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Here's your Christmas treat! (Or possibly Christmas trick, depending.) My review of Season 9 of Friendship is Magic, touching briefly on the usual stuff: which episodes I liked, which I didn't, how Fluttershy got on... you get the idea. The video takes a little under a quarter of an hour all told. It was recorded on my phone and only given very basic editing, so I do ask for your indulgence there. Even so, I hope you will find at least some of it interesting.
For those who find it easier or preferable to read, the script I used when making the video is given past the cut. Happy Hearth's Warming!
Hello, everypony. I’m Loganberry, and by popular request (well, one person asked me!) I’m going to take a brief look at the final season of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. If you’ve listened to any of my previous season surveys, then I feel sorry for you. Wait, no… if you have, then this one will follow much the same path.
I ought to make it clear right away that I’m not going to be assessing the show as a whole. I may do that at some future date, when the dust has settled a bit more. Nor am I going to be saying more than a few lines about the forthcoming Pony Life, except that I’m really not massively exercised either way about it, given that it’s a stopgap G4.5 series rather than the full-on G5 we’ll be getting in a couple of years’ time.
So, back to Season 9 of Friendship is Magic. I thought it was a reasonably good way to go out. Not the best season the show has ever had, but not the worst either. We had quite a few good episodes, a couple that could even be called great – and yes, a few stinkers too. In fact, let’s get that unpleasant bit out of the way first; here are my bottom three episodes of FiM Season 9.
Third from last is “A Trivial Pursuit”. Yes, it’s funny. Yes, Sunburst is pretty good. But I really, really did not like what they did to Twilight’s character here. Her freakouts went way over the top, and while I could believe her loving a trivia contest I really don’t think she’d behave this much like a jerk in one. It’s true that way back in the early days of the show, she was a pretty snarky unicorn, but I don’t think this episode fitted who Twilight is now very well at all.
Second-bottom is “She’s All Yak”. Given how much I liked the Young Six (Student Six, if you prefer!) in Season 8, I was quite disappointed in their early showings this season. “Uprooted” was a pretty dull effort, but “She’s All Yak” was worse. The Sandbar/Yona pairing wasn’t the problem in itself, though some actual build-up would have been nice. It was more things like Rarity believing that making a yak act as if she were a pony was a good idea, or reviving an event intended for ponies only – yes, I know Twilight changed that at the end, but she’d had a whole season of running a multi-species school by this point!
No real surprise in my least favourite episode of Season 9. That’s right, it’s “2, 4, 6, Greaaat”. And indeed, “greaaat” will be my reaction when I next switch on Tiny Pop to find this episode playing. There were good things about it, most notably Smolder’s feisty performance, but they were horribly overshadowed by the awfulness of other characters. Most notably, Rainbow Dash’s appalling behaviour – it reminded me of early Season 2, and added another notch to recent seasons’ annoying tendency for character regression. Twilight didn’t cover herself in glory either, treating Dash like a young student who needed a friendship lesson, not one of her closest friends. It’s a real shame for Rainbow, as she had last year’s worst episode too in “Non-Compete Clause”.
That’s enough of that, I think! I’ll be talking about my favourite Season 9 episodes a little later on. Even though this was the final season of a long-running show, we had two new writers this time – and I thought both did a good job. Gail Simone, best known for her comic book writing, produced “Between Dark and Dawn”; while Ariel Shepherd-Oppenheim, about whom I confess I know almost nothing, was responsible for “A Horse Shoe-In”. Some former writers returned, too: Joanne Lewis and Cristine Songco wrote the season premiere – though, to many fans’ disappointment, nothing else. Less successful returners were Ed Valentine (“Growing Up is Hard to Do”) and Brittany Jo Flores (the aforementioned “A Trivial Pursuit”).
It’s time to talk about Fluttershy! (yay) Her main focus episode this season was the bizarre yet very entertaining “She Talks to Angel” – though for much of that episode she was trapped in Angel’s body and couldn’t actually speak. She did come across as a little snappish early on, but thankfully things were resolved nicely in the end. Flutters also had a substantial supporting role in “Sweet and Smoky”, an episode I think is rather better than most of the fandom seem to – I don’t much like Garble, but I do like most of the rest. Picking out one example from ‘Shy’s other supporting appearances, I really enjoyed her all-too-brief chat to Spike in “Sparkle’s Seven”, and I wonder whether that may have been meant as a bit of a callback to the two characters’ instant bond in the Season 1 premiere.
Rainbow Roadtrip was an interesting oddity halfway through the season. Though not given an episode number in the way “Best Gift Ever” was and so not technically part of Season 9, it makes sense to talk about it here. This was a feature-length special made with ToonBoom rather than Flash, and so the closest thing we’re going to get to a sequel for the 2017 big-screen movie. It was… okay, I guess. The storyline that demanded so much grey rather undermined the attractions of ToonBoom, and the pace was very slow at times, but the plot was reasonable and new characters like Kerfluffle and my own favourite Torque Wrench made it a watchable bit of low-key ponying.
Songs, then. Since Season 7, we haven’t had as many as before, and that didn’t change. There was no big musical episode for the final season, which was expected but still a little sad. There were seven songs this year, including two I think are at least borderline classics: the hugely entertaining villain trio “Better Way to Be Bad” (AKA You Know When You’ve Been Tango’ed) and the bouncy princess duet “Lotta Little Things”. Of course, the series last ever song, “The Magic of Friendship grows” has its own special place in the MLP musical pantheon, although that wasn’t all about the song itself. I’ll talk about the epilogue later on.
All right; time for my favourite five episodes of the season. At number five, we have “The Ending of the End”, which just beat out the season premiere. Even though it wasn’t actually the final episode of FiM, this double-header by Nicole Dubuc and Michael Vogel felt like a grand finale, with a cast that eventually grew to enormous proportions, lots of excitement, big battle scenes and enemies who were a real threat. This last point emphasised by Chrysalis’s threat to pluck Spike’s wings off, something I’m a little surprised Hasbro okayed. Like many fans, I was disappointed that Grogar proved to be nothing more than Discord in disguise, and that slightly hurts this episode’s rating here.
Vogel is in fourth place too, with “The Summer Sun Setback”. This came out straight after “A Trivial Pursuit” and gave us a picture of a vastly more likeable Twilight, one I could actually see ruling Equestria efficiently. She also got a great Moment of Awesome as she raised the Sun at the end. The Twilight plot strand was interwoven with periodic check-ins with the Legion of Doom, and as such the episode made a nice preview of the finale’s excitement. My only real problem with this episode was that Discord seemed to be there more or less because he felt like it. Okay, that’s probably pretty in-character for him, but it didn’t quite work.
The bronze medallist is “The Big Mac Question”, written by Josh Haber and – again! – Michael Vogel. The Big Mac/Sugar Belle romance has worked better than I originally thought, and the quality of last season’s “The Break Up Break Down” and now this played no small part in that. Here, Discord’s antics and the related callbacks felt more fitting, and the CMC also got a better showing than they’d had the previous week in “Growing Up is Hard to Do”. Only Applejack of the Mane Six appeared, and even that not until near the end, but it worked. The framing device reminiscent of “The Saddle Row Review” also felt right. And, of course, away in the background, Lyra proposed to BonBon. One of the highlights of the season, without a single word being spoken.
My runner-up this year is “Sparkle’s Seven”, with credits for not only Josh Haber and Nicole Dubuc but the Mane Six’s and Spike’s VAs. This was the 200th episode of FiM, allowing for the fact that “Best Gift Ever” has an episode number, and I think the team were wise not to try to match the wildly over-the-top feel of the one hundredth episode. This was much more straightforward than “Slice of Life” had been, but it still gave all the Mane Sixers – and Spike – their moments in the sun. The episode was well paced, it had excellent dialogue, it looked good and the ending was a suitably heartwarming one. I suppose if I were being critical – and I am! – then I’d say that there were a few too many meme faces for my liking, but this episode is hardly alone in that tendency over the last couple of seasons. Overall, a very solid ep that was a good showcase of the modern series.
And the winner? You’re doubtless ahead of me – but yes, it was “Frenemies”. We’d never had a real villain episode before – partly because most of the real threats like Discord and Sombra were loners – but with this one, writer Michael Vogel pulled out all the stops. Sheesh… maybe I should just start calling this The Michael Vogel Show or something? Chrysalis, Tirek and Cozy Glow had wonderful chemistry and you couldn’t take your eyes off any of them for a moment. Not just because you didn’t know what they might get up to! At this point we still thought Grogar was real, and so the prospect of the three villains having a set-piece fight against him at the end of the series seemed a real one. Add a great song to the mix and you have a real classic.
“But Logan,” I hear you say, “aren’t you missing something?” And yes, you’re right: I haven’t mentioned the last episode of all. Why isn’t Josh Haber’s “The Last Problem” in my list? Simply because I don’t think it’s good enough to be there. The plot is paper-thin at times, Twilight’s new look is frankly awkward, Luster Dawn doesn’t have enough time to develop and – though this will split opinion, I know – I really didn’t like the canonising of one ship and the very-nearly-canonising of several others. It didn’t fit. On the plus side, the final sequence with that excellent song was well worth waiting for, and to have it end with those note from the show theme and then that book closing for the last time… I’m not going to claim my eyes were entirely dry at that moment.
And that was it for Friendship is Magic. Normally at this point, I talk briefly about what I hope for from the next season… but this time, there will be no more seasons. As I said earlier, Pony Life isn’t bothering me too much either way right now – the prospect of Gen 5 is of much more interest. We know that there’s a CGI movie coming in late 2021. We are pretty sure this will be followed by a 2D, ToonBoomed TV series. But that’s about it. Yes, yes, those leaks happened – but plenty will doubtless change by the time G5 actually hits our screens. All I can really hope for right now is that the new MLP will be entertaining.
One last thing. Although I said I wouldn’t be talking about the show as a whole in this video, what I will say is this: the fandom is not dependent on Friendship is Magic. We’ve seen the usual slew of ponyfics, fanart, music, plushies and so on appearing over the last two months. Meetups are still going strong around the world. Plenty of conventions are returning for 2020 and there are even some complete newcomers. Remember, G1 fans still exist, and they didn’t have the ease of multimedia-filled communication that we do these days. If you choose to move on, then of course there’s nothing wrong with that – but if you choose to stay a part of this wonderful fandom, then don’t be scared it’ll disappear. It really, really won’t.
To quote PrinceWhateverer: I’m not going anywhere; I’ll die with the Herd.
To quote PrinceWhateverer: I’m not going anywhere; I’ll die with the Herd.
We have cider.
I’m Loganberry, and that was… a review! Goodbye.
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