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| Lyra and Bon-Bon's colour co-ordinated ice creams are a nice touch |
S8E17: "The End in Friend"
18 Aug 2018
My original rating: ★★
IMDb score: 6.4
Thoughts: To my surprise, when I looked back I found that several prominent reviewers (notably Dark Qiviut) liked this episode in 2018. I wasn't thrilled by it, though, and I'm still not. Another ep with a good and quite rare team-up largely wasted. The setup grates: Gallus tells Rarity and Rainbow they have "nothing in common". Nah, apart from repeatedly saving Equestria together, nothing whatsoever. By the time we get to "banter" things look fairly bad. The story drags horribly to fill a full-length episode. It's contrived in the first place, and Twilight and the students being there as spectators is just weird. The Bufogren is pointless. Good things? Starlight had a pretty solid minor role, which helps. The visuals are excellent – I wonder who'd have believed in 2010 that Flash could look like this? The moral itself isn't too bad. But it takes forever to get there and the setup requires two good ponies to be dislikeable for most of the running time. A two-star rating like the last episode, but this one goes quite a bit lower in that band.
NB: One small and sadly (this being S8) almost certainly unintentional nice
touch, pointed out by a friend: real-world horses cannot see reds, so
actually magenta and blue gems would appear similar – though Rarity apparently can tell the difference.
Choice quote: Rainbow Dash: "Unless you like tripping with every step, heels on a horse are pretty useless."
Note she says "horse", not "pony". Hmm.
New rating: ★★
Not an unmitigated disaster, but not a great episode by any stretch of the imagination. It would be nice if I had an unquestioned classic with which to follow up, but sadly I haven't. Instead the next episode is "Yakity-Sax". Oh boy. Maybe it'll click with me this time. [Yeah, and maybe you'll win three lottery jackpots in a row —Ed.]
I am struggling to recall anything about this episode even after your description of it. It's like Non-Compete Clause if it elicited pure apathy instead of hatred.
ReplyDeleteI had the same reaction: "which episode was this again?" Yeah, it was a bunch of nothing and poor character development.
Delete*hissss* the unwatchable episode
DeleteBy no means awful, just pretty dull throughout. Rarity and Rainbow Dash questioning their friendship is pretty jarring when you take Rarity Investigates! into account, and that was three seasons ago! At least they didn't try to spin the moral into a joke at the end, so it's definitely a step up from Non-Compete Clause.
ReplyDeleteAlso, is it just me, or would this have worked a lot better during season three? Not only would it lead into RI much more believably, it would've also given Rarity something to do during said season.
I had a similar thought. It definitely felt like a rather poor attempt at an episode from many seasons earlier.
DeleteI wasn't a fan of this one either at the time (now UKofE's disappeared I'm not sure I can find my original rating :( ) - manely due to the problem of having the student 6 come in and just replay themes in older episodes, like you say, although I seem to remember that it had its moments Tabbi-Ball are unable to be entirely unwatchable :P .
ReplyDeleteI'm still watching TYT, but I'd like to go back through the eps again some time
Yeah, I did praise the voice acting in my original 2018 review on here. Probably on UK of E as well, but same problem as you there. :P
Delete