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| Someone bring one of these to a convention! |
S6E03: "The Gift of the Maud Pie"
My original rating: ★★★
IMDb score: 7.7
Thoughts: For some reason the IMDb air dates for S6 seem to be completely wrong. The website says this one debuted in early June, which is rubbish. Oh well, to the episode itself... the Fox brothers' writing debut is a bit of a mixed bag. Though... I have to admit, this was considerably less dull than I'd remembered. Although I still feel Pinkie's craziness is overdone (certainly for this late in the series) in the first act especially, there's a surprising amount of really quite touching emotion here. Pinkie playing with the confetti to avoid hurting Maud's feelings is heart-wrenching, and though I'm not sure the businesspony really deserved the Wrath of Maud it is pretty amusing. Actually, Maud in general is used quite well comedically here. Rarity plays her "outsider" role reasonably efficiently, too. On the downside, this is another step in modern Manehattan taking over from olde-worlde Canterlot as the centre of Equestria, and I personally do not particularly like that. The first half of this episode is a two-star for me, due to Pinkie's iffy characterisation, but the second half is a clear three. As such, it's another ep I have to come down on one side of the line for. A bit to my surprise, I'm sticking with the higher rating. Maud, you're the main reason for that. More custom closing credits music is nice to hear, too.
Choice quote: Maud: "It's the only restaurant in the city with nepheline syenite in their bathroom tiles."
New rating: ★★★
Next time, it'll be "On Your Marks", a CMC episode that I had a reasonably good, though not amazing, time with back in 2016.
Hey, the first Season Six ep I can get behind! (I found the opening two-parter somewhere between "dull in the moment" and "deeply misguided as a canon shakeup", but you know the old saying: if you can't say anything nice...)
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I agree with a lot of your assessment, though I'm not as bothered by Pinkie craziness. I'd also emphasize the genius of pairing up Rarity and Pinkie - two of the most histrionic yet socially-oriented ponies among the cast, but approaching both traits from different directions - and then putting the more stoic quirks of Maud in there as a foil. Probably the best example is how Maud somehow "breaks" Rarity despite doing basically nothing, then "breaks" Pinkie afterward, but it's Rarity's exaggerated reaction to and playing up of the whole thing that sells the joke.
Hanging as it does on the three-way character interaction, their collective chemistry is what'll make or break this ep for people, I think, and in my case it made it. It's not an exciting episode or a probing psychodrama by any means, but I like fluffiness in its own right, and despite the obviously stretched pacing (not the first ep to suffer from that, and it won't be the last) its few non-comedic emotional notes are sweet enough to get by. Rarity getting included in the sisterhood was a nice ending too.
(That said, the moral felt a bit "shouldn't they know this by now"?)
I'm also not as bothered by the Manehattan setting, but then I'm not bothered (as much, these days) by the Equestria Girls urban setting, nor for its blending that with fantasy elements. I like urban fantasy. Heck, I usually like urban in general, so the ponification of New York is pretty welcome to me (especially since I've never been to the real-world New York, so it's almost as mythical to me as the unicorns). Well, barring a few continuity issues with how it's depicted in "The Cutie Mark Chronicles", but you can't have everything.
Lastly, yeah: the street business pony (named Street Rat on the wiki, apparently by fans) didn't technically do anything wrong. He names his terms up front, and Pinkie's free to refuse. It kind of feels like the staff had to overcompensate by drawing/animating him in as shifty and sneering a manner as possible. Still find it funny the way he was "defeated", though. I dunno: him not being much of a threat arguably makes it even funnier to me, whether or not it was intentional by the staff.
So overall: very nice. Nothing superlative, but very nice indeed. n.n
For some reason the IMDb air dates for S6 seem to be completely wrong. The website says this one debuted in early June, which is rubbish.
ReplyDeleteNot quite, my friend – it's just showing the UK airdate. IMDb only subs in the local airdate when it's in the list for that episode, very rare for episodes of kids' shows – but of course, Friendship Is Magic is no normal kid's show.
And yes, there's argument to be made for this being redundant and distracting in today's digital age, and the local airdate should be kept just in the extra info. I won't disagree with that.
As regards the episode, I have precious little to add to yourself or Impossible Numbers. It lands in that spot of being better than its own "meh" reputation, and many of its brethren in its own season, just not enough to go around calling it a truly underrated episode. One can see many of the Fox Brothers' rudimentary writing tics and fallbacks here already, yet there's just enough grace notes here to make the shabby state of the rest of their FiM resumé look even more woeful.
It's another episode that, with minimal revisions, could have worked much better as an 11-minute one (strip out Rarity searching for new premises as a plant for an upcoming episode and compress the rest, easily done), yet at the same time there's enough here that it's not utterly boring. Maybe it's just that Maud works much better as a supporting player, a kind of "crazy in her own way" straight mare to the more melodramatic Pinkie and Rarity here - if this is not the best use of Maud in an episode (not the same thing as her best episode), it's in the running for it. Since, despite the Manehattan setting, this is a limited-cast episode (only the sleazy street pony and a policemare speak otherwise), it's a good thing the collective chemistry of these three lands fine enough. It'll never hold a candle to the show's best three-way pairings in seasons past, but it works.
As for Manehattan itself, I don't dislike its usage and prominence as much as you, though I do find it a bit more irksome than Impossible Numbers did.
Ultimately, not an episode I'm ever eager to revisit, and were it in the context of most past seasons, it would be lingering a fair bit down the list. But I've yet to have a bad time watching it, and that's gotta mean something; there's a gentle sincerity and niceness to it that does poke through the sometimes-stale writing (though yeah, the moral doesn't fly this late for them). And for all that it's stretched-out and occasionally boring, it still easily trumps "Made in Manehattan" in that regard. Not to be dismissed!
Hey, I have some nepheline syenite! With some Eudialyte in it, to boot, which lent its name to a S3 Sailor moon villain. Well played, Maud.
ReplyDeleteI knew I could rely on you for rock-based commentary! :D
DeleteWell, I'm with you 150% on disliking the exactly congruent Manehattan/Manhattan thing. A magical world can only be diluted by the most mundane of the mundane. Middle Earth would not be improved by the addition of Pittsburgh. Makes it easy for unimaginative writers, though.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of unimaginative... Ripping off The Gift of the Magi, one of O'Henry's most bland and soppy stories, (and completely missing the point of it, BTW) is not exactly what I would call creative. You see that sort of thing all the time in kid-vid, but MLP impressed everyone for a number of reasons, and none of those reasons was business-as-usual, lazy storytelling.
This one gets a low two-star from me.
The Gift of the Magi is not particularly well known on this side of the Atlantic. I wonder whether that's part of the reason why that aspect didn't bother me -- because it just didn't occur to me. (Now, I adore a certain festive episode coming up later this season, but that's different...)
DeleteIt's a standard of High School English classes over here (or was), and I'm a great fan of O'Henry's (much better) work; hence the bother. ;)
DeleteI quite like the certain other episode, but I think that's because it's better written.