Episode Review: "Common Ground" - Season 9 Episode 6 · 11:01pm May 5th, 2019
Over the years, MLP has had its fair share of notable quest stars outside of its main cast of actresses and other VA based in or near Vancouver, all of whom clearly loved their time on the show. Whether it be semi-famous people who appeared for one character and got to let it loose (Lena Hall's Colratura, Autumn Blaze's Rachel Bloom) or even John de Lancie's Discord, who gels with the show so well he comes back two or three times a season ever since his character was reformed and made semi-recurring back near the end of Season 3, it's clear this show allows them to have fun and embrace the wacky world of Pony, even if only for the length of their recording session. This even applies to the actors brought in for the Movie: whatever a hefty chunk of those 8 new characters were underwritten and didn't do much business, none of those actors phoned in their work one bit (well, maybe Sia, but she's a signer, not an actress, so that will happen: look at Billy Joel's Dodger in Oliver and Company). I'd even argue Emily Blunt and especially Liev Schreiber did some phenomenal work, able to stand with what a lot of the show's regulars do (well, maybe not the main cast, but you know what I mean).
I bring this up not as a random anecdote, but to lead into the main thing about this episode: the return of Patton Oswalt as Quibble Pants, one of two celebrity guest stars returning this season (Weird Al Yancovic's Cheese Sandwich is the other). As you may have heard, Oswalt brought his wife Meredith Salenger, also an actress, and his daughter Alice, not an actress, to play characters appearing alongside Quibble. More so, the dynamic they're playing in the episode is very similar to what happened in real life: Oswalt remarried after his first wife passed away, thereby meaning Alice had a new motherly figure in her life so soon (a year and a few months) after her birth mother was gone. In the episode, Quibble's new special somepony Clear Sky (Salenger) has a daughter Wind Sprint (Alice Oswalt) and Quibble's trying to get along with her.
Now, there's more differences then simply the role reversal of a stepdad rather then a stepmom - Salenger and Alice apparently got on very well quickly enough - but it is still the case that the episode was written primarily around its guest stars (as revealed by Jim Miller here, Oswalt wanted Alice on last time he was on the show, they remembered that when they decided to bring him back, as well as his wife being an actress and a comic bit he did eons ago about a future son not echoing with his Star Wars love so much he tossed his Boba Fett figure up on the roof, and the rest proceeded from there). The danger with that, of course, is that it runs the risk of the resulting episode hinging so much on knowledge of its quest stars that, divorced from that, it suffers greatly. Does this?
A little, though not as much as it might have. I almost dismissed bothering with the behind-the-scenes discussion altogether, except doing so would have hindered my ability to break apart and discuss this episode, for it is a fascinating one, even apart from its guest stars, but trying to explain so without that context would have been much harder. Now we know all that, the episode itself!
Though Quibble Pants does return for this episode, this calls back to that far less then to Buckball Season, an episode I'm fonder of then most people tend to be, starting with a funny newsreel detailing the rapid popularity ascension of both the game and Team Ponyville. Fluttershy, Pinkie and Snails are in Appleloosa with Rainbow (and Snips, stealing every moment he's pivotal in with his amusing subplot of profiting from fan demand of autographs from Snails), and Rainbow promised to check out the new Buckball museum for Applejack, where she runs into Quibble, Clear Sky and Wind Sprint, the latter being really into sports, which Quibble is very much out of his depth in. From there, all the beats you'd expect happen: he asks Rainbow for help, she tries to sportify him in a series of epic fails that are equal parts funny and cringey, Wind remains dismissive of his attempts and him the whole way, culminating in an outburst. It all wraps up with a heart-to-heart between Clear Sky and Wind, then between Quibble and Wind, and she telling him about the game rather then him trying to pretend to be something he's not to win her over.
Now, as great as the angle about stepparents getting on with stepchildren is, a lot of that ends up being sidelined for a hefty chunk of the episode, in favour of the Rainbow and Quibble Show. Still plenty amusing on its own, but there's a lot of repeated moments that all share the motif of, "This attempt to connect with Wind will never work", followed by, "of course it will, you've got Rainbow Dash helping you!" Which gets a wee bit repetitive fast, alongside come cringey moments along the way. If there's a thing that holds the episode back, it's that; there's a wonderful theme and moral expressed beautifully here, with a fun B and C plot for Team Ponyville with lots of great layering and callbacks, that it would be an episode almost devoid of real structural flaws, except that parts of the middle (more then the middle, really - all the way from the 4th or 5th minute to 4 minutes before the end, so a little over half) grate somewhat.
Having said that, the episode has the basic decency to be a very stellar version of that. I was very surprised by the strong characterisation present throughout - not a single main character has a moment that doesn't fit them if you stop and think about the situation they're in.
If the episode has a message not stated in dialogue but equally important, it's this: kids are far, far more perceptive then you think, and even if they can't quite articulate it into dialogue, they will often know when they're being led on or being talked down to. And as an adult, the best way you can win a kid over is not to try and be what they like, but to let them be themselves around you and captivate you with what makes them them.
The only kid Rainbow really interacts with is Scootaloo, who adores her, so this accounts for Rainbow not really knowing how to help Quibble the right way, and her characterisation throughout otherwise is spot on, as is Quibble's, also a newcomer to being around children as an adult, and who himself isn't annoying, just some of the business the writers give him. This is an improvement over Stranger then Fan Fiction, an episode I find tough to rewatch due to his attitude for most of it.
This extends even further to Clear Sky and Wind Sprint. Clear is such a sweetheart of a mom and a girlfriend, and while she's mostly a reactionary character, she serves her purpose beautifully, coupled by a lovely performance from Salenger. As for Wind, turns out the reason she's so hostile to Quibble (even when he's not trying to impress her, she turns glum whenever he shows up or speaks, mostly), is because she thinks Clear Sky and him are trying to make her forget about her dad in favour of Quibble. Now, the episode leaves it vague as to whether Clear divorced or was widowed, though drops the occasional subtle hint, like the use of past tense verbs, that let me to believe it's the latter. That doesn't matter; what matters is that Wind captured perfectly the feelings of a kid going through a tough time, trying to focus on what she likes, and being hostile to someone on the grounds of them being a reminder of the tough thing she's experiencing. Alice Oswalt gave an admirable performance that suited the parameters of the role; she's no child actress, but still had a knack for knowing the right inflection for the given mood of any line (and she gave many varied line readings of each bit of dialogue at that, said Miller) that worked in the same way using children works in those old Peanuts specials.
Really, I cannot understate how much Alice and Salenger's performance elevated their characters and the plotline; the familial love of the Oswalts showed through everything in the episode (even if it often felt sidelined in favour of the Rainbow and Quibble show) and really elevated the newly connected family thread far beyond what you may think otherwise. Even divorced from the behind-the-scenes knowledge, the episode benefits immeasurably from this.
Thus, I land on a quandary; this is a real neat topic for an episode to try and tackle, framed with a convincing setup, clever writing and structuring the whole way, no flawed characterisation, and some really beautiful and lovely performances that work wonders for what they're needed for. But there's just no getting around that segments of it are either cringe, boring or repetitive, just by virtue of the story they're telling and the parameters of how it can be told in this show. Sure, I'd argue you could fix it a little by shortening some of the Quibble and Rainbow material along the way and giving that time to the last 4 minutes, but that would only alleviate the problem somewhat, not altogether. A solid enough episode that I liked quite a lot, but which, taken as a whole, can't go beyond being merely very good, despite possessing lots of elements it would need to do so. As Quibble would say, butchering a sports saying: "It's a hit, but it's no house run."
STRAY OBSERVATIONS:
- I wonder how much of a coincidence it is that Quibble Pants' "Speed" mantra felt very similar to Lightning McQueen's "Speed. I am Speed." one from Cars, given Oswalt played the main character Remy in Ratatouille, the film made right after (and partly overlapping in production with) the first Cars. Maybe Haber felt it was a neat nod, or was it all in Oswalt's delivery? Or perhaps the third option, which is that these mantras people say to psyche themselves up for sports all sounds the same and I'm overreading into this? You decide.
- Seriously, even just as a character, Clear Sky was wonderful. She gently knew that the right way for Quibble way to not try so hard, and just how much to gently remind Wind that Quibble wasn't trying to replace her Dad. Heck, the episode is also elevated by Quibble trying to win Wind over not to win Clear over, they're already on perfect terms. He's trying to win her over because he knows being Clear's special somepony means he'll be spending a lot of time with her too.
- There's a brief moment where Wind asks Fluttershy and Pinkie what it's like playing in front of fans. They share a glance, and Fluttershy goes "Um..." before Rainbow Dash interrupts and saves them. It's a small moment that one could interpret as simply Fluttershy getting by large amount of viewers by ignoring them, but what's actually happening here is that the two perform so well when they filter out outside pressure and just focus on having fun in the moment, as was learned and explained in Buckball Season. Their brief hesitation to being reminded of the element that trips them up when they focus on it is a masterful callback, even more so considering Josh Haber didn't write the Buckball Season, though he was story editor at the time. And there's plenty more moments like that throughout, brilliant moments of callbacks and layering that don't aggressively announce themselves.
- You know how you watch something so much, you associate an actor with their role in it so much that it's a bit disorienting to see them in something else? If yes, then you've an idea how weird it felt to hear Sully's voice coming out of other roles John Goodman has voiced, or even when Steve Buscemi voiced, not Randall in Monsters, Inc., but in Monster House and The Boss Baby. Well, I associated Oswalt's voice with Remy in Ratatouille so much that the first time I watched Stranger then Fan Fiction, I had trouble separating Quibble from Remy. By the time I'd watched it again, I was a little more familiar with bits of his comic acts, so that problem was gone. But I felt it was an amusing anecdote! Having a distinctive voice that suits a character so well can be weird to hear it coming out of another character's mouth at times.
This is one of the most interesting reviews I've seen of this episode, and therefore also one of the hardest to boil down to a couple of lines for Text Review Roundup! I've gone for "positive with reservations", as it seems you found more good than bad here but with issues that couldn't be ignored. I tend to agree with you that Wind's dad is dead, but I'm not as sure as I was with "The Perfect Pear".
Also, "Buckball Season" is one of the best S6 episodes, so there.
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I mean, you’re basically right, but my opinion’s a bit more positive than that, if it didn’t come across. Less “positive with reservations” and more “a good episode, not a great one.” And the problems I mentioned aren’t as bad as the review may have indicated, actually. It’s just that the episode possesses so many things that would make it great, that it just missing that mark sticks out all the more to me. So more then “positive with reservations”; I just figured this would make for an interesting way to tackle the episode that not many people would do. And, well, judging by your reaction, I was right! I aim to please.
Also, did not intend for this one to be as long as it ended up being! But, such is life, especially as the first third is just BTS contextual info. Sure, you know yourself, my friend!
And yes, I’m well aware of your fondness of Buckball Season. As well as your sadness regarding that episode’s writer never returned for a second script, a sentiment I share. But you probably guessed that.