@Myro- I completely agree. It’s not a bad episode by any stretch of the imagination. The idea is good, the idea is sound and there are some very good bits in there, but I don’t think they really built on it enough. The song was creepy but nothing special (even though it had a few priceless lines- “You can’t have nightmares when no-one dreams” that s*** is scary) and could have been replaced by 4 lines of exposition and the episode would have been better for it (because then you’d have an extra two/ two and a half minutes to expand on the plot). The first episode came across as a lecture on the evils of socialism written by someone with only a 5 years olds understanding of the concept, but they fixed that with the frankly brilliant brainwashing scenes (full marks for the announcement system sound clips there). But the whole pay off was contrived and horribly convenient. There just happened to be a bucket of water right where she was walking, really? I am calling the faeces of Iron Will on that one, it made me groan so bad. The last scenes after Starlight is exposed are pretty good, the new ponies are cool (we have a new Cheese Sandwich in Party favour it seems, and I love Sugar Belle) and Starlights ranting was classic (plus it gave us some excellent animation moments), but it felt a bit flat as well. Starlight needs to return in the future (she probably will considering) because she wasn’t fleshed out at all. With all the other villains, their motivation was explained early on (Nightmare Moon wanted revenge, Discord is an agent of Chaos, Sombra wanted power and crystals), but they gave Starlight nothing. Probably to make her more mysterious, but whilst it kinda worked, I couldn’t get into her in the same way as I could with any of the others (not even the pony antagonists like Trixie or Flim and Flam). Also, this episode didn’t give us anything in terms of world building, which all the other openers have. Yes we got to see a map of Equestria and some new areas, but the other openers gave us history, background and backstory. There’s so much about the world of MLP they haven’t explained yet and they so rarely give us anything outside of the season openers (and last seasons finale). So yeah, middling episode, probably not helped by the fact that we had to wait a year for it and the season finale last time out was so god damn epic that it was going to be very tough to follow.
Oh but one thing I loved about this episode and will probably be my favourite thing through out this entire season is the fact that their arses now glow whenever they’ve got a mission. It’s classic. It’s like the bat signal but instead it’s the butt signal… I’m going to have so much fun with this.
Oh, and if anyone else wants to chime in on the conversation, feel free. I’m declaring my thread a brony sanctuary, so feel free to discuss your thoughts on the latest episode here. It’ll probably be happening after every new episode, so might as well start now.
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