With Season 3 being a half season and during its writing phase believed to be the final season, the writers had a chance to explore concepts or tackle ideas they had wanted to do but never gotten around to. One of them was the bullying episode, an extremely important one considering that in the early 2010's cyber bullying was just starting to attract attention and most discussions of bullying still involved physical interactions. Cindy Morrow, fresh off her success in Season 2 (particularly

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So, what was on tap for Season 2 after "The Last Roundup" and all the Derpgate controversy that overshadowed it? Well, it was this episode penned by the same M. A. Larson who'd done "The Return of Harmony", "Luna Eclipsed" and then "Secret of My Excess" with that being the one that seemed to get him back to that high level of quality he'd been known for in Season 1. So, was Larson able to continue his rebound or did he only end up proving that his success with "Secret of My Excess" was a fluke?

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Season 2 seemed to be doing well for most people up to this point, and there's no denying that with "The Return of Harmony" through "Sisterhooves Social" they were showing a desire to be more bold and explore avenues and characters that hadn't been explored before. Lauren Faust's contributing presence likely helped, since now the writers didn't have to worry as much about trying to please both Lauren and Hasbro (at least for the time being). However, this is widely regarded as the first true

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So after not being seen at all since the pilot, Princess Luna had indisupitably become the Brony fandom's mascot. Entire headcanons had been written around "Woona" based entirely on her design from Season 1 and what little we had seen of her in the pilot's closing minutes. But then this episode came along and would be Luna's official re-debut into the show. This episode was so popular in fact, that during the only major marathon The Hub ever ran (the "We Heart Ponies Fan Favorite Mareathon" in

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And now we're getting into something really, truly weird. Dave Polsky, just brushing off the controversy of "Feeling Pinkie Keen" returned to write this episode. To my knowledge this episode was nowhere near as controversial when it debuted, so many people were able to get a better feel for who Dave Polsky was as a writer. But was it a good impression or a bad one? Well, let's find out.

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*Sigh*, well "A Dog and Pony Show" was nice while it lasted. But now we're diving right back into the bad stuff. I think I can pin down what the problem is with Season 1's second half though. The show was caught in the crossfire between Lauren Faust who kept wanting to take it in a more adventure and action driven direction, and Hasbro who wanted the show to be more slice of life based so it'd be easier to market. The writers knew that no matter what they did they would never be able to please

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Brace yourselves, folks, we're heading into the show's first true clunker and the debut of what would become one of the show's worst written characters. Considering that the show hadn't really taken off by this point, and nowadays it can only take one bad or underwhelming episode to get your show cancelled, it's a miracle the show would recover from this early self-inflicted wound. Am I being too hard on this episode written by Chris Savino (who has since gained a rather infamous reputation

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