InkyJay

You could always interpret it as a flashing joke that got past the radar.

It makes me think that Applejack's key episode will be a sort of homage to "Setting a President" from the "Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends" series. Maybe the negative side to honesty for Applejack is that her brutal honesty can send the ponies around her in a panic that makes them less capable of handling the very real situation at hand. Part of being a leader is keeping up the morale so that people will be motivated to get things done rather than turn animalistic out of desperation, and it's hard to stay truthful while still accomplishing that. Try picturing an episode where Applejack is running against Mayor Mare for the title of Mayor of Ponyville.

Yet another one of Sweetie Belle's ideas gone wrong. Why am I not surprised.

You could always interpret the turkey call thing as Pinkie being a master planner. If she hadn't made Big Mac lose his voice, Fluttershy would've never sung in the first place and have her fun.

Nah. The regular cliché is that someone is a terrible singer entering a contest where they're singing, and their friend is a great singer that is lip-synching with them (sometimes against their own free will) in that contest so that the bad singer doesn't embarrass themselves completely. This episode did a subversion of that since Fluttershy was fine with doing the lip-synching behind the scenes, and was becoming even more excited and spirited when she got to do more singing for her friends so long as she wasn't up on stage. Speaking of the stage, though, that scene where everything goes black and white was pretty...dark. Is it weird for me to say that it was one of the highlights of the episode for me? Anyways, considering that Fluttershy is making strides towards taking care of her stagefright issues, I'd say that, in the MLP timeline, this episode takes place before Rainbow Falls. It would certainly explain why she wasn't freaking out so much over participating in the games themselves. Amy Keating Rogers...why must you disappoint me with your depiction of Pinkie Pie in this episode? You did such a great job in portraying her in "Pinkie Pride", so how could you make her so insensitive towards Fluttershy's feelings in this episode? Maybe you were thinking back to when Pinkie had Flutters carry all of her stuff in "It's About Time", but still, how could you? Overall, I'd say this episode was pretty good. Chalk up another point for Amy Keating Rogers on the "Good episodes written in Season 4" scoreboard.

Yeah. It's kind of amazing how every Rarity-focus episode always manages to be good at the minimum. Also, I think the one of the reasons why Spike wasn't freaking out over Rarity having a crush on someone else was because he was smart enough to know that it was just another one of those fangirl crushes that she has every once in a while. Rarity has a habit of getting over those relatively quickly, so there wasn't any reason for Spike to go into "Owl's Well that Ends Well" mode when Trenderhoof came along. btw, is it me, or does Trenderhoof's lanky design remind anyone of that one critic from the "Ratatouille" movie? I swear that those two look so similar in design minus the skin/fur color.

This was a good episode. This was a very good episode. What got to me the most in this episode was how the first act reminded me of the first Toy Story. I'm serious. Try imagining Pinkie as Woody and Cheese Sandwich as Buzz Lightyear. Even though Cheese came to plan Rainbow Dash's party, he at least wasn't being a jerk and trying to replace Pinkie entirely like the Flim-Flam brothers tried to do with Applejack. In fact, I think Cheese Sandwich was one of the few male characters on the show that didn't mean any intentional ill will towards the focus character or cause trouble with their antics. The only sour notes in the symphony for me were the end of episode joke (Shouldn't Pinkie be able to remember the people she's met, especially when they become friends?) and the fear that Spike will become to Twilight what Snips and Snails are to Season 1 Trixie: an annoying fanboy that keeps blowing their idol's horn for them.

1.) The High School/College setting. Is anyone really interested in how certain characters would behave if they went to a "normal" school with the typical bullies and unrealistically strict teachers? 2.) Atrocities that the main hero(ine) is put through for the sake of changing the tone entirely. Conflict is nice in a story, but there are better ways of getting to that conflict than, say, ripping off a pegasus's wings or blinding someone through an unjustified attack. If one or two atrocities have to happen for the sake of character development, that's fine, but don't go overboard with it.

I wouldn't say that Discord is feeding Twilight blatant lies. It's more like Discord is pointing out all of the inherent flaws in the concept (or at least Twilight's concept) of friendship in the hopes that Twilight will be broken by the inability to find a suitable answer, and simply turning Discord back into stone would just prove him right, meaning that disharmony would soon follow his imprisonment, thus freeing him early. On the other hand, if Twilight does pass all of the trials he forces on her and find a good answer, Discord will be better off regardless since he'll have a reason to genuinely believe that friendship is magic, meaning that Twilight and friends will trust him more and lengthen his leash.

Funny you should mention the scene with Soarin. The episode could've focused on how the top members of the Ponyville and Cloudsdale were getting fed up with the behavior of their team members. They could've shown more of the conflict where Bulk Biceps, Fluttershy, and Soarin just weren't taking the event seriously while the other flyers for their respective teams were getting progressively more irritated with their behavior. Rather than getting that scene at the very beginning with the training in Ponyville, they could've shown something else like, say, the teams and members representing Ponyville for each event being decided through a raffle invented by Mayor Mare, who got tired of complaints over 70+ Pegasi all wanting to do the same event. It all could've built up to a lesson about how quitting isn't always the best answer and that, sometimes, having a heart-to-heart with your teammates can be all that's necessary to fix or start fixing most of the big issues that made you want to leave in the first place instead of the tacked on "friends are more important than winning" moral that we did get. It feels like any pieces that could've been used to build a firmer story were cut out for the sake of driving home facts that we knew from either the start of the episode or Season 1. Overall, I like the episode for what it could've been, but it leaves me empty inside. It makes me think that Corey Powell was writing the scripts under the notion that the target audience's level of intellect was much lower than what it really was. It's an insulting slap in the face.

What about the idea that Starswirl (before turning into Discord) believed that friendship was just a flimsy chain used by other ponies to either climb up to the same social class level or rein in and subdue potential threats. Before his transformation, Starswirl was probably obsessed with creating magic that would consistently trump the Elements of Harmony. He couldn't understand what made something so vague and "flimsy" as friendship so powerful. If you ask me, Discord seems more intent on breaking Twilight than converting her to "evil". Turning Twilight evil would shut down the elements for one generation at best, but if Discord could convince Twilight and, in effect, the creatures in Equestria that friendship is just a farce, the elements could be unusable for centuries or even millenia. Discord is only staying tame for now so that he can push Twilight's philosophy on friendship to its very limits, and these trials will bring Twilight closer to her key. I'm honestly hoping that, in an ironic twist, Discord will have been holding Twilight's key this whole time. It just makes so much sense. Twilight and Starswirl are so similar to each other, but if Starswirl were to see her now, he would be wondering why Twilight is so well off when she hasn't put as nearly as much time to the grindstone as he has. Creating 200+ new spells is nice, but that achievement kind of pales in comparison to completing the one spell that lets you achieve divinity.

I'd say that the writers are handling Twilicorn relatively well so far, but I think it's more accurate to call her a princess in training. Even though she has a new pair of wings, there's nothing else around to showcase her as royalty. It makes sense that the changes to her personal life would happen slowly, but surely. Perhaps the trials of the box will help clarify her title to the ponies of Equestria. Speaking of the box, after this week's episode, does anyone get the feeling that Discord is unwittingly subbing for Celestia as Twilight's teacher. I was certainly convinced when Discord brought up that being friends in title doesn't mean you're friends for real. I wonder how much Twilight would fangasm if Discord turned out to be a transformed Starswirl. Wouldn't that make her feel stupid for avoiding Discord so much?

And what a disaster that episode was. Anyways, at this point, I'm kind of expecting Discord to be holding Twilight's key. Like someone brought up before, he's already acting like her advanced friendship lessons teacher while still hiding this by being an eccentric prankster. Speaking of Discord, I'm hoping that Twilight will learn that being a friend in title doesn't mean being a friend for real and that she should be more open to leaving her small circle of friends so that she can learn more about the others around her. As a princess, she'll need to learn this lesson eventually. Edit (since I don't want to double post): Now that I'm bringing up key episodes, I feel like mentioning how great it would be if Applejack were to become the new mayor of Ponyville. Remember that one episode from Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends where everyone was getting tired of how Herriman ran the house, so when election day came up, Frankie decided to run for house president (The episode was called "Setting a President")? Applejack's key episode can play out in a similar way with her running against Mayor Mare. Anyways, from the very beginning, Applejack is set on winning the election without having to resort to the option of emphasizing her connections to royalty in favor of the opportunistic vote. When the predicted polls begin to lean towards Mayor Mare, Applejack begins to question whether or not she really should resort to the princess option, but because of her stubbornness, she still refuses to do this and eventually begins to question if she really is the right pony for the job and that things are just fine with Mayor Mare as mayor. One rainbow later, Applejack makes a speech at the final debate that not only tips the votes in her favor, but also teaches Mayor Mare what being a mayor is all about. Applejack wins the election, and when she takes office, ex-mayor Mare gives Applejack the symbol of her new position, which also happens to be one of the keys to the box. ...So what do you think?

You know, I can't help but feel that Rainbow Dash got the team she got because pretty much all participants were allocated based on a lottery pitched by Mayor Mare, who couldn't be bothered to care about the events since Ponyville tends to lose according to previous years. Just a hunch.

Yeah. If I had to draw connections between the Wonderbolts and the Crystal Gems from "Steven Universe", I would say that Soarin' is the Amethyst of the group in the sense that, even though he is a skilled flyer, he doesn't take his role as a Wonderbolt seriously. Come to think of it, why didn't "Rainbow Falls" put more emphasis on that aspect. It would've been nice to get more dialogue from Spitfire or Fleetfoot to the effect of "Get serious! We need to be flying at 100% for the Equestria Games!". That would've solved a lot of the gripes that reviewers such as "Voice of Reason" had with the episode.

You could also say that Spitfire was only acting the way she did in this episode because of the lackluster performance the Wonderbolts have been putting on. The main 3 members together couldn't even save one unicorn during the young flyer's competition in Season 1 and had to be saved by Rainbow Dash while she was still an upstart, and then there was that incident with Spike in "Secret of my Excess" where they couldn't save that same unicorn from before that was put in danger once again. Normally, at this point, I would start to be skeptical about the overall competence of the Wonderbolts, but still wouldn't be reluctant to support them, but then we cut to "Wonderbolt Academy". The Wonderbolt Academy is supposed to be one of the most prestigious flight academies in all of Equestria, and if the main members played their cards right, they could've recruited both Rainbow Dash and Lightning Dust, who was around RD's level in terms of physical ability. If the Wonderbolt Academy is supposed to be such a high-ranking flight school, then how is it that they let two Earth Ponies, a pegasus, and two unicorns (one of them being a future ruler of Equestria) come so close to death? There's no way an incident like this would stay under wraps for long, and I'm sure that more than a few sponsors pulled their support away after hearing about an incident like that. The only thing that would make me believe completely that the Wonderbolts are not for Rainbow Dash is if they got desperate enough to let another "accident" happen that would force open a new slot that they would have Lightning Dust fill. Truth be told, I don't think Spitfire or Fleetfoot would be above doing this, and it would be kind of heartbreaking if they were going through all that to do something like preserve the academy since the pulled sponsors meant budget cuts for the school. ...Maybe I'm just being too wishful or optimistic right now, but I sure would be shocked if all this happened.