Where I Watch – My Little Pony – Episode 6 – Power Ponies

We open this episode with Twilight suggesting Spike needs some sleep. But he’s reading comics, probably as scary as the real MLP comics. It’s a Mission Impossible-style story about the Power Ponies. (Another defictionalisation episode?)

Twilight is still working on the Castle, so she urges Spike to get to sleep. She allows him two more minutes with the comics.

I do like the new credits with the bigger photograph of the Mane 6 and their friends.

Basically the ponies are giving the castle a magical makeover. Spike announces his arrival, but the ponies seem to have everything under control. So she suggests, natch, that he finds a place to finish his comics and find out if a certain Humdrum will defeat the villain. But Spike does’t seem so keen to read this anymore. And he ends up feeling in the way because he sees himself

His comics seem to have finished prematurely, with a tiny message in the corner of the page. “You can return to the place you started when the maniac is defeated. Take a closer look to join the adventure in this book…”

And he’s sucked into the comics just as the other ponies take a break and come to find him. So it doesn’t really seem like a defictionalisation. Rather, the ponies find themselves in Maretropolis. (Yup, the names just keep on coming.)

The ponies have created an Avengers-style line-up, the Power Ponies, in order to fight a new villain.

And the Mane-iac must be defeated. It took me, oh, three paragraphs to get that one. :P.

Pinkie has become a speedster flung half-way across the city, Applejack has a nice ability with a lasso which gets rather tangled. Twilight is the Masked Matterhorn, who can do blinding tricks which go nowhere fast. RD is a lightning and tornado generating filly who has just sucked up Pinkie, herself and other ponies into a spinning whirlwind. Fluts is Saddle-Ranger, but she thinks using her talent is not very polite. Rarity can build items from jewels, but conjures a tea-set.

Mane-iac is pretty far out herself, a veritable mane-dusa. Then Spike realises he’s Humdrum, inducing frustration mentioned earlier in the episode.

This is a fun episode, and I think it’s a nice story for young girls to get them interested in comics and show that superheroism is for girls as well as boys. That’s the social bit over for the moment. The ponies need to stop Mane-iac from destroying the world using the electro-orb or whatever it is. She’s based in the shampoo factory. And RD has just ruined their surprise.

The ponies try practising their powers again, and find, when tangling with anonymous goons, they are learning to control and build on their talents. Rarity, for instance, manages to create a “functional accessory”. Unfortunately Maneiac is a little free and easy with a paralysing agent in a hairspray can, and only Spike and Fluttershy end up alone. (At this point I’m asking why they’re using a hair motif for the villain, but of course, like with so many things, it’s “why not”, and therefore I need to get back to enjoying the episode.) Fluts is taken out because she can’t summon the anger needed to confront Maneiac, but when the mane-dusa confronts Spike, she …ignores him. “Why should I use the spray on you?”

Indeed. Because Humdrum is just, well, humdrum. And you have to have a flaw in the villain’s plan in order for Spike to learn something bla bla bla friendship bla bla. Not that there’s anything wrong with it in a cartoon for six year olds but it is a little as if the writers have painted themselves into a bit of a corner and now they have to get out of it, a bit like using ninjas during NaNoWriMo to pad out your word count.

This is also possibly an homage to the weird IDW comic series, in which the ponies are in genuine peril a lot of the time and the backdrops and artwork can best be described as far out. Maneiac’s speech is an obvious pastiche of evil overlord speeches. So this is very definitely tongue in cheek enough to get the episode a better rating than it would if this was being played for serious. Because I couldn’t really decide about five or ten minutes.

So the goons take the frozen ponies into the factory. And Maneiac has a super-hair-tonic cannon to grow everyone’s manes wild.

The Mane 6 know that Spike, even as Humdrum, will come through for them. Humdrum sneaks towards a tarp, gathers the goons up and sprays them. Fluttershy tries to summon up her anger, and the ponies’ abilities have finally come fully online just when they need them. Nothing is making her mad enough to challenge Maneiac. Maneiac hurts a firefly and Fluts becomes the Incredible Flutterhulk. Or something. I’m normally good at off-the-cuff puns, but…

And that’s how Humdrum and his friends destroy another gibberingly evil mad villain.

And get sucked back out of the comic book back into real pony life. It turns out to be a comic from the enchanted comic book store in Canterlot.

6/10. It’s a very weird episode, and the moral is “you don’t have to have superpowers to be a superfriend”, which is a basically saying, “you don’t have to be useful to other people to be their friend”. I don’t have a problem with that, but basically the episode seems a bit like it was written on some interesting cocktail of stimulants (maybe Pinkie Pie’s cupcakes) and it’s come a bit too soon after the other defictionalisation episode involving Daring Do. But it’s a fun way to spend half-an-hour, so I’m not going to complain at all much about it.

Where I Watch – My Little Pony – Episode 3 – Castle Mania

NB – spoilers! and I watched this and wrote this at the same time. So double spoilers for both the show and my ultimate reaction.

We open with Twilight developing the theme of the locked box, which I totally overlooked last week and has been playing out on Tumblr and other places for a whole week now.

There seems to be a story arc developing here with the next destination on a mega-quest . And Twily and I have something in common (well, we have a lot in common, such that her story could be mine if you squint hard and turn the picture through 90 degrees). We. Love. Books. THIS PLACE IS PERFECT!

We open with another pony image, resembling The Wicker Man. Applejack and Rainbow Dash are competing in the Most Daring Pony contest by surrounding themselves with bees. The beekeeper pony (could this perhaps be the Transformer Pony Bumblebee?) is wanting his bees back. The contest ends in a tie, and Pinkie Pie bounces off to her next engagement, leaving the two feisty fillies to dare themselves into oblivion.

Fluttershy and Rarity, meanwhile, are going for a walk in the forest. Towards the Castle of the Two Sisters, which has a reputation for its tapestries as well as its ancient magic and Rarity wants inspiration. Retro-ancient-classical inspiration.

This is a little …broken up. It seems a little bit like the comics – a bit too focused on set-pieces as yet. It’s good to see, however, that the ponies haven’t lost their well-written characters. So three ponies are at the castle, and three others…are not.

Except they are, because they came to the castle too, for reasons of finding dark magic originally belonging to Nightmare Moon – The Pony of Shadows.

I think they’re trying a little too hard. In trying to get a tapestry down, Fluttershy is catapulted through a secret door and swings round again, hurting her wing. This is My Little Scooby-Doo at its finest. Rarity is more concerned about tapestries than secret doors.

AJ and RD dare each other to stay in the castle the longest and therefore prove themselves the Most Daring Pony. So we now have all the makings of an interesting climax for about three different episodes, except the writers have seen fit to condense it into one. There better be something to make this come together; we’re already half-way through.

Rarishy find themselves in a secret tunnel looking for Angel the bunny. In a case of mistaken identity, they hook up with RD and AJ but as they are feeling each others’ hooves through a hole in the wall, they don’t realise it.

Twilight’s research has found out that many of these interesting elements are ways in which Celestia and Luna pranked each other. The other ponies are getting freaked out. (Pinkie Pie is absent, by the way. I think she would probably add a little too much levity to the episode.) Rarity and ‘Shy stumble on the throne room with its magnificent tapestries.

‘It’s not like it’s going to come to life or anything,’ says AJ of an old suit of armour – and, to be honest, of this episode. It’s trying very hard to be scary, and I guess it might be for little girls who have never seen Scooby-Doo, but actually, having grown up, it’s not exactly thrilling material. You get the impression that a lot of this stuff is trying too hard to work up a scary atmosphere over some mundane aspects. Three-quarters of the way in now and still no obvious antagonism apart from the furniture. AJ is lost, Rarity is spat out of a chute and left to rage at the ‘ungrateful’ castle, and Fluts is still looking for Angel.

RD is speaking for me when she says: ‘C’mon castle is that all you got?’ Followed by a major scream. The castle is falling apart. Spike is still in the doghouse for holding the chump ball from last episode, so of course Twilight thinks he’s being sarcastic. The rest of the ponies are losing their collective minds over a few collapsing beams. Twilight raises the obvious issue and asks what they’re doing.

The only unexplained event is the creepy organ music. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention it. Perhaps it’s the PONY OF SHADOWS?

Three guesses and the first two don’t count. Based on the rest of the episode it’s probably a mundane thing.

Well, OK, it’s Pinkie Pie. Duh!

And she would have got away with it but for those meddling kids.

I think this is a severe waste of a location. I suppose we’ve been spoilt by the previous few episodes continuing the broader series arc, such that a more mundane episode with the moral ‘Don’t let your imagination run away with you!’ and ‘Such and such is helping me cope with being a superprincessgoddesspony!’ has been something we’ve not seen for almost a whole year now.

So the shadowpony is just a myth, like many things.

I’ll give this a 7/10. The moral was fine as a story in its own right, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with reassuring kids that the spider is more afraid of them than they are of it. But after a whizz-bang start to the series, and as an adult fan of fantasy literature where most stories are myth arcs rather than needing to puncture the serious-business aspect for much of a series, it was a bit of a climb-down from recent form. Having said that, sometimes we all need reminded not to let our imaginations run away with us. When there’s big stuff brewing, don’t neglect the little stuff. In that regard, I need to give it a reasonable mark, because I let myself get caught up in the need for action adventure every week while forgetting the reason My Little Pony exists in the first place – to scare the bejeezus out of little kids and then reassure them that everything’s OK; sometimes the shadow on the wall is just a shadow. The suspense lacking for me as an adult would be more intense for the show’s target demographic. In a way, we adult fans sometimes make the show become something it’s not.

It’s not the show’s fault; it’s mine. I think next week I’ll be back to approaching and appreciating the show as a kid’s cartoon rather than something that has recently taken on the import of Lord of the Rings.