Season 8 Episode 3 “The Maud Couple” Review by EpicEnergy

Characters: Let me initiate this review by starting with the primary new character in this episode – Mudbriar. His personality is mainly technicality; as a matter of fact, he is only technical and hardly nothing else. This becomes very annoying over time, since he is always acting and speaking with technicality. Consequently, I must subtract a good portion of points from the episode rating for this. Next, I shall briefly talk about Pinkie. She acts somewhat out of character, overexaggerating too often, which doesn’t provide a natural feel to this episode. Therefore, I shall remove a very small amount of points for this. Continuing, I shall discuss Starlight. She appears to replace the rest of the mane six in this episode by counseling Pinkie and attempting to resolve Pinkie’s friendship problem with Mudbriar. I disagree that she replaces the mane six in this area; rather, I would say that her involvement in this episode has no problems. The only pony who would be qualified to take Starlight’s position would be Twilight, but she is not friends with Maud, so Starlight is the best candidate for this type of situation. Lastly, I want to address Maud’s personality. Maud can now demonstrate with ease her emotions through her tone of voice and facial expressions while still maintaining her normal personality. This is contrary to Mudbriar, as his technicality prevents his emotions from appearing to be genuine.

Overall, I must deduct some points from the episode rating because of Mudbriar’s technicality and Pinkie’s highly overexaggerated personality.

Plot: The general plot is superb, and well executed. Surprisingly, I found absolutely no contrived and arbitrary plot-devices or plot-conveniences in this episode. As a result, I must commend the writers for creating this genuine plot in this episode.

Scenes: In this section I will review specific scenes. I may also skip one or more scenes. Firstly, there is the opening, with Maud performing her “stand-up comedy” that I was really looking forward to after she announced it in the season 7 episode “Rock Solid Friendship”. That isn’t the only amazing aspect of this opening, because the developers also added the “Hayburger” restaurant building into this scene, which was first introduced in the season 4 episode “Twilight Time” (there are a few differences, but it is the same building). Now this is where the new MLP opening song is first revealed. It really needed alteration, since the school and numerous new characters were added, so this change is appreciated since it included the new features of season 8 while still maintaining a few of the old opening features and general flow. The entire opening sequence of this episode is well done. Now I will proceed far into the latter half of the episode toward the scene where we have Starlight and Maud flying kites. Starlight’s kite flying hobby is fantastic and serves to add to her being a great character, so its return makes this episode even more enjoyable. Also, before I proceed to the next subject, one should note that Starlight has kites hanging from the ceiling in her room during this episode. Next, I will discuss the Pie rock farm scene. The writers include Pinkie’s other sisters, Marble and Limestone Pie. It’s very nice to have them back into the picture after a very long time since their last appearance on the show. They are well written, so nice job on this part. They also played a significant role by enlightening Pinkie on what is known as the moral of this episode. That is basically all the scenes I wanted to review, since the remainder has nothing notable that I need to focus on that I haven’t already addressed in this review.

Moral: This episode’s moral is well informative and illustrated though the given metaphor. It is amazing how looks can be so deceptive, that’s why I always loved the geode metaphor, a long time before this episode even aired. I own a miniature geode that is within my bedroom up to this day to remind me of how one should not look on the outward appearance and judge someone by that method; rather one should look at the inward gems of another human, the positive side that has so much potential. That is a very considerable lesson to learn, and an even harder one to apply with humans being so judgmental of others.

Episode Rating: 7/10

Conclusion: This episode is highly enjoyable in all aspects except the characters. With Pinkie's overexaggerated personality and Mudbriar's technicality, it came become annoying, leaving this episode with a "great" rating.

Rating Scale:

0 = the worst of the worst, an absolute failure

1 = an extremely horrible disaster

2 = very dreadful

3 = terrible

4 = bad

5 = mediocre

6 = good

7 = great

8 = very fantastic

9 = extremely amazing

10 = an absolute perfection