Dark Qiviut

(Credit to a Discord convo with @Captain Clark for this little rant.)

Finished with MDW. It's long covered front and back. This episode is garbage. It was the first episode I hated, and now that I watched it in full for the first time in forever, I hate it more now.

1. Awful dialogue? Check.
2. Badly executed moral? Check.
3. Awful characterization of the entire cast? Check.
4. The episode and characters treat Ponyville's lives and the town's safety as secondary to teaching Dash a lesson. This broken premise ruins the entire episode from the get-go. It's the worst flaw of the whole episode.

I don't use predictability as a flaw nowadays, but in episodes like this one, it applies perfectly. This whole episode is completely mechanical. Every scene has three (or four) action scenes before an interlude. The structure makes the action not just repetitive, but boring, as well. This isn't an episode, but a virtual checklist instead. The overall pacing is shit.

TMMDW rubs in your face about how poorly behaved Dash is and treats her like a bad person for bragging. Before Dash starts being lazy in saving everyone's lives, the episode villainizes her. From the get-go, the episode paints her as a bad person, because she had the gall to brag and have an ego. The way the episode's written implicates that being self-confident in your best qualities and having an ego under any circumstance is really bad for you. Contrary to popular belief, pride and ego aren't inherently bad things; how you channel them determines it. If MDW showed that it's not bad to have self-confidence and pride in something, you may get a deep conflict. Unfortunately, MDW chooses an archaic, absolute, and destructive attitude towards them both.

Fuck this episode!!