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| "You really wouldn't like to be a tree, whatever Professor Fluttershy says." |
S8E22: "What Lies Beneath"
22 Sep 2018My original rating: ★★★★
IMDb score: 8.3
The one with plumbing diagramsThoughts: Not everyone agrees with me on this, but I generally find Mike Vogel to be among the most reliable writers of the later seasons of Friendship is Magic. He largely hits the mark again with "What Lies Beneath", an episode which was extremely popular at the time and which prompted a lot of discussion at the time and probably only faded a bit because of its misfortune in being immediately followed by "Sounds of Silence" and the fandom's kirin obsession. "What Lies Beneath" shows us that the Tree of Harmony is a complete sociopath very powerful indeed, scarily so really. As has often been noted, Smolder faces the terror of being cute at tea parties, while Gallus faces the terror of being crushed to death by rocks. Silverstream and Ocellus's past traumas are more directly addressed than ever before (or since) – though "tell[ing] him exactly what you think of him" prooobably wouldn't defeat the real Storm King. Yona is cute as ever and commands a mighty spider army. Sandbar... well, he's a bit dense, but quite appealing anyway. Cozy Glow's manipulative behaviour is considerably creepier from a post-S9 viewpoint. The (other) students support each other, and that I was very pleased with. In 2018, I thought this was four/five-star boundary. I no longer think it's that good, but it's still highly watchable, even if the Tree is weird. (Mind you, it's not a pony, so why should it think like one...?) Take a star off and it becomes a top-end three, but I'm going to creep it over the line to a low-end four. The students' character moments, their care and compassion for each other, is what does that.
Choice quote: Cozy Glow, to the non-pony students: "Golly, it's so inspiring how relaxed you all are about studying friendship, considering your disadvantage." [Creepy in 2018. Even more so in 2025.]
New rating:★★★★
Next time, it is of course "Sounds of Silence". I am not someone who thinks kirin are the greatest things since sliced bread, so don't expect me to rave on and give it an easy five-star rating. It does have a reasonable amount of Fluttershy in it, however, which is rarely a bad thing. We shall see!
The tree was being rather cruel here, but it did give the students a way to have their personalities shine in a way they hadn't before. I was never too much of a fan of them, but this may be my favorite episode that focused on them. My main objection is how Smolder (I think she did this in at least one other episode as well) characterized her desires here as "silly stuff." I get why they didn't want to call it "girly" or some such, but the word they did choose seemed both inaccurate and implying it's of lesser value than other attitudes, which rankled me a bit.
ReplyDeleteProbably the only halfway-decent episode to come from Mike Vogel, mostly because the majority of the characters involved hadn't been around since day one (although the Tree of Harmony is debatable...). But also because it's hard to go wrong with the Young Six, in which this episode seems to set them up as the next bearers of the Elements of Harmony. I would gladly have taken that over Twilight freaking out over a trivia competition that no one cared about or... well, pretty much the majority of filler episodes that plagued the next (and final) season.
ReplyDeleteThe only real issue I have is Cozy Glow; her villainy is so blatant and obvious that it kills any tension the finale may have had, but then again, subtlety isn't one of Vogel's greatest strengths either. But that's a nitpick to an otherwise good watch.
coming into this, I was thinking it was just a "set up stuff for later" episode, but I actually forgot it finally gave the Student Six actual characters, that was a nice addition
ReplyDeleteI always thought that the Tree of Harmony was something akin to an AI working from not-fully-thought-out parameters* to a point where it was willing to kill prospective bearers by way of testing them for suitability. I actually liked that the Tree was slightly creepy here.
ReplyDeleteLiked the Student Six as well. Vogel seemed to actually thought out the scenarios from their perspectives, which should always be the case but seldom is.
I'd give it a mid-4 rating. I can't think of a cringe moment, and that's really saying something in the later seasons where there were entire episodes that were nothing but cringe.
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* See: The Twilight Enigma ;)
It's weird – objectively, of the two big ensemble Student 6 episodes this season (the two-parters don't count), this is rockier than "The Hearth's Warming Club". That only had the overdone sternness of the adults as an actual problem, the rest was that the episodes wasn't as zippy and energetic as it could have been. Here, once I sat down after the rewatch and thought about it, there was a good deal more. How some tests aren't really of friendship, how some are overcome only by others showing up to tell them it's not real. The laziness of the Tree's avatar just assuming Twilight's form. The very-much not-well-threaded needle of how to write and tonally execute Cozy's manipulation and gaslighting lines. And once you get to the finale, the actions of her and the tree don't make any retrospective sense either.
ReplyDeleteAnd yet… I think I enjoyed watching it more than that one? Both episodes follow a thread of individual mini-stories for the six, so it might be as simple as the fact that they're cross-cut simultaneously here rather than told sequentially there. That left room for the pacing to sag and for the less-interesting stories (which were largely the longer ones, thanks Yona) to really just gloss by. Here, while there are obviously winners and losers (personally I fell Ocellus' leaves the most potential on the floor, while Smolder's could have been the most hard-hitting, had it felt like there were hints or glimpses of this before, rather than being a non-sequitur), the constant swapping makes that not nearly as felt, and while it's no film-worthy job of editing, it keeps the pacing going well. It's a structural tact well-suited to Vogel's "strengths" as a writer, to keep chunking stuff at us to distract from the tissue underneath. The tissue isn't base-breaking, in this case.
Also, colour me surprised, but once we look part the lazy avatar form they wrote the tree to take, I kinda liked the Tree's creepiness and lack of sentiment. iisaw's headcanon is a agreeable one, and while future episodes don't follow up on the Tree's tendencies towards absolutes demonstrated here (and in "The Mean 6", where it murdered the clones in cold blood), in the moment, I'm for it.
As sanitised as some of these fears are (a TV-Y show obviously ain't gonna elicit actual tension from a claustrophobia test), they don't feel arbitrary either (arguably Smolder's again, but it can be taken as struggling to reject her dragon nature). It has heavy problems if you start to consider the pieces it's meant to setup for later episodes, but eh, I'll be generous and let the blame for that lie with those other episodes.
Well, mostly. Cozy's angle here (minus the gaslighting dialogue, which is uncomfortably chilling nowadays for sure, I'll give it props for that) runs out of gas fast and kind of peters out. While I think it would have been even stronger just put earlier in the season, as how we got to really know these kids (Smolder's test would make sense as being out of left field then), plus them struggling with pony history would be more organic early in their schooling. Plus, it coming before "The Hearth's Warming Club" would have provided character insight to make those stories sing even more. But those are small quibbles. The episode uses the satisfaction from the fear triumphs to generate elation in the viewer well and without obvious cheats or cringe moments, and I'll absolutely take that in this season.