episode preview where I didn't thought I would see one, but I did not expect him to be a fraud who just wants to abuse Spike to get an advantage. I'm happy that the episode took such an unexpected turn, as it undid the spoiler I received, but what Spike had to go through there.....
This episode, it is one of the most dramatic episodes of the entire show, with how harsh it was what happened to Spike and even Twilight. After so many years not knowing his parents and his origins, he finally found his dad, ended up getting taught the wrong things and abused by him and then had to find out that he isn't his real dad..... And on top of that, Twilight had to face that she isn't such a good mother for Spike as she wished she would be, because she doesn't know a lot about dragons, and then had to deal with the thought that Spike's real parent is there now and that Spike doesn't need her anymore for that role, especially with Spike's remark.
It was a very heavy episode with a level of drama I didn't expect to see in a Spike episode. And what particularly amazed me about it is how it builds on Issue #40 of the Mane Series of the official comics from March 2016, that answered the question whether Twilight is a mother figure to Spike or not.
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Especially because Twilight had raised Spike ever since she was a filly, it was very hard for her to go through this situation. However, even though this doesn't excuse anything of what Sludge did, I have a theory why he wanted to stay in Twilight's castle so badly.....
As he lied to Spike about his mother, he said that he came to the "Land of Scale Collectors" and that the dragon hunters there captured him and had him imprisoned for a long time. This was obviously not true, however, it got me thinking if this land and these dragon hunters actually exist..... It is quite possible that he just made all of this up after he heard that Twilight and her friends had been to Klugetown, out of fear they could ask him questions about Klugetown he can't answer, so that he invented these dragon hunters on the spot. But it's also possible that they do exist and that he remembered their existence and used them in his lie.
And when he came to Ponyville, he did so inside a fireball that crashed into the ground and got injured in the process, which is something a dragon wouldn't do when arriving somewhere. Especially considering the injuries he took from that, this isn't something he would do voluntarily. The way he came to Ponyville seems like someone attacked him prior to his arrival. So, maybe he had indeed been imprisoned by the dragon hunters and managed to flee from them, which led to it that they chased him and attacked him and this caused his crashlanding in Ponyville.
Of course dragon hunters where nowhere to be seen as he came to Ponyville and he didn't seem to be concerned about being chased, considering how he turned first Spike's, then Twilight's offer to help down. But we don't know what powers these dragon hunters, if they exist, have and since he wasn't concerned about anyone finding him after he arrived in Ponyville and that the speed of the fireball indicated that he must have been flying inside of it for quite some time, the dragon hunters had to be far away when they attacked him.
And if it happened like this, this would explain why he was eager to stay in Twilight's castle: He was seeking shelter there. If these dragon hunters search for him to capture and imprison him again, they wouldn't be able to find him in Ponyville if he stays inside the castle and hides there, so maybe his plan was to stay there until the dragon hunters have passed by and he could safely get out again and leave.
There is quite some ground here to suspect that the dragon hunters and the "Land of Scale Collectors" really exist.

Other than this, Sludge also talked about how he flew by Mount Aris when Spike was still in his egg and said that Mount Aris was already abandoned at this time. Which is something that is definitely true because we know that Silverstream lived all of her life prior to the Storm King's defeat underwater, since she had never seen things like stairs and treated them as a completely new thing for her, so the attack of the Storm King on Mount Aris has happened a long time ago. And Silverstream's behavior and maturity indicates that she is around 12 years old, while Spike is around 19 years old now (as indicated by several details in a past episode of the show and the official comics), and with Sludge surely being able to roughly guess Spike's age as a fellow dragon, this means he spoke about an occasion where he came past the abandoned Mount Aris that happened at a time when Spike still had to be in his egg.
This lets us conclude that it's about 19 years ago now that the hippogriffs fled from the Storm King underwater and founded Seaquestria there, so we have a nice timeframe there now. It also means that Silverstream, unlike I previously thought, wasn't already born when the hippogriffs fled into the ocean, but only became born about 7 years after that happened.
That's already the second Season 8 episode that gave us a timeframe for something we wondered about, even though it wasn't as straightforward as in "Horse Play" and required some thinking to figure it out, and I am excited to see if this trend keeps up with Season 9 and possible future seasons.
Another trend I really hope that keeps up beyond Season 8 has to do with Smolder. In "Molt Down", Smolder got a big role alongside Spike and now, we had another Spike episode and Smolder got a big role in it once more! Smolder has become Spike's mentor lately and this seems to guarantee her a big role every time there is a Spike episode. This makes me hope she keeps mentoring Spike like this, so that she will get more big roles in the future!

And the future is also quickly creeping up on us now, as next week is the season finale which brings Season 8 to an end and we'll have to wait for new episodes again before Season 9 comes..... My review might be a little late next week because I could be at a meetup. See you next week!

Comments

[billykilly]

I loved the interactions between Spike and Smolder in this episode. I ship the two now!