Season One Revisit Thread

@DerpyFast
I think Rarity and Sweetie dont fully understand each other and theyre a bit less close just by the fact Rarity works a solo job that Sweetie cant meaningfully contribute to.

Rarity probably thinks Sweetie has it easy and might even be a bit spoiled; after all Rarity didn’t have a successful older sister growing up. While Sweetie thinks Rarity doesn’t appreciate Sweeties own hard work and passion.

And over time they start to appreciate each others work and presence.

And for Luna, yeah that dreamscape allows many possibilities, honestly I dont even know if there are any episodes that really deal with Lunas moon abilities.

Do you think this is one reason why you find Luna better than Celestia in that she has something better to do? Do you think Luna would be a duller character without them?

@Cosmas-the-Explorer
So there are very good reasons that Luna is more popular.

Even in the very beginning, people found the story of Nightmare Moon to be oddly one-sided and self-serving, and a lot of fans assumed that there was another side to it. Then there’s A Bird in the Hoof. The Cakes are extremely nervous, so Celestia pulls a quick prank, but the moment doesn’t end with her having built rapport with The Cakes. There’s also the part where Twilight thinks that Celestia will throw Fluttershy in the dungeon. It’s funny, but it’s also strange that she thinks that.

We didn’t know anything about Luna until Season Two, so we had to fill in the blanks. In Luna Eclipsed, Luna is this loveable dork, and despite a series of mishaps, including cancelling Nightmare Night, she somehow manages to do a better job of building rapport with her subjects.

Despite being Twilight’s mentor, I don’t think Celestia gives Twilight any advice that isn’t just an empty platitude. Compare that to Luna, who has offered life-changing guidance to The CMC.

And then there’s the big one. Luna embarks on this huge redemption quest where she tried to help others avoid making the same mistakes she did. She feels so guilty about turning into Nightmare Moon that she created a nightmare creature to punish herself, and when it gets out of control, she tracks it down and helps capture it.

The decision to release Discord and send him after Tirek caused more harm than anything Nightmare Moon did. Celestia doesn’t feel any guilt or remorse. She doesn’t apologize or reflect on her decision. In fact, it’s like she’s forgotten about the whole ordeal by the end of the episode.

Celestia started out as “a bit off” and went downhill from there. Luna started out as endearing, and got even better over time.

This episode gets credit for being a bit more advanced; exploring topics like false hope, placebos, and the idea that a person’s word means something. Unfortunately, watching it was a bit like trying to rewatch The Magic School Bus as an adult; it’s great at teaching, but I don’t find much entertainment value in it. And like The Magic School Bus, it would have benefitted from an afterword about the importance of just talking to your doctor.

I kind of like the idea that Granny Smith tried the tonic. She doesn’t have a reason to trust them, but I like how it shows that elders aren’t immune to scams, and how a person can let their guard down when it’s something they really want.

The song is nowhere near as memorable as the one from Super Speedy Cider Squeezy 6000.

This one’s fine, and there’s nothing really wrong with it. It’s just not for me.

I don’t have a ton to say about it. I like how it explores different styles of learning. I love how it gives Twilight and Rainbow something to bond over. And I especially love how it adds an extra bit of depth to Rainbow’s character; she has insecurities about her own intelligence.

And then the whole town getting together to help Rainbow was just the sweetest thing ever. I’m not sure it’s a sustainable learning method, but it’s a good springboard to get kids thinking about their own learning style. It gave me a warm, fuzzy feeling.

Trade Ya! is a nice simple downtime episode. It’s funny, there are lots of fun little easter eggs to spot, and it’s just characters doing stuff. Including Twilight finally doing some princess stuff. I enjoyed this one.

This could have probably been an 11-minute episode. It’s trying to be about addiction, but it only covers the “enabling” aspect. What would have really been cool is if Spike had told the truth at the halfway point, and then the rest of the episode is about her struggling to function without the magic. Maybe she relapses and goes after the book again. They wasted a perfectly good metaphor.

It’s really weird that Rarity is this upset over something like a puppet theatre. She makes costumes for celebrities, and this is the most upset we’ve seen her since Suited for Success.

They did Dave Polsky dirty. A single line from Rainbow Falls meant that Equestria Games was barely about the Equestria Games they’ve been building up since Season Three. Instead, it’s about Spike’s weird self-esteem issues. The sequence of events leads to a weird situation where hundreds of lives are at stake, there are four alicorns in the arena, and it falls to Spike to save the day.

This episode missed its calling as a worldbuilding episode. What sorts of athletic competitions do these ponies have. If you come up with five games, and dedicate two to three minutes to each, that’s ten to fifteen minutes of the episode filled. Maybe there’s some kind of shotput, where unicorns have to throw the shotput through an anti-magic barrier, and there’s a ceiling so pegasi can’t use flight to gain an unfair height advantage. Or Polo. Ponies playing polo would be kind of funny.

This one was a huge letdown.

I’m working on a system for recommending episodes. A blue triangle means that it’s a fan-favorite, or one of the best. A green triangle means it’s a solid episode I’m comfortable recommending. A yellow triangle often includes a timestamp, with the recommendation that the viewer skip to it if they get bored, or to skip to the next episode if there’s no timestamp. A red triangle means to skip to the next episode after the timestamp, and a red “X” means skip. Some episodes defy this system, so I have an interrobang (‽) for “It’s Complicated”.

Twilight’s Kingdom and Magical Mystery Cure are probably peak “It’s Complicated”.

Where do you even start? I like things about this episode, but it’s pretty dumb. It would not be unreasonable to drop the show after these episodes.

I like The Keys and The Box. The season benefitted from a season-long mystery, and I like how each of The Mane Six gain a more advanced understanding of their Element. It makes the show feel like it’s growing up. I even like how Twilight being an alicorn barely mattered this season. This was something that was dumped on them with no idea what to do with it or what it meant, so they made that part of the story.

Having said that, The Box is just a huge deus ex machina, in every sense of the word. It conveniently defeats the most powerful being we’ve ever seen, and it gives Twilight an easy and unsatisfying answer to the question of why she’s an Alicorn. I would have preferred it if The Box was opened as a denouement, rather than at the climax. Because it makes it feel like the world was saved by an extremely specific set of unrelated events that just happened to produce the required plot coupons. Feels less organic that way.

The decision to send Discord after Tirek was stupid, but it lends itself to some potentially interesting characterization. Maybe Celestia released Discord because she feels guilty about banishing Luna. Maybe she gets Discord to deal with Tirek because she’s gotten complacent and takes the services of others for granted. There’s a neat parallel, where both she and Tirek are just using Discord, but Tirek actually makes a valid point about friendship, and makes some effort at building rapport with him. And there’s a neat parallel between Celestia and Discord, in that they’re both lucky they have Twilight to bail them out.

This could have been such a cool deconstruction of the formula that two-part episodes follow, but nothing that happens means anything. Celestia matter-of-factly acknowledges that her decision has the potential to bring about the end of the world, but it’s like the show completely forgets about it by the end. She doesn’t say anything else about it, nobody calls her out on it, it doesn’t affect anyone’s opinion of her, and it never comes up again. This is the same show where Princess Luna has reflected on her mistake, punishes herself for the mistake, and she helps defeat The Tantabus when it escapes. There’s a very good reason that Luna is more popular, while Celestia is relegated to just being a meme. And you can’t even argue that she might be a competent leader off-screen, if these are the sorts of decisions she makes.

And then there’s Discord. If you haven’t watched this episode recently, you might have forgotten that it wasn’t enough to betray Equestria, Discord had to go and personally betray The Mane Six; to make sure they knew it was him. This is the second time he’s betrayed Fluttershy’s trust right to her face. And this isn’t even the last time he betrays Equestria.

At some point, you have to get over the novelty that they actually got John de Lancie to basically reprise his role as Q from Star Trek: TNG. Having watched most of TNG, it’s pretty clear that Discord is “No, we have Q at home”. TNG and everyone in it understands that Q is a terrible person. But he’s always in control, with the exception of the episode where The Q Continuum strip him of his powers. How cool would it have been if Discord was just faking, and Tirek never actually stole his powers. After Twilight negotiates for his release, he says that he’s seen enough, and snaps everything back to normal. Then he lectures Celestia about taking others for granted, and on the folly of thinking she can order The Lord of Chaos around. But as it stands, this episode just makes both Celestia and Discord look really dumb.

I do really like the fight. You have this setting full of gods and monsters, so it was about time they gave us a satisfying fight. And it’s a great fight; it’s well-choreographed, and it sells the power of the fighters. I love the subtle detail of Twilight using her ability to teleport to catch Tirek off-guard, and how her most powerful attack has a charge-up time, so she uses a quicker lightning attack to try and blind him. I showed the fight to a friend who doesn’t watch the show, and he thought it was a good fight. As time goes on, I’m less interested in action and lore, and more interested in things like character and theme, but the fight still holds up, and I still appreciate it.

Twilight herself doesn’t do very much to earn the castle. She solves a puzzle that was already mostly solved by Discord, then she loses a fight, and happens to make the choices that get the Deus Ex Machina to activate. But that’s the point; unlocking The Box was a group effort, and the castle is a group reward. All of the thrones are the same size.

This is the episode that made me add the “Guilty Pleasure” rating to my system. Because for all its flaws, I was never bored, and it is an undeniably epic episode.

We are so back!

This is my favourite kind of episode; one that’s about stuff. The show struggles with adventure, because when The Mane Six use their powers intelligently, it’s very difficult to write interesting and appropriate challenges for them. So instead, we get an intrigue/thriller episode, which works much better with a character-driven show.

This episode got me to watch Animal Farm, so that I could draw a meaningful comparison. Animal Farm is about a lot of things, but I want to frame this around a few specific parallels. The first is how natural differences make real equality impossible, and the second is how characters rise to power because of their exceptionalism and ambition. But the most important difference is that the titular Animal Farm was captured in a coup, and gradually transformed into a dictatorship, whereas Our Town was build from the ground up, and operates more like a cult.

Animal Farm is famous for the line “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”, but the line doesn’t show up until much later in the movie. In fact, after the animals overthrow the farmer, the first of many rules established is just “All animals are equal”, even though all the animals contribute to the farm in different, incomparable ways. The pigs try to give all the animals a basic education, but most of the animals aren’t intelligent enough to even become educated. It creates a sort of “intellectual power vacuum” where the pigs are able to keep awarding themselves more and more power and privileges, and the other animals lack the tools to challenge or even question them. The pigs also raise a generation of puppies to act as their personal attack dogs and watchdogs. While the pigs improve the farm itself, they neglect to improve the quality of life for the other animals. At the same time, the pigs’ intelligence lets them trade with the outside world and keep the farm running, and it’s easy to imagine a situation where they improve the living conditions of the other animals. CGP Grey’s video Rules for Rulers makes a great companion piece.

Our Town approaches equality from the opposite direction. The equality is at the forefront, and the equality in question is specifically “equality of outcomes”. This is a story about how it’s repressive and leads to mediocrity. The equality needs to be artificially enforced by Starlight’s magic, which requires her to be “More equal than others”. It shows how true equality is impossible, and it also shows how you can control others by getting them to submit to rules that you yourself are not subject to. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, if the benefits of submitting are actually worth it. Which brings me to the next point.

Starlight doesn’t stay in power through force. In fact, that wouldn’t even work. There’s a persuasion technique called “pacing and leading”, where you agree with people so that they start seeing themselves in you. Once that connection has been established, you can start subtly changing their minds. Starlight stays in control not by presenting herself as the leader, but as the pony who “just says what everyone else is thinking”. She has redefined the word “friendship” to mean something only her village can offer, which translates to something only she can offer. When she gets found out, she doesn’t point out that she doesn’t present herself as the leader, or enjoy special privileges, or view herself as more special than anyone else, or the supposed benefits of living in the village. Instead, she doubles down on the fact that the village is only possible because of her, which tells me that the village is all about control.

This makes Starlight an effective foil to Twilight. Despite being an alicorn, she doesn’t view herself as any better than her friends. Starlight is what everyone thought Twilight would become after ascending, and it retroactively makes me appreciate her alicorn status not being a big deal in Season Four. The core themes of the show are “Friendship”, and “Self-actualization”, and Starlight represses self-actualization in exchange for a warped version of friendship. And I really like how characters other than The Mane Six get to save the day. It shows that you don’t need to be “The Chosen Ones” to make a difference, and how a combination of friendship and self-actualization can be enough to defeat a powerful unicorn like Starlight. Even if some of their abilities are a bit silly.

Unlike the other specials which usually involve some kind of plot-convenient friendship lasers, this episode has some actionable advice about exposing hypocrisy, or forcing someone to play by their own rules.

Some stray thoughts:

Unlike Animal Farm, Our Town is far away from the outside world, to keep the residents cut off from any kind of support network.

They remembered that Pinkie is comic relief, and the most cartoony of the characters. Meanwhile, it’s great seeing Fluttershy’s kindness and willingness to listen playing a key role in the story.

Overall, this is the best two-part episode so far, and I kind of doubt that we get a better one. Season Five comes out swinging.