Remember that Game of Thrones-esque S6 trailer? It was really the first time that Discovery Family made some kind of effort at matching the inventiveness The Hub had shown with its promos. It wasn't up to the best of their efforts, of course, but at least it was something! I remember it causing a reasonably-sized stir at the time.
Anyway, at last here we are at the S6 retrospective. This is about where opinions on Friendship is Magic really start to diverge, and certainly at the time S6 was not an especially popular season. It was often ranked down at the bottom with S3 when comparing everything up to that point. How I ranked S6 this time is interesting, though. Here's the average:
1. Season 4: 3.42
2= Season 1: 3.38
2= Season 2: 3.38
4. Season 5: 3.27
5. Season 6: 3.23
6. Season 3: 2.92
And indeed, S6 does come in low down the list – although only a fraction behind S5. I wonder what odds I'd have got for that when I started doing these rewatches? It's this season's lack of cast-iron favourites compared with its predecessor that really hurts it in the ratings. Talking of which, past the jump you can see which episode scored what.
★★★★★
A Hearth's Warming Tail
★★★★
Gauntlet of Fire
The Saddle Row Review
Stranger Than Fan Fiction
Dungeons & Discords
Buckball Season
The Fault in Our Cutie Marks
Top Bolt
To Where and Back Again, part 1
To Where and Back Again, part 2
★★★
The Crystalling, part 1
The Crystalling, part 2
The Gift of the Maud Pie
On Your Marks
No Second Prances
Flutter Brutter
Spice Up Your Life
The Times They Are a Changeling
Viva Las Pegasus
Every Little Thing She Does
Where the Apple Lies
★★
Newbie Dash
Applejack's "Day" Off
The Cart Before the Ponies
28 Pranks Later
P.P.O.V. (Pony Point of View)
★
none
This is not, actually, too bad a result. Ten episodes rating four stars or more puts S6 on a par with S2 and S4 and one ahead of S5. However, having only a single five-star ep is disappointing, and perhaps a sign of things to come. FiM at this point is still producing plenty of episodes I really enjoy – but not quite as many that I adore beyond words. The spectacular edge is perhaps blunting now.
There was a good deal more disagreement in the comments this time than there had been for any previous season. While nobody adored "The Cart Before the Ponies", there were several times I was kinder than most of you lot, but also the odd one where I was less impressed. To absolutely nobody's surprise, "Every Little Thing She Does" saw the widest gulf in people's views.
By this time in the show, nearly all the original writers had departed – Dave Polsky hung around for one last hurrah, but other than next season's extremely arguable case of M. A. Larson, after "Bloom & Gloom" no survivors remained from S1. Perhaps not coincidentally, FiM was now often quite a long way from its roots at times and worrying noticeably less about series-level continuity.
We did see one arc reach its end as Rainbow Dash finally became a Wonderbolt, though "Newbie Dash" was an underwhelming way to do that. It suffers particularly by comparison with last year's 'Bolts ep, "Rarity Investigates!" Meanwhile, another era began with reformed!Starlight becoming a part of the main cast. It's fair to say she had her ups and downs in that role over her four seasons.
There was nothing as objectionable to me as "What About Discord?" this year, and it's nice to have a blank one-star section. The worst that could be said about the two-starrers was that they might have been dull ("Applejack's 'Day' Off") or poorly constructed ("The Cart Before the Ponies") but still produced some moments of magic here and there. It's not much, granted, but it's something.
The one five-star classic, "A Hearth's Warming Tail", divided opinions extraordinarily when we did the old UK of Equestria poll. Out of 18 voters, 17 of them placed the episode either in their top nine or in their bottom five. I was one of the former group, since I adore just about everything about it. I'm glad we had something I really loved this season, even if not very much.
Looking ahead to S7, it feels like a season of two parts. The first section, overseen by the highly popular "Lady Writers" team of Joanna Lewis and Christine Songco, is sometimes felt to be a short-lived renaissance in FiM. The second part, including the Pillars episodes, gets a more mixed reception and is widely seen as being inferior – though I do have my favourites in that section too.
And, of course, there's the little matter of My Little Pony: The Movie to consider...
It goes to show, there's no season that was 100% crap. But by this point, it felt like the highs were fewer, the lows were lower, and there was just a ton more middling filler than pre-S5. :/
ReplyDeleteHo ho, I've been waiting for this.
ReplyDeleteI think it's obvious to the point of banality, but the sudden inclusion and focus on Starlight post-S5 - an unprecedented cast shakeup - largely determines whether or not this season lands for people. That's simply because a good chunk of episodes (roughly a quarter, seven definite focal eps including two-parters in a twenty-six-ep run, excluding cameos elsewhere) rests on her shoulders.
If you're me, then that's a pretty big blow to Season Six.
I won't rant about why I think her inclusion was a terrible idea, poorly executed to boot, mainly because I don't think that's going to achieve much. What's more interesting is when you look at the rest of the season and judge that on its own independent merits.
In some ways, S6 feels like an expansion pack of S5. Not just in terms of obvious carryovers such as the Crusaders' new roles, the extra Map missions, or Rarity's business expansion. Tonally, most episodes seem content to work within the context of prior seasons without necessarily expanding much, or of sticking to any new characters or elements introduced.
Fluttershy's family, for instance, and new places like the Tasty Treat and Las Pegasus are like S5's Pie family or the Smoky Mountains and Griffonstone: they largely come and go with minimal fanfare. Maud starts becoming a regular, but even that was a trend you could date back to her two S5 appearances. Rainbow Dash joins the Wonderbolts, but otherwise her slice of life largely just continues as before plus a few mentions and a nostalgic Map focus. Discord is pretty firmly in Post-S4 slice-of-life mode, as with "Make New Friends".
Most eps could be set during S5 with little to no trouble. One episode ("Buckball Season") is so unconcerned with recent canon shakeups that a daring chronologist could sneak it in as far back as the earliest seasons.
And while this is a subjective judgement of mine, once I snip out the Starlight eps, I find the overall quality level is about on par with what it was before. A few eps of middling or poor quality, but roughly half the entire season still worthwhile and even reaching greatness here and there.
In the context of Starlight's sudden elevation to focal character, the massive lack of presence outside her episodes is really odd. I don't know if the studio were deliberately trying to split the difference between old and new, or if it was a case where Starlight got her quota and they weren't bothered about what was left, but I for one find the easily-sliced-off contrast welcome.
"It was often ranked down at the bottom with S3 when comparing everything up to that point."
DeleteThat's a comparison I find instructive. S3 made some controversial changes to the premises of the show going forward, and to a lesser extent feels like a transition season in its own right. (Notably, this is when McCarthy et al's focus on Twilight's ascension arc takes shape, a trend the beginning of which can be roughly - roughly - pinpointed as far back as the retcons of the S2 finale.)
Speaking personally, I think the difference is twofold. Firstly, that S6 doesn't just have a bigger version of S3's shakeup but simultaneously mirrors S4 in having to do after-the-fact cleanup for the previous season's introduction of said shakeup. Secondly, that S4 did a helluva better job of it. As much as I dislike S3 and the way it handled Twilight and Discord, at least S4 largely smoothed things over by dialing back on a couple of particulars (most obviously, by showing that Twilight hasn't changed all that much essentially).
By contrast, Starlight almost feels like a completely different character in S6, to the point where even small details feel off. To pick a less controversial example, the running gag about magical brainwashing in S6 bears little resemblance to how she actually managed the Our Town cult in S5. As for whether it smoothed over concerns about the new character...
Bluntly put, S6 with the Starlight eps put back in is - to me - like S3 but if S4 had sucked too.
"By this time in the show, nearly all the original writers had departed"
Not just the writers either. Season Five was a transition on multiple fronts, such as directors, story editors, and who was or wasn't working on the pony movie. It's even visible in the nature of the two-parters, with strongly Twilight-centric ones before the shift and a mishmash of Starlight, Pillars, and Student Six after, each time trying to integrate a new cast into the existing roster (with debatable levels of success).
Overall, I'd say S6 feels like two visions hybridized. One of those is a vision I'm happy to get behind, since it's basically "more of what I liked before". The other... not so much.
Leaving Starlight to one side (other than to note in passing how divisive she was even among old hands -- I think Pascoite likes her reformed version, for example) I could broadly go along with your perspective here. Looking at the episodes I really liked, most of them were in the "more of what I liked before" category. Most of the two-star episodes were not.
DeleteI have to say that I agree with you about Starlight's inclusion. She was a great villain, and the writers made a huge mistake in taking that popularity to mean she would be a good regular cast member. Same for Discord, really; great villain, irritating regular.
DeleteIt didn't help that the way Starlight was written made her feel middle-aged to me. The Mane 6 always had a young-adult verve and energy about them that made them engaging. Starlight... did not.
The Pillars... washed-up oldsters with hardly any drive or interests? Yeah that's the sort of characters I want to watch. :/
If the writers had seen the world from their perspectives, i.e. suddenly transported to the future, where things were new and different, with so many things to learn and explore, they may have been more engaging. But they... were not.
I liked the Young 6 because of the energy thing I mentioned above. They had a future ahead of them and had tons of life issues to be sorted out. Not that they weren't sometimes badly written, but the core of good characters was always there and didn't need a lot of hoop-jumping to expose.
TL:DR Bad choices were made and opportunities missed.
[That Games of Thrones-esque S6 trailer] wasn't up to the best of their efforts, of course
ReplyDeleteNot least because by 2016, it'd be harder to find someone who hadn't done a GoT parody than one who had. Heck, even Twilight's "Winter is coming" a year earlier felt slow on the uptake. The Hub probably would have done something fresher, or at least found a fresher angle then this trailer. Still, I fully believe it causing a stir at the time; Pony fandom was only starting to notably shrink at the time, and was still perfectly sizeable.
As for Season Six itself… well, between my comments on prior episodes, plus agreeing with nearly everything Impossible Numbers said, a lot of what I'd say would be redundant. But the point about the clear divide between the two-thirds of episodes that are just autopilot continuations/non-continuations of where the show was in Season Five, and those that are the Starlight Show/hard New Canon), is one that bears highlighting. Especially once you know the full details of how Josh Haber wished to drop the Mane 6 altogether and have a different cast he could mould as he wished take their place, but met too much resistance from executives and others with a voice in the show's direction to do that. If you don't know the full story there… well, it's a doozy!
Though at the same time, Hasbro's effort was too split with the Movie to truly manage him as they might have otherwise. If they had, we likely wouldn't have had so much autopilot continuations: Dash's Wonderbolts dreams being fulfilled in a tossed-off manner; fumbling with the Crusaders' future now; another good handful of episodes with characters/a place of the day that feel they they could matter and come back, but don't. And so on.
Now, most of these continuations were enjoyable enough, and some even surpassed how they were done in Season 5 – the Map episodes are far more confident in the groove of character pairing that bounce off each other, engaging COTD's, the works – but a lot were do overs. More or less, minus the lack of a few excellent episodes a la Season 5, the Season 5 Expansion Pack chunk of Season 6 is treading water. Yet though it has a slightly higher concentration of weak writing duds, I don't consider that to make it a seasonal rot or jumping shark season (helped, no doubt by the ease of setting nearly all of them in Season 5, sometimes even earlier). I haven't crunched the numbers, but I don't doubt the 18 or so episodes of that part would average ahead of Season 3 for me. And, for better or for worse, as Impossible Numbers noted, the very segregated nature of the Starlight episodes, her as a character, and the other handful of episodes dealing with Haber elements makes it very easy to ignore them if one so wishes.
The end result is weird hodgepodge where the bad effects of what was going on behind the scenes are very much felt, but largely only in peripheral ways in most episodes, so the feelings of the episodes is different, and most positive, than the gut feeling of the season. Making an actual episode average all the more important, to paint Season Six in a better light! As seen below.
[Dunno why Blogger didn't register my account being logged in and used for the comment above. Always something with it, isn't there?]
DeleteHonestly, Logan,trying to use your 5-star system for this season to my ranking criteria was a lot harder then prior seasons, as while I cry out for a middle ground between all tiers of a five-star scale, I REALLY need one between 2 and 1 stars here (small wonder most 5-star rating systems use half-stars stepping tiers too, for a more visually appealing out-of-ten system), given two stars means "average" for you, and the amount of episodes I'd put below that would really fill up the one-star tier without tinkering. I haven't yet settled in a ranking, so like yourself, this is only sorted by release order within tiers. An "*" indicates a Starlight/New Canon rating, which is used for an alternate average after the fact.
Great (★★★★)
Buckball Season
Top Bolt
Really Good (★★★★)
Gauntlet of Fire
The Saddle Row Review
The Fault in Our Cutie Marks
Viva Las Pegasus
Good (★★★)
The Gift of the Maud Pie
Flutter Brutter
Spice Up Your Life
Stranger Than Fan Fiction
Dungeons & Discords
Decent (★★)
On Your Marks
A Hearth’s Warming Tail *
Okay (★★)
Applejack’s “Day” Off
P.P.O.V. (Pony Point of View)
Where the Apple Lies
Weak (★★ or ★)
No Second Prances (★) *
Newbie Dash (★★)
The Cart Before the Ponies (★★)
28 Pranks Later (★★)
The Times They Are a Changeling (★★) *
To Where and Back Again - Part 2 (★★) *
Bad (★)
The Crystalling - Part 1 *
The Crystalling - Part 2 *
To Where and Back Again - Part 1 *
Terrible (★)
Every Little Thing She Does *
Abysmal (0 Stars)
My average rating here is 2.46 stars, a HARD drop from Season 5's 3.04 stars (Season 4 was 3.19). Here's the kicker: shift out the eight heavy New Canon episodes marked with an "*", and the average is 2.94 – only 0.1 below my Season 5 rating. Further proof that 70% of this Season is just Season 5 treading water with a few more weak episodes, I need hardly look for. So, yep, New Canon chunk was a hard miss for me, though weirdly, it does produce some actual hits next season. Not many, but some. As we'll see.
Well, there you are: look at the episodes I enjoyed a significant amount more than you and they're Starlight ones: "A Hearth's Warming Tail", "To Where and Back Again pt 1", even "Every Little Thing She Does" -- although as you saw, I have more problems with that last one than I once did. It all fits with what I remember from discussions at the time (UK of E as well as EQD or here) -- a very substantial part of people's feelings on S6 was down to how they got on with New Starlight.
DeleteCue the voice of Kimi Sparkle in the back of my head shouting, "JOTH HABEEEEER!"
Delete@Logan New-Starlight is enjoyable when not shackeled to Haber's "story" for her and his New "canon". There are many instances next season, and even in Seasons 8/9, where I have no real problem with her. I know I've said this before, but in the wake of your "yep, wide gluf on those ones" (of course, that tiny element was the only thing of note in my comment…!), it bears repeating.
DeleteThough I am glad to see you omit Part 2 of "To Where and Back Again" there from the above "wide gulf" examples. Came around to my point in the comments that our gluf, while large, wasn't that wide relative to others, eh?
Now, Logan, you must see what I mean by really needing inter-tiers. While I initially inched into ★★★ for "A Hearth's Warming Tail", I reflected on it and felt it just missed that threshold. The problem is that where ★★ means "average" for you, on my out-of-ten scale (or a 5-star scale with 1/2 star increments), that could mean anything from a 6.9 down to a 5. Thus, for instance, above, "A Hearth's Warming Tail" and "To Where and Back Again – Part 2" share the same star rating despite being 1.9 apart, in my eyes. Not asking, expecting or wanting you to change your system; just something you have to bear in mind when comparing even my "adjusted-to-try-and-match-your-system" ranking to yours.
@Mike: It doesn't matter much either way -- a bottom-end three or a top-end two are both a good way behind any kind of five. I chose to stick to five tiers after considering the options, not on some totally random whim -- and that's the way it's staying. Indeed you haven't asked me to change it, but even if you had I probably wouldn't.
Deleteof course, that tiny element was the only thing of note in my comment…!
No, it's that I had very limited time and that was one bit I felt like picking out. I'm really not especially interested in, for example, picking up stuff about your deep dislike of where Josh Haber took the show, since I've read your views on that plenty of times already. However, the point I was mostly making on the Starlight thing was that it was (and often still is) a dividing line in the fandom -- for lots of people -- right from 2016.
I still like both parts of the S6 finale. Quite a lot.
I think Logan is quite right in that the make-or-break issue for this season is how well Starlight was perceived. For me, there was no instant dislike, but rather a slow slide into "Oh no, not another Starlight episode!" territory.
DeleteOnce her relationship with Trixie was firmly established, that made for a couple of very enjoyable episodes, but it's only the dynamic between them and how beautifully awful Trixie is. (And those were mostly next season, I think.)
This all just goes to show how important a good Show Runner is, and how a bad (or not-so-great) one can twist a terrific show into just another meh-fest.