Postby Nate » Sat Dec 14, 2013 3:17 am
I'm one of the ones who liked MMC and rates season 3 as the best season of all, so I went into season 4 with high hopes. Unfortunately, the first two episodes didn't live up to them.
The first episode was pretty good, actually. I have no complaints about it, it was very well done. It's the second where things fell apart.
First, too much of the episode was devoted to showing things that happened in the past. I feel like this is something that could have been better focused on in another episode, not to mention the deus ex machina of Zecora just happening to have a potion that can only be activated by alicorn magic (how did she know what it does?). I can ignore that because kids' show, but what I can't ignore is that the flashbacks ate up too much of the episode's time, leading everything else to be rushed due to time constraints. Then, they go off to the forest. The group makes completely legitimate complaints that Twilight is the de facto leader of Equestria right now, and can't be risking her life because if something happens to her, the country is more or less without leadership and completely hosed. So she runs back to Ponyville...only to run back to the Everfree Forest after speaking with Discord for about two minutes, making the previous scene--you guessed it--entirely pointless!
And not only that, but when she gets back to the forest, she immediately gets ambushed by a group of plants that nearly kill her...thus proving that her friends were 100% correct and she could have been killed, and then the country would have been doomed! She also forgot how to use her magic to attack things to put her in danger! Which was necessary because if she hadn't forgotten by word of the writers, she could have wiped out all the plants easily. This is bad writing!
So then Twilight figures out what to do because otherwise she would have had no reason to be there, and the day is saved, and then a box appears...because! Why did a box appear? Because! Why would a tree have a box in it? Because!
Yeah, maybe they'll explain why there was a box inside the tree but I'm not holding my breath, pretty sure they're never going to explain it and that's crap.
So yeah. Hopefully the rest of the season will be better, but the second episode was just atrocious, hands down the absolute worst episode ever made.
Ezekiel 23:20