Episode Review: "2, 4, 6, Greaaat" - Season 9 Episode 15 · 9:30pm Aug 10th, 2019
Phonetic title, eh? Guess it had to happen eventually.
Ironically enough, this week’s episode echoes back to “Common Ground” much like last week’s did (as far as being the second episode this season to feature a returning guest star), though this time it’s for Buckball being back. I welcome this – “Buckball Season” remains one of my favorite Season 6 episodes to date (and I believe time has been not too unkind to that season – certainly, in light of a lot of episodes the past two years, anyway). And even if buckball ends up being focused on far less then in its debut episode, as with “Common Ground”, the mere fact of a growing national sport gives fresh possibilities for stories to tell, especially ones that can show off how far a character has come.
…alas, this episode is not that. Not even close. The worst you could say about “Common Ground” was that large chunks of its middle were repetitive and edged into mild cringe at times, but other then that it made no mistakes worth being hung up on, and the core message really shone through. And there, Rainbow Dash struck a balance between her usual brashness but also having some level-headness she’s nurtured over the years. But in “2, 4, 6, Greaaat”, she regress hard to levels of being a butt not seen since Season 2 (and Non-Compete Clause I suppose), and infinitely worse due to how she’s shown herself to be much, much, better then this many times in the seasons since.
Sigh. Let’s unpack the cesspool of mistakes this episode makes.
Celestia wants her school to face Twilight’s in buckball (don’t worry, they address the elephant in the room later), prompting Twilight to enlist reigning buckball champions Fluttershy, Pinkie and Snails to crash-course her athletic students in 2 weeks. She also enlists Rainbow Dash too… though not to help them. No, Rainbow Dash gets to do something much more important – coach the cheer squad!
Make Rainbow's reaction of utter disbelief and resignation be that of a floating white ghost and you have a near-duplicate image of my reaction to this news.
Believe it or not, this questionable premise wasn’t what lost me. And after Twilight lightly stated that she felt Rainbow was the right pony for the job, I saw the mild potential possible here (even if it was squandering a more interesting story of crash coursing a buckball team, but that’s neither here nor there). And speaking as someone who enjoyed Snips’ unabashed buckball profiteering in “Common Ground”, having him back doing the same again but if a properly expanded role was a welcome surprise to me.
Where the episode did lose all hope was mere minutes later – after Snips introduces Rainbow to the squad (three of the Student 6 and two blandly typical high school cheerleaders in pony form), Rainbow expresses complete apathy to the whole matter. No, seriously, she flies up to the window and watches the buckball practice instead, misses the demonstration of their woefully uncoordinated routine, shrug-replies they have it in hand, and flies off.
The rest of the episode until the last six minutes is a painful exercise in watching Rainbow not even attempt to disguise her disinterest in her assigned task and put no effort into it, despite the students and Snips (for monetary reasons, of course) consistently begging for her help. And when forced to try and help, she asks for ideas from others and gets the equipment, but still leaves them be to do it themselves. And this isn’t some subtle thing that may only annoy die-hard fans who pay super attention to the Mane 6’s intricate characters and growth. When Rainbow responds to Pinkie and Fluttershy saying they’re looking forward to seeing the cheer squad’s trial run, Rainbow responds not with a nervous laugh, but instead with a “how much work does cheer squad need?” Watching a character be a dense jerk, who’s been shown to have progressed far beyond this, is not only painful writing, it’s painful to watch too.
It gets less painful once the others let Rainbow have it, culminating in a poignant outburst from Smolder that she had been looking forward to Rainbow coaching them, because Rainbow makes everything awesome, but was gutted to discover that was only when it was about something Rainbow cared about… which apparently doesn’t extend to the students. Rainbow does realise her errors at this point and finally starts fixing their coordination – improves the dancing steps of the dancers and Yona so they don’t shake each other up, fixes Ocellus’ rhyming and vocal projection and assigns Smolder a flying smoke pattern. The final four minutes culminate on excerpts of the game either side of the final performance, which goes solidly (and surprisingly enough, they allow Twilight’s school to lose by a point). Cue Twilight slyly remarking it’s almost like Rainbow was the right and choice, Rainbow calling her out on knowing the lesson to learn right from the start, Twilight playing ignorant and the group laughing in the final shot.
Now, even if Rainbow had been handled properly, the episode would have still only been decent – there’s very little good humour in it past Snips’ merchandising, and it’s still a predictable story, at least in it’s current form. And it still registers as such a trivial story to tell this late in the game, and a lesson Rainbow shouldn’t need to know. But Rainbow being as much of a butt for as long as she is makes the episode such a raw slog even though that only occupies half its runtime. Episode writer Kaita Mpambara previously wrote the solid “Horse Play” and “A Rockhoof and a Hard Place”, and while both of those feature to a degree characters being ignorant when they should know better, it’s far milder in those cases and at least features decent (and in the case of “Horse Play”, great) humour alongside it. Toss in the “lesson” Rainbow needs to learn about caring for others enough to care about their interests and all the side morals that spin off from that coming out of nowhere, and you have an episode this isn’t fun, is poorly written and is a structural mess.
This could have been fixed easily enough. Put the focus less on Rainbow not caring, and more her actually not knowing what to do. If her sentiments had been “Why am I here? I don’t think I can help much…” but she still tried, and the episode featured her progressing towards gradually using her athletic prowess to improve their routine rather then it all being crunched up in a single montage, we’d have an agreeable episode that, while still predictable, disposable and light on comedy, wouldn’t make as many obvious mistakes. Add a cherry of a scene of Rainbow expressing her frustration at feeling helpless to Twilight (whose absence outside of the start and end does the episode’s theme and structure no favours) and getting some intentionally vague guidance in return, as well as enough reasons from Twilight why she feels Rainbow would be good, one of the main reasons she half-arses it in the actual episode, and you’d be set. You could still have the same moral of Rainbow learning to care more when she realises the others care a lot, just as long as she was still trying from the start, but that realisation prompted her to try a different approach.
The episode being a mess is a pity, because there is neat stuff at the margins. The buckball world building delights yet again through giving the sport’s presence in Equestria some weight, Snips remains the episode’s sole funny point, Smolder gets another very good moment to her resumé (I’ll admit she’s got a solid few by now). Alas this is an anaemic, frustrating episode that could have been more then solid enough, even if it would have still being disposable. Not as dull as “The Last Laugh”, but mostly by virtue of provoking incredulous feelings in the viewer as Rainbow returns to being a butt, all while the episode sports many flaws atypical of recent episodes that it really shouldn’t have. Small wonder many are calling it the season’s worst; while I wouldn’t go that far myself (cough “She’s All Yak” cough), it’s a faintly awful episode.
STRAY OBSERVATIONS
- “I’ve seen you two around school, haven’t I?”. Wow, way to not know students you have definitely taught, Rainbow, as well as not caring to know. Just, wow.
- The one usage of “20% cooler” in Rainbow Roadtrip seems unobtrusive compared to the, what, four times it or a variation of it is used here. More proof, if it was needed, that the show is being written by people who desire to please the fans on a mere superficial level.
- The quick explanation as to how a team of all unicorns can play buckball is neat – we’ve seen those wings before, after all, and I get the feeling the magical dampening ring isn’t totally new either, even if I can’t specifically remember it appearing before. A moment like this comes across as well thought out, and the episode even makes it obvious the magic team is rougher as a result, though given the Ponyville team is new-ish to the game (while the Canterlot team could have been practicing for ages, for all we know), it balances out. The animators seemed to forget to give the Canterlot team’s flying pony a magic dampening ring as well, though.
- There’s definitely material for fandom jokes in there regarding Rainbow not trying with something she doesn’t care about and the show staff having the same attitude given the final season is final no matter the effort they give, and they won’t get more work regardless.
- It barely registers that the cheer team’s all-female like (most) real life ones (the whole concept of a team for cheering for your school team is not a thing this side of the Atlantic – sorry Yanks), given almost all the athletes (and characters in this show are). Just something that struck me. Makes me wonder – are cheer squad’s in Equestria gender regulated too? Who knows. It’s probably not something we’re meant to think about much.
And don't even get that right. The fandom as a whole doesn't want "20% cooler" references stuffed in.
I'm not sure we've seen rings specifically before -- given how common it is in ponyfic, I think I'd probably have remembered -- but there was a sort of magic-sealing device used at the entrance to the stadium in "Equestria Games". We saw Rarity being subject to it.