Originally posted at the DL August 2015
I used to wonder what friendship could be.
The first few episodes are pretty rough. While Pinkie and Rarity seem to have sprung forth fully formed from the brow of ZeusFaust, going back to season 1 Rainbow and Twilight is weird, and Fluttershy and Applejack are kinda painful in the first couple episodes because they clearly don't know what actually to DO with them yet. All the cast do develop through the seasons of course, but the latter two don't even have a basic foundation for about five episodes before the actresses find their footing and get the personalities down.
The rest of the season is pretty good. It's proportionally the most slice of life oriented (as I remembered it), but that works since the writers had lots of play just introducing the core cast at this point and still had their A material to draw from. There's a lot of conscious use of Looney Tunes gags throughout the season which I didn't really remember, but it feels out of place in most episodes since they're so character driven. It does give off the impression the show is channeling Tiny Toons at times, which makes bunches of sense. Also probably the animators saying "look at what we can do in Flash now!"
The show has no relationship whatsoever with chronology at this time. The writers probably kick themselves for it now. Also makes me wonder if they only expected to get that first season, which would be weird because it's not like Hasbro is going to NOT make more toys...
... hah, just noticed something.
Weakest Episode: Feeling Pinkie Keen. I talked about this waaaaay earlier in the topic. This rewatch has not revised my opinion much. There is less faux-science gibberish than I remembered at least, so instead of sounding like an asshole AND an idiot Twi just sounds like an asshole with a side of mocking her subject. Basically any episode that pushes the character outside their usual personality for sake of the message is going to rub the wrong way, and this episode additionally stands out because of the whole "Twi is kinda an asshole" thing. It's really the fact that they had her be so BOTHERED by it. You could have had a similar episode that wasn't a chore just by having the approach be "Pinkie does have a lot of abilities that don't follow the rules of magic. Alright, I'm going to figure out how she does it!" Twi can still eat cartoon gags, episode can still end with "I guess some things just can't be explained", but nobody's an asshole.
Which immediately preceeds
Best Episode: Stare Master. I am of course a sucker for Fluttershy Badassery, and few things are as conceptually as awesome as "Stared down a Cockatrice. And won." But the episode is just a lot of fun in general. It's a great showing for the CMC in particular, because they just get to be kids for a while and do kid things and be adorable and loud and have a pretty danged good musical number. They often lose this aspect when they have to carry an episode (or at least it's splitting time with them being lectured at or going DRAMAAAAAAAAAAA), but here it's part of Fluttershy's development for the episode which works wonderfully.
Grade- 7/10. Better at the end than the start, basically a pretty normal first season for a show that had multiple more after that.
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