The Problems with My Little Pony's Last Season (So Far)

It's safe to say that many of my views on My Little Pony's ninth and final season of the show have been controversial, to say the least. It's even gotten to the point I got harassed over my views on The Last Crusade and Between Dark and Dawn, but to put things into perspective, and hopefully shut up those complaining about my views being "wrong" (for the record, no one's perspective is right or wrong - people have the right to say how they feel, whether or not you agree with them; it's a non-issue), I'll go over all the problems I've had with season nine thus far. All I want to say my piece and leave it at that.

Introduction

By the time My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic comes to an end, it will have lasted for nine years, which is a fairly long time for a children's show to run. However, by comparison, The Fairly OddParents had been running for sixteen years, likely having ended due to Butch Hartman's departure from Nickelodeon; SpongeBob SquarePants has been running for twenty years and is still going on to this day despite Stephen Hillenberg's death; The Simpsons has been going on for thirty years, thirty-two if you include the shorts that were a part of The Tracey Ullman Show; Thomas the Tank Engine's thirty-five year history is well-documented, and then there are the shows running at fifty years or longer like Sesame Street and Jeopardy!.

Which leads me onto the question; does longevity equate to quality? The short answer is, no, it doesn't. As Mr. Enter explains in his review for The Big Fairy Share Scare:

"After about four seasons, most shows start to decay quickly. We may see the signs before then - the show will start reusing concepts, flanderizing characters, have more and more animation errors, and the people who care about the show, either out of passion or for monetary gain, will desperately do anything in their power to keep it alive. And that this effort tends to make the show worse and worse."

He didn't know this at the time - January 24, 2016, when the most recent episode was The Cutie Re-Mark, where we saw Starlight get integrated into the main cast - but that quote seemed to have been written with My Little Pony in mind. Except maybe the animation errors, but you get the point.

The Problem with Re-Hashings

It would be fair to say that for the last few seasons, the show has been reusing older concepts and tried to either freshen them up, fix up some of the mistakes from the original story, or do neither. It Ain't Easy Being Breezies from the fourth season is a prime example of how to fix up an older episode, Putting Your Hoof Down from two seasons previous. Not only did this episode portray Fluttershy in a more sympathetic light (and even strengthened her character development), the moral was also handled correctly about finding the right balance between tough love and tenderness.

On a similar note, Gauntlet of Fire fixed up most, if not all, of the mistakes Dragon Quest suffered by expanding on dragon culture, showing that not every dragon was a complete jerk, showcasing Spike's strengths very well, and keeping Garble an antagonist (for three more seasons, at least).

But re-hashing older ideas can often be a negative. Every Little Thing She Does practically rewrote Lesson Zero and tried to change a few things to stand out from the season two episode but flopped; 28 Pranks Later amplified all the problems The Mysterious Mare Do Well had, and The Mean 6 completely undid Chrysalis' deviousness and charisma that she had in To Where and Back Again and made The Return of Harmony better than it already was.

Long and short, season nine thus far has been the nadir for rehashing older concepts. An episode most guilty of this, according to many fans, myself included, was Uprooted, which was a near beat for beat retelling of Castle Sweet Castle with the Young Six taking the place of the Mane Six (barring Twilight and Spike) and the Tree of Harmony taking the place of Golden Oak Library.

However, that pales in comparison to The Point of No Return; the episode was yet another retreading of Lesson Zero, with bits of Amending Fences thrown into the mix, made even more tedious and unfunny, and it completely assassinates Twilight's character development. The same thing can be said about Between Dark and Dawn in which the B-plot copied the conflict from Princess Spike and made Twilight look more incompetent than usual, and it back-pedaled Celestia and Luna's development from A Royal Problem mixed with Road to Friendship. Heck, Common Ground and She's All Yak felt interchangeable in how they handled the "be yourself" moral, and they were back to back.

There's more, but I feel I've already made my point. Watching every episode of the season up to this point, I feel as though every episode thus far has been chopped up and spliced together, because they were chopped up and spliced together. Nothing has any sort of coherence to it, which brings me onto the next point...

Where's the Big Story Arc?

The big story arc of the show is that Twilight is to be taking over for Celestia and Luna at the end of the season, and by extension, the show. It was originally conceived by Lauren Faust when she was working on the school, but the more I think about it, the more I feel like they just dug it up because, according to Hasbro, "it's the last season and we got to end it somehow!"

In The Beginning of the End, we get the bombshell that Celestia and Luna are planning to retire and pass on all of their duties to Twilight and her friends. But then Sombra returns after being revived and even takes over the minds of everyone in Ponyville and Canterlot before being defeated again.

Then what?

The only other episode to feature the four major villains - Grogar, Tirek, Chrysalis and Cozy Glow - was Frenemies, but that was it. Similarly, the only episode that's aired so far that even mentioned Celestia and Luna retiring soon was Between Dark and Dawn, and there will be an episode focusing on their last Summer Sun Celebration as leaders of Equestria this August (The Summer Sun Setback).

Save for a few mentions about Sombra's recent invasion, there's nothing about season nine that actually feels like it's the last season of the show, or that there's an arc going on. How differently would Sparkle's Seven have fared, I wonder, if it had aired during season six? Remove the references to Sombra and the story remains exactly the same.

There is no story arc taking place, and there never has been. Hell, there's no reason for this arc to take place at all. Twilight and her friends already have their own duties and lives to worry about, so there is no reason for Celestia and Luna to heap all of their duties onto them for the finale. It all feels like there was no thought put into it whatsoever. You could easily be forgiven into thinking that there's no arc going on.

Continuity Confusion and Parental Problems

"Ya know, some ponies would dream of having parents like that ... I never thought I'd be the best at anything, because nopony ever told me." - Scootaloo, 5/20/2017

Two seasons, five episodes and a feature length movie later, we're finally introduced to Scootaloo's parents. In the middle of the last season. Where do I begin with the problems?

First of all, they come from literally nowhere. We're given no build up to their presence in Equestria and they turn up just for the sake of The Last Crusade happening. When A Canterlot Wedding was first announced, people freaked out over Shining Armor being Twilight's big brother despite that we'd never seen him or Cadance before, but A) there was enough of an idea as to why that was the case, and B) most importantly, it was during the second season of the show, back when it was a huge deal. And since that episode had aired, the backlash had long since died down and Shining and Cadance have been more or less accepted into the series.

With fifteen episodes left to go by the time of airing, we're suddenly forced to care about a pair of new characters we've never seen before in a shallow attempt at building upon an already well-established character.

When the English dub of The Last Crusade was leaked after its premature airing in Italy, fans went nuts over it, but by the time it had aired for real in America, the reaction had cooled off, and some began to notice the flaws of the episode, which brings me onto the next problem; the implication that Scootaloo's parents don't care for her.

Scootaloo builds them up as being awesome parents, but Parental Glideance implied that her relationship with them wasn't that great. Heck, Flight to the Finish never saw Scootaloo with a caretaker or guardian in sight. The pieces do not go together.

By the time, Shutter Snap and Mane Allgood finally return to Scootaloo's life, they plan on bringing her with them to Shire Lanka. All of a sudden they care for her, and that was after Sombra's recent attack. Never mind the fact that Scootaloo had survived Nightmare Moon's return, Discord's return, Chrysalis' first invasion, the Everfree Forest attacking Ponyville, Tirek's rampage, the invasion of the Storm King, and just before Sombra's revival, Cozy Glow's brief reign of terror. So them worrying about Sombra's attack on Ponyville and Canterlot completely loses merit when you realize that Scootaloo's parents never bothered to check on her after the previous invasions.

If Shutter Snap and Mane Allgood actually loved their daughter, then why did they never bother checking on her after all the invasions in the previous eight seasons and the movie? On a similar note, if they care for their jobs, then why did they have a daughter in the first place? Either they're complete idiots, neglectful parents, or a combination of both. They might as well be the worst parents in Equestria (at least with Spoiled Rich, she was intentionally written as a bad parent).

When you're a parent, being there for your children should always be top priority, regardless of what job you have. Because they didn't bother being there for her, Shutter Snap and Mane Allgood completely missed out on many of Scootaloo's great achievements which seems to imply to me that their (apparent) sole appearance says, "You should leave your only child to other family members, and they'll still accept you regardless of how focused you were on your job." That is an incredibly harmful message as far as I'm aware, especially to children that may actually have neglectful parents.

Fan-Service Taken Too Far?

I start this section off with a controversial statement; the Brony fandom has been pandered to for far too long. Now obviously, this is nothing new. Fan-service has been incorporated into the show since the early days (season two's The Last Roundup is the earliest example I can think of). The thing with fan-service is, it's a double-edged sword. There are ways to incorporate fan-service properly (Amending Fences), and there are ways that it has been incorporated poorly (Slice of Life).

In the case of season nine, more often than not, it tends to fall into the latter category.

Case in point, Aunts Holiday and Lofty. Them being talked about as an LGBT couple was a huge deal before the episode aired in America, except A) we already saw it in Italy and B) we already knew about them from a chapter book from two years ago (Riddle of the Rusty Horseshoe, to be exact). In retrospect, there was nothing to be hyped up about, especially as they overshadowed the entirety of The Last Crusade.

In my review, I praised it for being progressive, but now, the novelty has worn off and instead, it just comes across as hollow pandering to the LGBT fanbase - and in case anyone starts stabbing their keyboards accusing me for homophobia, let me make this clear: I am not anti-LGBT. Whatever a person's sexuality is, I'll support them, unless they're an incredibly vile person. (The personality is completely separate from a person's sexuality, for the record.)

Shoving a pair of LGBT characters in the middle of the last season almost sounds like it's something they couldn't bother doing in the early seasons. Not only that, making a press statement about your characters being gay could lead to PR trouble; just look at what happened when it was confirmed that LeFou in the live-action remake of Beauty and the Beast was gay, only to have him dance with a male partner for a few seconds during the final scene. (You'd have to watch it for yourself to know what I'm talking about.) Just imagine if Dumbledore was outright "outed" in the late 1990s; how many people would have cared about Harry Potter after that?

To be honest, I feel that the Thomas and Friends episode Rosie is Red did far more for the LGBT community than The Last Crusade ever did with the two workmen looking at each other lovingly. And this was an episode where that little moment didn't even need to be included!

Heck, the entirety of the Good Omens miniseries on Amazon Prime contributed a lot to the LGBT community, largely due to the fantastic chemistry between Michael Sheen as Aziraphale and David Tennant as Crowley. Yeah, I know the book said that angels don't have a sexuality unless they really make the effort, but still. If anyone told me they were in love, I'd believe it.

What do Holiday and Lofty contribute? That Scootaloo has a family? That's pretty much it. It felt as though the writers just didn't care and said it was all in the manual. Wow, I focused a lot on the LGBT topic more than I initially intended.

Getting back to the fan-pandering issue, a general theme I noticed is that the writers seem to include fan favorite characters purely for the sake of pleasing older fans. The sole possible exception seems to be Zephyr Breeze in Sparkle's Seven, as an idea by Ashleigh Ball cause apparently, she seems to like seeing Rainbow Dash suffer (no disrespect to Miss Ball, of course). Not to mention Zephyr isn't exactly everyone's favorite...

Then in the episode immediately after, The Point of No Return, Moon Dancer makes a speaking cameo at the Tasty Treat and was rendered redundant for the rest of the episode. Moving on.

Terramar and Mud Briar both made a return in Student Counsel alongside semi-regulars Maud Pie and Trixie, almost as if the writers were telling us, "Hey! These guys were introduced in the previous season! Remember them? Anyone? Huh?!" (Okay, maybe they didn't say that, but you get the point.) It almost feels like a distraction from the fact that the episode was a boring, sluggishly paced slog, though from what I read, Mud Briar is at least becoming more self-aware, so... maybe not as annoying?

Apart from Celestia and Luna getting a starring role in Between Dark and Dawn, the song featured a lot of cameos ranging from Discord to the Flim Flam brothers to Thorax to even a cameo by Capper. But they're so brief it's easy to miss them; they come and go quicker than a Stan Lee cameo (R.I.P., you utter legend). I only mention that now because it had nothing to do with the remainder of the episode.

And then there's the presence of Scootaloo's family which... I've moaned about enough already.

The only episode where it seemed to make sense to bring back a fan favorite was Common Ground with Quibble Pants. Not only did the episode expand on his personality beyond Daring Do, it even made him a more relatable character to the audience. And that was so far the best episode of the season.

The Stories Equestria May Never Tell

So instead of just pandering to older fans for the sake of pandering to older fans, why couldn't the writers have instead focused on story arcs that needed expanding upon?

The Young Six potentially becoming the new Element bearers is a great example of potential not being built upon. They were one of the best parts of season eight, if not the best. Heck, I'd argue the whole season did the school concept way better than Equestria Girls ever did. If School Raze and Uprooted were anything to go by, we could've had a great story arc to show them becoming the next bearers of the Elements of Harmony. Instead, what they got thus far were a pair of stories that could easily have been in season eight. That's a huge waste right there.

Not only that, there was opportunity to have some closure with Babs Seed and the Manehattan Crusaders. What we got instead was a voiceless cameo in The Last Crusade. It's most frustrating when you consider that the last time she got a mention was getting her cutie mark in Bloom and Gloom, but even then, it felt like an afterthought.

What about seeing the Cake twins grow up and start to enter school? Or Flurry Heart? Or how Coco Pommel is managing fashion business on her own? Or Big Mac and Sugar Belle taking their relationship to a new level with marriage? Heck, what is Moon Dancer like outside of her circle of friends, especially as she's been given nothing since Amending Fences? Anything would've been great! But no, we had to focus (or as much focus as the season will allow) on a Princess who doesn't deserve what she'll achieve by the finale...

Twilight Sparkle, Princess of Danger

Out of all the Mane Six post-season five, Twilight has received the worst treatment when it comes to character derailment. Yeah, Pinkie can be a mind-numbing idiot at her worst, but she still displays common sense... sometimes. Rainbow Dash can turn into an over-the-top jerkish smartass, but again, that's only on the odd occasion. Applejack sometimes abuses her Element and Starlight tends to get the short end of the stick from the writers, but neither get starring roles that often.

But Twilight? In a lot of her recent starring roles, with exceptions such as Top Bolt and A Flurry of Emotions, she's either an insufferable hypocrite (No Second Prances) or an over-reacting idiot (Marks for Effort). Season nine has Twilight at her worst in the latter category, and cranked up to eleven.

The stress over taking over for Celestia and Luna I can understand... sort of, but at this point, Twilight should be a lot more composed than she was in Lesson Zero. I mean, in Sparkle's Seven, she's practically hellbent on beating Shining Armor just for a tinfoil crown - I think it should've been thrown away by now - making the 200th episode feel more anticlimactic and low stakes than it really was.

It didn't help that it was followed up by The Point of No Return, the one episode where I practically gave up on Twilight as a character. I wouldn't remember that episode at all if it wasn't the one I decided Twilight had completely lost it. The only thing I genuinely remember is that it's a terrible rip-off of Lesson Zero.

If that episode was the point where I gave up on Twilight, then Between Dark and Dawn was where I felt that Celestia and Luna will have blood on their hooves when she takes over. For me, that was the real point of no return for the final season. The season being boring, rehashing ideas and doing nothing with them, not bothering with the potential in side characters. That episode was the straw that broke the pony's back.

Put simply, the episode told me that when Twilight takes over for Celestia and Luna, things will fall into complete chaos and probably end up being worse than before the events of Nightmare Moon's return. In the real world, people are being killed because of incompetent politicians not doing their job properly. To suggest that Equestria will be a mess when Twilight starts to rule it is one of the most horrifying things the show has ever suggested, and she is supposed to be the character we root for. At this stage, I feel like rooting for Grogar and his Legion of Doom, even if Tirek, Chrysalis and Cozy Glow have lost their edge (though Cozy Glow had none to begin with, but I digress).

Equestria needs a leader it can trust to feel safe, and Twilight Sparkle isn't. Not anymore. Her character development has been completely undermined by her behavior in season nine alone, and it's absolutely heartbreaking to see her character twisted and broken beyond recognition. Proofreading your scripts is important, and Between Dark and Dawn is a prime example as to why; otherwise, you'll just end up implanting unfortunate implications.

"But if Twilight isn't fit to rule Equestria when Celestia and Luna retire, who is?" That's easy to answer; Fluttershy would've been a far better choice than Twilight. Let's look back at her greatest moments.

Dragonshy. Hurricane Fluttershy. Keep Calm and Flutter On. It Ain't Easy Being Breezies.

Even if we don't know, Fluttershy has always been the true hero of the series. Not Twilight - Fluttershy. Whether it be confronting a dragon about his snoring being harmful to his surroundings, helping Discord learn to change his ways, helping the Breezies home, or helping to provide the last wingpower to create a tornado to lift the required water for Cloudsdale's rainy season, Fluttershy has always been the hero of My Little Pony. Maybe not in number or profile, but unquestionably spirit.

She's the character who you cried for when she remembered the trauma of being mocked in flight school for her flying abilities. And then you urged her on to provide that little bit of wingpower needed to complete the tornado, and then you cheered for her when she succeeded.

The long and short is that Fluttershy had the strongest character arc out of the Mane Six. From the start, she was incredibly shy and withdrawn, afraid to stand up for herself, but as the series progressed, she grew more and more out of her shell to the point she chewed out Garble for his bullying of Spike. And the sad irony is that as she was the most popular of the Mane Six when the series began, people seemed to stop caring about her as it went on, and nobody noticed her character growth.

That is why I feel Fluttershy would've been a better choice for Princess than Twilight. That is why she's my favorite out of the Mane Six. And that is why I love her most recent outings like A Health of Information.

If you're a Twilight Sparkle fan, stick to the first five seasons. At least back then, her freakouts and moments of self-doubt could be defended, even in It's About Time to an extent. But no thanks to Gail Simone in her sole script thus far, Twilight's charm as a character has been destroyed, and I don't think there's a very high chance she'll ever recover from it.

Not-So-Terrifying Villains?

I've already brought up the poor messages implying that parental abandonment is perfectly acceptable as long as the kid is on good terms with you (The Last Crusade) and that someone diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia is perfectly fit to rule a land (The Point of No Return, Between Dark and Dawn). But there's one more that I've yet to bring up...

Frenemies felt my wrath when I first covered it. It's storyline was reprehensible, and the overall message practically spelled out to me that "criminals are not bad, they're just misunderstood". That may be true with some, but what happens if you translate that message to focus on criminals who don't care at all for what they're doing?

In the episode, Cozy Glow, Tirek and Chrysalis practically felt no shame over what they have done. In School Raze, Twilight's Kingdom, A Canterlot Wedding and To Where and Back Again, it was made crystal clear that they were villains the audience should root against. And then all of a sudden, Frenemies basically undermines all of that by saying they weren't evil villains all along working for an even bigger baddie, just misunderstood. Hell, it even implied that they might go through a villain redemption for the finale!

There are way too many villain redemptions as it is, but if you give that to Chrysalis, Tirek and Cozy Glow, it will completely undermine what made then great villains to begin with (or in Cozy's case, more hateful than she already is). Their one episode together was practically conceived without a care for any negative implications it could have in the series. In fact, that one sentence summarizes how poor the final season has been thus far.

Final Thoughts

It was T.S. Eliot who once said, "The world will end not with a bang, but with a whimper." That one line sums up My Little Pony and its final season perfectly. It almost felt as though Hasbro didn't care anymore about what Lauren Faust had created and barely put any effort into making season nine really feel like it was the last season. A lot of the episodes felt like they could've been in any of the previous eight and nothing would change.

The sad fact is that there's a good season hidden somewhere. Seriously, if they didn't force in a character arc about Twilight taking over Equestria, it would've served as a nice, gentle goodbye to the fans, showcasing perfectly what made the show great to begin with.

But as season nine currently stands, the trailer Hasbro released on the official YouTube account feels like a lie. The previous eight seasons had more effort put into them, and even with season six, which I used to consider the worst of the show, at least there it had some great ideas hidden among the bad ones. Season nine had no ideas, and even when they did, they were terrible ones.

Which brings me onto the million dollar question; do I think the second half of the season will be better? No. While yes, we're getting the return of Weird Al Yankovic as Cheese Sandwich and a hopefully interesting finale to cap off the show, it still doesn't change the fact that to me, the first half of season nine has been a complete mess and only exists so Hasbro could flog it off to the world as the last season of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.