Music Chart Fan

Overall, I would say that this episode is more-or-less okay; I still question some things (as I'll go through in more detail below), but most of those things are at least more on par with a standard episode. My biggest issue is probably that I found the repeated attempts to lampshade Twilight's previous neurosis and freakouts to be tiresome, and I don't buy into the idea that her sudden and off-screen progress on that represents real character growth and evidence that she's ready to lead Equestria. But setting that aside, I hadn't necessarily expected to see the villainous three again before the end-of-season two-parter, so it's interesting to see them working together and see a bit more of what they're up to. I also hadn't necessarily expected the Casterlot Castle defenses from "Sparkle's Seven" to be retained, but they're still there, and they actually served to slow down the villainous three, although the three of them managed to get through in the end anyway. And there are a few other entertaining moments, such as Rainbow's hoping in vain not to be assigned more work, or Luna's comment that getting Discord not to do anything Discord-y "truly is amazing". ----- I'll start off by getting probably my biggest issue with the episode out of the way - namely, Twilight's revelation that she's "made a lot of progress" on her freaking out and on her abilities to delegate and trust others. All of this supposed progress occurred off-screen, is never described or explained, and seems to be presented as something that the other characters, and us in the audience, should just believe. And on top of that, the episode portrays this improvement as real character growth, and as proof that Twilight really is ready to lead Equestria. Sorry, but I don't buy it. This seems to have been the strategy in multiple episodes of the show recently: overexaggerate and/or create new character flaws, so that the characters can then "overcome" those flaws and, in the process, prove that they've matured and are ready to lead or whatever. But as I see it, the characters' "overcoming" these contrived character flaws essentially means just returning to how they were characterized in earlier seasons of the show. So if Twilight's freakouts have been toned down, then in that respect, Twilight has "progressed" to...about where she was circa seasons 3-4. Consequently, I don't see that as evidence that Twilight and the Mane Six/Seven are ready to lead Equestria. ----- Now I have a few things related to what the villainous three did in the episode. First, we twice see the villainous three plainly and openly discuss their treacherous plans mere seconds after Grogar leaves. Grogar may not even be out of earshot when Cozy Glow eagerly declares that he's gone. The villainous three should at least give Grogar a few minutes to make sure he's really far enough away not to see/hear anything, and to be sure that he doesn't forget something and come back. And more importantly, if I were them, I wouldn't be sure that they aren't being surveilled (via magic or other means) while inside Grogar's lair. Next, I guess we're not supposed to expect that Feather Flatterfly - the pegasus in charge of the weather - would know that Cozy Glow is a criminal who's supposed to be in Tartarus, or that he would recognize her on sight. Even setting that aside, though, does he have any hesitation or questions about a kid who's a total stranger approaching him and offering to take over his responsibilities? Why isn't his response to Cozy Glow along the lines of "What are you talking about? How old are you? Why are you doing this? Where are your parents?"? And later, when the weather's going crazy, he says that he doesn't know how this happened, and worries that he's going to be fired for sure. Might this have happened because he apparently entrusted (at least some of) his responsibilities to a random kid? I would say that that was a pretty bad judgement call. Also, evidently all it took was a few lines from Chrysalis to convince the Flaming Sky Firework Troupe to rethink their job, consider it to be beneath them as unicorns, and quit, because they're "better than that". Why are they even taking this brief conversation with a random stranger this seriously? But later, a little talk from Twilight and Rarity is apparently all it takes to re-convince them that their pyrotechnics job actually is worthwhile after all. They didn't seem to need much to be convinced either way. The end of the episode suggests that it'll be easy for the villainous three to turn earth ponies, pegasi, and unicorns against each other. But will the other residents of Equestria really be as easily swayed as the Flaming Sky Firework Troupe was in this episode? I hope not, but I guess we'll just have to see. ----- Now here are a couple of other things about what the Mane Seven did, and about the Summer Sun Celebration. I'm not sure what to think about whether the rest of the Mane Seven are justified or have good reason to try to hide the issues with the Summer Sun Celebration from Twilight. But what I find a little hard to believe is that Twilight doesn't find out about any of the issues with the Celebration for a significant period of time. Does Twilight not see the storms outside through the windows, or see or hear the rain and thunder and lightning that just popped up? And also, wasn't Twilight going to practice using the amulet to raise the sun and moon with Celestia and Luna? Does that not involve going outside and practicing with the actual sun and moon, and consequently seeing the crazy weather and screaming and panicking ponies? We even see the three of them walking around the grounds later, but it's only after they run into Discord that they finally notice that something's up. Next, I found Celestia's reasoning for not having a need for the Summer Sun Celebration any more a bit strange. Why would Celestia's and Luna's retirement mean that the defeat of Nightmare Moon, or the return and reunion of Princess Luna, are no longer meaningful events to celebrate? Aren't those important historical events that still have an impact to the present day, regardless of whether Celestia and Luna are currently in power? It feels like saying that the 4th of July shouldn't be celebrated because the colonists who declared independence from Great Britain aren't alive any more. It can still be considered an impactful historical event worthy of celebration. Moreover, near the end of the episode, Twilight announces that the holiday on this day will no longer commemorate the battle at which Celestia defeated Nightmare Moon, nor will it commemorate Celestia's and Luna's happy reunion. Instead, the newly-declared Festival of the Two Sisters will...celebrate how much Celestia and Luna mean to all of us. Was that not already a major motivation for and part of the Summer Sun Celebration? I guess I'm not really seeing how the new Festival of the Two Sisters is meaningfully different from the Summer Sun Celebration. And as a consequence, that sort of limits whatever emotional impact that scene would have on me. ----- Finally, here are a few other miscellaneous observations: I guess it's ironic that Chrysalis initially likes the sound of her triumphant return to Canterlot, but that "triumphant" return ended up being a mission sneaking around trying not to be detected. How many Summer Sun Celebrations have there been celebrating the reunion of Celestia and Luna, besides the one in Season 4? Nobody says anything about Pinkie or Applejack needing to taste-test food; Applejack only says that her and Pinkie's job is "giving Braeburn and the Appleloosan ponies some adjustments to the menu". So I don't see any excuse for why Pinkie declares herself an "official food-taster" and eats at least half a wagon's worth of pies and other baked goods. Seriously, how many ingredients and hours of work went into making those things for the festival, just for Pinkie to stuff her face with them in a matter of a minute or so? Why was Chrysalis behind the stage in her untransformed state before transforming into a unicorn? I don't see any particular benefit to her to wait to transform, and with all the ponies running around preparing for the Celebration, wouldn't Chrysalis be running the risk of being seen? The chains around the book on Grogar's bell are so brittle that they fall apart with one smack of a book from Cozy Glow. What kind of weak material were those chains made from? And if the book is "dangerous" enough to be chained up, why wouldn't it just be put in a more secure place, accessible by request only? It's not like anyone can read the book when it's chained up, anyway. That's an interesting observation. I'll admit that I haven't kept close track of when the stained glass windows have been depicted, and how consistent they've been. Looking back, these 5 stained glass windows were seen in the same order back in "A Royal Problem", but some of these windows were seen on opposite sides of the hall back in "Princess Twilight Sparkle - Part 1", and even further back in "The Return Of Harmony - Part 1" (although the positioning of the stained glass windows isn't even consistent within that same episode). If we see at least 5 stained glass windows on one side of the hall, and we've seen stained glass windows on both sides of the hall before, then we might think that there could be 4 or 5 stained glass windows on the opposite side of the ones seen here. At least one of those ought to be the one depicting Twilight's ascension to alicorn; maybe at least some of the other stained glass windows depicting Discord, as seen in "The Return Of Harmony", might be there.

Overall, I would describe this episode as exasperating. For one thing, it's exasperating to have Twilight going into crazy freakout mode yet again, complete with wacky distorted facial expressions, and to have this occur from the beginning of the episode. I just think that Twilight in crazy freakout mode is way too overplayed at this point; I just find it frustrating, and unbecoming of someone whom the show appears to be setting up as the soon-to-be leader of Equestria. However, another thing I find exasperating about the episode is how it focuses on Twilight as being essentially the only one in the wrong. Yes, it basically goes without saying that Twilight's rules-lawyering is obnoxious, that Twilight's purposefully tricking Pinkie into getting disqualified is underhanded, and that if Twilight is going to act this way, then she probably should learn not to do that. But I don't derive any pleasure or entertainment from seeing Twilight get her comeuppance in the last third of the episode; I just feel like Twilight shouldn't have been written to misbehave so badly in the first place. (And I sympathize with Twilight's frustration; if getting randomly paired with a bad partner for Trivia Trot is frustrating, try getting randomly and permanently paired with a bad partner or partners for a semester-long laboratory class, which happened to me multiple times.) Moreover, I think that the lesson of this episode also implies that it was bad and/or wrong for Twilight to take Trivia Trot seriously, and to try to achieve three wins in a row. Instead, apparently, Twilight should have, and is made to, adopt Pinkie's attitude of "just having fun" and not taking the Trivia Trot game seriously. Meanwhile, there are evidently no lessons to be learned from anything Pinkie does, and no attempt is made to point out anything that Pinkie could have done better; she's essentially a pure victim, to whom Twilight is made to conform in the end. But I think Pinkie could have observed that many other players are taking this game more seriously than she is - particularly Twilight, who told Pinkie that winning this game is very important to her. And after Pinkie sees that this game is being played differently than she might have expected, then I think Pinkie could have either tried harder to do what Twilight asked her to do in order to win, or, if that turned out to be impossible, concluded that this game isn't for her, and voluntarily stopped playing. Finally, there's also a significant amount of weirdness concerning the rules of Trivia Trot and how the game was conducted, which contributes to the conflict and isn't really addressed in the episode. ----- First, I'll try to talk about the rules of Trivia Trot and how the game was conducted, and how those probably contributed to the whole conflict of the episode. To start off, we see that there's a literal book's worth of rules to the game, and those rules are laid out in a formal and complex way. So I would think, with the rules being as involved as they are, that it would be prudent to have potential players, and particularly new players, give some acknowledgement that they've read, understand, and agree to abide by all of these rules. And yet many of the players, and sometimes even Granny Smith as host and referee, don't seem to know or particularly care about the rules, which serves to fuel Twilight's rules-lawyering later in the episode. Even Sunburst, who cites rules by chapter and verse later in the episode, seemed not to notice or care that his teammate Cranky was sleeping (and snoring) right next to him, which is a rules violation worthy of disqualification, and results in Sunburst's being sidelined from the game until Twilight teams up with him. Why are there all of these rules if many of the players don't seem to be familiar with them, or seem to particularly care about following them? And, in what might be an even bigger problem with this complicated rulebook, Pinkie appears to just walk in off the street and put her name in as a player with no questions asked. Is she aware that there's a literal book's worth of rules to the game that she has to follow? On the one hand, I wonder why neither Granny Smith nor anyone else asked Pinkie to acknowledge that she's read, understands, and agrees to abide by the rules, before she entered as a player. But on the other hand, perhaps it's known that Trivia Trot has this rulebook, and it's incumbent on any new players to learn and abide by the rules. And I don't think it's unreasonable to expect people to have some idea of how Trivia Trot is played before they enter as players. Pinkie demonstrates in the episode that she doesn't even know that a team can have negative points, and doesn't even know that answers must be specific and exact. Those seem like pretty basic things to know before starting to play the game. So it seems to me like there's blame to go around to both Pinkie and the people who are running the Trivia Trot game for this issue of Pinkie's not knowing and abiding by the rules. It also just seems like the way that the rules are set up and that the game is played is asking for trouble. Trivia Trot has: (1) a complicated book's worth of rules; (2) the ability for anyone off the street to join the game, without any apparent demonstration of understanding and agreeing to abide by the rules; (3) having randomly and permanently assigned partners for the whole night, regardless of seriousness or skill level, unless your partner is disqualified and you find another person to take that partner's place; and (4) at least several players who take the game quite seriously and are looking to achieve or maintain difficult records. I would be kind of surprised if something like the events of this episode hasn't happened before. Maybe Trivia Trot was enough of a niche thing that the regular (and serious) players didn't have novices throwing a wrench in the works who don't know the rules and aren't taking it seriously, at least until Pinkie showed up and changed all of that. And just from observing this episode, is there really much to be gained from having randomly assigned partners, anyway? Trivia Trot appears to consist only of questions in which all teams try to answer as soon as possible; that format doesn't seem conducive to consulting with partners to come up with answers, particularly when those partners could be strangers who don't know anything about each other's knowledge bases or strengths and weaknesses. Finally, there are at least a couple of other rules that seem strangely not well-thought-out. Why is sleeping during the game cause for disqualification and removal, but getting outside help to answer a question only results in the loss of a point? And if this game is going with having randomly and permanently assigned partners, then it seems like a significant oversight to allow, say, two players teamed with partners they don't want to trick or goad their partners into disqualifying themselves, and then allowing those two players to team up with no penalty. Does that make for a fun, fair, and entertaining game if players with partners they don't want end up more concerned with finding ways to dump their partners - or quitting - than playing the game? So I think that these Trivia Trot rules, and the way in which the game was conducted, are a significant contributing factor to the conflict of the episode. ----- Now I'll talk a little more about Pinkie's and Twilight's behavior in this episode. To start off, just after it's announced that Pinkie and Twilight will be partners (and after Pinkie does her "name the shipping names of Twilight x Pinkie" shtick), Twilight directly tells Pinkie that this is a special game for Twilight, that she's trying to get her third win in a row, which no one has done before, and that she's really hoping to do so. And Pinkie replies "You don't have anything to worry about. I'll do everything I can to be the bestest and most funnest teammate ever". Since it's established that winning this game is very important to Twilight, I might think that being the "best and most fun teammate ever" would mean letting Twilight - the veteran player who probably knows what needs to be done to win - to take the lead, and for Pinkie to try hard to do what Twilight wants her to do. But then we get Pinkie not knowing the rules, and ringing in with overeager, long-winded and/or vague answers that result in a point loss. (I might also add that those things are a nuisance to everyone, not just Pinkie's teammate.) We also see that Pinkie can't even concentrate on the topic of apples for more than 2 seconds, and is distracted from ringing in by a normal body function. So what are we supposed to take away from that? Is Pinkie just not even trying to concentrate? Is she actually incapable of concentrating on a topic for more than 2 seconds? And in either case, why shouldn't we consider that Pinkie might just not be equipped or suited to play this game? In fact, I can't help noticing that four of the Mane Six are here playing Trivia Trot, and appear to be regular players, and yet this episode is Pinkie's first time playing. Had these four invited Pinkie to play before, but Pinkie was just always busy or declined for other reasons, and all of a sudden, in this episode, she decided to take them up on the offer? Or did the four of them choose not to invite Pinkie to Trivia Trot for a good reason - namely, that they think Trivia Trot (as it's being played) is ill-suited to what Pinkie normally likes to do? And so, after trying to deal with Pinkie's behavior, I'm not surprised that Twilight resorted to tricking Pinkie into disqualifying herself. What should Twilight have done, if tricking Pinkie into being disqualified was underhanded? I don't know. I find it hard to believe that talking to Pinkie or continuing to try to coach her would have worked. By that point, I think that Pinkie had demonstrated that she couldn't be relied on to concentrate, ring in at the right time, and actually give correct answers, even if she might know them. And she also probably couldn't be relied on to contain herself, not be distracting, and generally refrain from ringing in, either. Maybe, if Cranky is sleeping during the game, and Pinkie doesn't have the requisite mindset (or knowledge of the rules) to play the game without being a nuisance, both of them could be asked not to play any more, and then perhaps Twilight and Sunburst could be made into a team, or something. But the solution that this episode seems to come up with is that Twilight should just give up on her hope and dream of achieving 3 wins in a row, stop taking the game seriously, and conform herself to the way that Pinkie wants to play the game. And that's reinforced by Spike's telling Twilight that this is "just a game", and even by the pun in the title of the episode, which implies that the record which Twilight is pursuing is trivial. But I don't think that it's inherently bad or wrong to take a game (or other activity) seriously. In many cases, the fun and enjoyment of a game (or other activity) can come from taking it seriously, playing hard to try to win, and even striving to achieve and maintain records. So I don't like the implied message of this episode's resolution. Perhaps a point could be made that it's a fool's errand for Twilight (or anyone else) to strive to achieve or maintain records in a game where her teammate is randomly assigned, and could be a total novice who doesn't take the game as seriously as she does. But I would argue that there are potential solutions other than deciding that nobody should take Trivia Trot seriously. I could imagine, for example, having separate competitive and casual games of Trivia Trot, with the competitive games perhaps having stricter rules or standards about who can play or how teams are chosen, while people like Pinkie could just choose to play casual games. ----- Now here are the rest of my miscellaneous observations: I didn't realize at first that Trivia Trot is being held in the Hay Burger as seen in "Twilight Time". Does the restaurant get any particular benefit from hosting Trivia Trot, or are they doing it just to be nice? In the ongoing saga of trying to figure out when and why characters draw their cutie marks to represent themselves, as opposed to just writing their names, we see that Twilight and Pinkie drew their cutie marks to put in the bowl, but at least some other players did opt to write their names. However, we don't know who chose to write their names, or why. When Rainbow tells Sunburst "I hope you realize not every category is gonna be 'Spells So Old, Not Even Star Swirl the Bearded Remembers Them', it took me a little bit to realize that that's not just a figure of speech; Star Swirl the Bearded is living right now in-universe and could actually be consulted about which spells he does or doesn't remember. When Spike begins to roll up Twilight's scroll outside, he's rolling it with the writing facing inward, but when Spike opens the door and brings the scroll in, the writing is facing outward. After Spike comes back in from outside with the rolled-up scroll, Twilight looks at it and we see a chart with 11 potential players down the side of it, including Mudbriar, Sunburst, and Pinkie. But how did they, and particularly Pinkie, get on the scroll? Twilight's bar graphs of potential teammates shown previously only had 7 people - Fluttershy, Applejack, Dr. Whooves, Rainbow, Bulk Biceps, Matilda, and Maud - and Twilight explicitly says that she hadn't anticipated Pinkie as a potential player. And we never see Twilight or Spike write on the scroll at any time between Pinkie's entering herself as a player and our seeing the scroll with 11 potential players on it. There is a jump cut between Spike's being teleported outside and when he walks back in, so perhaps he could have written on the scroll then, but Twilight only asked him to "find the part on matchups", not to write up new matchups including Pinkie (and the others). Would an air horn of the size that Pinkie uses really be capable of making that loud or low-pitched of a blast? Why did Applejack and Sunburst say that the scorekeeping job is intense, and try to dissuade Spike from doing it? As far as we see, he's not tasked with looking for rules violations or making judgement calls; essentially all he does is flip the digits representing each team's score. Cranky actually goes from looking to be perfectly fine and awake to being fast asleep in about 3 seconds. There are times throughout the episode when two characters just talk to each other for 10 seconds or more, even in the middle of the game, and all the while, seemingly nobody else is doing or saying anything. Does everyone else just wait silently and patiently for the two characters in focus of the camera to finish talking? Some of the Trivia Trot questions seem quite vague, and I wonder if there would be more than one potential correct answer. For example, is there really only one place in the world that "used to be a cavern, but after thousands of years of erosion, is now a gorge"? Are Lord Tirek and Scorpan really the only ones in all of Equestrian history who "traveled to Equestria from a distant land seeking to steal the magic from its pony inhabitants"? Throughout the episode, we only ever see teams earning 1 point for a correct answer, and sometimes losing a point for wrong answers or rules violations. Yet by the end of the episode, the 5 remaining teams have scores in the 40s and 50s. That seems to imply that at least 250 questions or so have been asked, and the game is still going on, with Twilight not even totally ruling out the possibility that she and Pinkie could still win starting from zero. So how long do these Trivia Trot games go? How many questions are asked by the end of a typical game? And since an intermission occurred earlier when the teams had 3-11 points each, how many more intermissions occur in a typical game?

Overall, despite a few good elements here and there, I ultimately don't care for this episode. Smolder is the best part of the episode, with her joining cheer squad with her friends because she thought Rainbow would make it awesome, and her getting angry and giving Rainbow a figurative kick in the butt. (I have to admit, though, that I think this idea of the students having to teach the teachers has been overplayed.) I liked the cheerleading outfits, and I found myself kind of liking Shimmy Shake and Lighthoof, even as they displayed the sort of "Valley Girl" stereotypes and speech style. And I did like seeing the cheer squad come together when Rainbow eventually changed her attitude. However, I really can't excuse just how bad of an attitude Rainbow had in the first two-thirds of the episode - how she put zero effort into coaching the team, and wasn't even honest enough to just resign if that's what she was going to do. Furthermore, though, I also didn't like how Twilight volunteered Rainbow for the coaching job, even after Rainbow expressed that she really didn't care about the job and didn't really know how to do it. And then Twilight apparently just left the students in the cheer squad to deal with Rainbow's bad attitude, and to take the responsibility of motivating Rainbow to do her job. I think that was unfair to the students for Twilight to foist upon them a coach who had already expressed a dismissal of (and even disdain for) the cheer squad, without any effort on Twilight's part to ensure that Rainbow would take her job seriously. To start off, one pet peeve of mine in the show is when characters express total confidence in others being able to do things, and if questioned about that (which often doesn't even happen), they just provide shallow platitudes or quite debatable reasons to back that up. The first example of this in this episode is when Fluttershy expresses apprehension at being able to train a new buckball team in just two weeks, and Twilight says "Relax. You're gonna do just fine". And when Fluttershy (justifiably) asks what makes Twilight so sure, Twilight responds "Because I have faith in my friends, who also happen to be the best buckball players in Equestria!". But the mere fact that Twilight has faith in her friends doesn't necessarily mean that faith is justified, especially in this particular instance. And I can think of at least a couple of counterpoints to Fluttershy's and Pinkie's and Snails's being "the best buckball players in Equestria". For one, if professional buckball is a relatively new thing in Equestria, then being "the best" at it may not be a high bar to clear. But, perhaps more importantly, being good at buckball doesn't necessarily translate to being good at training others to be good at buckball, particularly in a short time span. Perhaps Fluttershy and/or her teammates just play on the basis of some combination of adrenaline, intuition, or even fear, and so they don't know exactly how or why they do what they do. Or maybe what Fluttershy and her teammates do when they play makes sense in their heads, but wouldn't make sense to the other players they're trying to teach. Perhaps Twilight could come up with answers to these objections, but they're not even brought up. And this applies just as much, if not more, to Twilight's volunteering Rainbow for the job of coaching the cheer squad. The only reasons Twilight gives for doing this are that she can count on Rainbow's enthusiasm (just before Rainbow shows a distinct lack of enthusiasm for the job) and that this would be a good opportunity for Rainbow to find out why people like the cheer squad. But for her part, Rainbow pretty clearly shows that she doesn't care for this job. And she says that she's only casually seen cheer squads before, that she's not even 100% sure what they do, and that she'll probably just mess it up. But Twilight's only response to this is that Rainbow might be surprised, and that Twilight's even more sure that Rainbow's the perfect choice. Do Rainbow's objections count for anything in Twilight's mind? Do those objections not even merit a proper response? If Twilight thinks that Rainbow actually does know enough (or could learn enough) to do a good job coaching the cheer squad, shouldn't she give reasons for thinking that? And Rainbow isn't just a little unsure about whether she wants to do the job; she gives a long and derisive laugh to the idea, and clearly implies that she doesn't think that it's important. If Twilight believes that Rainbow can and/or should care about doing a good job coaching the cheer squad, then considering Rainbow's response, doesn't Twilight have some convincing to do? Instead, Rainbow's professing to not caring and not knowing about coaching the cheer squad only makes Twilight even more sure that Rainbow's "perfect" for the job, without any further justification for why. At the same time, though, I don't think I can justify just how dismissive and disdainful Rainbow acts about the cheer squad. For one thing, shouldn't Rainbow have at least some appreciation for a good cheering section? How many times has Rainbow had people watching and cheering her on as she gives an athletic performance - including the rest of the Mane Six, Scootaloo, Rainbow's parents, and other Wonderbolts fans? Does Rainbow not get something out of that? And if Rainbow is really going to put zero effort into coaching, and just look for the first opportunity to run away from the job, wouldn't the honest thing be to resign - to tell Twilight that she really doesn't care for the job of coaching the cheer squad and just can't bring herself to do it? Instead, Rainbow nominally keeps the title of coach while pretending nothing's wrong, or trying to pawn off her job to Snips, or trying to make an excuse that it's entirely the cheer squad's responsibility to make and practice their own routine. It's very exasperating to watch, and even if that's arguably the point, that doesn't make it any more entertaining. Finally, I think the extent of how badly Rainbow acts in the first two-thirds of the episode serves to make her change of heart - her rapid and total 180 and commitment to give "120%" - less plausible, because of just how far Rainbow has to go to make that change. Speaking of that, while I do appreciate Smolder's getting angry and giving Rainbow a figurative kick in the butt, I can't help wondering why things had to go that far. Should it really be the responsibility of the students on the cheer squad to motivate their coach to do her job? I was kind of surprised that we don't see any students on the cheer squad talk to Twilight (who could be considered Rainbow's supervisor) about Rainbow's refusal to coach the cheer squad properly. But then, if Twilight's ulterior motive was to secretly teach Rainbow this lesson about caring for things that her friends care about, then how would Twilight react to that? Would Twilight have actually talked to Rainbow in that scenario, and considered finding a new coach if Rainbow couldn't be convinced to do her coaching job well? Or would Twilight have continued to leave it to the students in the cheer squad to convince Rainbow to do her job, making the students potential unwilling casualties in her social experiment? I find Twilight's smugness about Rainbow's turnaround at the end of the episode to be unwarranted, particularly when it was Smolder and the other students in the cheer squad that actually did the work to change Rainbow's attitude, and who had to put up with Rainbow's bad attitude before that. Finally, I'm not sure that I fully buy into the final lesson of the episode - as Twilight puts it, that "you don't have to care about a thing other ponies like as long as you care about the ponies who like it". That may be true to some extent, but it also seems like there should be some limit to that. If, say, a friend or family member really cares about something that you don't, then sure, it's probably good to let him or her like that thing without disparagement, and it would probably be nice to show some level of polite interest. But can you really be reasonably expected to show the same (or similar) level of interest in that thing, or to give that thing "120%", just because you care for the other person? Would there not be some point at which the other person is being a jerk if he or she continues to push that thing on you when it's known that you just don't care that much for it? This episode seems to portray Rainbow's change of heart about coaching the cheer squad as being motivated essentially entirely by her caring for the students on the cheer squad. But I might have preferred if Rainbow was also at least partially motivated by being convinced that the cheer squad does have value, that she herself likes being cheered on in her performances, and that she can like cheering others on in their athletic feats, too. Now here are the rest of my miscellaneous observations: Do Celestia's school and Twilight's school have students of similar age/maturity, such that a buckball game between the two would be fair? I suppose that that would be the case if (at least some) students at Twilight's school are of a similar age/maturity to Twilight back when she was Celestia's student. When Rainbow says "I figured I'd better grab every piece of coaching equipment I could find", where exactly did she find all this equipment? Is this all stuff she owns? Did she ask others she knew to borrow some of it? Or did she "borrow" some of it without asking? Is "20%" and "20% cooler" really as much of a meme in-universe in Equestria as it is in the fandom? I feel like those were kind of overused in this episode. It's funny that after the whole kerfuffle about the Fetlock Fete/Amity Ball, trying not to make it too pony-centric, and everyone's (supposedly) trying too hard to make Yona fit in as a pony, Yona still ends up saying that she wants to make a "pony pyramid". When the cheer squad first demonstrates their routine, does Lighthoof say "all we need is a little music" or "Muzak"? Because the latter doesn't seem well-suited to cheering or doing athletic feats, haha. Did the cheer squad check if Rainbow was even paying attention before they demonstrated their routine? The big game is supposed to be in two weeks, but Fluttershy and Pinkie want to see what the cheer squad has come up with after, what, one or two days? Even if the cheer squad didn't have coaching problems with Rainbow, they still likely would have needed more time to finalize and practice their routine. I'm confused about the timeline of when Snips gathers the squad together after Rainbow's change of heart. First Snips appears to wake Yona and Ocellus up some time at night, when it's dark out and they're sleeping in their beds. But then, when Snips goes to get Shimmy Shake and Lighthoof, they're awake and stretching, and there looks to be daylight out. And finally, when Snips wakes Smolder up out on the field, it's definitely daytime. So how much time passed between those three scenes? Did Yona and Ocellus take a long time to get ready to go out to the field? Also, why is Smolder sleeping under the bleachers outside? Did she get ready much earlier than the others, so she was just snoozing while waiting for the others to show up? Or is the episode implying that she actually slept outside overnight? Smolder said specifically in "Father Knows Beast" that she lives in the school, as opposed to living outside, so the latter wouldn't make much sense to me. I'm not sure that a megaphone that isn't electrically amplified would help that much with Ocellus's cheers if she's that quiet in the first place. The student on Celestia's team who's on the ground acting as an earth pony is wearing a magic-dampening ring, but shouldn't the student with wings acting as a pegasus be wearing a magic-dampening ring also? Pegasi can't cast magic with horns, either. Or does the student with wings need to keep use of her magic to maintain her wings, or to be able to save herself in an emergency, or something? Celestia says that she appreciates Twilight's allowing Celestia's students to compete, even as unicorns. But is that solely Twilight's decision to make? Is this just a one-off game, or is this the start of a "scholastic buckball league", with other schools (such as those mentioned by Pinkie earlier) involved? If it is a buckball league, wouldn't there be some oversight committee in charge or something that would have determined that an all-unicorn team could play with the given magic restrictions? Finally, the cadence of some of the cheers of the cheer squad did seem a little wonky, and sometimes seemed not quite in line with the music, so I wouldn't quite say that the performance was "flawless".

Overall, I would say that I'm pretty neutral about this episode. I've seen some people comparing this episode to "Pinkie Pride", and saying that the latter was more entertaining, but I'm really not a fan of the type of hyper random zaniness found in that episode, so I would actually prefer this episode's approach of not dialing that up so much. I also like the character of Sans, and I appreciate that he isn't made out to be the bad guy. However, it does seem to me that some viewers could take away some unfavorable - and I believe not quite accurate - impressions of the factory and how it's run, particularly as we see it from Pinkie's perspective. And I'm also not sure that this episode really ends up doing much with the premise that Pinkie wanted/needed help to find her life's purpose. To start off with that last point, the episode tries to frame this problem for Pinkie where the rest of the Mane Six have "found their things", but that she (supposedly) hasn't, and is being left behind. But I'm not sure what particularly valuable revelation or lesson Pinkie learned by the end of the episode. She already seems to know what she wants/needs to do with her life - i.e., her statements that "I'm a party pony! I need to make ponies happy in real-time!" and that she "need(s) to see ponies laughing to feel fulfilled" - and we don't really see her questioning or changing that. Maybe the best that could be said is that she was reaffirmed in that prior belief, and after seeing the factory, she knows she doesn't want to work in an environment like that. I guess that just doesn't really seem like anything new, or any particularly significant growth of her character. Next I'll talk about how the episode portrays the factory, and particularly how Pinkie reacts to it. To start off, I would admit that the name of the "Cheese Sandwich Amusement Factory" at first sounds like a name for an arcade or family fun activity center or something. But upon seeing that it's a literal factory, and that it researches and produces gag props, then it really seems like Pinkie's expectations should be changed. But instead, she continues looking for the fun and wondering where it is. And of course, the factory's not being "fun" in the way that Pinkie expected shouldn't mean that it doesn't do good work in improving people's lives, or that the factory is necessarily a bad place to be employed. And I think the combination of (1) Cheese's having lost his laugh at the factory, (2) Pinkie's continued bafflement at what the factory does and how it's run, and (3) Sans's sort of no-nonsense approach and citing of numbers could lead viewers of the episode to come to some not quite accurate impressions or conclusions. I could see some people concluding that it's bad and/or wrong to "commodify" or mass-produce things, particularly things that were conceived from wanting to bring people joy on a personal level. Or that some things, like humor, can't and/or shouldn't be subject to analysis. Or that it's a good thing Pinkie declined to work at the factory, or else she would have had all the life sucked out of her, just like Cheese, because that's just what big companies do - use people up and throw them away, right? But that's not how I see what's going on here. Cheese saw that there's demand for gag props beyond what he was personally capable of making, so building a factory to produce such gag props seems like a perfectly fine idea. Also, some people might see Sans's suggestion to "try taking the nostril flare down 10%" on the Cheese mask, and his suggestion of a "7% tighter wind on the snake springs", as ridiculous, or as sterilizing the art of comedy, or something like that. But I think these type of gag props also seem like they can do their jobs well enough if they're mass-produced; I don't see too much to be gained from these gag props being handmade or anything. And if these gag props are going to be mass-produced, then decisions will have to be made about how they're produced, what materials will be used to produce them, etc., so that the factory will make good products at good prices. Finally, managing a factory and working with (what could be seen as) dry analysis and statistics isn't for everybody, but people like Sans or the researchers who do such jobs are an integral part of maintaining the standard of living we enjoy. Not everyone can live Cheese's carefree life of wandering the world and crashing people's parties while trying to get creative inspiration to strike, either. If some people are working jobs that they believe to be boring or soul-crushing or whatever, it often won't be feasible to just quit their jobs and go wherever their dreams take them, as Cheese may appear to do at the end of this episode. But it might help to think about the value that such jobs bring, and how they actually are important to improving people's lives, as mundane or dry as they may seem. For example, working as a software developer for an insurance company or for a major bank seems like a boring job, and on top of that, many people don't really hold insurance companies and banks in high regard. But at the same time, providing insurance and providing banking services really are important jobs in a developed economy, and those services allow for people to be freed up to do other things to improve their lives even more. So perhaps one lesson should be that people can look for (and find) the positives of what their jobs do, rather than wasting their lives away dreaming of doing something that may not be feasible. Now here are the rest of my miscellaneous observations: It seems like there's something wonky about the size and/or perspective of Pinkie's cupcake invitation to the factory. It fits comfortably in Pinkie's hoof when she's first holding it, but when Spike's holding it, it seems significantly bigger - almost the size of his head. If, as the guard says, "nopony ever comes out, and nopony ever goes in" to the factory, then do all the employees live on the premises? Do they get food and other living essentials delivered by some means other than through the gate? When Pinkie and Sans say that they've "tried everything" and "exhausted every avenue that even the science of comedy can provide" in trying to bring Cheese's laugh back, does that include sarcasm and dry humor? Because those are more what I find amusing than the prop comedy or puns often seen in this episode. When Cheese tells a joke to Sans, Pinkie gets annoyed that Sans says that Cheese's joke is funny, but Sans doesn't laugh at it, at least not in a natural way. But Sans responds that he's "not much of a laugher", and I can relate to that. I can find things funny or amusing even when I'm not rolling on the floor laughing or anything, and I can be interested in or excited about things without necessarily showing many outwardly visible signs of interest or excitement. It seems like one of those personality differences that's not always understood or kept in mind. I have to admit that I didn't find Cheese's switching of letters in "lost cause" (whether done on purpose or not) to be hold-back-your-laughter funny, and so it was a little strange to me that that was what set off the chain of events to get Cheese's laugh back. It reminds me of a segment from the Angry Video Game Nerd's Castlevania episode. The credits of that game just take famous people's names and change letters or syllables in them, and he says that's not funny, that's kindergarten level - and perhaps not even kindergartners or aliens would find that funny.

Overall, I would say that this special is pleasant, if also a bit slow and overly simplistic in its resolution. I actually did like that the Mane Six just solve a relatively low-stakes problem without having to defeat a big bad villain. Twilight gets to be her nerdy self and do some research and thinking without too much pressure. I particularly liked Rainbow's giving lessons to the two kids who are fans of hers, and inspiring them to be their best. It's also nice to see Rarity working with a fan of hers, Applejack's encouraging Torque to take pride in her work, and Pinkie's and Fluttershy's facilitation of a mutually beneficial working relationship between the Hoofingtons and Moody Root. It's also interesting to note that this special just focuses on the Mane Six, and not the numerous secondary characters and events that the show has accumulated over 8+ seasons. In fact, other than a handful or so of references (Twilight's wanting to grade papers, Rainbow's being referred to as a Wonderbolt, etc.), it feels like this special could fit in at almost any point in the show's timeline. However, I would say that this special feels a bit slow in its nearly hour-and-a-half time slot, particularly in the first third or so. The quirkiness and accents of the town residents were laid on a little thick for my taste. And the biggest question I had that the special never really answers is why the residents of Hope Hollow lost hope in the first place. That was evidently what started the town on its downward spiral and caused it to lose its color, but no one really answers that question. And I think that's a concern that would deserve some serious consideration. Sure, the town appears to have gone back to normal by the end of the special, but if nobody gets to the root cause of why the town lost hope, and consequently lost its color and became run-down, then isn't all of this liable to happen again? ----- To start off, as mentioned above, probably the biggest question I have from watching this special is why the residents of Hope Hollow lost hope to begin with. Some of the only information we get about this phenomenon comes from Mayor Skies's song. A few lines in the song say "Then fences went up, we lost track of our neighbors / Every year passing, dimming spirits all around / The happy days came to an end / Nopony had time to spend together in the town". But why did fences go up? Why did residents lose track of their neighbors? Why did residents have no time to spend together? Those questions aren't answered by Mayor Skies, and we don't hear of any attempt by him to investigate those questions. And later, when Twilight explains that the town's colors dimmed before Mayor Skies turned on the Rainbow Generator, Mayor Skies asks what did cause the town's colors to dim, and Twilight says "It's called 'Hopeless Magic'. Everypony was already giving up on each other, losing hope. Then, when the Generator blew up, it must have been the last straw. It took all the hope out of the town for good, along with the color". But again, I feel like the analysis should go at least one step further. Why was everyone already giving up on each other and losing hope at that particular time? Hope Hollow was on its third generation of mayors and had apparently thrived for many years, so what changed? Was there an economic downturn? Did tourism dry up? Was there some industry or something integral to the town that changed or left? And all of this means that, even as Petunia continued to insist that Mayor Skies shouldn't blame himself for the town's losing its color, I'm not entirely sure that Mayor Skies is blameless for the whole situation, or that he couldn't have searched for and/or done something more effective to stop the town's decline. We're meant to believe that Mayor Skies's alteration of the Rainbow Generator didn't cause the town to lose its color, but it's still possible that Mayor Skies may hold some responsibility for the residents of the town losing hope, no longer helping each other, etc. We can't say for sure without knowing the root cause of that phenomenon. However, regardless of that, as Mayor Skies observed Hope Hollow's decline, apparently the only thing that he thought to do was to make the Rainbow Generator output a bigger rainbow. And after the town's color disappeared and the town really became run-down, apparently the only thing that he tried to do was to get everyone interested in the Rainbow Festival again. If that clearly wasn't working, did he have any other ideas? Did he take any interest in trying to figure out the root cause of all of this? Couldn't the mayor of the town be expected to be something of a leader and a problem solver? ----- I also had some questions about how exactly this "hopeless magic" worked to drain the color of the town. According to the special, the town's residents were giving up on each other and losing hope for some time before the fateful Rainbow Festival, and evidently the entire town lost its color right before or as Mayor Skies activated the altered Rainbow Generator. Does it make sense that the entire town lost its color all at once? We see in this special that the things and residents of the town regained their colors at a rate of just a few at a time, and over a somewhat extended period of time. So did all the residents of the town hit the same critical level of hopelessness at the same time, such that the whole town lost its color simultaneously? However, I don't know that there's any consistent rhyme or reason to the order in which things and residents of the town get their color back, so I also don't know how much to read into that. I also don't know what exactly determined which things lost their color. The giant rainbow sign would presumably be considered a part of the town, so why didn't it lose its color? Perhaps the explanation is that (almost) every object within a certain radius or boundary lost its color, and maybe the rainbow sign was outside of that boundary. But what would determine that radius or boundary, if not what's considered part of the town? Also, the handful of pictures of previous Festivals in the Rainbow Room were spared from losing their color, and apparently that's because those pictures are memories of happier times, or something? So are there any other pictures or mementos of happier times in the town that also kept their color? Are there any other objects in the town that would give residents happiness or hope, and therefore they would retain their color? ----- Now here are the rest of my miscellaneous observations. I would ask how Mayor Skies knew where to send his letter to Rainbow Dash; is Rainbow's cloud house address publicly known? But the intro just shows the letter flying into Rainbow's house surrounded by some magical aura, with no mail delivery pony or anything, so I don't even know how that works. Rarity packs Opal into her valise in the intro, but do we ever see Opal being let out or fed or anything? In fact, after the hot air balloon falls down, we see Rarity's valise on the ground lying open with nothing inside it. Maybe we'd better hope that Rarity ultimately decided to leave Opal at home, because otherwise, who knows what could have happened to her in that fall. When Twilight is running late with her bags full of books and papers to grade, we see papers falling and fluttering out multiple times, and I can't help thinking that losing students' papers is a serious matter. My brother has a story of how he turned in a project for his high school English class with everyone else on the due date, but when the projects were graded and returned much later, the teacher said she never saw any project from my brother. She was easily observed to be disorganized, and most likely lost his project at some point, but when my brother said that he turned it in with everyone else back on the due date, she accused him of lying in order to get more time to do the project, and consequently gave him a zero on it. Even if Twilight doesn't act like that, any students whose papers she loses would probably have to re-write them, since I would guess that they probably don't have back-up copies of their papers. Yeah, there's a perfect rainbow in the dead of night, with no significant precipitation around, and the rainbow is glowing like it's artificially lit - seems legit. Speaking of which, the rainbow really does look to be artificially lit; it "shorts out" after the Mane Six bump into it. So how is it lit? We don't see any obvious electric lights or anything, and when we see the pieces of the sign later, they only appear to be made of wood. Also, how tall is this rainbow billboard? I read that recreational hot air balloons typically travel at a minimum altitude of 1000 feet. And if the rainbow billboard is this fragile, I wouldn't have expected it to last long, even if the Mane Six hadn't bumped into it. In order to escape the hot air balloon falling out of the sky, Twilight, Rainbow and Fluttershy first each grab one of the other three and fly out of the balloon, and then Twilight teleports all of them next to the ground. Could Twilight not have just teleported the six of them to the ground in the first place? Was it an issue of Twilight's not knowing how far away the ground was at that point? When the Mane Six first talk to Petunia, Twilight says that they're here for the Rainbow Festival, and Petunia mutters under her breath "Oh, for cryin' in the mud, what's Sunny done now?", followed by saying "I mean, um, you'd best talk to Mayor Skies about that". And then Twilight replies "Great! And where would we find him?". Did Twilight just assume that Mayor Skies was male? Up to that point, Mayor Skies hadn't been referred to as male or female. Even if Twilight had heard Petunia mutter about Sunny, is "Sunny" an obviously male name? When Twilight asks if there's a magic section at the library, Petunia points out "Arcane", "Elemental" and "Theory of", each in a different part of the library. So those topics aren't filed near each other? Pinkie just sort of announces that they're going to give away all these apricot pies at the Rainbow Festival. Was that agreed upon ahead of time? Presumably a lot of labor on the part of Mr. Hoofington (and perhaps Pinkie and the others) went into making those pies; Moody Root put a lot of labor into growing the apricots; and somebody had to pay for whatever other ingredients went into the pies. One funny thing, though, is that Mrs. Hoofington calls out "Pies for sale!" when at the booth later. Twilight's "wing bling" (ugh) was described to have "every shade of the rainbow", but it doesn't appear to have any red, and the percentage of orange and yellow is pretty low. Mayor Skies's marriage proposal to Petunia was a bit of a surprise to me; their behavior seemed more to me along the lines of people with a crush who haven't asked each other out yet. I suppose, in retrospect, that Sunny's saying "I'd be lost without her" early on could have been a clue that they're fairly serious. Rainbow describes the two kids as being "Hope Hollow's very own Junior Wonderbolts", but I can't wondering if they're authorized to use an official-sounding title like that. Can any group of flying and/or Wonderbolts enthusiasts call themselves "Junior Wonderbolts"? Or do they need to have official approval by the Wonderbolts organization to use a title like that? Can Rainbow, as a Wonderbolt, authorize them to officially call themselves "Junior Wonderbolts"? Finally, the "big show" for the Rainbow Festival essentially consisted of Rainbow Dash doing a Sonic Rainboom and a single flyover while the two kids just flew behind her. The two kids were doing more impressive flying while practicing than they did for the big show. But maybe they and/or Rainbow didn't feel like they were ready yet to attempt stunts when under pressure at a performance.

Overall, this is probably a bit of a "meh" episode for me. The plot with Celestia and Luna was okay; there were good moments, but there might have been a bit too much of the zaniness and wacky faces for me, and I didn't find the conflict - in which the two of them continue to insist on making each other do things that the other doesn't want to do - to be all that engaging. And I didn't like the subplot with the Mane Seven; I don't see any good reason for Twilight to believe or insist that the Mane Seven need to do everything for the Royal Swanifying Ceremony themselves, and their incompetence when put in charge again leads me to question the direction that this season is taking them. ----- First, regarding the conflict between Celestia and Luna, wouldn't an obvious solution to their diverging interests be to schedule time to do some things together that they can agree on, but also to schedule time to do different things separately? I don't know why they would continue to insist on doing everything together, even as they end up repeatedly dragging each other into doing things that the other doesn't want to do. Also, wouldn't Celestia and Luna have more-or-less opposite sleep schedules, as depicted in "A Royal Problem"? If Luna normally isn't awake during the day, then Celestia's expecting Luna to do thrilling and physically exhaustive activities during the day is a lot to ask, and it wouldn't be surprising that Luna would want to take breaks and not exert herself so much. ----- Next, I'll talk about how I see no good reason for Twilight to believe that the Mane Six need to put on the Royal Swanifying Ceremony by themselves. It starts right after Celestia and Luna depart, and Twilight tells the Mane Seven "This is our chance to show Celestia and Luna we'll do whatever the job requires. If they can take care of all this themselves, then I know we can. Together". But nobody said anything about Celestia and Luna "taking care of all this themselves", and I don't see why Twilight would assume that. Of course, Twilight says this before even getting the full picture of what all is expected for the Royal Swanifying Ceremony. And I see no good reason for Twilight to refuse the assistance of the Royal Swanifying Committee. Twilight's supposed "reasoning" is that "If we ask for help, it's just like admitting we're not as good at the job as Luna and Celestia are". But, again, Celestia and Luna do not do the job by themselves, and there's no reason to think that they do. The fact that the heads of the Royal Swanifying Committee came to the throne room expecting to talk to Celestia and Luna is evidence that the princesses do not take care of all this themselves. Why would there be a Royal Swanifying Committee to offer assistance if Celestia and Luna put on the Royal Swanifying Ceremony with no help? And by the end of this subplot, what was learned? Delegation is good? Even as far back as "Winter Wrap Up" in Season 1, just to give an example, Twilight was saving Winter Wrap Up by organizing and delegating tasks to the residents of Ponyville. In fact, after this subplot, I can't help questioning what direction this season is going with the Mane Six/Seven. If this season is preparing for the Mane Six/Seven to take over leading Equestria by season's end, then what are we intended to take away from seeing Twilight and the Mane Six/Seven making really stupid decisions when they're put in charge? Is it that the Mane Six/Seven are almost ready to lead Equestria, but they need to learn just a few more things before doing so? Is it that the Mane Six/Seven will be good leaders because they (supposedly) learn from their mistakes? Is it that Twilight is trying too hard to prove herself, and that she and the Mane Six/Seven are actually ready to lead so long as they don't psyche themselves out? But it seems to me that having the Mane Six/Seven learn these lessons now, and in the manner depicted so far in this season, makes them look less competent and capable now than they were in earlier seasons. And that, in turn, reinforces - to me, at least - the idea that the Mane Six/Seven are NOT ready to lead Equestria. It's going to seem incongruous to me if the Mane Six/Seven continue to mess up and make bad decisions on this level when left in charge, and yet they're still put in charge at the end of the season anyway. ----- Now here are a few larger points, followed by the rest of my miscellaneous observations. At the beginning of the episode, Applejack asks "why there's a giant turtle eatin' my family's entire summer crop!" and Fluttershy says "Oh, dear. Mr. Tortoise-Snap said he was hungry. But he promised me he would only take a few small bites". A few small bites of what, the Apple family's apple trees? Is Fluttershy authorized to allow animals to eat the Apple family's crops without the Apple family's knowledge or express permission? This scenario reminds me of the episode "Bats!", in which (as I wrote in this post back then) Fluttershy's solution to the problem of fruit bats eating the Apple family's crops is for the Apple family to just give away part of the orchard to the fruit bats with no compensation; but don't worry, they'll definitely only eat the apples in the designated "sanctuary" part of the orchard, right? Twilight's telling Celestia and Luna that "we know you have way more important ruler-y things to do" could also be framed in terms of the principle of comparative advantage. Is Celestia's and Luna's time and effort best spent on relatively menial tasks like replacing bridges, clearing paths through the forest, baking cupcakes, carrying old ladies across the street, etc.? Or would everyone be better off if they used their time and effort on diplomacy, dream watching, leading Equestria, etc., in which they have relatively high expertise and ability? Fancy Pants tells Twilight "you must do something about the garbage piling up outside" because "the street sweepers are on strike". But is that really Celestia's and Luna's job, and by extension, Twilight's job to handle in their absence? Garbage collection and street sweeping seem like distinctly local services, so I would wonder why Celestia and Luna would be in charge of them. For example, the President of the United States is a different position than mayor of Washington, D.C., and state governors are different positions than the mayors of the capital cities of those states. So does Canterlot not have a mayor or local governing body that should be taking care of these things? Why did Pinkie's tongue get stuck in the mixer? When Mrs. Cake opened the door, Pinkie may have been surprised, but we don't see her crank the mixer or anything. If Celestia and Luna are concerned with "experiencing life" and "making a difference outside the throne room", then why is it that every example in the first part of the episode of Celestia's and Luna's doing that involved the Mane Six or was in view of the Mane Six? Were Celestia and Luna also doing other things that the Mane Six didn't see? Or were Celestia and Luna specifically stalking the Mane Six in order to find things with which they could "help"? Why can't Luna throw a throne down on the beach? I don't see why a throne like that depicted in the episode would sink through the sand completely. Do parts of the beach there consist of quicksand? Is the roller coaster that Celestia and Luna ride in the song montage supposed to be the Wild Blue Yonder, as seen in "Grannies Gone Wild"? It certainly looks to have the same aesthetic. But in "Grannies Gone Wild", it was supposed to close forever after that week. So did the hotel owners change their minds about closing it? Is this a new roller coaster that replaced the Wild Blue Yonder? Celestia's exasperation while at the theater with Luna is also puzzling. Didn't "Horse Play" tell us that Celestia loves theater, and always wanted to experience being a part of a production? Does Celestia only specifically like plays, and the pony version of "Wicked" is a musical, so that doesn't count? Has Celestia seen this particular musical too many times, and it's lost the magic for her? Is this not a very good production? Is it that Celestia is already able to go to the theater in the course of her normal job, and she wants to do something else that she can't normally do? Is Luna's fascination with the post office a vestige of her getting used to life in Equestria after having been banished to the moon for a thousand years? Did Equestria presumably not have postal service a thousand years ago, and so this is a novel thing for Luna to observe? If Celestia didn't want to be done up in goth style, then why is that happening? Did Luna dictate what hair style, makeup, etc. Celestia had to get? Where exactly was Mr. Tortoise-Snap teleported to by Celestia and Luna at the beginning of the episode if Pinkie was able to get him in such a short time to eat the garbage piled up in the streets in Canterlot? Also, what did happen to the street sweepers on strike? Did they get whatever they were striking in order to get? Or are they still on strike, and Celestia and Luna now have to handle whatever their dispute is? So the amulet is infused with a small part of Celestia's and Luna's power, and they told Twilight to activate it with her magic, but it's a mechanical device that would be fixed by turning the screw on the back?

Overall, this is another episode about which I'm not quite sure how to feel. The episode introduces some fairly complex subject matter, and I'm not sure that the episode handled it all that well. Scootaloo's parents may be nice people, and they may be doing important work, but I don't see them taking their roles as parents seriously. I have a lot of questions about what Scootaloo's parents intended for Scootaloo's living situation to be in their absence; Scootaloo's parents take a rather flippant attitude toward Scootaloo's apparent distress and disagreement with their decision to move with only a couple of days' notice; and the two of them even just let a cragadile go loose into the school and threaten everyone inside. I can't help wishing that the episode had spent more time exploring some of these issues, rather than spending a good chunk of the episode on the CMCs' slapstick antics that were doomed to fail. Also, with all of these issues with Scootaloo's parents, I was rather taken aback that Scootaloo had nothing but admiration and excitement for them, at least up until they announced that the family was moving. Finally, while the CMC Appreciation Day is nice (and I like Rainbow's support for Scootaloo in this episode), and it could be argued that the ending solution will probably work out well for Scootaloo, I really don't buy the argument that the CMC have a very important job that requires that they stay together in Ponyville, and realistically, I don't think most kids would be working out alternative living arrangements away from their parents just because (essentially) the kids don't want to move. ----- First, I'll just try to look at the logistics of how Scootaloo is taken care of while her parents are away. From what I see, it doesn't seem like Aunt Holiday and Auntie Lofty have been Scootaloo's full-time legal guardians, until perhaps the end of the episode. The two of them appear to live in a primary residence outside of Ponyville, and are just visiting Scootaloo at her parents' house in Ponyville. And as Aunt Holiday says, there are a number of rotating caretakers who temporarily watch over Scootaloo for a day or a few days. Perhaps the one contrary piece of evidence is when Scootaloo runs away to go to her aunts' house near the end of the episode. Scootaloo tells her aunts that her parents are back, and when Aunt Holiday expresses surprise, Scootaloo says "Oh. I think the mailpony delivered your letter to my house". So the postcard that Scootaloo's parents sent saying that they're coming back home was intended to go to Scootaloo's aunts? Is that meant to imply that Scootaloo's parents intended for Aunt Holiday and Auntie Lofty to be Scootaloo's primary guardians when they're gone? But if that's the case, then why is Scootaloo living in a house in Ponyville while her two aunts leave her to go to their primary residence outside of Ponyville? That line from Scootaloo was a bit odd, and I'm not really sure what to make of it. Also, Aunt Holiday says that she left "plenty of healthy food for the weekend" (and Auntie Lofty left cookies), but shortly after that, when the two of them are leaving, Auntie Lofty says "See you next week, slugger". So is there food for the rest of the week? Are we to presume that the other Ponyville residents who take turns watching over Scootaloo are also responsible for buying her food and other necessities? If so, are they just doing that out of their own pockets? And who maintains this house in Ponyville in which Scootaloo is living? If, say, the house were to be damaged by some crazy event that happens in Ponyville, who would be responsible for paying and making sure that it's repaired? And the particularly surprising thing is that this whole situation of Scootaloo's seemingly not having any permanent legal guardians in the absence of her parents may have gone on for quite some time - maybe even several years. At one point, Scootaloo tells her parents "I can give you a tour of the school if you want. I mean, if you're staying for a while this time". That seems to imply that, on the rare occasions that Scootaloo's parents do see her, they don't stay for a while, or very long at all. If Scootaloo's parents know that they'll be away from home for long periods of time, or they realize that, as Snap Shutter says, they'll be away for longer than originally planned, then why wouldn't they work out a more permanent living arrangement and more permanent legal guardians for Scootaloo in their absence? Instead, it appears that Scootaloo's aunts and several residents of Ponyville rotate as temporary caretakers. Were they all asked to do this ahead of time, and agreed to it? Are they being compensated to watch over Scootaloo for potentially months or years? Did Scootaloo have any input about this arrangement? So I see a lot of questionable things about how Scootaloo's parents intend for Scootaloo to be cared for while they're away, and I don't think that reflects well on them. ----- Next, regarding Scootaloo's parents' sudden announcement that the family is moving to Shire Lanka, it really does seem like Scootaloo's parents ought to have, at a minimum, talked this over with Scootaloo well in advance and given her time (and help) to come with terms with a big change in her life. But instead, this big change is dropped on her with no prior notice, at a time when she's just trying to catch up with her parents in who-knows-how-long, and with just a couple of days before moving out. Despite that, though, it does also seem like Scootaloo's parents would have authority over her as the parents of a minor, and that would also mean that they have the final say in where they want Scootaloo to live. So if Scootaloo's parents want her to live with them in Shire Lanka, then they could order Scootaloo to go with them, even if she doesn't want to. And in real life, in most cases, if kids' parents move somewhere, then presumably their kids have to move with them, regardless of whether the kids want to, or whether the kids have made friends and connections in their current place of residence. So, thinking about it that way, I can see how this episode's ending would be more realistic and more interesting if Scootaloo ultimately did have to move with her parents away from Ponyville. But this makes me wonder whether there's an Equestrian equivalent of Child Protective Services, and whether such an agency would consider Scootaloo's parents to have been neglectful in, for example, failing to make permanent legal guardianship arrangements for Scootaloo while her parents are away for months or years. I suppose that, even if there were such an agency, someone would have to report this situation of Scootaloo's living with rotating temporary caretakers as her parents are gone for extended periods of time. And maybe everyone who participates in or knows about this (including Scootaloo, her parents, her two aunts, all the other rotating caretakers, and anyone else who has heard about this arrangement) has no problem with it or wouldn't want to report it. Furthermore, I have no particular knowledge or experience with this, but I wonder if a case could be made that Scootaloo's aunts, and possibly her other "temporary" caretakers, have acted more as her guardians over the past several years (or more) than her parents have, and therefore, they have a better claim to be her legal guardians than her parents do. So if Scootaloo really wanted to continue living in Ponyville, but her parents insisted that Scootaloo had to move with them, then could Scootaloo's aunts and/or the residents of Ponyville try to obtain a court order forbidding Scootaloo's parents from moving her until this legal guardianship dispute is resolved? Would Scootaloo want to go along with something like that, and potentially ruin her relationship with her parents? But I suppose I'll stop this train of thought here, since I know that court orders and messy legal guardianship battles are almost certainly beyond the scope of this show. As the episode stands, Scootaloo's parents are convinced to allow her to stay in Ponyville, while her aunts are going to move to Ponyville and act as more permanent guardians. And I can see how that could be a good outcome for Scootaloo. Essentially, the status quo with Scootaloo's friends and caretakers in Ponyville is maintained, but with the bonuses of her having a more permanent living arrangement, and her being able to visit her parents on a monthly basis, if she desires. Scootaloo is probably used to living away from her parents at this point, so I can see how Scootaloo might prefer travelling to visit them on an occasional (but more frequent than before) basis, rather than moving away from Ponyville with her parents, and only being able to visit Ponyville on an occasional basis. ----- Now I'll give just a couple of other larger points, followed by the rest of my miscellaneous observations. First, with all the Ponyville-threatening and Equestria-threatening events and villains that have been on the show for the past eight seasons, now all of a sudden it was the return of Sombra (who's now defeated just as the other villains were) and the destruction of the Tree of Harmony that convinced Scootaloo's parents that their family should be together? Why is this time so different? I just find that hard to believe. Also, I really don't buy into the idea that the Cutie Mark Crusaders are the only ones in Equestria who can do what they do (supposedly analogous to Scootaloo's parents), and therefore, the CMCs need to continue living together in Ponyville. Are we really to believe that nobody else in Equestria, other than three middle-school-age girls in Ponyville, could help ponies get their cutie marks, or help others find their purpose? And also, if the CMCs' "job" is to help others find their purpose, why does that necessarily mean that they need to stay together in Ponyville? Couldn't the CMCs help more people if they traveled, or if they spread out and lived in different places to help different people? If the CMCs are the only ones in Equestria who can do their "job", then why should everyone in Equestria have to go to Ponyville to seek their help? It seems like this line of argument could even cut against what everyone in Ponyville wants, which is for Scootaloo to continue living in Ponyville. And it seems particularly contrived to me that this is the argument that breaks through and convinces Scootaloo's parents to allow her to stay, when they had no apparent inclination to do so before that point. Knot-tying - now there's a good life's calling! How does the pegasus weather factory specialize in sunshine? If Celestia raises and lowers the sun every day, does the pegasus weather factory have any control over sunshine or ability to change it directly? I can't remember if we've seen a globe in the show before, or if this is the first confirmation that Equestria is on a planet that resembles Earth, with continents separated by large oceans and the like. I wouldn't have thought that chalk could be used to draw on pony skin like Scootaloo does when she's demonstrating her dad's scar. Finally, in at most one day, people from as far-flung regions as Canterlot, Manehattan, Appleoosa, Starlight's old village, Mount Aris, and Griffonstone were all willing and able to travel to Ponyville for this Cutie Mark Crusader Appreciation Day, with no prior notice?

That's a good observation, I hadn't noticed that. In the episode, Starlight says that "Twilight and the others have already left to celebrate the spring solstice in Canterlot", and Trixie refers to the "Spring Solst-astic" party, the "genuine pre-Equestrian spring solstice chafing dish", and Mrs. Cake's "famous spring solstice cake". But when Starlight is running around distracted, she refers to the "genuine pre-Equestrian equinox chafing dish" and Mrs. Cake's "equinox cake". So maybe Starlight mistakenly uses the term "equinox" because she's distracted. And it's interesting that Equestria apparently has a spring solstice, rather than a summer and winter solstice. As far as I can tell, the show hasn't referred specifically to a summer or winter solstice before. So if Equestria has a spring solstice, then do their seasons work differently than ours? Then again, if we believe that Princess Celestia (or another unicorn with similar power) raises and lowers the sun at will, then she could also change the path of the sun in the sky, and create a solstice or equinox whenever she wants.

Overall, this episode is a bit of a strange one. I actually do sympathize with Trixie's annoyance at Starlight's state of distraction and failure to keep her promises. And I basically agree with the final messages of the episode - Sunburst's telling Starlight "You can't be expected to supervise your students every second of every day", and Trixie's point that "always being at work isn't fair to anypony". But I'm not really satisfied with how the episode got there. For one thing, I feel like the search for Silverstream takes up too much of the episode time, while not contributing much to the narrative of the episode. But also, I think Starlight's being too busy and distracted with her job is a separate issue from Silverstream's going missing, and this episode seems to conflate those two things and not make any distinction between Starlight's job as guidance counselor and her job as an adult supervisor in the absence of the Mane Seven. And I don't consider Starlight to be at fault for the whole situation with Silverstream, so I was frustrated by how Starlight was fretting and blaming herself; instead, I wish Starlight had made a better defense for herself. ----- First I'll talk about this situation with Silverstream's going missing. When Terramar says that Silverstream is missing, Trixie throws Starlight under the bus, and Terramar chews Starlight out. But Starlight just happened to be in her office late (i.e., at or just after sundown) when Silverstream came by yet again, and Starlight told Silverstream that "I need to lock up the school for the holiday, and it's time you caught the train home". And Silverstream didn't appear to be in obvious danger or distress. So I think it would be reasonable for Starlight to believe that Silverstream was capable of packing up and catching the train home without active supervision all the way there. After all, many of the other students probably packed up and departed for home without active supervision. The Mane Seven apparently believed that it would be fine for them to go to Canterlot and leave Starlight to close the school for spring break. And I've said before that I think the Student Six are at least the equivalent of high schoolers. We even see the Student Six getting on the train in "Best Gift Ever", presumably to go home for the holiday. And I don't think that it was Starlight's responsibility to know exactly what Silverstream was doing or where she went after leaving the school. When I was in high school, as far as I could tell, the school and the staff generally weren't responsible for checking or knowing what students were doing or where they were going after school hours, and especially off of school grounds. It's not like students were stopped and interrogated when they were leaving and asked "Where are you going and what are you leaving to do? Is that what you told your family that you would be doing?". So, for example, let's say that my parents believed that I was going straight home after school one day, but then I decided to go to someone's house or to a restaurant or something, and I didn't tell my parents about that. If my parents were wondering where I went (and let's say that I couldn't be reached by cell phone), perhaps they could call the school and confirm that I was in classes that day. But should the school or the staff be held responsible for where I went or what I did after school and off of school grounds? I wouldn't think so. Similarly, Starlight told Silverstream that the school was being locked up, and that she ought to catch the train home; Starlight had no reason to believe that Silverstream would do anything but that. It was Silverstream who then decided on a whim to go to the Crystal Treehouse without telling anybody and lose track of time. Consequently, I find Starlight's fretting and blaming herself frustrating, in part because I don't see it as accomplishing anything, but also in part because I don't think it's obvious that Starlight is at fault. Just focus on finding Silverstream (or solving the more urgent and immediate problems) for now; everyone can work out how much Starlight is or isn't to blame for Silverstream's going missing (or the situation that everyone is in) later. Silverstream seems to really be the one who needed to learn a lesson or two here. If she's going to run off to the Crystal Treehouse in the Everfree Forest at night, she ought to tell someone where she's going and how long she plans to be gone. And how long did Silverstream expect to be gone? Did she think about whether she was going to be late getting home for break, and think to inform her family if she was likely to be late? Has Silverstream ever taken a trip away from home before, or taken a trip by herself before? Telling people about your plans seems like a pretty basic thing to do, but apparently Silverstream didn't know or didn't think to do that. ----- Next, I'll talk about this whole issue with Starlight's being too busy with her job as guidance counselor and/or adult supervisor. To start off, I remember when Starlight had nothing to do and was bored out of her mind in "Marks For Effort", and she commented in that episode that there's "not much need for a guidance counselor at a school of friendship". And in "The End In Friend", Starlight had the spare time to listen to, and come up with multiple methods to try to mediate, the dispute between Rarity and Rainbow. But now Starlight is frequently being called upon to answer students' questions. When, and why, did that change? I suppose Starlight did have a line of students outside her door in "Road To Friendship", so the change might have occurred some time before that episode. Now Starlight has students lining up outside her door (rather than, for example, making appointments) in order to ask about things like Yona's hard time with her braids, or Silverstream's trying to come with how to describe showers or towels to her family. Why are things like this a guidance counselor's job to help with, especially during office hours? For example, if anything, Silverstream might ask her language/grammar teacher, if she has one, about how to describe showers or towels. But even better, she could ask her friends, or go to the library and find a dictionary or thesaurus or encyclopedia or something. I would say (as Sunburst and Trixie also more-or-less say at the end of the episode) that it's not reasonable to expect Starlight to be available to answer virtually any question from any student at any time, and it's not reasonable to expect Starlight to supervise the students in everything they do. I would think that high-school-age (or older) students can (and should) be expected to take significant responsibility for themselves. So how did Starlight come to believe that she should, or that she's expected to, do these things? It seems to me that this is the kind of thing that happens when, to my recollection, none of the Mane Eight has any particular training or experience in being a guidance counselor, or in running a school, for that matter. Twilight wrote this massive rulebook for the school, but it looks as though Starlight's job duties and responsibilities weren't defined so as to be limited, since essentially everyone would want (and need) to have regular uninterrupted personal time. This seems to me like another example of the issues with trying to run a school and fill the roles in it without any particular prior training or experience. ----- Now here are the rest of my miscellaneous observations: When is this picnic with Starlight and Trixie taking place at the beginning of the episode? Is it on a weekday, but after school has let out for the day? Is it on a weekend? I'm just curious about what day/time Starlight would agree to hang out with Trixie, on the assumption that she wouldn't be too busy, but yet there are multiple students in quick succession that want to talk to Starlight. Also, is this picnic taking place after the Mane Seven have already left to celebrate the spring solstice in Canterlot? We see Trixie putting at least 5 sugar cubes in her cup of tea. Is that enough? I would wonder if all of that sugar would even dissolve in just a few fluid ounces of tea. Starlight says that "being able to use the experiences of my checkered past and help young students feels pretty great". But how often are Starlight's experiences of her checkered past relevant to whatever students are asking her about? What's with this student who twice knocks on Starlight's door and then opens it and pokes his head in, even when he knows that Starlight is talking to Trixie? Is someone in imminent danger, or is there something that urgently requires Starlight's attention? If so, then he should spit it out already; if not, then sorry, he needs to wait. I had to look up that a chafing dish is typically a large pan that's raised up and heated on the bottom to keep food warm in a buffet line, for example. (I've obviously seen those before, but I hadn't known that that's what they're called.) I don't know why an antique pre-Equestrian chafing dish would be particularly desirable to use, other than just because Sunburst likes antiques. Also, we see the chafing dish holding something green at the party later, but there doesn't appear to be anything keeping it warm, which I thought is a defining characteristic of a chafing dish. Maud's telling Terramar that this is a private cavern makes me wonder: how much property is Maud claiming to own? Does she believe she owns the entire cave system? Does she have a deed on file showing the boundaries of her property? Terramar says that he was told that Starlight would be here in Maud's cave, but by whom? Did Starlight or Trixie share the details of the time and place of this party to the merchants in Ponyville that they were buying things from? Do people in Ponyville generally know that Maud lives nearby, and know specifically where Maud's cave is? When Terramar says that Silverstream had a big project due for Twilight, Starlight says that Silverstream never told her about a project, but Silverstream actually did mention it in passing just before she asked about how to describe a shower. However, Silverstream only mentioned that it's a lot of work; she didn't express any doubt about being able to get it done, or say anything about having to stay at school and skip going home to work on it, or anything like that. When Starlight and Terramar go back to the school to search for Silverstream, we first see Starlight look in her office. Does Starlight not lock her office when she's not there? And for that matter, are the classrooms or the library not locked when they're not in use either? So closing the door to the heavily degraded Castle of the Two Sisters stops the cockatrices, even as there clearly aren't complete walls or a roof? Would the cockatrices not just fly over or around?

Overall, I'm not really a fan of this episode. If the message is that it's good to have fun with your younger siblings, or that it's okay to enjoy doing things as an adult that you did as a kid, then that would be fine enough, I suppose. I wouldn't believe in the Great Seedling or something like that when there don't seem to be any compelling reasons or evidence to believe in it, but I probably wouldn't care that much about it, so long as it's not harming anyone and I'm not pressured into going along with that belief myself. But probably the biggest issue I have with the messaging of this episode is that Apple Bloom's, and later Applejack's, sudden resurgence of belief in the Great Seedling leads to (1) their dumping their share of the harvesting work on the rest of their family while they run off to set traps and whatnot, and (2) their traps becoming a nuisance and potential danger to others who might set them off. If Apple Bloom and Applejack set traps and tried to find the Great Seedling in their own free time, and their activities weren't a nuisance or danger to anyone else, then I could see their activities as more-or-less just a bit of fun. However, that's what not happens in the episode; instead, Goldie Delicious and Granny Smith enable Apple Bloom to get out of doing harvesting work, and Applejack later joins her, while Big Mac endures most of the abuse throughout the episode. To start off, it might be more than just a coincidence that Apple Bloom suddenly re-develops this desire to catch the Great Seedling right after it's shown that all of the Apple family, including Apple Bloom, has a lot of harvesting to do. Apple Bloom could be seen to use this as an excuse to avoid doing her share of the work, and to dump her responsibilities on the rest of the family. And if I were in Applejack's and Big Mac's place, I wouldn't just let Apple Bloom get away with running off to look for the Great Seedling and set traps for it while shirking her share of the work. In fact, I kept track of how the harvesting maps changed over the course of the episode. Below is how the harvesting map starts: So this distribution of harvesting responsibilities seems pretty fair. However, by the second morning, we get the following updated map: Big Mac is now taking over all of Apple Bloom's share of the harvesting, as well as taking over a part of Applejack's share of the harvesting. The latter is never explained or pointed out in the episode; did Applejack herself not do her share of the work because she was busy watching Apple Bloom or something? But also, why is Apple Bloom removed from the harvesting map entirely? What happened to Applejack's hesitantly saying that "I guess there's no harm in [Apple Bloom's] huntin' the Great Seedlin' for a day"? Well, that one day is up, so Apple Bloom ought to be on the schedule to work. A bit later, though, Applejack makes a deal with Apple Bloom that "if you help me with the harvest today, I'll help you set traps for the Great Seedlin' tonight". And that seems like a perfectly fine solution, provided that their traps weren't an annoyance or danger to others. Applejack also says at the end of Granny Smith's story that she felt guilty that everyone else had to work harder because she had trapped herself in her own hole that she dug to try to catch the Great Seedling. That ought to be one lesson of the story: if Apple Bloom (and Applejack) is capable of helping with the harvest, and is expected to help, then she should be helping, rather than leaving the rest of the family to do her share of the work while she chases her dream of catching the Great Seedling. Of course, another lesson of the story would be not to create traps for the Great Seedling that could actually hurt someone just going about his or her normal business. However, by the third day, Applejack has really gotten into the whole Great Seedling business, and has seemingly completely forgotten about the above lessons from her story. Because Applejack and Apple Bloom both ran off to set more traps, Big Mac has to make this final harvesting map: Big Mac now is responsible for all of Applejack's share of the harvesting, as well as half of what was originally Granny Smith's (and Goldie Delicious's) share. Applejack even looks at this final map later, which shows Big Mac's being responsible for harvesting 90% of the farm, and expresses no guilt about her and Apple Bloom's having dumped 90% of the work on Big Mac, who has been worked to extreme exhaustion. And what I find rather galling is that, at the end of the episode, Applejack gives a general statement about how "there will always be work to do", but neither she nor Apple Bloom ever apologize to Big Mac or personally own up to having dumped their harvesting responsibilities on him, caused him to have to update the harvesting map multiple times, forced him to work to extreme exhaustion, or caught him in their traps multiple times. This episode displays on several occasions that Apple Bloom and Applejack are shirking their harvesting responsibilities, and this episode tells the story of how Applejack originally stopped hunting the Great Seedling because she felt guilty that everyone else had to work harder (and that she had endangered herself with her own trap). But then the end of the episode focuses almost entirely on Applejack's learning to have fun, and to bond with Apple Bloom, while those issues are just glossed over with a few perfunctory words. Now here are the rest of my miscellaneous observations: I guess the blueberry syrup shows that the Apple family is allowed to have products made from other fruits, at least occasionally. The talk in this episode makes "The Confluence" - when every apple comes ripe at the same time - seem like an act of nature that's predictable, but out of the Apple family's control. So, are we to presume that normally, the apples on the Apple family's trees come ripe at different times? Does the Apple family normally have some level of control over when apples come ripe, by scheduling when they prune and plant their trees, by varying how they take care of their trees, by growing different types of apples, etc.? If so, then why wouldn't those strategies work at "The Confluence"? Why can't the Apple family hire temporary help for "The Confluence" other than the Mane Six or their extended family? (I asked the same question when watching "The Super Speedy Cider Squeezy 6000" - if the Apple family's cider is so popular that hundreds of ponies spend hours standing in line every day to try to get some - with most potential customers not getting any - why can't they find a way to increase their production to meet the obviously very high demand?) Are these jobs that the Apple family does supposedly so specialized that no one other than their extended family or the Mane Six is capable of doing them? Does the Apple family just trust absolutely no one other than their extended family or the Mane Six to be able to do these jobs competently? Is it really too much to ask that, if Goldie came to the farm to help with the harvest, that she actually help with the harvest? Instead, Goldie is too busy enabling Apple Bloom to goof off, talking with Granny Smith so that neither of them do much harvesting, and criticizing Big Mac for not putting in his best, when he's one of the only ones actually getting work done. I also don't see why Goldie should find it particularly amusing that Apple Bloom keeps running off in search of the Great Seedling, when her doing that means that everyone else just has to do more work. Apple Bloom dismisses the accidental pattern of apples that Applejack made by saying that it's not "hundreds of apples in a bunch of different lines". But the apple pattern that Apple Bloom was getting excited about had 117 apples in it, which I wouldn't consider to qualify as "hundreds of apples". Granny Smith tells the story about how Applejack "was plumb loco about catchin' the Great Seedlin'" when she was Apple Bloom's age, but in the flashback, Applejack doesn't have her cutie mark yet. As far as I recall, we've never been told that Applejack was particularly late in getting her cutie mark, whereas it seems like the Cutie Mark Crusaders were fairly late in getting their cutie marks. So I would be skeptical of Granny Smith's claim that Applejack was Apple Bloom's current age at the time that Applejack was super eager to catch the Great Seedling. Young Applejack certainly dug a pretty deep hole, if it was several times deeper than her height at the time. What, did she use a ladder to dig the hole that deep? And should she really have been allowed to dig a hole that deep, such that it could actually hurt somebody if he or she fell in it? (Of course, Applejack and Apple Bloom also dig a similarly deep hole that Big Mac falls into later in the episode.) I wouldn't have bought Applejack's belief that there's "no way" that critters and/or the wind and/or something else other than the Great Seedling sprung the traps and caused the supposed apple patterns on the ground. And even if I were unable to think of any explanations for how the apple patterns were made, or how the traps were sprung, I would still think it's better to say that I'm not sure (yet) how those things happened, rather than jumping to a premature conclusion that the Great Seedling must have done it. What was with the "Great Seedling's" (a.k.a. Big Mac's) glowing red eyes? Were those just a figment of Applejack's and Apple Bloom's imaginations?

Overall, I find this episode kind of a mixed bag. I appreciate how much Spike and Smolder have become friends, how Smolder is happy to have Spike come along, and how Smolder sticks up for Spike. Ember also makes a nice showing in this episode. I can also see how Fluttershy's appearance in this episode would be enjoyable, although I found Fluttershy's "cute" faces and baby talk to the dragon eggs/newly hatched dragons a little over-the-top and excessively cloying; I will admit, though, that I'm not generally into that kind of overt display. However, to my recollection, Garble's history on the show has just been acting as the dumb bully stereotype, so it's really hard to believe that Garble's "tough guy stuff is just an act", or that it's all caused by peer pressure from his posse. There are a couple of other aspects to this episode that seem a bit more contrived than usual. And I thought that the resolution, and some of the characters' lines, in this episode sort of muddle the message this episode seems to be trying to send. ----- I'll start off with the things in the episode that seem to me to be muddling the message. When Garble tells Fluttershy that she better not tell his friends about his beat poetry, Fluttershy responds "But why? If I was a poet, I'd want to share my creations with everypony". But is that implying that there's a problem, or that there's something wrong, if Garble doesn't want to share his beat poetry with everybody? It seems to me like beat poetry is a kind of niche thing, and that many people may think it's a little weird, or just not take any particular interest in it. Is it okay for someone to have niche interests that perhaps only a select group of people would share, and therefore, that person doesn't want to share those niche interests with the world, or with everyone he/she knows or meets, or with certain friends of his/hers? And I'm also left rather baffled that the resolution to Garble's loneliness in his interest in beat poetry, and his fears of being made fun of forever if he performed in front of anyone else, is to perform in front of everyone, knowing, and even intending, that everyone will laugh at him and find him ridiculous. And afterward, Smolder says that "Garble saved our eggs because he was strong enough to be who he is, whether you liked it or not", and says that we should celebrate our differences. But must one display every aspect of "who one is" to everybody, and if other people don't like it or care for it, then they're in the wrong, and they're preventing one from being who one truly is? Is it okay to generally acknowledge and let people have their differences without needing to actively celebrate them or share them with everyone all the time? One analogous situation to this would be our interest in watching and commenting about this show (and the attendant spin-offs). I was never one who felt the need to proclaim that I like this show to other people, or to try to get other people to watch the show or give it a chance, or to try to convince the world that it's okay for us to like a cute cartoon primarily targeted to young girls. I'm perfectly fine with watching and commenting on the show on my own time, and generally not talking to most of my friends and acquaintances about it. Does that mean that the people that I choose not to talk to about this show aren't my real friends, and are stopping me from being who I am? I wouldn't see it that way; I would probably just say that I have different friends and acquaintances with whom I share different interests and opinions, and not all of those interests and opinions overlap. In fact, that seemed to be the message of "Make New Friends But Keep Discord": that it's okay to have "different friends for different things", and that one need not share everything in one's life with all of one's friends. So if your friends find out about some interest you have, and they actively pick on you, laugh at you, try to embarrass you, and/or repeatedly pressure you to stop even when that interest isn't hurting anybody or affecting them, then sure, you may want to find some new friends. And if your friends are essentially nothing but a bad influence, and do little else than pressure you to do bad things that you wouldn't otherwise do, then again, yeah, you probably should find some new friends. But if your friends (or others) find out about some interest you have, and they think it's kind of weird, or just aren't interested themselves, and don't necessarily want to share that interest with you, then sometimes that's just the way things go. I don't see that as necessarily meaning that those people aren't your real friends, or that they're in the wrong for preventing you from being exactly who you are. It's up to you if you want to remain friends with those people and just share other common interests. And in either case, you can try to find some other people who do share that particular interest with you. ----- Next, early in the episode, Smolder tells Garble "Only gonna warn you once. Spike's my friend. You mess with him, you mess with me". But after that, we seem to be meant to believe that Smolder never saw Garble messing with or bullying Spike again until Fluttershy calls Garble out on it near the end of the episode, and Smolder angrily asks Garble "Wait. You've been picking on Spike?". But earlier, when Spike, Smolder, and Garble went to a lava pool, Garble pushes Spike into the lava pool before Spike's ready. And after that, Garble cannonballs, causing Spike to swallow lava and irritate his eyes, and causing Smolder to need to dive down and rescue Spike from below the lava. Later, at the tea party, Garble smacks the red velvet cupcake out of Spike's hand and smashes it on the ground with his foot (which makes an audible squishing noise), followed by Garble saying "Feeling better already" while Spike tears up and looks at his smashed cupcake on the ground. Smolder's eyes were closed at that moment, but did she really not hear any of that, or see the aftermath of it and ask what happened (or put together what happened herself)? And later still, did Smolder not hear the exchange between Fluttershy, Spike, and Garble & Co., especially when Garble & Co. started throwing lava balls and Fluttershy shouted "ENOUGH!"? Did Smolder not ask what that was about? It seems like there are multiple instances of Garble's messing with or bullying Spike (and Fluttershy) that Smolder could have observed or found out about with a minimum of curiosity. Finally, there are a couple of things about the situation with the dragon eggs to comment on. The show has seemed to give the impression that dragon parents raise their children in at least a somewhat similar way to how we humans usually do. So why does it seem to be solely the Dragon Lord's job to watch over and hatch all the dragon eggs? Why aren't the dragon parents contributing to the watching and care of their own children? And when do the parents "claim" and start to raise their children themselves? Just after they hatch? Some later point? Also, when Spike asks whether the hatching grounds are supposed to be hot, Ember seems to know that they should be, and yet Ember had apparently never taken notice of the temperature of the eggs or of the hatching grounds themselves. Ember had said earlier that the eggs have been shaking for days, and the temperature of the hatching grounds may have been dropping for even longer than that. So it comes across as a little contrived for Ember not to have noticed that, but for Spike to nearly instantly diagnose the problem correctly. Now here are the rest of my miscellaneous observations: This teacher's lounge is larger than any of the teacher's lounges I saw in school. When Twilight says "I'm sorry to hear about your brother, Smolder. But the Dragon Lands are really far for you to go by yourself", I half-expected the next sentence to be "Let me contact your parents and have them pick you up". But then, if Twilight did say that, then the whole suggestion of getting school credit and having Spike and Fluttershy come along might not have happened, and the episode would be significantly different. Smolder's making a "begging" face (alongside Spike and Fluttershy) could be taken as proof of her liking "cute, silly stuff", and/or proof of her ongoing adaptation to pony culture. We might think that making a "begging" face like that wouldn't be very effective in the dragon lands. Spike offers Garble a cupcake that appears to be brown with red icing and says "Try this. Red velvet". But the brown at the base of the cupcake doesn't resemble the color of red velvet cake. Does Spike's "red velvet" refer only to the icing and not the cupcake itself? Fluttershy tells Spike "For a land that's all rocks, this place is surprisingly easy to get lost in". So Fluttershy expected a land of all rocks to be easy to navigate? Perhaps there isn't tree cover or something, but if the rocks all look more or less the same, and the land doesn't have many distinguishing features, then I would expect it to be more difficult to find one's way around. I did notice that we don't see Ember make any comment or take note of Spike's wings, even as he flew in to greet her at the hatching grounds. I suppose it's possible that Spike or Twilight, say, may have written to Ember and told her about Spike's molt in a letter, or that Smolder had informed Ember at some point. But it still could have been nice for Ember to make some acknowledgement when seeing Spike. How did Fluttershy lose track of Smolder, Garble & Co.? How far did they travel in the ~15 seconds that elapsed between Garble & Co. flying down to join Smolder and Fluttershy's talking to Spike? Or is it implied that they all ditched Fluttershy at a later point? Somehow I find it hard to believe that stone bongos would sound like that. Many of the clutches of the eggs are bathed in fire even when dragons aren't actively breathing fire on them. But what's burning to keep the fires going in those cases? The eggs appear to be just sitting on dirt and rock, which I wouldn't think would be (easily) flammable. If the eggs are in danger of dying, then it seems like Ember and Smolder and Spike could also be helping to breathe fire on them. In "Triple Threat", Ember's fire breath was a kind of magenta color, so it may even be hotter than normal already. Yeah, I did find this a little strange. Spike's encounters with Garble (and his posse) have been some of the few interactions Spike (and the Mane Six) has had with dragons and with dragon culture. So if Spike and Smolder have talked about Spike's lack of knowledge or experience with dragons and dragon culture, I might think that Garble would have come up. Furthermore, this may imply that Garble never talked to or complained to Smolder about his encounters with Spike, either. (On a side note, this may also mean that Garble gave Smolder a hug on Dragon Lord Spike's command in the aftermath of "Gauntlet of Fire" and Garble didn't complain or badmouth Spike when doing so.) And yeah, if Smolder were aware of Garble's and Spike's previous run-ins, then she might have been more on the lookout for Garble's attempting to bully Spike, and she and Spike may have come up with a different approach to trying to cheer up Garble.

That's a good point. As far as I remember, we never learned how Tirek was sending and receiving letters to/from Cozy Glow while he was in Tartarus, so Tartarus may not be as secure as everyone might think that it is. And considering how many powerful villains have been defeated just to come back later, along with the who-knows-how-many powerful magical artifacts scattered around Equestria, we might think that Celestia and Luna and the residents of Equestria ought to keep a pretty close eye on the villains that they do have in custody, to make sure that they aren't up to something, being broken out of jail, etc.

Overall, I would probably call this an okay episode. It serves to advance the plot for this season while introducing some twists, and it has some good moments. For example, it was interesting to see Chrysalis feeding off of love again, and cocooning her prey. I liked Tirek's sitting back and just letting the other two fail. And I liked that Rusty Bucket didn't fall for Cozy Glow's "golly gee, poor pitiful me" shtick, which resulted in her "true nature" being shown, and her subsequent failures at going it alone. However, I also found that this episode exhibits an (seemingly increasing) overreliance on contorted and hyper-exaggerated facial expressions for entertainment, particularly with Cozy Glow (but also with the others), and I'm not particularly a fan of that. I don't think I have any super in-depth points to make, so I'll just write my observations below in episode order. I do kind of wonder why Grogar continues to keep the other villains around, considering their self-centeredness, obnoxiousness, and (seeming) incompetence. Grogar says in this episode that he doesn't trust anything that any of them say, and he has to threaten them in order to get them to do anything. (Plus, I wonder if Grogar realizes that people generally resent being forced to do things under threat, and will look to avoid or do the bare minimum of work under such conditions.) Grogar also hasn't been making much of any effort to work with the other villains; so far, he's just repeatedly told them and threatened them to work together while he just does his own thing. I guess we'll see if Grogar's aloofness and lack of investment in working with the others is all part of his plan, and will play into later episodes. As I saw someone else point out, Queen Chrysalis is only a queen if other people recognize her as such, and right now, she's not really a "queen" of anything. Where did, for example, the arts and crafts supplies for Cozy Glow's poster come from, or the cupcakes that were at the team meeting? Those don't seem like the kinds of things that Grogar would just have lying around. Chrysalis tells Cozy Glow that she "doesn't do meetings". But what about when she was queen of the changelings? Would she not have had meetings, even if only to give orders to commanders or such? For example, in "To Where And Back Again - Part 1", the changelings who were impersonating the Mane Seven gave a report to Chrysalis in the Cutie Map room; does that not count as a meeting? I could see how Chrysalis might have some reason to believe that she could overcome the magical winds "preventing anypony from reaching [Mt. Everhoof's] peak", because she could transform into other animals that might be better suited to scaling the mountain. But after the three villains go their separate ways, Cozy Glow also believes that she'll get to the top first and be waiting for the other two. How did Cozy Glow believe, at that point in time, that she could overcome the magical winds specifically designed to "prevent anypony from reaching [Mt. Everhoof's] peak"? She wouldn't seem to have any particular physical advantage. Had she already seen Rusty Bucket's house and expected to recruit whomever's living there (using her special talent) to help her reach the top? Rusty Bucket tells Cozy Glow "I'm the guardian of this here mountain. It's my job to keep ponies from heading up". So who gave him that job? Is he being paid for it? Perhaps Gusty the Great tasked Rusty Bucket's ancestors with guarding the mountain, and that responsibility has been handed down through the generations (with their family having to live off the land). But if so, then who's next in line to fulfill this duty, if, as Rusty Bucket says, "there ain't been ponies around here in I-don't-know-how-many moons"? Does Rusty have any other family? Is anyone else aware that Rusty is here doing this job? This reminds me a bit of the ticket pony that Applejack and Fluttershy ran into in "Sounds Of Silence" - someone just doing a job alone, out in the middle of nowhere, with essentially no contact with pony society. Also, if "there ain't been ponies around here in I-don't-know-how-many moons", then how did Rusty get a copy of the Friendship Journal? In "Fame And Misfortune", we see the copies of the Friendship Journal being distributed by book stores, news stands, or by Twilight in person. And Rusty's statement above would seem to preclude, say, somebody delivering mail to him. We don't know if it was even possible to get a copy of the Journal by mail, or if anyone would know where he is in order to, say, teleport a copy to him. Did Rusty abandon his post to go to some town relatively recently, and he bought a copy there himself? When the three villains are sitting around the campfire, Cozy Glow grabs her toasted marshmallow with her bare hooves and pulls it off the stick before eating it. Even if we assume that it's not too hot (if it's at a safe temperature to eat), I know from experience making s'mores that toasted marshmallows make a sticky mess that isn't easy to clean. Wouldn't eating the marshmallow off the stick be less liable to make her hooves sticky and messy? Referring back to the events of "Twilight's Kingdom", Tirek tells the other two "You should've seen Twilight's face when her friends appeared in bubbles around me. She was all...", followed by Tirek contorting his face and making exaggerated groans. But if we go back to that scene in "Twilight's Kingdom - Part 2", Twilight actually didn't make a contorted facial expression, and she had a shocked intake of breath, but didn't scream or groan or anything like that. When the villainous three bury Rusty and his house in snow and walk by him to approach Mr. Everhoof, what is Rusty supposed to do? Is he supposed to try to stop them himself? Is he supposed to inform some higher authority of the attempt to breach the mountain? That vine across the ravine stays surprisingly stiff and straight when both Chrysalis and Tirek are making their way across it. Cozy Glow says to Tirek to keep the hole in the magical barrier open, or else she'll be trapped forever. But why would that be? If Tirek became too tired to keep the hole open, could he not just rest and do it again later? It doesn't look as though Tirek's opening a hole in the barrier was permanently using his magic or anything. The villainous three are shown to enjoy having worked together to retrieve Grogar's bell, before they reiterate that they totally aren't going to succumb to the magic of friendship. But people can work together on things (or make trades, etc.) just because they each expect to benefit from doing so, even without becoming friends or turning to "the good side" or anything like that. So if this is intended to foreshadow their eventual reformation, I wouldn't necessarily see that as a good argument for eventually "turning good". Grogar's bell is glowing at the end of the episode, when it wasn't earlier. Is there any significance to that? Would Grogar be able to feel the bell's presence, even if he didn't see it directly?

Overall, I didn't really care for this episode. Part of the reason for that may be that I don't particularly care for the subject matter. Out of the Student Six, Yona is probably the one that I least like, and Sandbar's eagerness to invite her to the dance seems to come out of nowhere. Also, I generally don't enjoy going to dances, in part because of the types of preparations for these dances that are shown in this episode. When I've had to attend dances (as a required activity at band camp, for wedding receptions, etc.), I've done what Smolder, Gallus, Ocellus and Silverstream did: eat food and hang out away from the dance floor to talk, play cards, etc. Besides that, though, I feel like the seemingly intended message of the episode - that Yona should have just been herself and not tried to be something that she wasn't - doesn't follow from what actually happened. To start off, I don't see any particular problem with the event itself. When Twilight puts up the poster for the school dance, she says "We're bringing one of Ponyville's oldest traditions to our school – the Fetlock Fete". But after Sandbar says it's a pony dance party, and Ocellus transforms into a pony, Twilight says to the Student Six (who are, as far as we've seen, the only non-pony students) that Ocellus doesn't need to transform into a pony, and that the event is "open to everycreature" (and will be called the Amity Ball). I think the situation here might be analogized to, say, being invited to a formal ball or other such event where specific dances will be done, a dress code may be enforced, certain rules of etiquette may be expected to be followed, etc. So if one wants to participate, then one may have to learn (and practice) the dances, rules of etiquette, etc. ahead of time. But if someone (like me) doesn't really want to do those things, then he or she can choose not to participate. So, in this episode, Yona agreed to attend the Amity Ball with Sandbar, and so she tried to get dressed up and learn the dances and traditions so she could participate in them with him. On the other hand, Smolder, Gallus, Ocellus and Silverstream evidently didn't want to do those things, so they didn't participate. However, there are a couple of oddities about the run-up to the Ball itself. Rarity runs into Yona with a rack full of dresses that Rarity says she's sewing for the dance, and that leads Yona to ask Rarity for help with getting a dress, which leads to helping Yona with other preparations for the Ball. However, at the Ball itself, we see almost nobody else dressed up at all, and I don't recall seeing anyone wearing any of the dresses that Rarity was sewing. So why is that? What happened to the dresses Rarity was making for the dance? Is it just that the animators didn't create clothing for all the background characters? Was Rarity's preparation of Yona more in accordance with the Fetlock Fete tradition, and Rarity wasn't informed that the tradition wasn't being followed that strictly for the Amity Ball? Did Rarity make dresses in anticipation of students wanting them for the Amity Ball, but it turned out that none of the other students wanted to wear them? Also, the other four of the Student Six knew that Yona was preparing by learning the traditions of the Amity Ball, but apparently they and the Mane Six kept that a secret from Sandbar, who's totally surprised by Yona's preparation for the Ball. So I guess we're meant to assume that Yona asked all of them to keep it a secret? Or maybe Rarity (and perhaps the Mane Six) suggested to keep it a secret? However, as we see Sandbar repeatedly being surprised that Yona dressed up, brought a lucky pot, knows the dances, etc., I couldn't help wondering what he was doing in the run-up to the Ball. Since Sandbar asked Yona to be his "pony pal" and to enter the contest with him, shouldn't Sandbar have told Yona about what the traditions are, and talked to her about what she wants to do or plans to do for the dance? Did Yona deliberately avoid talking to Sandbar about the Ball in order to keep her preparations a secret and surprise him? However, despite Sandbar's initial surprise, he seemed to like doing the dances with Yona, and the two of them seemed to be having a good time. But then we get to what happened at the Ball itself. And there, the real problem doesn't seem to be that Yona "wasn't a good pony" or that she tried to be something she wasn't; rather, it was that, when Yona's wig blocked her vision, she spent close to 30 seconds running around and smashing into things like a proverbial bull in a china shop, even when her friends explicitly tried to get her to stop. So why did that happen? Was that response something that Yona (or anyone else) was aware that she would do? Is that something that Yona could/should be learning not to do? Is that supposed to be some kind of subconscious automatic instinct that she's incapable of stopping? It could be argued that Yona, Rarity, Fluttershy, and/or Rainbow should have realized that Yona needed to practice dancing in her dress, or that she should have worn a dress that wasn't a tripping hazard. And if it was known that Yona would react the way she did when her vision was blocked, then it could be argued that Yona shouldn't have been, or should have been more careful about, wearing a wig or something that could block her vision and trigger that reaction. But regardless, Yona's response in that situation really ought to be addressed - not just because Yona might embarrass herself and make a mess, but because she could really hurt people or do a lot of property damage. Also, we see in the episode that Twilight was right there when Yona first hit Sandbar and started running around, causing guests to scatter in fear of getting hurt, and Twilight reacted quickly enough to make a magic barrier to stop the flying food from hitting some of the room. So couldn't Twilight have levitated Yona off the ground or used her magic to force Yona to stop? Now here are the rest of my miscellaneous observations: Is Yona's exclaiming that she loves Brussels sprouts supposed to suggest to any kids watching that vegetables are good? Rainbow's being one of the dance instructors reminded me of the mid-air "twirl" that she did during the song back in "Castle Sweet Castle", and how people joked that Rainbow was secretly learning ballet or something, although in this episode, Rainbow doesn't end up teaching anything like that. Also, as a demonstration of how much of a music chart nerd I am, the first thing that came to my mind when Rarity mentioned the "pony cotillion" was the R&B record label Cotillion Records, which was in business from the late '60s through the early '80s. There's one scene during a montage where Rainbow is wearing hockey-style protective equipment and flying around interposing herself between Yona - who's hopping around - and other stuff in the room. Was that supposed to be teaching Yona not to run into and break things? If so, what was the outcome of that lesson? The opening "pony cotillion" dance at the Ball didn't even last a full minute. We might presume, though, that Spike cut it short because he saw that everyone stopped dancing to look at Yona, and Spike was trying to get the Ball back on track. When Twilight goes to erect the magic barrier against the flying food, she also drops Spike on his head; I'm not sure if his costume exacerbated or alleviated how much that would have hurt. It's a little strange to me that other dance goers appear to be helping to clean up, but Ocellus, Gallus, Smolder, and Silverstream are just hanging around a table, doing nothing in particular. Do they feel like they don't have to help because they weren't participating in the dancing and/or the pot luck? Are they considered to be particularly traumatized by what Yona did, and so everyone is okay if the four of them don't feel like helping with the cleaning? Also, in the clean-up scene, there shouldn't be any food or buckets near the DJ booth; Twilight put up her magic barrier to stop the flying food well in front of the DJ booth, and we saw that area remain clean in the immediate aftermath of Yona's rampage. Finally, I hope that a room full of people doing the "Yakyakistan stomp" doesn't result in anybody getting hurt or any property damage. When I was an undergrad, there was a story about some students who had a dance party at their house and had the floor collapse. Considering the tunnels and such under the school, hopefully the floor is structurally sound.

Yeah, that's a really good point, I hadn't thought about it that way. Oftentimes "metas" can develop in multiplayer RTS games, FPS games, etc., whereby certain characters, weapons, or strategies end up dominating the others, such that the "meta" can't be countered effectively, and players feel limited in their choices if they want to have a chance of winning. As a result, developers try to tweak the rules or the character/weapon stats and abilities to re-balance the game and make the other characters, weapons, strategies, etc. viable. And if buckball is a relatively new sport, then there may still be "exploits" or overly dominant strategies that the rules haven't taken into account. Maybe whoever's responsible for the professional buckball rules could refine the rules in consultation with the author(s) of the buckball almanac, since they seem to have spent a lot of time analyzing the game - although, for all we know, those may be the same person or people!

Overall, I find this episode kind of a mixed bag. Clear Sky is a nice character, and there are some cute family moments; I can relate to Quibble's lack of knowledge and aptitude about sports (although the episode is very over-the-top about how bad he is), and to his interest in hobbies that most other people probably don't care about; and I appreciate Rainbow's trying to be helpful in her somewhat misguided way. However, it seems like the lead story about the family dynamics going on here could have been given more episode time, rather than filling the middle of the episode with a bunch of "nerd can't play sports" stereotypes, which I didn't find terribly entertaining. And one message of this episode seems to be that Quibble should have just been himself when trying to bond with Wind Sprint, but with her attitude, I don't know if even that would have worked. I don't have any experience with stepparents or stepchildren, but I can't help wondering whether Clear Sky could have improved the situation earlier by being a little more proactive. To start, it's easy to look at what Quibble and Rainbow do in this episode and second-guess it, and part of the message of the episode seems to be that Quibble's pretending to be a "sportspony" when he isn't put Wind Sprint off. For example, when Quibble asked Rainbow to "talk him up" to Wind Sprint, I didn't take that to mean that Rainbow should pretend that Quibble is "pretty sporty". I thought that meant more along the lines of saying that Quibble's a cool guy, fun to hang out with, etc., which at least might have been more believable. Or arranging for Wind Sprint to meet Fluttershy and Pinkie doesn't seem like an inherently bad idea, but I don't know why it had to be tied to trying to prove that Quibble is "sporty". Why couldn't it just be like, hey, Quibble knows Rainbow, who's friends with Fluttershy and Pinkie, so Quibble arranged for Wind Sprint to meet them because he knows that she would like that, and he wants to do nice things for her? And yeah, I don't see any way that the halftime playing against Team Ponyville made any sense, especially when Rainbow had already seen that Quibble is utterly incompetent at even attempting to play. No amount of having Fluttershy and Pinkie throw the game would help that. However, I don't know if any attempt by Quibble to bond with Wind Sprint would have worked, given her attitude toward him. Quibble apparently tried to bond with Wind Sprint over things that he likes - Daring Do, comic books, roleplaying games - and that didn't work. So okay, the argument might be that he needs to take an interest in what she likes, rather than trying to get her to like what he likes. However, we would think that Quibble's planning this whole trip to the Buckball Hall of Fame and the tournament would be a sign that he's trying to take an interest in what she likes, but that didn't seem to be good enough, either. Wind Sprint had a bad attitude about this trip from the beginning, and she's hostile toward Quibble almost every time she sees him. So I can't help wondering whether this whole situation could have gone better if Clear Sky were a little more proactive. How long has Wind Sprint's attitude toward Quibble been an issue? What have Clear Sky and Quibble tried to do about it? Had Clear Sky ever talked to Wind Sprint about how no one is asking her to forget her dad, but that Clear Sky is asking Wind Sprint to have reasonable expectations about a potential stepdad, and to give a stepdad a chance? Clear Sky does something like that near the end of the episode, but it almost sounds like it's the first time it's been brought up. Should a talk like that have already occurred earlier? (And with how hostile Wind Sprint was to Quibble throughout the episode, I don't know if she would have turned her attitude around as much as she did after that brief conversation with her mom.) On the other hand, Clear Sky sees Quibble repeatedly trying (and failing) to ingratiate himself with Wind Sprint, but in these repeated situations, she basically just tells him some variant of "you don't need to try so hard" and leaves it at that. If Quibble is clearly still concerned, then could Clear Sky have suggested some alternative course of action to convince him to stop? What if Clear Sky had told Quibble something like "Wind Sprint probably needs more time to warm up to you, and I'll try to talk to her about that one-on-one later. For now, let's just try to enjoy what we can together with the three of us"? At one point Clear Sky tells Quibble that "everything's gonna be fine", but Quibble certainly doesn't seem to think so. What makes Clear Sky think that, and could she share that with Quibble to assuage his concern? Finally, on a different topic, I do relate to how Quibble has no knowledge or aptitude about sports, and how he's interested in hobbies that most other people probably don't care about. I don't follow sports, either, and know very little about them. But it seems like, for people who do watch and follow them, sports are often an easy topic of conversation to strangers, and are something that's relatively normal to like. When people have asked me what I do for fun, and I say with honesty that I compile music popularity charts from past decades, I've gotten my share of strange looks, or polite acknowledgements followed by changing the subject. Other people have sometimes taken some interest in my talking about music charts and popular music from past decades, but usually only after I've already built up some good will with them. And of course, that whole topic wouldn't be something that kids would understand or care about, so I can relate to Quibble's situation in that respect, too. Now here are the rest of my miscellaneous observations: When do Fluttershy and Pinkie (and perhaps Snails) have the time to train and play as professional buckballers, especially such that they're the championship team? And is Rainbow (and possibly Applejack) acting as a coach? I guess we can add another commitment to the list of things that the Mane Six do. Fluttershy says "I can't believe the ponies of Appleloosa built this place", and Pinkie adds "Yeah, especially after their team lost to us". I'm sure there are many examples of professional sports teams that don't win (and sometimes don't even come close) year after year, and yet their home cities still spend millions and millions of dollars on building new stadiums (and upgrading/maintaining existing ones). Fluttershy also says "I never thought I'd get to be in anything like a Hall of Fame", with Pinkie replying "Me neither", but they're Elements of Harmony, and they're already enshrined in stained glass in Canterlot castle. Is that close enough? How common are tents emblazoned with Daring Do's cutie mark? Is there a whole line of Daring Do outdoor equipment? Clear Sky's handkerchief tied around her neck reminded me of the tea salespony that Discord talked to in "Discordant Harmony", who also wears one. And then, by coincidence, we actually see the tea salespony behind the counter in the museum later. So it looks like she may work two jobs. When Rainbow suggests that Quibble might find meeting Daring Do more amazing than Clear Sky, at least Clear Sky is cool about it, and doesn't, say, get upset at the idea that she might not be the most amazing pony that Quibble has ever met. But when Clear Sky says "When it comes to describing your special somepony, a little exaggeration's normal", I can't help wondering if it would be better not to have a cultural norm whereby deliberately exaggerating about one's significant other is considered normal, or even expected. When Rainbow talks to Wind Sprint inside the museum, it's only when Rainbow mentions that she's a Wonderbolt that Wind Sprint recognizes her as Rainbow Dash. I thought that Rainbow has a pretty unique and recognizable appearance, but I don't know, maybe Wind Sprint doesn't follow the Wonderbolts (or the news) closely enough to recognize Rainbow on sight. In the "race" with Snips, Quibble apparently thinks that he's running, but then we see that he hasn't advanced down the track at all. So what, did he just run in place? He does know how to run with forward motion, right? When the announcer describes the halftime show as "buckball's biggest stars take on a team of fans just like you!", the funny thing is that there probably are a fair number of fans that, like Quibble, have little to no athletic ability. If Pinkie's and Fluttershy's moves on the buckball field are so predictable that they occur (with given conditions) 83% or 92% of the time, then couldn't the opposing teams come up with effective countermeasures for those moves? It looks like Team Ponyville may be getting too complacent! That's an interesting point. In "Daring Done?", Rainbow says to Daring Do that "most ponies don't know that you actually are Daring Do and that the stories are real", and the article in the Ponyville Chronicle only refers to her as the author A.K. Yearling. Of course, Daring Do has had interactions with the residents of Somnambula in southern Equestria, at least, but they may not have really told people in other places in Equestria about Daring Do. So it's possible that Daring Do's being real is still not widely known. But Clear Sky and Wind Sprint don't seem surprised or anything when Rainbow mentions meeting Daring Do, so Quibble may have told them already. His adventure with Rainbow and Daring Do was probably one of the most exciting events of his life.

I had the impression that the theater we see at the beginning of this episode may be small because it's part of the Hall of Fame, and may only show documentaries or things associated with that (comparable to, say, a mini-theater inside a museum), rather than being a full-fledged commercial movie theater. I do remember a significantly larger theater being depicted during the song back in "One Bad Apple". There was what appeared to be a cartoon movie being shown before Babs Seed interrupted it. However, there did also appear to be a stage, so that may not have been a dedicated movie theater. I don't remember any other movie theaters being depicted in the show off the top of my head. Of course, there was the PSA-style black-and-white film at the beginning of "Hurricane Fluttershy" that was shown in the Golden Oak Library. Rainbow also asks to just watch the history of the Wonderbolts movie instead of studying in "Testing, Testing, 1, 2, 3". And Starlight refers to her and Trixie as being "like a buddy movie where the two protagonists can't get away from each other because they're wearing hoof-cuffs" in the song in "Road To Friendship". If that last line is taken seriously in-universe, it may suggest the existence of commercial fiction movies, such that buddy movies like that would be common enough to make a reference to.

The funny thing about the overdue fine being only 28 bits is that, if bits are made of gold, then even 28 bits would be pretty valuable to us. When I saw 28 bits stacked on the desk at the end of the episode, it made me think that that's a decent chunk of metal. But it's possible that bits aren't actually made of gold, or that gold is more abundant in Equestria than it is on Earth. I hadn't thought of that! I guess we don't necessarily know what numbers the beads on Spike's abacus were representing, and apparently there are different methods of doing calculations on an abacus, which I'm not familiar with. But that's an interesting point.

Overall, I would say that this episode had some good moments, particularly with Spike, but I also often found this episode exasperating. Twilight seems to spend most of the time fruitlessly fretting about things, overblowing things in her mind, and jumping to unwarranted conclusions. Spike did often represent my frustrations as an observer, and he had many amusing responses, quips, and reactions. But I also couldn't help wishing that Spike could have been more effectual in getting Twilight to calm down, think things through, and recognize a different perspective on what was going on. And there are a few things depicted in this episode for which I'm not sure that I can think of a completely satisfactory explanation. ----- To start off, there's a flashback to the very first episode of the show, depicting Twilight haphazardly pushing aside a couple of books in a stack on the floor, and this particular library book then sliding under the bookcase after Twilight pushes it aside. But if we go back and watch the first episode, that doesn't appear to be what happens. After Twilight haphazardly pushes those top two books in the stack on the floor aside, we see what should be the library book standing upright, half-open, facedown on the floor in front of Twilight. So that book didn't seem to slide under the bookcase at that moment. In fact, the bookcase in the first episode doesn't even appear to have a gap under the bottom shelf that the library book could slide into. So, okay, maybe that part of the flashback to the first episode was just Twilight's imagining what could have happened that day, rather than an accurate depiction of what actually occurred. So then what did actually occur? What happened to that particular library book? Again, looking back at the first episode, the literal answer seems to be that it disappeared. After we see what should be the library book standing upright, half-open, facedown on the floor in front of Twilight, the camera pans up to show a book that Twilight is levitating down from the top shelf, and when the camera cuts back to Twilight, she doesn't appear to have moved, but the floor around her is empty. And as far as I can tell, we never see that particular book again in that scene, although the animators didn't appear to be too concerned with maintaining the continuity of how many books there were, and where they were, in that scene. (Of course, the animators back in 2010 also couldn't have known that that one particular book would be crucial to the plot of an episode 8 seasons and nearly 9 years later.) Even if we just look at what happened in the rest of that scene, Twilight levitates a bunch of books off the shelves, and when Spike finds the book Twilight is looking for, she drops the books she was levitating on the floor, and Spike appears to pick the books up and reshelve them. But if Spike picked up this particular library book, along with a bunch of other books, what would he have done with it? Would Spike have "reshelved" it mixed in with other non-library books? In the current episode, both Twilight and Spike seem to recognize the book as a library book essentially instantly, so wouldn't Spike have also recognized it as a library book back then? Did Twilight and Spike have a system for separating borrowed library books from the books that stayed in Twilight's study? But also, perhaps a bigger question is why this particular library book was found and shipped to Twilight. When we saw Twilight's former study in "Amending Fences", it still had plenty of books in it, including at least some of Twilight's personal books, and Twilight wanted to give Moon Dancer the key to the study so that Moon Dancer could use the books in there. So if someone was cleaning up in Twilight's former study, how did that person conclude that the library book didn't belong in the study and shouldn't stay there? And if that person recognized that, then why didn't she or he recognize the book as a library book and try to return it to the library, rather than shipping it to Twilight with other personal belongings of hers? ----- The next question that I would have about this whole library book debacle would be why the Canterlot library had seemingly never tried to contact Twilight about her overdue book and ask her to return it. Even if Twilight had moved away from Canterlot to Ponyville, I wouldn't imagine that it would be too difficult to find out where she had gone and to contact her. (They could just ask Celestia, or maybe Twilight's parents, for example.) But I believe I figured out a theory that could (at least partially) explain this. I hadn't thought of this at first, in part because the episode doesn't call any attention to it, and in part because I'm so used to a world of computerized records. The key is that the checkout card with Twilight's cutie mark on it, and the date, is still in the card pocket. Normally, that checkout card would be removed and filed when the book was checked out, so that the library would have a record of who checked the book out, and when. But it appears that Dusty Pages (and Twilight) neglected to remove the checkout cards from the books that Twilight was checking out on that fateful day. That means that, when the library eventually discovered that the book was never returned, they had no written record of who had checked the book out. And if they didn't know that, then they didn't know who to contact and remind to return the book. However, this explanation would seem to require that Dusty Pages completely forgot that Twilight had checked the book out - even though Twilight was the star patron of the Canterlot library, with whom Dusty was personal friends; this book was particularly popular, with a long waiting list of patrons who wanted to read it; and Dusty had called specific attention to this book in asking Twilight to be sure to return it on time. Plus, I would think that if there was a waiting list for the book, then the library might not allow Twilight to check it out for very long, and the library would find out pretty soon after the book's due date that the book hadn't been returned. (@Truffles also suggested that maybe Dusty and the other librarians just couldn't believe that Twilight would ever fail to return a book on time, so even if Dusty thought she remembered Twilight's checking that book out, Dusty could have doubted her own recollection and assumed that it was someone else.) If this is the intended explanation for why Twilight had never been contacted about the overdue book, though, it seems a bit odd to me that there's no dialogue in this episode to suggest it, and the episode never calls any particular attention to it. When I first watched the episode, I never made the connection that the checkout card still in the library book would be significant, and I would wonder how many other viewers didn't make that connection, either. ----- In this section, I'll go through various cases in this episode where Twilight seems to fruitless fret about things, overblow things in her mind, or jump to unwarranted conclusions. First, outside the Canterlot library, Twilight frets about potentially having her Canterlot library card revoked, or even being banned from the building. But, for one thing, I don't know if Twilight has even used her Canterlot library card since moving to Ponyville. (In fact, her card could even be expired because of inactivity.) Twilight was also totally unaware that Dusty Pages left the library staff "moons ago", so Twilight doesn't seem to be particularly concerned with staying "caught up" with the goings-on at the Canterlot library. And besides, Twilight doesn't live in Canterlot any more, and doesn't seem to spend much time at all just hanging out there - i.e., doing things other than "official" business with Celestia and Luna or whatnot. If Twilight were to suddenly need materials from the Canterlot library for "official" reasons, I would think that she could assert princess privileges. Plus, Spike says that Twilight has most of the books in her collection at home. So I don't see much reason to fret about this, at least from a practical point of view. On a related note, Twilight protests at the end of the episode about her "Best Book Borrower" picture being taken down, but it was literally covered in dust when Twilight came in to return the book earlier, so I really don't think anybody was paying attention to it anyway. The next thing Twilight needlessly frets about is the overdue book fine. At the libraries I've used, the fines for overdue books or materials don't just continue to accumulate in perpetuity with no limit; they have maximum fines set at some relatively low amount (like $10 or $25), or set at the cost of replacement of the book or material. We might imagine that a library's attempting to collect an overdue fine of hundreds or thousands of dollars for a single book or item would come across as rather ridiculous to the library patrons and the community. If a book or item is overdue long enough, then practically speaking, the library would probably just consider it lost, and buy a replacement if needed. And this turns out to be the case later in the episode. However, both Twilight and Spike seem to have a different idea of how the Canterlot library's overdue fines work. When Twilight first remembers that there'll be a fine, she says "A book out this long will probably cost a thousand bits!". In the basement, Twilight insists on finding First Folio now, saying that she's racked up another 17 bits in late fees in the time it took to go down there, and she acts as though she was making a calculation to determine that number. Later, when Twilight and Spike are out searching for First Folio, Twilight says that her late fines are already up another 26 more bits. And still later, Spike asks about the late fees as he and Twilight are running to Dusty's house, implying that he believes that the late fees are still being accrued. Finally, when at the retirement community, Twilight asks Spike about the late fines, and Spike calculates some number with an abacus before saying "you don't wanna know". So do Twilight and Spike think that the Canterlot library policy is for overdue fines to accumulate by the hour, or by the minute? In the real world, don't overdue fines almost universally accumulate on a per-day basis? Again, would Canterlot library patrons and the community consider that a reasonable policy? Ultimately, whatever calculations Twilight and Spike were making about the overdue fines were way off, because Twilight's total late fees - capped at a month - were 28 bits. Compare that to how Twilight believed earlier in the episode that she had accumulated an additional 44 bits in late fees in just a 1-or-2-hour time period. Next, First Folio says that she heard that Dusty Pages was "forced to leave" the library, and that Dusty Pages "had a perfect librarian record. Until one careless pony didn't return a book, ruined it all". Upon hearing this, Twilight also concludes that Dusty was fired for failing to find Twilight's unreturned book, thus ruining Dusty's perfect record. But what does that narrative imply? Are Canterlot librarians fired for having anything less than a perfect record of having books returned? Once again, would the librarians, library patrons, and the community think that that kind of zero-tolerance policy is reasonable? It would seem to me that some patron is bound to lose, fail to return, or damage a borrowed item, such that it would need to be replaced, at some point. And there doesn't seem to be all that much that the head librarian or other staff could really do to prevent that. (If the checkout card theory I laid out above is true, then perhaps Dusty carried some small amount of blame for neglecting to remove and retain the checkout card from Twilight's book, but okay, an oversight like that is bound to happen at least occasionally.) This is another thing that Twilight frets about that turns out not to be true. And on a related note to that, at the retirement community later, Twilight says "I can't believe that my carelessness sent [Dusty] here, when she could be happily surrounded by millions of wonderful-smelling books!". But how is Twilight believe that she's responsible for sending Dusty here specifically? Even if Dusty lost her job at the Canterlot library, why couldn't she have continued to live in Canterlot, and/or gotten a job at a different library or something if she really wanted to? Does Twilight believe that Dusty was blacklisted from all library jobs in Equestria immediately after failing to maintain a perfect record? Does Twilight believe that Dusty, with the loss of her job at the Canterlot library, was suddenly unable to afford to continue living in Canterlot...but was able to afford to live in a pretty nice retirement community? Finally, Twilight jumps to the conclusions without evidence that the Silver Stable Community is "terrible" (because, for example, "there's not a single bookshelf in sight!" in the welcoming lobby), that Dusty must be suffering while living and doing activities in the retirement community, that Dusty's apparent contentment is "all an act", and that Dusty must surely want her job at the Canterlot library back, even several years later. And needless to say, none of these things turn out to be true, either. These latter things in particular even arguably lead Twilight to mistreat the retirement community band in a couple of different ways. When Twilight is convinced that she needs to tell Dusty about the overdue book as soon as possible, Twilight stops the band's practice by using her magic to pull all their instruments out of their hands and mouths, including pulling out the saxophone player's dentures in the process. And later, when Twilight wants to mope about Dusty's response to her, and Twilight puts her head on the table while the band resumes practicing, Twilight annoyedly asks them "Do you mind?". But why should they have to be quieter or stop playing? They're the ones who live in the retirement community and normally practice in this room at this time. If Twilight doesn't want to listen, it seems to me that it's incumbent on her to go elsewhere. ----- Now here are the rest of my miscellaneous observations: I'm not normally a fan of Derpy in particular, but I liked her appearance in this episode, and I thought that it worked well. Derpy's having to fly while carrying Twilight's big heavy box for delivery makes me think that a big heavy box like that would probably have been better off with ground shipping, rather than air shipping. Ground shipping may have been a bit slower, but I don't think anybody would have considered that package particularly urgent or anything. (And this topic reminds me of separating "P1" and "P2" freight back when I was a non-conveyable package sorter at DHL.) This episode also avoids the Derpy/Muffins name issue by just having Twilight say "Are you all right?" and "Thank you" to her without using her name. I couldn't help feeling a little anxiety at Twilight's and Spike's going through the box of books, scrolls, etc. right next to splashing (and possibly misty) waterfalls and pools in which Twilight's stuff could be dropped. Couldn't the box have been taken inside to open? It looks as though the library book checkout card has the checkout and return dates handwritten, while the cutie marks - representing the ponies checking the books out - are stamped. Wouldn't it make more sense for that to be the other way around? In the real world, the checkout and return dates are constant for each day, so those would often be stamped, whereas the names of the people checking the materials out would be handwritten, because those are different for every person. Did the Canterlot library make cutie mark stamps for every patron who checked materials out? Did the library only do that for "high volume" patrons who frequently checked materials out? Even if the latter were the case, that would still mean having to find the stamps for individual patrons whenever they go to check things out. And this also means that we see again ponies being represented on paper by their cutie marks, rather than writing their names out as words, even though their names ought to exist as words, and one might think that writing ponies' names as words would be easier than sketching cutie marks, or having stamps custom-made to represent everyone's different cutie marks. Isn't this the same library at which everyone was shushing Moon Dancer and Twilight when Twilight tried to talk to her in "Amending Fences"? But in this episode, no one even reacts as Twilight repeatedly teleports in quick succession with the accompanying teleporting noise. Spike tried to say earlier that it's pointless for Twilight to attempt to keep the returning of the book a secret, but it's especially pointless for Twilight to try to conceal her face and her voice from the librarian at the desk when actually making the return. The librarian is almost certainly going to see that it was Twilight who had checked the book out when the librarian goes to mark the return date and note that the book was returned. (And that's not to mention the distinct cutie marks on her saddle bags, or her own pretty unique appearance.) When the librarian at the desk asks who Dusty Pages is, Twilight just pulls a book-sized picture of Dusty Pages out of the book she was returning. What was that doing there? Twilight seems to take the "Grossly Overdue Book Return Office for Ponies Who Should Know Better" moniker completely seriously, even though that sounds like it should be a joke, even in-universe. When Twilight and Spike go down in the basement, Spike says that it "looks like nopony ever goes down here", but then First Folio leaves a note on the door saying that she's out to lunch, as though she expects that people might go down there looking for her. So if the basement is used frequently enough for First Folio to do that, then why isn't it kept in better shape? I'm not sure why the two ponies at the Tasty Treat just think that Spike is a waiter. Does he particularly look like one? And I'm also not sure why Spike just goes with it, after an initial attempt to say that he's not a waiter there. I wouldn't think the restaurant would particularly like for random unaccountable people to just start going around taking customers' orders and acting as servers. Twilight and Spike have to go on a wild goose chase looking for where Dusty moved before finally finding the right place. Did no one in Canterlot have any idea of where Dusty moved? Did Dusty just not really have any friends or acquaintances in Canterlot who cared where she moved? At the retirement community, Twilight asks the three ponies painting on the dock about Dusty Pages, and they list off the activities she does, but they don't give any times for those things, or say where Dusty could be found right now. Couldn't Twilight have asked them where Dusty might be right now? Or could Twilight have asked the reception desk if they know what Dusty Page's schedule is, and where she might be found right now? Also, does Spike really need to continue to haul the mail bag around after he and Twilight start searching the facilities for Dusty? Couldn't he and Twilight ask the reception desk to hold it for Dusty or something? Dusty certainly looks to be playing an acoustic guitar, but the music has an electric guitar playing. Dusty seems to be happy to get her mail, so I'm curious if she ever wondered about why she's received less (or no) mail since moving to the retirement community, since she apparently neglected to change her address with the post office. I wouldn't consider watermelon in the rind to be a squishy fruit safe to throw in a food fight. When Twilight and Spike go to sit next to Dusty Pages on the log, Twilight levitates her saddle bags somewhere off screen, not close to where they're sitting. And yet, when Twilight brings the book up in conversation, she levitates it up as though it was right next to her the whole time. After Twilight and Spike are pelted with fruit, Twilight was able to teleport Spike, herself, and her saddle bags while leaving the smashed fruit behind, and leaving no apparent residue or stains. So could Twilight do the same with the library book - teleport the book itself, but not the smashed fruit in/on it? And who threw that, anyway? "Time out" was clearly called. Twilight was hauling this book around, and instantly recognized it as a library book when she first saw it, but she never read the title on the cover? Finally, when First Folio says that "Most ponies don't know that [the late fine] caps at a month. Probably 'cause we don't tell them", does she just mean that that information is in the fine print that most people don't read, and the librarians just don't verbally tell people about it? Because otherwise, I might wonder if there would be legal issues with the library's attempting to enforce a policy that patrons have no means of knowing about because the library deliberately didn't inform them.

When Shining Armor introduces that line of defense, he says "The castle is surrounded by shards of Queen Chrysalis' throne. Thanks to Star Swirl, its anti-magic powers are now tuned to stop anycreature from using a spell to get inside". So it looks as though Star Swirl could have modified the throne shards to prevent outside magic from coming in (or vice versa), but people inside the castle would still be able to cast magic. Yeah, I had noticed that too. But one explanation I thought of is that the heist could have occurred on a weekend or some other day when classes weren't being taught. So Starlight could stay at the school just to keep an eye on the students living there and to be on hand if something were to happen, but the Mane Seven would be free to (try to) execute the heist.

Twilight explains at one point that "at the end of each week, we'd add up the stars", so it looks to have been a weekly competition. And I can understand Twilight's having some resentment toward Shining Armor if, for example, he happened to be the last winner of the weekly competition before it was stopped, and he then kept the crown for himself, with the implication - or even explicit statement by Shining Armor - that this meant that he was the ultimate winner. (Whereas, if Shining Armor had returned the crown to their parents, that would be an implicit or explicit statement that neither of them was the ultimate winner, or that it didn't matter.) I just feel like, if I were in that position, I wouldn't view reviving the competition one last time to determine a really ultimate winner as a good resolution; I feel like I would rather just see everyone reach a mutual agreement that it really doesn't matter who the ultimate winner was, and to set the competition aside. But ultimately, this might just be something that Twilight handles differently than I would; there are still plenty of other things with which I can relate to Twilight. Yeah, I guess there wouldn't be much of an episode if Luna had just teleported the crown out of the throne room. I can also see it as Luna enjoying "toying with" Celestia in a similar way to how Shining Armor enjoyed "toying with" Twilight. Shining Armor let Twilight's plan appear to work until the last second, and then snatched victory away from her. Similarly, Luna could have been letting Celestia believe that she was right to do things her way and to ask Shining Armor to handle the security upgrades, only for Luna to show Celestia at the last second that Shining Armor's security - and, by extension, Celestia's decision to ask him to handle that while cutting Luna out - wasn't as good as Celestia thought. I suppose Celestia does tell Luna at the end of the episode that "it seems we need to make adjustments to account for threats inside the castle as well as out", so that could serve as an explanation for some - or most - of Shining Armor's defenses being altered or removed offscreen. But I can also imagine, for example, the newly-tuned shards of Chrysalis's throne playing some protective role in a later episode. I guess we'll have to see whether any of Shining Armor's defenses are shown or referred to in any later episodes, or whether they'll be dropped as just devices for this one-off episode.

Overall, I would probably say that I found this a just okay episode. Wacky antics, overexaggerated faces, and hammy voice acting aren't generally my type of thing, so I don't particularly care for much of that stuff. I don't really relate to the "sibling rivalry continued into adulthood" premise, nor do I buy into the idea that all of Shining Armor's ideas were going to be a serious and permanent upgrade to the Canterlot castle's security. But there are parts of this episode I found amusing, including Rarity's and Rainbow's roles in the first plan, Spike's and Fluttershy's talking and working together, and the twist that Spike and Luna made a deal to steal the crown out from under everybody else. And while Spike has said, for example, that Twilight is his family as recently as "Father Knows Beast", I suppose it's still nice to have Twilight and Shining Armor clarify that Spike is "the little brother we've always had". To start off, I've seen some reactions to the premise of this episode along the lines of "Yep, sibling rivalries never really die" or "Yep, siblings are gonna be siblings and compete with each other". But, in contrast to that, I find it weird that adult Twilight and adult Shining Armor are still apparently this invested in, and eager to participate in, a sibling competition from when they were younger and still living in the same household - particularly one which was originally facilitated by their parents, and which is all for the "reward" of an artificial title (and a toy crown to go with it). That seems to me like the kind of thing that kids might care about and think is important when they're young and don't necessarily have bigger things to worry about. But then those kids would leave that behind as they get older, realize better what is and isn't important, and live in different circumstances where that kind of thing just doesn't really matter any more. I have a big family of eight siblings, and most of the nine of us are now at least in our twenties. And yeah, as kids, we argued, fought, and competed with each other over things like who was or wasn't following our parents' rules, who got to use limited resources like computer or game console time, who had to do which chores, who was better at doing certain activities, etc. But these days, we generally don't feel the need to compete with each other or prove who's better to each other or to our parents. If one of my siblings made a serious-sounding proposal that we do some activity, with the outcome proving who is "sibling supreme" once and for all, I would find that rather pointless and ridiculous; I would ask why we couldn't just hang out or do something together without the pretense of proving who's best forever. So, throughout this episode, I couldn't help having those "Why are we doing this? Why are we taking this so seriously?" questions in the back of my mind. On a related topic, Twilight tries to give the excuse to the rest of the Mane Six that doing this is "to protect Celestia's castle", and I've also seen people saying or believing that all these lines of defense for the Canterlot castle (designed by Shining Armor) were serious and were going to stay even after Twilight's and Shining Armor's little competition. But that's not the impression that I got from watching this episode; it seems to me like this gauntlet of defenses would be untenable to keep around the castle for the long term. Do the residents of Canterlot and the castle, and the potential visitors to it, really want the airspace above and around Canterlot castle to be nearly unusable, permanently? Is it really feasible or desirable to keep the tunnels below the castle sealed permanently? Who would be paying for the permanent doubling of the ranks of security? Do Celestia and Luna really want a permanent floor trap, activated at the slightest touch, right in front of their thrones in the throne room? And do Celestia and Luna really want biting and very loudly honking geese taking up permanent residence in the throne room? If the geese's honking can be heard "all the way in Ponyville", then presumably everyone in Canterlot can hear them. Do all of them really want to hear the honking every time the geese are agitated? Finally, Spike's and Luna's plan was apparently to get the Mane Seven to do things "the Twilight way" (as Spike suggested later), so that everyone would be in the throne room, and Shining Armor would then gloat and believe that he had won, providing the opportunity for Spike and Luna to steal the crown from under all of their noses. But then that would mean that the first (non-Twilight) plan would need to be sabotaged. Spike's puncturing the hot air balloon ended up sabotaging Pinkie's role and Applejack's role (sort of). It didn't really stop Fluttershy and Spike, but I suppose Spike might have planned to sabotage his and Fluttershy's role later. But how were Rarity and Rainbow supposed to be sabotaged? Was the closing of the "seedy juice joint" supposed to have stopped Rarity and Rainbow, and the pony who pointed them to the secret tunnel entrance actually ruined Spike's and Luna's plans? But if that's the case, then why did Luna follow through with putting Zephyr as the guard to the secret entrance? Wouldn't that arguably make it easier for Rarity and Rainbow to get in the secret entrance if they found it? Or if Rarity and Rainbow were intended to find and get into the secret tunnel entrance, then what? The only obstacle the two of them really encountered once inside was getting lost and tired of looking around, which didn't look to be facilitated by Spike or Luna. Wouldn't it be possible that Rarity and Rainbow could find their way to the throne room from the tunnels relatively quickly and take the crown? Or would Luna have had some other means of stopping them if they got that far? Now here's the rest of my miscellaneous observations: I don't know what Starlight and Twilight are doing in the office at the beginning of the episode. Starlight appears to be levitating papers from a stack, one at a time, over to Twilight so Twilight can hoof-stamp them, while both of them are smirking and not saying anything. So what are these papers that Starlight is levitating, and why is she staying in the office to levitate them? When Starlight tells Twilight "Guess that explains your love of charts", I thought of how I kind of love charts too, as my user name suggests, though for different reasons than because I used to "chart" my progress in an inter-sibling competition. There are students at the school when Twilight and Spike rush off to Celestia's castle, which suggests that the school may not be (fully) closed in this episode. Despite this, Twilight and Spike just run off to Celestia's castle, seemingly without any plans as to who's in charge or anything. I do wonder how long they expected to be gone; if it was only a few hours or so, then the school could probably just continue running without the two of them. The Mane Seven do seem to spend at least a day making and executing the plans to infiltrate the Canterlot castle throne room, though. Perhaps this episode, or at least the latter part of it, just happened to occur on a weekend or something when the Mane Seven wouldn't have any particular obligations at the school (or elsewhere, for that matter)? Both Twilight's and everyone else's plans seem to rely a fair bit on the castle guards being incompetent and easily distracted, but I guess that's been shown (or assumed) to be the case multiple times in the show before. Pinkie wants to be the Mane Seven's "eye in the sky" lookout...from space? How far away does Pinkie plan to be? How good is her eyesight from that kind of distance? And how would she communicate even if she saw something? That's not to mention that she apparently thinks that all that's needed to survive in space is a glass dome on your head. Every other part of this plan seems to be serious, so why isn't Pinkie's part of it apparently being taken seriously? In the flashback about "Apple Chord", we see her playing on a big stage, and when Granny Smith, Big Mac, and Apple Bloom try to peek in to see from the doorway, the security pony slams the door shut. So "Apple Chord" is a fairly big star, but she couldn't get VIP passes, or even just regular tickets, for her own family members for her own performance? Would any of the guards particularly care about "Apple Chord"'s giving a "farewell performance"? Is that supposed to be a particularly good distraction? Or is it no better than any number of other potential distractions that could be made instead? In the imagining of what Fluttershy and Spike would do as super-spies, isn't the usual purpose of the grid of lasers like that to detect intruders? And if so, wouldn't breaking the continuity of the laser beams, even in the process of destroying them, trip an alarm and cause them to be detected? The episode acts as though the grid of lasers are intended to be weapons in themselves, such that reflecting the lasers back causes them to explode. As the first plan is being executed, Twilight repeatedly talks about aspects of the plan out loud in a normal voice, even after she was told by Shining Armor that the security around the castle is doubled, and guards are within sight distance of where Twilight is talking. I'm not particularly a fan of the way that Rainbow was dressed/made up to "distract" Zephyr in this episode. I think Rainbow has "cleaned up" better in other episodes before. Perhaps she could even pull off just wearing her Wonderbolts uniform - if Zephyr is going to brag about looking good in uniform, maybe Rainbow could do the same. Also, while Rainbow's forcing herself to interact with and distract Zephyr was amusing, I also can't help having some misgivings about it. Is it really a good idea to encourage Zephyr in his false belief that Rainbow really has feelings for him, but she just can't admit it, so Zephyr needs to "encourage" Rainbow by continuing to try to get intimate with her, despite her apparent disgust and protestations? Finally, in Spike's voiceover at the end of the episode, he says "all Luna had to do was float the crown over to me", but on-screen, we see Luna teleport the crown over to him.

I hadn't really thought about this or noticed it before, but when I combed back through the episodes, it appears that the immediate surrounding area of the Castle of the Two Sisters has always been clear: in flashback ("Princess Twilight Sparkle - Part 2", "Shadow Play - Part 2"), in the present ("Friendship Is Magic - Part 2", "Princess Twilight Sparkle - Part 2", "Castle Mane-ia", "Inspiration Manefestation", "Twilight's Kingdom - Part 1", "School Daze - Part 2"), and even in the alternate timeline where Nightmare Moon took over Equestria ("The Cutie Re-Mark - Part 2"). So I suppose that the immediate surrounding area's being clear is nothing new. Also, in the flashback in "Princess Twilight Sparkle - Part 2", there does appear to be forest beyond the immediate surrounding area of the Castle. So I guess I'm not exactly sure when or how the Everfree Forest became particularly dangerous, or if it always was. Maybe, as you suggest, something did happen after the Castle of the Two Sisters was abandoned to make the Everfree Forest more dangerous, such as the Elements of Harmony becoming lost or inactive. But it seems that we still don't really have a definite answer for whether there's a clear and safe path to the new crystal treehouse and the Tree of Harmony (and the remains of the Castle of the Two Sisters), or whether a trip there through the Everfree Forest is still (at least somewhat) dangerous. If the crystal treehouse is going to play a role in later episodes, perhaps we might have to wait and see if the trip to it is ever shown or talked about.

I understand that we would want to see Twilight and the Mane Six first learn of the Tree of Harmony's sentience, and we would want for that to be a significant scene. But my impression, particularly after the sort of nonchalance with which this episode treats the subject, was that we might just have to assume that that happened offscreen, disappointing as that may be. As far as I remember, the only reason that the Student Six didn't tell Twilight or anyone about their direct communication with the Tree of Harmony is that Cozy Glow asked them not to. So after the events of "School Raze", I wouldn't think that the Student Six have any particular reason to keep that a secret any more. Furthermore, we might think that, shortly after stopping Cozy Glow and saving Equestria, the Student Six and the Mane Eight would have some kind of "debriefing" where they all tell each other what happened and what they did. In that case, it would come up that the magic of the Tree of Harmony probably saved the Student Six, and if asked why that might have happened, then the Student Six could have talked about how the Tree of Harmony had communicated with them and "tested" them before. I suppose it's still possible that this is being saved for a big revelation to Twilight and the Mane Six later, but I guess I'm not really expecting that at this point. However, it does seem at least more likely that the Tree of Harmony could still directly communicate with Twilight and/or the Mane Six in a later episode, as @Truffles suggests.