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| "Er, Twilight? I think Troubleshoes has already made this act his own" |
S6E10: "Applejack's 'Day' Off"
My original rating: ★★
IMDb score: 6.3
Thoughts: This was written by the Fox brothers, with Neal Dusedau in addition for story duties. Let's be honest, that's not the most inspiring FiM team. And look at that IMDb score. Not great, is it? Even allowing for IMDb-ishness, that's not the sign of a popular episode. It wasn't particularly popular with me either, as my 2016 review score shows. What I remembered, and indeed said back then, was that I wasn't actively repulsed by it but that it just wasn't all that interesting to me. This is still the case: the 22 minutes really do not fly by. Now, a lower-key, small-town feel isn't a bad thing in itself, of course. But I'm afraid this one just feels dull. It also doesn't help that for some of the routines Applejack with eg the pig-feeding, her having stuck to them all this time without thinking about it requires her to be frankly rather stupid. And AJ is not rather stupid, nor even always set in her ways. Indeed, when she fixes the spa machinery her intelligence is there for all to see. Twilight and Spike don't do a whole lot that's actually interesting in this episode, at least not until fixing the farm irrigation system at the end. Rarity has a decent showing in this episode and is probably the most entertaining character pretty much throughout, though Rainbow's pretence that she doesn't like spa pampering is amusing, or at least would be if the one joke didn't go on quite so long. (Her Tank slippers get a point, though!) So yeah, I'll stick with the two-star rating here. This isn't offensive, it's just not very interesting.
Choice quote: Rarity: "An hour of spa perfection? I can work with that."
New rating: ★★
Next
time, I'll be rewatching "Flutter Brutter", an episode which many people disliked (largely because they disliked a certain character in it...) but which I rather enjoyed.
What a nothingburger of an episode. I don't think this even gave us anything worth chewing up and spitting out as fanfic.
ReplyDeleteThe one with Rarity pronouncing "schedule" the British way
ReplyDeleteWell, she does have a cultivated Trans-Atlantic accent…
[^ Not an actual counterpoint that justifies it, but it might have been what Tabitha was going for, or how it slipped.]
In watching this one again last night, I was not surprised at how largely dull it was, nor that the routines and patterns Applejack has supposedly fallen into are not remotely justifiable for her to have gotten stuck in. Instead, I was able to focus on why – specifically, how plodding and lethargic the writing of the Fox brothers is. And also how they just don't write funny. This episode being padded has a lot to do with that – the Rainbow gag doesn't intersect with anything else here, and it takes up 10% of the runtime – and it's most noticeable in the construction of the dialogue, with many run-on sentences stressing again a point already clarified, often less than a minute prior.
Even purely on the structural level, this is questionable, with the actual character conflict – Applejack being caught up in a routine – having no onscreen evidence until we fade from the spa back to Twilight and Spike doing the chores, and there's only six minutes left to go (their early bit opening and closing the gate is too minor and in the past to register by then – the episode may have benefitted from cross-cutting the two plotlines a bit). I actually kind of enjoy most of the scenes in the spa, just for getting some fun from it, but there's no denying the writing even there is compromised on both the micro and macro level. And never has the pairing of Applejack and Rarity done so little, with only a "AJ is stubborn about doing things the way she always does" bit contrasting against an impatient Rarity. You barely even notice Applejack having spa days with Rarity in the first place doesn't feel quite right for her. Lastly, while the spa ponies' accents have always been Eastern European, never have they been pushed this far into parody, though they've never spoken this much before either.
Now, outside of Applejack getting caught up in a routine she never would be caught up in, there's nothing offensive or bad about this episode. It's just dull, boring and indifferent, and outside of AJ suiting up, the visuals don't get much chance to have fun and enliven the proceedings (imagine this with the visual comic timing of Seasons 1 or 2!). Puts me in mind of Three's A Crowd or Made in Manehattan, also lethargic episodes, but those two at least had fully functional screenplays, and some mild compensating factors.
I borderline like this episode, but it's a hair's breadth away from "complete negligible" in my book, and it definitely has a noticeably sedative effect in the moment.
ReplyDeleteThe obvious problem is the lack of insight. I like Rarity and Applejack's dynamic more generally, and the vaguely "when will she stick to a bloody date with me?" subtext in Rarity's impatience is about the most noteworthy thing going on here. Applejack getting stuck in a rut feels at least like a fresher take on her stubbornness, and there's something to be said for her workaholic odd job approach getting a bit of the spotlight. Otherwise, all the goodwill I have towards the pairing is imported. On its own, this episode does nothing to further their relationship or shed any light on them as characters. You could skip it and miss barely anything, leaving it little more than a disposable curio.
Moreover, the pacing is glacial. The episode makes a point that could be illustrated in a four-minute short, but at twenty minutes plus? Definitely feels creaky and tired.
Shame too, because the lesson about not letting the inertia of tradition block out sensible time-saving solutions is actually a glint of gold among the grey, and however infantilized its depiction ends up being, Applejack the family farmer and stubborn traditionalist feels like the right candidate for the cant.
About the kindest thing I can say about it is that it rarely rises above a basic hang-out episode, wherein we're not expected to do much, save sitting back and basking in Rarity and Applejack and Twilight and Spike's presences as they bumble and stumble for twenty minutes. Which might have worked as an extremely fluffy breather ep, if this wasn't primarily a series full of fluffy breather eps.
Even then, the plodding way they negotiate Applejack's free time, followed by the plodding way the spa queue is set up, followed by the plodding way the mystery is solved, followed by the plodding way the pig-feeding traditions are revealed (followed by the plodding way they're explained), followed by the plodding montage of Applejack doing her job wrong and the unicorns doing her job right, followed by...
There really is no other word for it. It's plodding. Ploddingly pedantic, with not much in the way of far-out comedy (and even that's pedantically stretched out and reiterated to the point it barely gets an amused smile).
I mean, considering some of the outright toxic episodes this show has produced, I'll take "inoffensive blip on the entertainment radar" any day of the week, and it does show glimmerings of potential here and there. But it's a weak setup with a weak payoff, and I feel like a better-disciplined staff (we're well into the transition into the second half of the series now) would have produced something stronger than this, or even refrained from giving it the green light in the first place.
So... extremely basic hang-out ep, not much meat otherwise. Two stars? Sounds about right.
As an example of the few little things that slightly amuses me: Twilight insisting on doing things by the book - er, I mean list - even though it's blatantly absurd, ending with her in that awkward rope situation... whereupon the other two return to witness it. Did feel like the sort of endearing self-denial and unintentional embarrassment Twilight would reason her way into, for vaguely noble reasons.
DeleteI know for my part, it's always been a struggle when doing (silly) things like ranking episodes to answer the question of which is worse: the episode you hate or the episode you feel nothing for? The toxic, or the boring? The bad, or the mediocre? And I still don't know.
DeleteGosh no. The boring wins every time. Crudely put, I'll take a sedative, not an emetic.
DeleteBoring is better than toxic. Of course, people differ on what qualifies for either. It'll be interesting to see what happens when I finally get to "Fame and Misfortune" -- which, cards on the table, I really rather liked back in 2017.
DeleteI honestly feel like season six was the point where Friendship is Magic began to decline in quality. There were hints of it in season five, but six was pretty obvious about it. It started off okay after a bumpy start with The Crystalling (a two-parter that feels longer than it really is), but then we got two awful episodes in a row with No Second Prances and Newbie Dash; the former marked the beginning of Twilight's downfall as a character, and the latter... well, need I say more?
ReplyDeleteThen there's A Hearth's Warming Tail. Michael Vogel cannot write solo to save his life. He's one of the worst writers the show's ever had, and Twilight's reaction to Starlight not wanting to join the Hearth's Warming celebrations just feels... wrong. It's like they're saying "either join in the fun, or you'll risk causing the apocalypse." I mean, come on! It's not as if one pony missing out on the fun is the end of the world! It practically goes against what Scare Master (which wasn't a great episode to begin with) was trying to teach. Frankly, For Whom the Sweetie Belle Toils did the Christmas Carol shtick a lot better, and it didn't even need to directly adapt said story!
And then there's The Saddle Row Review, an episode that I never got invested in to begin with, most likely because I don't like episodes where things just happen for the sake of the episode (that's also why I don't like Sparkle's Seven, which, besides marking 200 episodes of the show, wasn't interesting to begin with). Nick Confalone's writing was very ill-suited for FiM, as if he thought it was a pure comedy show, which is a very narrow-minded view as to what made the show good in the first place.
You'll notice that I haven't gotten to Applejack's "Day" Off up until this point. Well, that's because said episode leaves me with nothing to talk about. It's just... there.
So after Gauntlet of Fire, we've had two atrocious episodes, a cliched re-telling of a story that's been adapted so many times it's practically lost meaning, a random events episode that adds very little in the long run, and an episode that's sub-par at best. Thankfully, two of the remaining episodes in the first half picked things up for a short while.
It's been a while since I've seen your name around these parts. Hello again! Anyway, you doubtless know that I adore "A Hearth's Warming Tail", regardless of its inspiration having been used approximately ten trillion times already, and so take an entirely different view from you on that episode. But on this episode I can't really go against your summing-up of "It's just... there." Yep.
DeleteThis one was just so aggressively boring.
ReplyDeleteI wish I could disagree. I want to like it in an S1 kind of way, as a domestic and "everyday" sort of episode. But I just can't get worked up about it.
Delete