Text Review Roundup "The Railfan Brony" special, part 3 of 3

This is a scheduled post. For personal reasons, updates may be uneven for a while. If they turn up, then great, but if there's a dry spell at any point, it won't mean I've given up on this blog. Very much not the case!

Here's the final part of this series, in which we discover The Railfan Brony's thoughts on episodes 3 through 10 of S8. (To remind you, "School Daze" was a video review, so doesn't belong here, and from "Molt Down" onwards these are included in regular TRR editions.) For this season, Railfan moved away from numerical marks and to a simple one-word rating. It's actually been rather fun doing this, though it's not something I'd like to do all the time. TRR for "Friendship University" will be along sometime in the next few days.

Railfan had a fairly good time with this section of S8, and at one point three successive episodes earned an Excellent rating. However, things went downhill after that. As you'll know if you've read TRR since then, he's considered some episodes very strong (eg "Molt Down" and "The Hearth's Warming Club"), some on the meh side (eg "Marks for Effort") and some very poor (eg "The Mean Six" and "Yakity-Sax"). Not all of his ratings agree with mine, but why should they? So Railfan, as long as you keep writing these reviews, I'll keep including them in TRR.

803: "The Maud Couple" – positive with reservations (rated Good; "a very strong message [although] the plot is quite thin [...] Had it not been for the theme, it would've gotten a worse rating.")

804: "Fake It 'Til You Make It" – fairly positive (rated Good; "surprisingly good given that Josh Hamilton wrote this [...] the humor was actually quite funny [but] the rest of the Mane Six (barring Rarity of course) felt kind of useless")

805: "Grannies Gone Wild" – very positive (rated Excellent; "did Gillian Berrow pull [this] off? Absolutely [...] funny [...] the whole conflict all felt believable and relatable")

806: "Surf and/or Turf" – very positive (rated Excellent; "I liked Terramar a lot. He is incredibly sympathetic and relatable [...] subtle allegory [...] Seeing Scootaloo swim around as a seapony is just adorably charming [but] the conflict between Scootaloo and Sweetie Belle felt rather shoehorned.")

807: "Horse Play" – mostly very positive (rated Excellent; "Celestia is an absolute delight throughout the entire episode [...] the standout was Fluttershy, no question [...] issues with Twilight and Pinkie's characterization [but] a solid episode")

808: "The Parent Trap" – negative (rated Bad; "boy, does it get frustrating after a while [...] a crapload of wasted potential [Sunburst is] so boring [but Starlight] does what she can to give the episode some weight")

809: "Non-Compete Clause" – very negative (rated Terrible; "the Young Six are really good throughout [but the episode] completely ignores character development that had happened in the past seven seasons [...] the moral comes off as extremely forced, and the ending makes the whole endeavor pointless.")

810: "The Break Up Breakdown" – positive (rated Good; "the characters are actually entertaining, Discord and Spike especially [and the] best character of the episode was [...] Big Macintosh. [However,] the Crusaders' subplot felt useless")