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| Lyra and Bon Bon even go to see buckball together! |
...an entertaining 22 minutes! The episode had substantial callbacks to both "Stranger Than Fan Fiction" and "Buckball Season" – and those are two of my favourite S6 episodes, so I was fine with that! It did stretch credibility a bit, even for My Little Pony, that what seemed to be a very localised passion a few seasons ago was now a big enough deal for a Hall of Fame, but I'll let it slide. The episode wouldn't have been as much fun without that.
The buckball theme meant supporting roles for the likes of Pinkie Pie and Fluttershy – and, for the first time in quite a while, Snails, who was accompanied by Snips this time. Somepony like Twilight should probably have a quiet word with those two before they turn into a junior version of Flim and Flam! As for 'Shy, I was interested to see that she seemed pretty comfortable with being famous, something that shows her character's evolution over the seasons.
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| Considering only one team is in the Hall of Fame yet, that's quite some marketing operation! |
Clear Sky and Wind Sprint had slightly unusual colour palettes, which I'll confess I found a bit on the garish side for the first couple of minutes. They quickly ceased to bother me, though. Wind's VA was very obviously not an experienced voice professional, which might be considered a risky move given the exceptional quality of most VAs in FiM. I do think it worked well as a one-off, though it would probably begin to grate if Wind were a recurring character.
Rainbow's increasingly desperate attempts to get Quibble (rather amusingly called "Q" by Clear) to do something – anything – sporty were the meat of this episode's comedy. These scenes weren't exactly unpredictable, but they were generally quite amusing and contrasted nicely with the awkwardness, and at times sadness, of Quibble's inability to connect with the filly. Dash was a bit too full of herself at times, though I guess that is in character for her.
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| If you think Quibble is bad, Wind, you should see me play sport |
All in all, "Common Ground" was a solid episode. I've given it the same three-star rating as last week's ep, but I think it sits higher in that band than "The Point of No Return". It plays things a little safer than it might have done with Wind's family situation, and the moral of "don't try to be someone you're not" was nothing new. Mind you, it was still a good moral, and the action rarely flagged too much. I doubt we'll ever see Quibble again, and this was a reasonable way to bid him farewell.
Best line: Quibble Pants: "I have a 17 Charisma, right? Don't you think I tried?"
Best moment: Fluttershy's spinning buckball moves
Worst moment: A rather weak "everypony laughs" ending
Yays
- The return of Quibble Pants – with a family
- Ponyville's now-famous buckball team
- A good moral, even if not a startling one
- Held the interest well almost throughout
- Predictable in where it was going to end up
- Not being clearer about what happened to Wind Sprint's dad
- Rainbow Dash's slightly overdone cockiness
The S9 is in for a good streak of solid eps. It is a trend started with the second half of S8 thought. Despite the anti-combo of Yakity Sax (aired as 14th despite being the 18th) and A Matter of Principals every eps onward have been solid at the very least, at least for me (althought, admittedly Father Knows Beasts wasn't the solidest eps in the series). Hopefully, it stays on this track until the very end and no big disasters happen in the meantime.
ReplyDeleteYes, I think the standard has generally been pretty decent since late S8, one or two blips aside. Not many full-on classics ("What Lies Beneath", maybe) but then you don't get many of those in any season. I think things are going okay.
DeleteIn all honesty, as long the series finale is satisfying, I think I'll be happy. It is pretty far away from now thought...
DeleteWithout wanting to get excessively meta, Patton Oswalt is himself a remarried widower parent, and so this story must surely have struck an intensely personal chord for all three guest VAs here.
ReplyDeleteLike Surf and/or Turf, I'll always appreciate the show telling the target audience that not all families follow the same model and that, look, these ponies are most like you! - as a starting point for some helpful and validating discussions rather than attempting to try and actually have those discussions on behalf of parents, carers etc. (hence the careful vagueness - having gone to the trouble of directly showing a child it's OK not to have two parents, or that it's OK if their parents aren't together, it'd be easy to then unpick that work by getting too specific and accidentally excluding the viewer. I'd posit that this was a line skirted *very* carefully even without the added layer of the VAs' own experience, and I think they did it very well.
I agree with almost all the points you made. I thought all three guests did a great job (nonactor VAs are always risky - hi, Angel Wings! - but used sparingly I think they add a definite extra touch, and I found Rain charmingly authentic.) Snails giving out autographs and Snips as the cynical sports manager was surprisingly good, and a nice way to bring two of the most incongruously cartoonish characters (for me) back into the fold. And as someone who owns over a hundred editions of Wisden and pores over the Baseball Prospectus each year, I can absolutely buy Quibble transferring his love of D&D numbers (oh, "I have 17 charisma!" was great!) to an affinity to sports numbers!
As a massive sports dork and a parent, I thoroughly enjoyed this, to the point it's possibly my favourite of the season so far.
"just like you", not "most". Phone fingers.
DeleteYes, I thought about whether to mention Oswalt's RL situation in the review, but in the end decided against it. On another day I might have done, though.
DeleteLike Surf and/or Turf, I'll always appreciate the show telling the target audience that not all families follow the same model
I prefer "Surf and/or Turf", but that's partly Scootaloo bias! I agree that MLP does this quite well considering the restrictions (informal or otherwise) it operates under. Mind you, I'm not sure I take entirely the same line as you. I wasn't bereaved of a close relative until early adulthood, so it's hard to be sure, but I think I'd have liked to see someone in the same position as me. After all, with sex a seven-year-old doesn't really need to know anything about the up-close details -- but millions of seven-year-olds have to come to terms with death on a very personal level, sometimes very suddenly.
as someone who owns over a hundred editions of Wisden
Okay, now I'm jealous! A mere 31 here, and I'm running out of space as it is! It's all the ponies, of course... (For any confused Americans: Wisden is the cricket yearbook.)
Forgot to say: for all people (including me) talk about Scootaloo or Derpy, we have had an unambiguously disabled character in the show. Stellar Eclipse in "Trade Ya!"
DeleteIncidentally, Stellar Eclipse was the first case of a non-VA guest starring as a character, through the Make A Wish Foundation, similar to Angel Wings two seasons later.
DeleteLogan, I know you're critical of the lack of clarity over what happened to Wind Sprint's dad, but compare it to Surf/Turf. At this point, I think the fandom's pretty well agreed that episode is about divorce, but I remember saying that episode had muddled its message when it aired. I could see it as an allegory for everything from living in a mixed-race household to being bisexual.
DeleteLikewise, whether Wind Sprint's dad is dead or left, the end result is the same: she misses him. I can't say I've experienced it myself, but to a kid, losing a parent has to look the same whether they died, moved across the country or left without a forwarding address. I think either episode has value if it gives comfort to a young person in any kind of stressful family situation; getting the details right is less important in that case.
I'm more unsure than critical, really. I may well revise my view on a rewatch after it's had time to stew. I actually thought "Surf and/or Turf" handled its own message fairly well, and I always assumed separation/divorce was what it was about.
DeleteI am pretty sure that he is meant to be dead. No single parent would speak that fondly of someone that just left.
DeleteI think your interpretation is probably correct, but I don't know if I'd be as definite about the reason. It may be unusual, but you see enough stories like this one to show that it can happen.
DeleteI love that she called him "Q".
ReplyDeleteQuibble Pants does not have a charisma over 10, though. :|
A one-liner from Discord would have been fun after one of the "Q" references. Probably entirely unsuited to the episode, but still fun.
DeleteLet's see.. I liked this episode quite a bit, though I do feel chunks of the middle were either repetitive, stale or cringey. This may sound like a lukewarm response, but the episode performs better thanks to not only stellar performances from the Oswalts, but also hilariously amusing moments from the B and C-plots (even if calling them that is misleading), and a really solid script full of numerous clever layering and callbacks, both to the episode itself and to others.
ReplyDeleteFinally, such gentle touches as Quibble already being in Clear's good books and trying to win Wind over simply because he knows being with Clear means he'll be around Wind a lot too, rather then the old tired trope of winning the parent over by winning the kid over, really go a long way (as does Clear Sky herself, such a gentle sweetheart that supplies a lot of what makes the episode work, despite being the least prominent of the three from a dialogue and screentime perspective).
As an aside, when I was rewatching the episode, I noticed that the talk between Clear Sky and Wind Sprint at the end lasted only 30-35 seconds, when it felt like lots more. It wasn't that I'd misremembered there being more dialogue then there was; there was just very little pauses between each of them talking. This leapt out at me, for some reason, as it struck me as a conversation where beats of silence as the characters mull their words over, even for just an extra second or two, would have felt natural. Put it this way: I would have had that scene be 8-10 seconds longer without adding any dialogue or changing the script much at all. It struck me like they were trying to rush over it just a bit, maybe due to time spent elsewhere but also due to not wanting to linger on the specifics of Wind's parental situation longer then felt necessary.
It's not specific to this episode, but I sometimes feel the structure of episodes is hampered somewhat by where Discovery Family requires commercial breaks (which the episode is built around). Unlike the usual methods of two halves of 11 minutes each, this series follows an odd format of the cold opening plus the opening titles (which can be anywhere from just over a minute to three, though usually between 1.5 and 2 minutes tends to be the norm) before the first break. Then it's usually two chunks of 7-8 minutes each broken up by a commercial break, and finally the last bit of 4-5 minutes. I bring this up because it is very nearly always the case that the problem the characters are facing reaches its worst peak right at the end of the second 7-8 minute chunk, giving us 4 minutes to resolve it.
Now, that's all just how writing narratives (screenplays especially!) works, but I feel the weird format of commercial breaks Discovery Family employs limits the series' ability to juggle around how many minutes from the episode's end the problem reaches its apex. Even in a classic 3-art structure (and even 22-minute episodes like this, while more of a 2-act structure, still hit most of the same beats in a Hollywood screenplay), there's lots of wiggle room for the proportional length of each segment. Basically, I feel that the 4 minutes at the end could have been longer and some of what came before shorter (which might have improved it somewhat) were it not for DF's weird commercial format (which, incidentally, is very noticeable when watching the series on UK cable, where the commercial breaks happen at the usual halfway point, meaning we not only get an abrupt fade out, but also fades to black and fades back in without breaks at all). Just food for thought, I feel.
Maybe the above shows my ignorance of how modern American television works regarding commercial breaks, but my impression is that most networks still operate on a standard "breaks every 11 minutes" schedule.
"such gentle touches as Quibble already being in Clear's good books and trying to win Wind over simply because he knows being with Clear means he'll be around Wind a lot too, rather then the old tired trope of winning the parent over by winning the kid over, really go a long way"
DeleteOh boy, I hadn't even thought about that! That's a really great point, yet another thing this episode did surprisingly well. :D I think Josh Haber has come a long way in his tenure as a writer for this show.
Few things I want to talk about this ep:
ReplyDelete. From moment I saw Quibble's new family, I knew my QuibblexRainbow ship was sunk FOREVER. ;c
. His family is very diverse, Earth pony, Pegasus and Unicorn, perfect for a Buckball game, clever idea.
. Snail didn't even try now, he is too OP. Quibble Pant is the worst earth pony ever, he cant even lift 2 books. God must trade his strength for his sharpy tongue.
. A nice sequel of Buckball Season, my favorite episode, it's good to see ponyville trio become famous sport ponies... and Snip makes a profit out of it...….
.A nice 7/10.
I guess not every earth pony can be strong! We know of pegasi who can't fly, after all. :P
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