Episode review: S8E08: "The Parent Map"

Bedroom design by Horse Voice

Season 8 has been going quite well recently if you ask me. You probably don't ask me, but I'm going to tell you anyway. The perils of reading Louder Yay. Anyway, we had a returning writer this time: Dave Rapp, previously responsible for "Newbie Dash", "Flutter Brutter" and "Where the Apple Lies". Not a collection that everyone enjoyed, but I thought all three episodes were at least okay and so was cautiously optimistic. In the end, we got...

...a solid episode. I think it was a little bit of a step down from the last two, but it was always going to be an uphill struggle to win me over with a Sunburst-heavy story. I don't dislike the stallion, but I don't tend to find him especially interesting. He does usually work well with Starlight, though. Glimmy in my book has been the most consistently entertaining pony in S8, and she did well again this week.

The storyline was a pretty unoriginal one, and in truth it didn't do a lot beyond going over well-worn ground quite efficiently. Still, the solid writing meant it was always watchable, and the characterisation was especially nice in one respect: the side characters actually had a bit of personality. I'd almost have liked to have spent more time in that baker's company than in that of the parents of the title. I wonder if he knows Sugar Belle?

Talking of the parents, I didn't find either all that compelling, though again they served the plot well enough. Good choices of names in Firelight and Stellar Flare, too. Even so, it did feel at times as though we'd been here before – and I prefer the way annoying parents were handled in "Parental Glideance". You could see this episode's resolution coming almost from the start, but I can live with that when the journey is entertaining.

Starlight was the only pony in Sire's Hollow who wasn't wearing clothes or accessories

One thing I found a bit irritating was the bookshop subplot, which didn't seem well thought out. Starlight and Sunburst were told they couldn't handle the books, but: a) as unicorns, they don't need to handle books to read them; and b) ponies did handle the books later in the same episode, with no explanation. The staff members at the bookshop were a little obvious, but I suppose once again they served their purpose.

I was more interested in Starlight's background than Sunburst's throughout this episode, and we had some nice little scenes. Glimmy's obvious discomfort when reminded of her past was one, though "I know I've made some mistakes ... that's what growing up is" is maybe putting a slight bit of a gloss on becoming a cult leader and enslaving a town for several years. I bet she'd have had creepy talking gates fitted in Our Town if she'd thought about it.

Sire's Hollow itself was the sort of town I usually dislike in MLP: too modern for Equestria. As regular readers will know, I tend to fret about Manehattan-set episodes for the same reason. However, this time there was a good reason, and the tension between excessive modernisation and excessive preservation was something that a really great episode might have made the centrepiece of its story. I must see if I can find any fics that do deal with this.

As you can see, I have less to say about this episode than about some others. It didn't massively exercise me either way, and was more a time-passer than anything else. The scenes involving both Starlight and Sunburst do enough to raise it above the mediocre, and – let's face it – that one shot of Glimmy's old bedroom would make the ep worth the watch. A predictable story with a predictable moral, but with some nice touches scattered through.

Dwarf bread apparently has an Equestrian equivalent

Best quote: Stellar Flare: "Use your words, Sunburst."

Yays

• Pleasant friendshipping between Starlight and Sunburst
• A generally solidly executed script
• Interesting, if underexplored, tension about development
• Starlight's teenage bedroom!

Neighs

• Sunburst still struggles to be a compelling character
• Some inconsistencies in the bookshop scenes
• The parents were a little by-the-numbers

★★★