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| I love that the runic inscription says "Pony Rocks" |
S7E25: "Shadow Play, part 1"
28 Oct 2017
My original rating: ★★★★★ (for both parts)
IMDb score: 8.4
Thoughts: As you'll have noted, I loved this finale first time round. Perhaps inevitably, this first episode has lost a bit of its shine since 2017. Part of that's because the show rarely made the Pillars all that compelling. This was the first episode with a writing credit for Nicole Dubuc,¹ which won't help it in some viewers' minds, either. Nevertheless, I still like this episode. Rainbow is such a good Spike buddy, especially. Starlight being the voice of reason when it comes to magic is a fun reversal of her norm. She works well with Twilight and Sunburst, too. I like the storybook-style opening. The setup at the end is exciting – if only it had been a full cliffhanger, but oh well. There are irritations, for example Applejack suddenly acquiring Maud-level strength when it comes to rock control. Things ramble a bit and could have been tighter with a tad less exposition. But overall, though not the amazing experience I felt it was back in the day, this is still a pretty enjoyable and very watchable first half. Top-end three seems a better rating now.
¹ On Discovery Family. For its earlier Treehouse (Canada) showing, Haber got sole credit.
Choice quote: Rarity: "Darling, your diorama!"
New rating: ★★★
It's been a much longer ride than I'd have liked, but next time out I shall finally be reaching the end of S7! I wonder how this half of the finale will hold up? Only one way to find out...
There have been problematic two-parters before where most of the big issues are mostly or fully present only in the second half, most obviously with "The Cutie Re-Mark", thereby leaving the first half stronger and a false promise of what's to come. Obviously not having watched Part 2 yet, I can't fully comment on the scale of such, but this seems to be another such case, because this first part was a lot stronger.
ReplyDeleteIn part, that's because most of what we remember in this two-parter happens in Part 2, and outside of the third devoted to the Mane 5 (plus Spike) locating the Pillars' artefacts, this is basically an exposition and setup episode, with very little in character outside of Starlight's worry about what they're doing. Not a very organic exposition dump either, though possibly that's just the effect of the usual "circular dialogue" thing Season Seven episodes seem to have (indeed, this episode could have easily been a few minutes shorter and moved up some of Part 2 to give that more room for its truckload of incident, and I suspect the only reason they didn't was to end on the cliffhanger on the reveal of bringing the Pony of Shadows back – basically why the film version of The Two Towers invented a lot of material to put its cliffhanger at a spot that made sense).
All that being the case, while the "unearthed more ancient history that changes everything we know about Equestria which was never mentioned before, kay thanks" plot reflex has no real impact by this stage in the show, the proceedings are engaging enough, given the worst retcons aren't present until Part 2. And for all its basically an exposition episode, there's some decent use of character here, from Sunburst working with the group to the Mane 5 showing their virtues in their segments (with the exception of Dash and Spike's segment, which is also the longest and doesn't really have anything to do with the episode or Loyalty/Bravery, but I'll forgive it for the great Dash/spike chemistry and showing Garble up). Even the payoffs to the prior Pillar episodes are generally well-considered, and only ring hollow due to the follies of said episodes. And there are definitely more funny moments that I would have expected, coming back to this.
Plus, the tradeoff of being focused on exposition and plot incident is there's very little room for Josh Haber's usual tics, nor for Nicole Dubuc's to make themselves known, though given the evidence suggests this plotline was one they were saddled with to resolve from earlier and wanted to just get it out of the way before they got to make their season (hence almost no Pillars going forward), that's not really a compliment. Still, this kind of episode can survive lacking an authorial voice more than most.
Of course, paying compliments to two-parters separately is a bit superfluous, as they're never meant to be watched separately (I'm sure some reruns don't have them air back-to-back, but that's how they premiered). Still, this was a pleasant surprise, and while "mildly, blandly diverting" isn't a huge compliment, it's meant utterly sincerely here.
I really do wish we'd seen some more of this approach to teaming Rainbow with Spike in the earlier seasons. Would have made a fun S5 map episode team-up, for example. Oh well.
Deleteas they're never meant to be watched separately
The major exception being "The Return of Harmony", the only time the halves of a two-parter premiered a full week apart. I don't know whether they were meant that way, of course, but the full cliffhanger would have been quite something to experience. I wasn't in the fandom at that point, so I never got to do so.
I did actually get a cliffhanger with a two-parter myself, but only because Tiny Pop happened to host the world premiere of "To Where and Back Again" and chose to schedule the parts on successive days rather than one straight after the other. In that case, of course, Discovery Family did show them back to back as usual.
It says something that even after reading this summary of it, I can't remember anything about this episode. Other things might jog my memory... like if this is the one that leads to the Pony of Shadows, which the title suggests, then I do remember it for that at least, but not any of the details, not even that characters got paired up like you mention, though I guess i do vaguely recall that being how they retrieved the artifacts. It just didn't make any impression on me.
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