Episode review: "Daring Don't" (S4E04)

"Bring it, Polsky"

Season 4 of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic has got off to a pretty impressive start, and three episodes in we've yet to see a really disappointing instalment. This time around, the show welcomes back a stalwart of the writing stable, Dave Polsky. I personally wouldn't rate any of his episodes as absolute Celestia-tier examples, but in the main they're good fun if you don't look too hard for problems. Will "Daring Don't" follow that pattern? Join me after the jump and we'll see!

This is very much a Rainbow Dash episode, as you'd expect from one with Daring Do playing a major role. Twilight is the main support, again unsurprisingly given that (as she pointedly remarks at one stage) she was the one who introduced Dash to the series in any case. Although there's a lovely opening scene for Fluttershy, a couple of bits of silliness from Pinkie Pie and a rather startling hat for Applejack, these ponies (and even more so, Rarity) are reduced to little more than background characters for the majority of the ep.

I'm not even sure I want to know what this is based on

Polsky pulls a major surprise in "Daring Don't" in terms of world-building. The vast majority of fans (including me) had assumed that Daring Do was a fictional character, and that AK Yearling would just be doing a bit of self-insert dreaming when she wrote her books. Instead, Yearling is DD, and so both she and her main enemy Ahuizotl are utterly real. I'm not sure how I feel about this: it's rather out of nowhere, and the Mane Six are surely famous enough adventurers in their own right that Yearling/DD would have heard of them.

As was the case with "Read It and Weep", I was impressed by the (for want of a better word) cinematography in this episode. There are widescreen shots, sweeping pans, all that sort of thing. It did a lot for the ep's atmosphere. Once again there's no song, but once again William Anderson comes up trumps with his background and incidental music. There are obviously strong echoes of Indiana Jones, but then that's the case with just about everything where Daring Do is concerned and it feels entirely appropriate.

One ring to rule them all...

If you're just out for a good time rather than concentrating too hard on the actual plot, "Daring Don't" is a really enjoyable episode. It's action-packed in the, er, action sequences – although the pacing is a bit uneven – and the fanfillying from Rainbow Dash and (to a slightly lesser extent) Twilight Sparkle is highly amusing. Their back-and-forth exchange about details of books three and four (the only ones that get mentioned, for some reason) is brilliant. Pride of place, though, must go to Dashie's facial expressions. Unforgettable, sometimes in a good way...

At the end, we saw the journal used for the first time in anger. Rainbow Dash's comments were reasonable as far as they went, though really a moral along the lines of "respect celebrities' privacy" might have been better. After all, there were clear (and presumably deliberate) parallels between Rainbow's stalkerish obsession with Yearling and certain of the less constrained members of our own fandom. (Or indeed any fandom, but it's ours that's relevant here.) I was a little uneasy that what we actually got was a message along the lines of "Pester your favourite author enough and they'll put you in their next book."

In reality, doubtless written by AK Rogers...

This was quite a hard episode to rate, but my gut feeling is that this was the least impressive of the three stories we've had thus far. It was a huge amount of fun, and I laughed my head off at Rainbow Dash's (and to a slightly lesser degree, Twilight's) fanfillying. But as with several of Polsky's previous episodes (especially "Too Many Pinkie Pies") it seemed to make fun such a high priority that one or two quite substantial underlying problems were glossed over. As such, it scores well but not brilliantly.

Best quote: Daring Do: "Now, Ahuizotl, you know I love you... but I can't give you the ring till I've properly proposed." Twi's "pedestal" speech to Rainbow comes close, though.

Yays

• Very funny at times, especially RD/Twi's geek-out "duel"
• Rainbow Dash's range of facial expressions
• Major world-building, setting up for DD to return later on
• The music was particularly impressive
• Aztec mythology to go with all the existing Greek stuff
• Fluttershy was stupidly cute in the opening scene

Neighs

• If Ahuizotl is real, how come no-one but Daring seems to know?
• The rest of the Mane Six were barely used
• Moral seemed to be "if fans stalk enough, they'll get rewarded"
• The Wilhelm Scream is becoming overused

7.5/10