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| At this point, the Phantom's outfit parts to reveal... Pinkie Pie |
My original rating: ★★★★
IMDb score: 9.1
The one with sudokuThoughts: Kirin time! Now, to me kirin are a bit like Luna. (Stay with me on this.) I like them, but I don't share the utter adulation for them that half the fandom seems to. Fortunately, their big episode here – Gregory Bonsignore's only FiM writing credit – is a good one. The kirin/nirik¹ have an interesting concept and design. Applejack and Fluttershy make a good Map team, though Twilight's excitement about their being the first repeat Map team is never followed up. Autumn Blaze (voiced by Rachel Bloom) is a nice character and her song is plenty of fun. The moral is surprisingly solid for this late in the show's run. The crazy ticket office clerk is amusing. Downsides: Flutters insisting the kirin needed to be eternally silent isn't great. The plot is a tad predictable, and the story itself is actually not that packed with action. But I enjoyed the watch a lot. I think, as with "What Lies Beneath", it still just about scrapes a four. But no, I'm still not obsessed with kirin. Sorry!
¹ Fans often give the plural form as "nirik" too, but in the episode both that and "niriks" are used, more than once each.
Choice quote: Twilight: "Sorry, Fluttershy – flanks don't lie." [Cringey, but funny with it.]
New rating:★★★★
The next episode is "Father Knows Beast" – and if I give that four stars, scraped or otherwise, you can probably safely assume that Logan has been quietly replaced by... dunno, really. But by something. From here, it's definitely a "get this one out of the way" episode. But I will give it a fair chance!
Only three episodes left this season! (Well, four, technically, since Best Gift Ever is counted as an episode by Jim Miller.) Hard to believe, isn't it?
ReplyDeleteWhen I first saw it back in 2018, I gave it a 6/10. In hindsight, I felt I didn't give Sounds of Silence enough credit back then, and now it's one of my favorites from season eight. I don't know if I can add anything to the discussion that most others haven't, but with that said, there are two episodes this season that I think are a little more impressive.
I count BGE as an episode, since that means 222 episodes in total and that's a more satisfying number than 221! (Also, if you don't, "Sparkle's Seven" is E199, which doesn't fit with its reason for existing.)
Deletestupid kirin
ReplyDeletestupid episode >:|
I thought this was a really fun episode. I don't really remember the context of whether the show doled out new races pretty regularly, but it doesn't seem there were a ton in the late seasons. Yaks, higgpogriffs (though they came from the movie)... I'm sure there were others. But the kirin were a cool idea that played out well. Though I have to say Rain Shine didn't seem like much of a leader. Good song, good character. There's a lot to like here, though I never felt inspired to write anything using kirin. Not in Equestria anyway, but in an EqG setting, yes.
ReplyDeleteI honestly don't remember this episode at all. I guess I'll have to rewatch it!
ReplyDeleteI do remember Father Knows Beast and therefor will enjoy it only insofar as you rightly savage it.
Okay, finally caught up!
ReplyDeleteBecause this episode has been so adored, and the Kirin have certainly made their splash on the fandom, I've seen it enough times that this watch didn't really illuminate anything new. To whit: the world building, on top of the typical "whole society is really just one village" thing we've seen with the yaks and griffons already (which makes even less sense as the kirin have culture and society, despite being considered "legends"). The story summing up such a societal change and resolving it in 22 minutes shrinks the scope even further. And so forth. Basically very little about the Kirin makes sense if you try to work backwards or forwards, or consider their lore beyond the scope of this episode.
While not nearly as aggravatingly so as episodes from actual established writers, there is still a little stretching of the characters here. Fluttershy is too argumentative at points as a counter to show her "assertiveness", and it nicked at me how the episode doesn't have Applejack consider that the Kirin physically can't speak. Still an episode that used the two characters in a well-chosen way for a Map mission (the last for the show!), better than most, even if the overstuffed nature of the episode meant plot points related to that tended to be hammered in swiftly to fit them at all.
And yeah, said overstuffed nature. Unlike most episodes, that primarily occurs here due to giving over screen time to bits that are actually properly funny and entertaining (Autumn, yes, but also that ticket clerk). The episode is blazing ahead with contrivances and hoping we don't mind with fun bits to distract us, and they actually do. So I certainly wouldn't want to cut many of that to make the episode more coherent and consistent but notably less entertaining. Still, my heart pines for an impossible two-parter version of this, which could extrapolate the plot enough to not make the scope feel so small.
That said, I can stop being crabby and admit I do see why it is easy to overlook all that. This episodes moves, and it's fun, and the kirin's visual design is that good. For a song that's pure exposition, "A Kirin Tale" is easily one of the best ones this late in the show, positively crackling with energy. As much as the character of Autumn Blaze can reek of guest star syndrome (fun fact: Rachel Bloom would have been well outside of their price range by the time the episode aired, she shot up between 2017 and 2018), it is nice to see a character written to allow for scenery chewing, and an actor being allowed to just go at it. Whenever Autumn's onscreen and speaking – and for basically all of the six-and-a-half minutes with her and Applejack – the episode is basically bliss. And it is easy to prefer an episode with a third that is basically bliss-free and the rest being serviceable (if frustrating for how much potential with the Kirin is squandered) than one where is basically flatly "good" for its runtime. Fans have raised up otherwise-okay (or often worse) episodes for less runtime than that.
So yes, absolutely one of the best of the last two seasons, even as it is absolutely overrated. That'll have to do.
As the last three episode of the season are all total rubbish, I'll see you come the roundup post, Logan.