Episode Re-Review: A Royal Problem · 4:03pm Jun 13th, 2021
By now, Season 7 was having its episodes aired early on Treehouse T.V. in Canada, so spoilers were a plenty in this season. Meanwhile, in what seemed to be a common trend for the season, it would go from something good or even great to something equally bad as we went straight from "Hard to Say Anything" to "Honest Apple" and one of the worst OOC performances Applejack ever had. To get things back on track, Lewis and Songco were writing this episode which was to be the very first royal sisters focus episode. This was something fans had been asking for for years. But nowadays it's incredibly divisive, and quite a lot of fans consider this episode to be a misfire. What probably doesn't help is that originally there was going to be a similar episode to this, but Twilight would be involved. They didn't say for sure that that episode got the boot because of this one, but considering it's a Starlight Glimmer focus episode it wouldn't surprise me. So, is this episode as good or bad (depending on who you ask) as the fandom makes it out to be? Well, let's find out.
The episode begins on probably not the best note, Starlight is called all by herself by the map. Yes, that's right, Starlight gets a solo map mission all to herself: Not Twilight, not Spike, not any of the mane six who've been in the show for longer. Stuff like this really doesn't help to dispel the criticism that Starlight is a writers pet. Anyway, she goes to Canterlot (more specifically the castle) and begins to suspect that Celestia and Luna are the problem, but they aren't willing to talk to each other about what's bothering them. Twilight (who is checking in via a ballerina doll) thinks that's ridiculous, but Starlight suggests that Twilight might be biased. Then Starlight spends time with both princesses, finding out that Princess Luna is always exhausted after a night of patrolling the dream realm and can't stay awake even for breakfast (her sister makes pancakes). Meanwhile, Princess Celestia seems more interested in tending to delegates all day long than taking any notice of what her sister does around the castle. Of course, the solution is quite obvious.
So Starlight does this. When, you ask? First thing in the morning when Princess Luna is getting off her night shift and is too tired.
Naturally, Luna is not in the best of moods and unfortunately it proves contagious as it spreads to Celestia. And the two start arguing, sounding more like petty teenagers than these all powerful rulers. This is compensating too much for the problem of them being these wise but distant ruler characters, it gets to a point where they look childish and immature. It's not as bad as Applejack and Rarity acting like their little sisters in "Look Before You Sleep" but it's still there. And so what does Starlight do as a result? She has a knee jerk reaction that allows her to somehow swap the sisters' cutie marks (Celestia gets a patch of Luna's surrounding darkness so the moon won't blend in on her white flanks). So once again, Starlight is using magic as a shortcut despite the fact that it's already backfired on her multiple times.
She apparently can't undo it, so Starlight has now forced the royal sisters to do each others' jobs for the next twenty four hours or so. But even this isn't fair because Luna has just woken up and will have to now stay awake, whereas Celestia gets to sleep in all day and be well rested for her night shift. And now comes the real problem with this episode, Starlight's interactions with both princesses feels very forced here. She has no prior history with either of them, aside from very briefly interacting with Princess Luna during "To Where and Back Again". Twilight, Spike or Cadence would work much better. But nope, they had to go for Starlight. And she's front and center giving both princesses advice, as if the writers were afraid the royal sisters couldn't hold an episode on their own. It feels like they intentionally held themselves back.
There's also a lot of questionable things that a princess is apparently needed for, including apparently needing to look happy in order to ensure a bunch of school foals can raise money for a field trip. And the photographer insists on going with a picture of Luna clearly looking unhappy after smiling so much, and somehow no one stopped it from being leaked to the papers. This becomes all that Princess Luna can think about, to the point where she out of the blue slips into her Royal Canterlot Voice to reassure some delegates that there are no timberwolves in their area. But why do they need a princess to tell them that? Shouldn't that be the job of a mayor or something? Naturally, Princess Luna is exhausted after a long day while Princess Celestia is refreshed and ready for her night shift. And since she already managed the sun and the moon for a thousand years, raising the moon is very easy for her. However, as everypony is asleep at night she has no one to talk to. That is, until she decides to talk to ponies in their dreams. Hey, at least that's something her sister also does.
Princess Celestia soon stumbles on Starlight having a nightmare, apparently caused by Twilight berating her for the cutie mark swap and just in general putting pressure on Starlight (it feels like they're going back to "No Second Prances" for the interactions between the two). And Starlight fears that she messed up so badly that Nightmare Moon will be coming back. Celestia is confident she can deal with that, but then another evil figure appears in the form of Daybreaker.
Daybreaker does look a lot like Nightmare Moon, but her design doesn't seem like a carbon copy. Daybreaker then claims that Celestia can "absolutely" turn into her if she stops caring about others. The fight between Daybreaker and Nightmare Moon then rages on, which seems to mostly be an excuse for Nicole Oliver and Tabitha St. Germain to go ham on each other (especially since Nightmare Moon appears to be slipping back into how she sounded during "Luna Eclipsed"). Realizing she needs back-up, Celestia reaches out to her sister, who is having a nightmare involving the school foals from earlier.
But Luna reveals that since she has Celestia's magic, there is nothing she can do in the dream realm and that it's all up to Celestia to dispel the nightmare before it's too late. With that encouragement, Celestia breaks up the fight and even though Daybreaker claims "I'm everything you want to be!" Celestia replies by saying she's not like Daybreaker and that Daybreaker "will never exist again!" which raises questions about whether Daybreaker is just a figment of somepony's imagination, or if she might actually exist.
The dream is soon dispelled and Celestia and Luna promise to be more open with each other in the future, then they praise Starlight for going with her gut even though she regretted it (a far cry from how she felt about her questionable behavior in her Season 6 focus episodes). So yes, reward Starlight for being lucky when a situation she caused could've easily backfired. Twilight then appears once the problem is officially cleared up and drags Starlight away to explain everything. Then Luna leaves as she tells Celestia that she's going to have fix a few mistakes Luna made.
And that's the story, so what do I think of the episode? Well, I probably sound more critical of this episode than I actually do. Believe me, I am sorely tempted to fail it for how petty the royal sisters act, how obnoxious the writers wrote Twilight and how it feels like Starlight is once again getting favorable treatment. But there are lots of moments on their own that are quite enjoyable, such as Starlight showing actual remorse for what she's done and not resorting to magic first thing, showing some signs of character growth even if it's hard to notice. Daybreaker is also a very good antagonist, although her existence does raise the question of where she came from and if she's real or not. But the original episode plan with Twilight, while still a map mission, had her more or less just looking everywhere but the royal sisters while they did a mostly good job of hiding it. And then they would come to an understanding on their own about needing to talk things out. So none of this episode's flaws can be excused by virtue of it being a holdover script from Season 6 or being someone else's work that Lewis and Songco took over. This episode, I can only assume, was written by them because they wanted to do something to make up for "Celestial Advice" not being a two parter like they had planned. I still stand by my statement that Starlight should've been in "A Flurry of Emotions" instead and that this should've been Twilight's episode instead. As it is, this episode very narrowly earns itself a B-.
Now, since I've again nothing new to say about the next three episodes, we're going to skip ahead to the infamous episode "Fame and Misfortune". There's a very important detail about it that has now come to light, which might explain why it became what it unfortunately is.
This is one of my favorite map episodes in the whole show, and one of the best Starlight episodes.
You know, I've read somewhere that Twilight's biasness towards the princesses, especially Celestia, is exactly the reason why she wasn't chosen for this map mission in the first place.
Also, as I've mentioned in your re-review of The Fault in Our Cutie Marks, it really felt like the show staff wanted to make Starlight into the main series substitute for Sunset Shimmer by doing whatever it took to make her look good, including exaggerating Twilight's flaws. I know you'll agree with me when I say that Starlight can be a good character, or at the very least tolerable, when the series isn't going out of its way to make her seem like the greatest thing since sliced bread.
5534644 Maybe, and I know we would get an addressing of Twilight's bias towards Celestia next season, but they still should not have made this a Starlight episode. Spike or Cadence would work just as well and without the need to "force" the sisters to deal with their problem.
5534718
How about making this into a Spike and Cadance episode to make up for Princess Spike?
5534744 That could've worked.