MLP Season 9 Finale: The Last Problem

So here we are at long last; the final ever episode of Generation 4 of My Little Pony. This could also be my most anticipated review yet - I've waited since the English dub got leaked early for it to be published - and I even sounded off against it as the worst episode of the show. Let's see why I think that, shall we?

The Last Problem

Written by Josh Haber

Literally the first thing I said after watching it was, "that's it?" I'm not even joking. But where do I begin with the problems I have?

As we've known from the beginning of the season, Twilight was going to take over for Celestia and Luna in ruling Equestria. As the season progressed, I starting thinking that this was a stupid idea from the get go, even if it was Lauren Faust's intention when she was in charge of the show. Firstly, why would one princess take over for two? And secondly, why can't Twilight have her own kingdom to rule over? Cadance is ruling the Crystal Empire alongside Shining Armor, and they have a daughter who will one day take over for them when she grows up. So Twilight taking over for the royal sisters makes no sense at all.

While I'm on the subject, why did Twilight move to Ponyville in the first place back in the premiere? I know that it's to learn about friendship, but moving back to Canterlot almost feels like a spit in the face, and she only gets to see the rest of the Mane Six once a moon, almost as if the writers were making the entire series pointless! I know I kind of sound like that pony from Fame and Misfortune saying Twilight's "character" would've been more interesting if she'd stayed in Canterlot, but that's literally what this episode is implying! Oh, and her new design just looks laughably bad.

And then there's the time skip. If they want to imply that things have changed since Twilight took over, fair enough. Except they shoved in so much into the last episode that it almost felt like they didn't even try. By using the time skip as a part of the story, it hurts the episode by going for "tell, don't show", which is a bad idea in storytelling in general. How did Pinkie tie the knot with Cheese Sandwich and had a foal with him? How did Granny Smith die? What became of Spitfire and the other Wonderbolts? Who's the foal of Big Macintosh and Sugar Belle? None of this is explained at all! At least when SpongeBob SquarePants uses time skips, they're used for a joke. Here, they just shoved so much into one episode that it just becomes a jumbled confusion.

We're also given flashbacks as to how Twilight's coronation went... and you know what? That's actually a decent idea for an episode. Except they screw it up by having a framing device with Twilight telling her student (I'll get to her in a bit) about it! Seriously, the time skip just makes this episode worse than it is! If you simply focused on the flashbacks themselves and then ended with the song, the episode would largely be the same. Hell, it'd probably be even better! It would've been mediocre at best, but still.

I hate Luster Dawn. She's literally Twilight Sparkle from season one in all but name, design and voice. It felt like they weren't even trying, and this episode gives me no reason to care for her, nor does it tell me anything about her that makes her stand out from Twilight. In fact, she's less of a character and more of a plot device to allow this episode to happen! Say what will you about Moon Dancer, but at least she stood out from Twilight enough to be her own character in Amending Fences.

Not only that, Luster Dawn just enforces another problem I've had with the show; simply put, there are far too many characters in the series and not enough time for all of them to get screentime. Yes, I get that the Mane Six and Spike are the main characters, but the show is as much about their friends and families as it is them; no less, but no more either.

And while I'm on the subject, wouldn't it have been nice to see how Babs Seed was doing with the Manehattan Crusaders before the show ended? Or Coco Pommel with her fashion business there? Or what about Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon after Crusaders of the Lost Mark? Hell, why not give Zecora some focus so we could find out if there are other zebras in Equestria? All of them are great ideas that the show didn't even bother to focus on, much less in this season, because they'd rather give us stories like 2, 4, 6, Greaaat or A Trivial Pursuit, stories that nobody probably wanted to see!

Back to the flashbacks, and the thing I don't like the most - big surprise - is the callbacks to previous episodes. All of them. Whether it be Twilight telling Luster Dawn about her own personal struggles (Celestial Advice), Twilight undergoing a second coronation that goes horribly wrong (Magical Mystery Cure crossed with The Best Night Ever), the Mane Six shrugging and laughing off everything that went wrong that day (again, The Best Night Ever crossed with The Mean 6), a forced display of sadness over the fact that Twilight won't be in Ponyville when she takes over (The Last Crusade, except this time, it's actually happening), or outright ripping off the very first episode of the show (which pretty much tells me they gave up three-fourths of the way through), this episode may as well be Frankenstein's monster! Hell, even the damn title is unoriginal! There's other episodes that I feel this one has copied from, but let's continue.

It's been said in the past from the creators that Twilight will not outlive her friends, but this episode implies that she will! Her friends will eventually die of old age and the only constant companion she'll have is Spike (assuming, of course, that dragons age differently from ponies) unless she makes a new set of friends for her council and they'll die of old age as well, rinse and repeat. How is this a happy ending for Twilight, based on that? I could only imagine how Celestia and Luna felt when they had friends that eventually passed on!

There's a lot of fans accusing the likes of Josh Haber, Nicole Dubuc and Michael Vogel as the reason the show went into a decline of quality, but I'm not one of those people. Yes, it's on them to make the ideas that Hasbro hands down to them work, but it's also on them to put in their best effort to make them entertaining, even if they sound like bad ideas on paper. Heck, there could've been a meeting between this season's writers to figure out how to go out big with the show. It's not as if Hasbro was blackmailing them to make terrible episodes!

But as it stands, what I hate most about The Last Problem is what it represents. It, for me, shows that Hasbro didn't care about the world Lauren Faust had created and put toy sales and making as much money as they could over making quality entertainment for TV. (Yes, My Little Pony started off as a toy franchise, but even that's no excuse.) I've already brought up how stupid the overall season arc was, but the fact that the events of this season as a whole barely got a look in within this episode just feels like a massive insult. You might as well watch The Beginning of the End and The Ending of the End back to back before this one and it wouldn't make a difference.

Were there any positives I could find to this episode? Well, all I could think of is the animation, voice acting and music, but they're practically a standard by this point, not a freak occurrence. I'd just be scraping the bottom of the barrel finding positives. They end this episode on a song, but it's so bland and generic that I can't even remember the title.

Final Thoughts

For Generation 4's finale, The Last Problem does not even feel like there was any effort put into it whatsoever. It's basically what happened if you took every finale between Magical Mystery Cure (or, depending on who are, A Canterlot Wedding) and School Raze and ramped up the negative traits up to eleven; that's the episode in a nutshell. I genuinely feel sorry for the voice actors and animators that all of their amazing talent was wasted on this.

The sad fact is that it could've actually been a decent episode. I'm serious; if they removed the time skip gimmick, kept Twilight in Ponyville, fleshed out elements of the flashbacks (making them the main focus here) to fill the runtime to 22 minutes and removed Luster Dawn altogether, it could've been an ideal sendoff to the series.

Instead, what I feel we ended up with feels like a complete lie. The post-season four finales - The Cutie Re-Mark, To Where and Back Again, Shadow Play and School Raze - plus The Movie and Best Gift Ever feel more like series finales than this. Even if I find their combined quality mixed at best, at least they understand how to make something feel like an extension of Lauren Faust's vision. This does not.

I was going to end this right there, but a little more than a week ago, there was an announcement from IDW Publishing that starting in April next year, there would be a My Little Pony comic series dubbed Season 10.

Just... what do you even say to this?

First of all, this is an extremely blatant way of stretching Generation 4 out for as long as they like before Generation 5 comes along. Second, this is made to be a continuation of season nine, possibly leading up to the timeskip in The Last Problem as a way to explain the elements they couldn't bother doing so in animation form. Third, it's yet another sign that the franchise is creatively bankrupt and needs to be put to bed, not stretched out as a desperate way - and I really mean a desperate way - to maintain relevance. It's utterly pathetic.

I will not bother with Season 10; good, bad, or in-between. But then, I never really followed the comics to begin with. But considering how shocking the writing for season nine was to me, not to mention the last ever episode being a failure on every level, the fact that Season 10 is a continuation of it and a desperate attempt at maintaining relevance is something that I don't think I will ever get over.

Let the show end on its own terms and stop milking it to death just for monetary gain. Leave it in the past with any dignity it might still have.

Rating: Atrocious (-10/10)

Combined Rating with The Ending of the End: Terrible (-5/10)