IDW Comics Revisited - Main Series #4

So we come to the end of the first big arc the comics did, and it hasn't really held up the greatest with the third installment being the one that has held up the best simply for being as filler loaded as it was when first seen. The first installment was rough around the edges and the second installment just reeked of forced conflict that has only gotten worse when the show somehow thought it could revisit that years down the road. So now we come to the fourth and final comic in the "The Return of Queen Chrysalis" arc. Is this one able to send off the arc on at least a decent note, or just indicate that this whole arc maybe isn't all it once cracked up to be? Well, let's find out.

The story begins with the mane six right at the gates of the changeling kingdom, and their plan seems to be reliant on Twilight to fight Queen Chrysalis and save the day, while Twilight insists that won't be enough. Still, despite some hesitation they trot in, soon finding themselves lost amongst a maze of stairs and doors. Chrysalis' voice taunts them with finding the right door while the others will have rather nasty surprises waiting. We get references to things such as Pennywise (the Tim Curry version anyway), The Shining and even The Phantom of the Opera. And meanwhile, Chrysalis looks like she's finally had enough of the CMC and plans to kill them.

Twilight finds the door that leads to Chrysalis but must answer a riddle: How is a pegasus like a writing desk? Twilight and Rarity suspect the answer is: They can both take you to far away places, but Pinkie Pie believes the real answer is not an answer, to say that she can't answer the question. And this works. Most likely the door is based around Chrysalis' mentality, she wanted Twilight to admit that she wasn't smart and couldn't be more intelligent than Chrysalis for figuring out a riddle. Kind of wish they would explain that or at least how Pinkie figured out that's what the solution was.

The door opens as Chrysalis intends to order her changeling subordinates to throw the CMC into the dungeon (making the earlier implication that she wasn't going to let them go kind of pointless and just cliff hanger bait). Before long the conflict is centered around Twilight fighting Chrysalis alone as the rest of the mane six are immediately captured and sidelined. The secretariat comet powers up both Twilight and Chrysalis' magic, but it seems like Twilight's best isn't enough to defeat Chrysalis. Chrysalis then makes her proposal to Twilight: Join her and teach her how to do powerful magic and in return Chrysalis will let her friends go. Despite pleas from her friends not to do it and despite the fact that Chrysalis' whole shtick is deception, Twilight agrees to this, ordering her friends to go get Celestia and come back, fighting her if necessary.

Of course, surprise surprise, Chrysalis isn't exactly being honest. She won't harm Twilight's friends, but she'll drain Twilight's love and then have Twilight drain the magic out of all her friends so they can't stop her. Twilight is naturally quite angered at this, and in some pretty cool panels we get to see her stand up to Chrysalis and blast her with magic that destroys the kingdom and sends Chrysalis far away. Twilight wakes up sometime later to find her friends and the CMC alongside Spike and Princess Celestia, the latter two of whom are looking quite beat up. It turns out that Spike helped Celestia battle a bunch of magical cockatrices that attacked Canterlot while the comet was passing by, and even got a medal for it. Twilight actually acknowledges this and gives him a hoof bump. It seems that it's all well that ends well as it's revealed that Chrysalis has to lick her wounds far away, and Pinkie Pie left behind her costume of herself to annoy the changelings. This would eventually lead to Chrysalis being captured proper in the comics, only for Twilight to stupidly let her out when Chrysalis got the last Fiendship is Magic issue, and then Chrysalis would go on to be involved in the terrible "Siege of the Crystal Empire" arc, all of which can no longer be canon due to the events of "To Where and Back Again".

We also get to see the Spike and Celestia story as a short, which is nice and I kind of wish it were fleshed out more (perhaps by trimming or cutting the filler from previous issues?). And what about Princess Luna? Well, there's a page of her being lost while looking at a map, trying to find Manehattan which was said to be under attack from a marshmallow pony. Kind of a disappointing way to include her, even more so than "A Canterlot Wedding" having her be completely absent for unexplained reasons while the battle for the city was taking place. Even knowing she would star in the next big arc doesn't quite make up for her inclusion here for a cameo and a joke.

And that's the story, so what do I think of the issue? This one is just insanely rushed to get to its ending: Twilight versus Chrysalis in a magical showdown. It's clearly meant to parallel many fictional works where the big bad tries to corrupt the hero and turn them against their friends/allies, only for the hero to reject the offer and defeat the big bad for good, but that shouldn't have come at the expense of completing sidelining the rest of the mane six during the climax. Give "A Canterlot Wedding" credit, they put up an actual fight there, and at least "To Where and Back Again" left it vague how the changelings took over, so we could assume the mane six were caught off guard and captured before they knew what was going on. And the Spike and Celestia substory perhaps could've been an issue all to itself for how great it was. Looking back on this arc as a whole, it's still quite decent but I have to ask if they were on a four issue restriction for arcs or something? Maybe a fifth issue could've given them more time to tell the story they wanted to tell, but then again they probably could've told the story in two to three issues if they'd cut out all the filler. That being said we have since gotten far worse stuff even just from the initial run of the comics (as in before they officially became tied to the show), though we also got far greater stuff (more so from the side series if I'm being honest). So if you have the rest of the issues of this arc and wanna see how it ends, go ahead and pick it up. There are some retail exclusive covers, but I don't think they're quite as worth it here, so staying in the five to ten dollar range should do it.

And there you have it, come back tomorrow when we'll take a look at the first issue of what was going to be a rather... unfocused arc: The Nightmare Forces arc.