My quick takes on the Make Your Mark special · 1:07am May 27th, 2022
Spoilers, click after the break only if you've watched or don't care.
So, it, uh, wasn’t that good. The pacing was far too rushed, as they crammed like a half dozen plotlines into 40 minues. Of these, the festival planning didn’t really matter, and slice of life like that could’ve just gone into the Tell Your Tale shorts instead. The dragon didn’t need to be there either, it just got shoehorned in out of nowhere as a needless disruption, likely solely for toy sales. Meanwhile, we just got magic back in the movie, so having the reverse as a main focus here seemed dumb to me. Also, the literal all-consuming voids in reality was a gigantic escalation that came out of nowhere and gave me tonal whiplash. The character writing was also kinda terrible. Hitch came across as too wacky to me when compared to his character from the movie, shirking his responsibilities constantly even when he’s needed. And Posey’s complete turnaround combined with the sudden revelation of ‘oh earth ponies have magic too now’ was super forced.
By far the most interesting conflict was Zipp needing to reconcile her personal desires with her royal duties, but that got resolved super quickly as a footnote. Haven barely objected to Zipp’s choice. This had so much potential, I would have just planted the narrative focus here. The other major bit of missed potential was the evil alicorn at the end. Even with only 30 seconds of screentime her motivations make no sense. If she wanted magic back, why wasn’t she helping the tribes get it back? That would’ve been a cool twist for the main film, actually. She could have come in as this messianic figure promising the return of magic and friendship, and then delivered, but then five minutes later reveal she wanted the magic back so she could steal it all and then does so.
I'd like to watch that special
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See, the show writers need to step up their game.