Season 9 kicking off

Alright, a couple weeks behind, but that was typical in the past. I've been excessively...well, distracted by WoW and work and stuff, so I, Spy and its eventual sister story have been sitting there collecting dust. I'll be able to get some cranked out this Sunday after I get home from Daytona Beach after...ugh...hanging out with family. Fucking holidays. Kind of hard to believe that we're finally going to be seeing the end to the show. I got started between seasons 2 and 3 if I remember correctly. I remember first being on the Cheezburger network and seeing pony memes here and there and was really confused about the whole thing. I decided to check into the show out of curiosity to see why people were posting memes about the thing and before I knew it, I had finished watching Season 2 and had a good time doing so. I knew of the original show since I was a Saturday morning cartoon watching kid in the 80s and would see Hasbro related shows like Transformers and occasionally G.I. Joe, but I was aware of MLP. Knew it wasn't for me and I paid it no mind, but I never heard any of the girls talking about it at all at school and stuff. But, I'd talk to my friends about the shows us boys liked from time to time. So, with that, I figured the show wasn't very good in any respect, and as far as I know, I was right. Kind of makes you wonder why the company kept making more generations of the stuff, but I guess if they stopped altogether, we wouldn't be where we are now, so....yay on them? Shame what happened to Transformers though. Back then, I thought it was the most awesome cartoon ever, but of course, nostalgia glasses show how stiff and stilted the (granted 80s) animation was and that the writing was pretty stupid, for the most part. Unfortunately, a lot of modern iterations, especially the movies, are steaming piles of crap. Ah well.

Anyway, onto the reviews!

The Beginning of The End. A fitting title. I'm seriously down with what I'm going to assume is going to be an ongoing narrative for this final season. Grogar, back from the original series, has a pretty cool new look, and he wants to destroy the girls because they're probably the only thing keeping him from retaking his rule over the land. A decent motivation, considering what he said he accomplished when was overseeing everything. May also explain stuff like the Everfree Forest and all the bizarre monsters we've seen through the show that are actually based in ancient mythologies. But he can't do it alone; he recruits Tirek, Chryssy, Cozy Glow and Sombra to help. His reasoning makes a lot of sense. Seen it in comics plenty of times. The good guy(s) are too unbeatable as a team, so you gotta beat them at their own game. Kind of funny how the KID seems to have had the right idea over Season 8. Kind of retroactively makes her motivation a little more understandable, since, in the previous review about the Season 8 finale, I couldn't figure out what the hell she was trying to do; Grogar's reasoning is probably what she was going for, but just not quite so brutally. I like how he resurrected Sombra, keeping with that necromancy shtick like how he did in the original series. Kind of raises a question though. He threatened to send Sombra back to the ether....is that 'death' or 'purgatory' or is Sombra more of an actual....spirit entity or something like that? I don't know if that's the right wording for it. Sort of like the Shadow King from X-Men except able to take physical form instead of residing on the astral plane or...whatever. I'm just going to assume that was their version of saying 'death' since, y'know, kid's show...even though it showed the Tree of Harmony literally melting faces last season.

I like how they decided to really pull out all the stops too, even going so far as to destroy the Tree itself. Also kept up with the idea of the Tree and its energies keeping the Forest at bay, which makes me wonder what was going on with the place before Starswirl and the other pillars created the seed that the Tree grew from. I mean, he said he was the one keeping it under control back in the day. Was that a 24-hour job or did he just cast a crazy powerful spell to slap it back every so often for an extended period of time? Seems the latter since the next episode involves the Young 6 going into the Everfree to visit the Tree's remains and they had no problem getting there. And just as I suspected, back at the end of Season 4, the box that the Tree gave them actually DID infuse them with the power of the Elements since that seems to be exactly what happened to Sombra when they went to Canterlot after, I will admit, cleverly escaping from his prison. They probably could have gotten away with leaving the Elements in there the entire time, even when it came to dealing with the Pony of Shadows at the end of Season 7.

I'm not sure I really like Sombra's voice. He sounds too...I dunno, haughty? And he's still a blank flank. THAT'D I'd like to know more about honestly, even though it doesn't have any real bearing on anything. I also liked the voice he had during the albeit brief lines he had in the Season 3 opener. I kind of pictured him having a deep, almost demonic voice just based on his looks, not sounding like a hoity toity drama queen that was acting like he should be in a L'Oreal commercial. However, it does give him some characterization, which he was severely lacking. So, he's an arrogant, overconfident braggart and probably got that way after enslaving the Crystal Empire a thousand years ago. Not sure why he thought he was so unbeatable when a pair of alicorns could look at him funny and vaporize him. I wonder if Celestia and Luna were the reason he was ethereal since it looked like they obliterated his physical form but his 'soul' or whatever got trapped under the ice. Again, still some backstory missing about him. Could be cool, but I have a feeling he's gone for good this time since I can't see Grogar resurrecting him again unless he gets desperate and tells Sombra to sit down and stfu.

I find it interesting that it seems at the end of the series, the princesses are probably going to retire anyway, passing the crown to Twilight and her friends, which was what Lauren Faust's original plan was anyway. While they finally did what I had been screaming at them to do with Discord, ie, if he's on your side, who in the world could really hurt you, being that he's essentially omnipotent, it feels like they've done that whole 'I learned how to ask for help from my friends' thing more than once. Hasn't Twilight done this several times already? Is she a dope? I mean, shit, in the Season 3 opener, she asked Spike for help at the end even though she was told she had to do it herself. And yeah, I knew immediately Discord was faking, as did everyone. He didn't want to be there and probably knew they themselves were the Elements by then.

The comedy in this two-parter was pretty solid. Rainbow's line about the Princesses being pretty useless got the biggest belly laugh I've gotten from this show in a while. Twilight's freak out coupled with everyone else's nonchalant attitude was spot on too. Perfect way to write it. Everyone had gotten so used to her freak outs, it no longer bothers them and they kind of expect it anyway. She really hasn't changed since she got her wings - and everyone was worried she was going to, at first. Hah! Discord's asshattery at the end when he reveals he was full of shit the entire time after taking a bullet for Flutters was great too. I was worried at first when they reformed Discord that his line of thinking and his tomfoolery and his motivation for being was going to be affected, because, let's face it, he was written to be a polar opposite to harmony - being chaos and all. But they did a good job with him. He can be chummy with the cast but he'd be the obnoxious friend that the others do learn how to tolerate but still find to be a dick sometimes. Just picture any buddy comedy movie and you can probably pick that stereotype out of the group. First one that comes to mind is Stifler from the American Pie series. Can you see any of the main cast wanting to be around someone as assholish as him for any real length of time IRL? Probably not, but they can stand each other in small doses. The villain interactions were good for some laughs too. I'm going to assume that the villains will eventually end up butting heads and turning on Grogar but, who knows? Maybe it'll be a Justice League vs. The Legion of Doom style throw-down. I'd be cool with that. I just really really REALLY don't want to see anymore villains turn good. Life isn't all sunshine and rainbows. There are some real pieces of shit out there, so there's no reason that there shouldn't be some real pieces of shit in the show. Conflict is what tends to drive most stories.

Anyway, this was a fantastic two-part opener. Fantastic final story set-up, one I'm very anxious to see play out, good comedy when it was there, a pretty cool bit of action involving Sombra and we got to see a lot more about him, which I was happy with. Wish a few other things could have been explained about him, but eh, not everyone is going to have a back story. We're also finally coming full circle with Faust's story, which is quite satisfying. Since we're going to see a Generation 5 with the same characters but different races (Pinkie as a pegasus, Twilight's an Earth pony, Flutters is a unicorn, wat?!!??!, different look for AJ), I figured that they're going to be in a no-win situation and the only thing the main cast can do to stave off extinction was to hit a giant reset button for existence and Generation 5 is the result - lots of similar things, but some notable differences somehow. Sort of like a Flashpoint Paradox style thing I suppose, except without the 'time boom', as Zoom put it. Sort of. I think you know what I'm trying to say. But, it could also just be a new set of stories with similar enough characters. As far as I know, and correct me if I'm wrong, supposedly Generation 5 is going to be more teen/young adult oriented since the target audience fans of this generation are probably about that age range now, so doing similar more child-friendly stories wouldn't make too much sense in that regard. As long as the writing and characterization is solid though, it should do well enough. I have no idea if I'm going to be around for it though. I've got a lot on my plate now and, as you've seen with my lack of writing lately, it's gotten harder and harder to keep going with this, and I still have one giant series of stories to write after the current two are done. Anywho, final score for this episode 9.5/10. Can't wait to see how this turns out.

It's getting late as I write this and I have to pack a few things for tomorrow and Sunday, so I'm going to go ahead and write up my thoughts on Uprooted in a few days. Until then!