It's that time of the week again, so let's get on with the latest TRR. You know, I'm going to miss writing up this feature when the show's finally over and done with. It's nothing very special, but as far as I know there's nobody else out there who does anything quite like this. Video-based reviews are where it's at for most people, but as everyone knows I'm not most people. Going to try to keep the extracts a bit shorter this week!
For this episode, the text-based reviewers were generally clustered around the middle ground. With the exception of MLEEP, who loved it, nobody either adored or detested this one. To some extent, its reception depended on how reviewers felt about a rather slow-paced, down-home episode with a small cast and no real thrills. My own assessment was in the pack, albeit in the upper half of it, on this occasion.
Cuddlepug
– positive with reservations (graded B-; "well-written and interesting [but] a fairly silly outcome that isn't entirely believable [and is] a massive anti-climax. Still, everything up until the last couple of minutes is grand")
Dark Qiviut
– mixed ("The first half is loaded with exposition [...] Until the end of the flashback, it was really slow and bland [but] the rest of the episode picks up from there, focusing on Apple Bloom and AJ's bond.")
DrakeyC
– rather negative ("I'm not sure what this episode was supposed to be because there was a lot of disparate elements here that didn't really gel")
Dramamaster829
– mildly positive ("a simplistic story where nothing is truly at stake, except perhaps the spirit of youth [...] I’ve learned three things to never discuss: Religion, politics, and the Great Seedling.")
JDPrime22
– fairly positive (rated 7/10; "a fairly interesting episode [...] Gotta love them deer (are they pets or are they their own intelligent species?)")
Lightening McQueen
– positive ("The Great Seedling is such an interesting legend [...] wonderful that we get to see yet another flashback featuring Applejack's parents [...] moral was pretty good")
Louder Yay
– fairly positive (rated 3/5; "There's nothing especially extraordinary about "Gone to Seed", but it's
solid and nicely crafted and has a pretty decent message when all's said
and done.")
Mike Cartoon Pony
– broadly positive ("at its best when its portraying Applejack well and
enjoying its time with her and Apple Bloom [...] the episode's a bit of an apple itself: simple and largely unremarkable,
but healthy and good for you, and with its sell-by-date well in the
future")
MLEEP Reviews
– very positive (rated 10/10; "it had great music, it had a wonderful theme and there's something about the bluntness of the Apple Family that's actually very refreshing")
Present Perfect
– positive ("certainly a fair sight better than any of [AJ's] solo or duo episodes since… Season 5? [...] solidly middle-of-the-road, gave us some fun stuff to watch, and had a pretty good moral [...] the Great Seedling's design is fantastic")
The Railfan Brony
– rather negative (rated Bad; "nothing really happens [...] The characters and theme in general were fine, but the story's pretty slow-paced with nothing spectacular going on.")
TheDragonWarlock
– rather negative (rated 5.5/10; "The plot is predictable, but not done in a fun way, the writing is mediocre, and the whole thing feels so boring and uneventful [...] Dave Rapp really never found his stride with FiM")
Yup. :B
ReplyDeleteNothing unexpected this week. The reception was pretty much what I expected no completely positive (side one exception) and no completely negative reviews. What I would expect from an episode that doesn't have much wrong but yet doesn't have anything to stand out. The reception was still better than Uprooted's and She's all Yak ones thought. I kind of agree that of the three weakest of the season this one was the better one, mostly for the story being more coherent thought.
ReplyDeleteAh, i really like this ep, too bad that not everyone like it. ;( Well, at least the ratings are not that bad.
ReplyDeleteI think, as Logan's own review mentioned (and a few of the comments elucidated), this was basically "filler" in the most positive possible sense of the word, and so I'd expected a lot of the reviews to pretty much cluster around the middle of the range. The idea that an episode now can be comfortably mid-pack in the context of the entire series as a whole, and still only rank around 110th overall, is an artefact of its extraordinary longevity; if all the different reviewers were grading on a curve, this, for me, is the sort of episode you'd get if you randomly plucked one from the top of the bell.
ReplyDeleteBut that's not a bad thing, and the reviews reflect that, too. This, really, is why I watch MLP, or... rather, I suppose, it's what I want from it. It's not a comedy classic or an emotional soul-wringer (although seeing Pear Butter with baby AB, and Bright Mac giving Big Mac the yoke, definitely packed a real and unexpected punch for me); I do think it's easy to become desensitised, in a way, by now, to the sheer folksy wholesomeness of Scenes from Life with the Apples, but every time I get a new one I'm reminded of how much I love them, how much these kinds of scenes drew me to the show back in Season 1, the absolute *heart* of it all.
And yes, Logan, this is one of the very best features I've seen on any pony blog anywhere, and the work you do collating the text reviews is much appreciated. It's a shame you (or someone with the same idea) weren't doing it from the very start, as a lot of blog-based reviews have probably long since disappeared from the Internet as their authors drifted from the fandom or deleted their 'embarrassing' pony blogs or whatever, but it's great that it's happening now, that these things are being preserved as part of something bigger while it still lasts. Thank you.
Thank you so much for the kind words. I'd do this even if nobody read it, as I find it interesting to refer to myself, but it's certainly nice to know that it's appreciated.
DeleteAlso, TRR will not necessarily come to an end when FiM does. I have a couple of half-formed ideas on that score, one of which of course depends on what happens with G5.