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| Scootaloo in a world of her own. She wishes... |
S8E06: "Surf and/or Turf"
21 Apr 2018
My original rating: ★★★★
IMDb score: 7.7
Thoughts: This was, and remains, one of my favourite episodes from Season Eight. The first of Brian Hohlfeld's three Friendship is Magic writing credits, it brings together a new location for the show, an enjoyable new guest character and the CMC on a Map mission. Apple Bloom is the voice of reason as the other two Crusaders grump at each other. The ep looks lovely by Flash FiM standards, even if understandably its Seaquestria can't match the film's beauty.¹ I really like the ponies' seapony designs, both Twilight's and the CMCs'. Terramar's dilemma is a fairly transparent attempt at portraying a child of divorced/separated parents without actually mentioning that aspect, but he's likeable enough that it works fine. Okay, as with so many other problems, it could have been solved with a bit of forethought before the Crusaders ever arrived, and Twilight's presence is just slightly irrelevant given how little time she actually spends chaperoning the fillies. What I love most, though, is Scootaloo's sheer joy at swimming, the closest she can get to flying. I can't stop smiling at that segment. I really liked watching "Surf and/or Turf" again, enough that I'm certainly letting it keep its four-star rating.
¹ Yeah, that iffy animation going down the stairs early on, but that's short enough that it doesn't stick too much in the mind.
Choice quote: Sweetie Belle: "I have some serious field twirling to do."
New rating: ★★★★
Next time, it'll be "Horse Play". This is an episode that gets very mixed responses, though I quite liked it and (based on a totally unscientific quick chat at a recent Worcester meet) I'm not the only one. We'll see whether I'm still of that opinion soon.
The ep looks lovely by Flash FiM standards, even if understandably its Seaquestria can't match the film's beauty.
ReplyDeletePossibly I wouldn't have been so focused on the visuals if this hadn't been the first episode worth returning to, but this being my Season Eight debut this time around left me really wowed. Whatever else can be said, the last two seasons really reached an apex in visual complexity for this kind of show, and this episode having mostly new backgrounds/sets or those based off the movie's makes for a major flex. FiM isn't a show designed to show off its visuals tonally, so even this produces largely just a "that's nice" reaction (the scene transitions especially make Seaquestria rather cozy and small rather than the vast underwater chasms we saw in the movie). But it did delight me enough.
Past visual matters, a 4,000-character comment isn't nearly enough to touch on all Season 8 trends relevant here. So in brief: I applaud this episode trying to do some damage control on the undernourished hippogriff parts of the movie (the one part of the lore the new crew used, because it fit their diversity mantra, I guess), and Terramar's multi-layered plight is a solid enough story to pivot it around, even if he is built too much around that to have the personality for more appearances. That core speaks for itself enough that I don't need to say much more. But the rest, while largely serviceable in the moment, is full of holes and begging questions.
Fresh for me this viewing: it's actually kind of a crummy map episode. There have been others where why those ponies were called is a valid question, but this is the first where it's plain as day that nothing about the Crusaders specifically solves the problem: in fact, as they bought blindly into Terramar's belief that a choice was necessary, it takes Twilight's adult wisdom to point out there isn't actually a problem here. Plus in using them, we get some character mangling: Scootaloo's love of swimming is an adorable character moment, but Sweetie's preference for Harmonising Heights is arbitrary (yeah, she does like singing, but in a casual, timid sort of way hinting at her eventual Mark as planned in early seasons, not this), and the episode doesn't make her bitter defence of it remotely believable.
Crusaders need an episode every half of a season yeah, and their usage here isn't episode-destroying at all. Mild, by Season Eight standards! But it is forced.
Once DannyJ pointed out how weird it is that an episode about Silverstream's brother doesn't also have her, when we've barely gotten to know her yet (by the end of this, we know him better and he seems to need the Friendship School more), it's even weirder she's not the focal character. Probably even shouldn't be a map episode, just have her going home for whatever reason, and her love of land can be a perfect conflict against Terramar's split mind. Boom, writes itself. Keep Twilight as the chaperone making typical 2010s "writer acknowledging the contrivance they're forcing and makes jokes about it to try and get away with it" bits if it's too early for a Student 6-only episode.
To be clear: this is a perfectly fine episode even without adjusting for reduced Season Eight standards, and it's easy enough to get swept up in the moment (though the dialogue has the "hammer on the head" repetitive quality re: the issue and moral late-show writers tend to fall back on). Don't begrudge you or anyone finding it 4-star quality! But the above could have made it a really good one for any era of the show (the "Amending Fences" of its era, for handling serious issues delicately), so there's big missed potential here. Thus, my first Season Eight rewatch is still a (mild) disappointment relative to my memories.
Yeah, that iffy animation going down the stairs early on
And here I had a piece all ready about how pony rigs were not designed to walk down stairs from that camera angle (medium shots from the side where more articulated movement has been done many times before). But, gives me space back for other parts.
Yes, the big highlight here is Scootaloo "flying," and I wonder if she'd deliberately befriend more hippogriffs because of the increased opportunities to do it more. I kind of wish I'd seen this revisited, and while I bet fanfiction has done so, I haven't read any that did.
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