Season 4 episode discussion (Stream & episode links in first post)

FF#1 has the weird distinction of being both padded AND rushed all at once. Which is just some weird meta level of messing up.

@ClownDicks  
Well, of course it had lots of minor things dragging it down. Poor pacing, too many songs (Pinkie Pride was a Pinkie focused episode guest staring Weird Al. An overdose of songs was appropriate. MMC did not need to be a musical) they forget what Rainbow Dash’s motherfucking cutie mark means, etc. Those were just the big ones, I feel.

We are getting a bit side-tracked though. There’s a IDW thread in case anyone feel like bashing FF#1 a bit more. And for once, I don’t disagree with bashing something.

@Trickquestion
 
To be fair to MMC the songs served as montages. MMC was a 2 parter condensed into a single episode and hence stuff they would spend 5 minutes on would be condensed into a 2 minute song. Montages are probably the number 1 reason for any musical interlude to be put in a TV show by the creators.
 
If they do it well you don’t notice it, ie. a huge chunk of early simpsons used montages pretty well.

@Trickquestion  
I know this is getting into headcanon territory, but I’ve seen people justify those discrepancies with cutie marks in MMC by saying that when the Other Five switched CM’s, they became how they perceive the original CM holder.
 
For instance, Rarity and AJ are both very work-oriented, so they respectively saw Rainbow Dash and, well, Rarity, by their jobs rather than anything deeper and acted accordingly. Pinkie grew up on a farm and hated it, so she saw AJ’s life as nothing but toil, even though AJ never saw it that way.

@The Twelfth Doctor Whoof  
Which I would regard as subtle brilliance if that’s what they were going for.

@The Twelfth Doctor Whoof  
That’s an interesting idea, but if that’s what the show meant, they needed to explain it, because all I saw was an Ultima 9 grade continuity error.

@Trickquestion  
Oh they definitely needed to explain it better. No argument from me there.
 
Let’s be honest. MMC was written to be a series finale. McCarthy and Larson had no idea if they’d be renewed when that script was locked-in back in late 2011, because of the 65-Episode Curse. They just wrote an episode that could work either as an ending or a so-called “new beginning”.
 
Unfortunately for them, the series was renewed, which made all those plotholes and continuity errors suddenly mean something. I said at the outset that writing their way out of the disaster than was MMC would be a Herculean undertaking. Jury’s still out on how they’ve handled it, since they’ve mostly avoided the Alicorn-shaped elephant in the room.

@The Twelfth Doctor Whoof  
It doesn’t seem suitable to be a series finale. It just doesn’t have enough of the rest of the mane 6. After all that time hammering in the importance of all the mane 6 and their friendship, I doubt they would end with a story of Twilight being the central focus.

@The Twelfth Doctor Whoof  
@Grieffon  
I don’t think anyone’s asked Larson if it was written with that in mind. We don’t know anything for sure.

@The Twelfth Doctor Whoof
 
You joking? Where’s the closure? Where’s the payoff? Why would they go about introducing this massive and then just cut it off abruptly before we even get to see the implications? If they wanted to be a finale they should have gone with an flash-forward epilogue scene that showed where the characters are in the future.

@Zennistrad  
No I’m not joking. Twilight’s Alicornication was meant to be the payoff. And of course it would focus solely on Twilight to the detriment of the others; she’s been the main character from Day 1, and Meghan - at least back then - had a blatant preference for Purplesmart. She’s gotten better. Most kids cartoons don’t have the sort of “closure” we take for granted with live-action shows and anime.
 
If the show had ended right then and there, maybe they figured that they may be able to do an epilogue movie somewhere down the line. I actually figured that’s what the movie was before it turned out to be Equestria Girls and we were getting a Season 4.
 
I’ve said many times that MMC felt like a series finale to me, and I’m sticking by that.

@The Twelfth Doctor Whoof  
If MMC was supposed to be the series finale. Then why did the previous episode begin the build-up towards the Equestria Games? It just doesn’t make sense that they raise the hype of a future event in the series just to end of the series on the next episode.

@Grieffon  

 
Thing is, it really doesn’t make any sense by itself. There’s a lot of mentions to events to previous events in the series.
 
Admittedly, Twilight’s transformation wasn’t explained to any extent any point and totally came out of left field, and she’s already proven worthiness in much more impressive fashions earlier in the show. Like in the pilot of the series, just as an example.
 
Okay, the first part of Magical Mystery Cure could have stood as a full episode, but the second part desperately needed another episode or two to explain what the hell was going on.
 
@Trickquestion  
With regards to Rainbow’s mark, they seemed to be switching jobs/lives more than just cutie marks. If they were just trying to live up to each others’ talents, they wouldn’t have swapped houses, after all.
 
And Applejack should have been digging for jewels if they were going for cutie mark talents.

@The Twelfth Doctor Whoof  
Then why did Dash get her butt tattoo back for doing the weather and not for Going Fast?

@ClownDicks  
Or how come Applejack decided to leave her family because her ass has diamonds on it?

@Psyga315  
And why was her family nowhere to be found when Ponk was fucking up?

@ClownDicks  
And how the hell did the farm waste away simply within a few days?

@ClownDicks  
And how come Celestia thought it’d be a nice idea to fuck up Ponyville and render it a squabbling mess with shitty weather? Besides rendering the fate of everyone as a test… AGAIN?

@Psyga315  
And what the heck was Starswirl’s spell supposed to do in the first flippin’ place?

Lets all be honest here, there’s a very real possibility EQG took resources away from Season 3, and when you look at season 3 as a whole it’s only major problem was a lack of length to allow anything to build up.

@Roboshi  
Yeah, though that would just give the detractors more fodder and give it more shit than it already has.

@Zennistrad  
Without touching on the more fundamental point that someone who never worked on a farm in her entire life nor knew the whole scope of what they were dealing with had the one perfect solution to generations of plague and hardship of presumably intelligent farmers, which to me might suggest a little writer’s bias, I would like to offer one single point.
 
Suspension of disbelief can’t cover vocal delivery as bad as in that song.

Friends Forever #1 was… a thing. I can’t deny it’s the worst issue I’ve read because it just has way too many problems. The pace changes gears more often than in an animated sitcom, and my skull is sore from all my headscratching. (Pinkie? Getting nervous in a competition? I don’t really see it. The rest of the Mane 7 are there, yet no one brings up that maybe they got AJ’s name wrong.) Then there’s the artwork, which has its moments but suffers from quality breakdowns, especially with all the panels lacking any backgrounds (other than maybe a cheap gradient or some such).
 
But I can’t help but love this comic because of it’s gloriously insane quirks. Marine Sandwich is a Fluttershy recolor, but her hair seems to shorten later to look like Babs Seed’s. Then there’s a contestant who starts looking like a Fluttershy recolor midway. There’s even one piece of dialog with an honest-to-god emoticon in it. It’s not a chat log, but actual spoken dialog with a “:D” at the end. Also, when characters weren’t turning into Fluttershy recolors, most of them looked pretty well designed.

@K_A  
It does have the spark of bizarre grandeur, I’ll give it that. Reading it was equivalent to consuming an explosively hot pepper: an incredibly wretched and unpleasant experience, but there was a sort of joy and triumph to be had.