“The book doesn’t say anything about having a giant tree branch at your slumber party! Or, at least, I haven’t found that entry yet.”
Episode written by Charlotte Fullerton
Entirely unofficial reflections by sixcardroulette
This is a full-length Ponywatching essay. For a condensed review
of this episode, check out The Shorter Ponywatching!
So, thanks to those wacky British DVD compilers, this was the fourth episode of My Little Pony we ever watched – from memory, we watched it the morning after we saw the first three – and again, like Griffon the Brush Off, even though it’s actually out of sequence (something we didn’t realise at the time), it works just fine in its misplaced role.
But unlike Griffon the Brush Off, hindsight has made a difference here. When we later found out the correct running order, and that both Applebuck Season (17th on the DVDs) and Boast Busters (22nd!) were meant to have come before this one, it raised all sorts of questions about the portrayals of Applejack and Twilight Sparkle here – how was our understanding of these characters, characters we’d come to know so well by the time we saw those episodes, affected by seeing this one first?
For sure, seeing this fourth up, straight after Griffon the Brush Off, gave the four of us a pretty radically different idea of what the show was going to be like week-to-week, thematically if not structurally. Following the chaos of the opening two-parter, it really seemed like each episode for the foreseeable future was going to be a slice-of-life sitcom/dramedy affair building on the foundations of a friendship first laid in the pilot.
*A* friendship, not “Friendship” in general. Both of these early “regular” episodes focus on a particular pair of ponies, diametrically opposed, who’ve ended up in the same gang: the ponies least likely to be believable as plausible friends just because the scripts tell us so. Just as, in reality, friendships need to be built, nurtured, earned, so it goes with our faith in friendships onscreen. Show, don’t tell, as the maxim goes. Time and again, My Little Pony shows.
This, then, is the story of how Applejack and Rarity became friends.
Theatricks
Except it isn’t. Not really. Or, rather, it isn’t just that.
They’ll be friends by the end, don’t worry.
What we have here is a different take on the Classic Odd Couple model (two clashing personalities reluctantly spend time together, wacky shenanigans ensue, everyone learns a lesson about looking beneath the surface, cue friendship); this is actually a three-handed comedy piece.
Just as in Griffon the Brush Off, where the need to stretch a simple plot over three acts by avoiding an easy resolution early on actually seems to have resulted in a better, tighter script, here the show seems to luck in again. Twilight Sparkle technically had no reason to feature prominently in a story about Rarity and Applejack putting aside their differences, other than the fact she has to present the mandatory friendship lesson to Princess Celestia at the end. But that hands-tied need to involve her ends up driving the entire plot and structure of the episode, and Lauren Faust and her team integrate her into the story in the cleverest way.
If Look Before You Sleep shares a basic theme with Griffon The Brush Off – the thawing of relations between two unlikely friends – nonetheless both episodes take a different approach to tackling the same issues. In Griffon The Brush Off, much of the tension came from the very public nature of events; specifically, two key scenes (Gilda being a nuisance in the town square, and the big third-act party showdown) actively required the presence of big crowds in the background. Furthermore, by the end Gilda was firmly cast in the role of antagonist, and the need to deal with her story (or, more accurately, her impact on the Pinkie-and-Rainbow story) relegated the personality clash between the actual ponies making friends further down the scale.
By contrast, in Look Before You Sleep there’s no external antagonist to act as a plot catalyst, there’s only one setting (the entire episode is set in Twilight’s library), and there are only three on-screen characters, none of whom ever exits a scene for more than a few seconds. Just as in Elements of Harmony earlier in the series, Twilight’s social awkwardness and adorkable cluelessness is a major plot point, where the presence of her only actual friend from before the show might have complicated matters or led to plotholes, and so Spike is again absent, lampshaded from the off:
Spike is away in Canterlot on royal business. I’m home all alone tonight!
So all of the comedy and drama has to come from the characters themselves; brilliantly, the writers engineer a setup whereby it’s first established that two ponies can’t stand one other, and then that they’re forced to spend time together, not only by practical considerations but also social considerations – because they’ll be sharing that time with a third, wildcard character.
See? I promised!
TV Tropes classifies this one as a ‘Bottle Episode’, a money-saving job featuring few locations or speaking characters, and, okay, by the technical definition it is. But I had a different reaction first time out: as far as I saw, this is actually more akin to a stage play, a combination of farce and comedy of manners, except pitched for seven-year-olds.
Triple Nerd Score
Coming so early in the show’s run, and the DVD compilers having presumably bracketed this and the previous episode together for thematic reasons, and looking at the fact the show is actually called Friendship is Magic, it felt like a reasonable guess we’d be looking at a different pairing each week, so that eventually all 15 permutations (I think that’s right?!) of the Mane Six would have had a spotlight episode, and this week happened to be Rarity and Applejack.
(It’s a mark of how good the show really is, I suppose, that as of the time of writing (almost 100 episodes in!), I’ve no idea whether we actually have done this now – without going back to check, I can’t recall off the top of my head if we’ve had extensive scenes looking at the relationship between, say, Fluttershy and Applejack (yeah, that was Bats!, wasn’t it?), or Rarity and Rainbow Dash (no, easy, Sonic Rainboom), or whatever other pairing comes to mind. The thing is, it just sort of stops mattering after a while whether we have or haven’t seen a particular couple pulling focus; these are such an organic-feeling, realistic group of friends that it’s not necessary to see every possible permutation has been covered, because by and large every time an episode zeroes in on one particular character, their interactions with any of the others (even if it’s just a couple of lines) adds to our total understanding of that particular sub-relationship. But back when this was only the fourth episode we ever saw, we weren’t to know that.)
So, almost immediately, Look Before You Sleep throws a curveball, one that only made me admire the show more back in those uncertain first days. Watching with hindsight, Twilight Sparkle seems to be acting a little out of character – but remember, we hadn’t seen either The Ticket Master, Applebuck Season or Boast Busters. Because this one came so early in the series, me and my family didn’t really have much of a bead on Twilight’s character yet, beyond what we’d seen in the introductory two-parter. That is to say, for us she didn’t have a character to be acting out of, and this episode is as much about building one for her as it is about the Applejack/Rarity conflict.
Fun, fun, FUN!
Twilight Sparkle is just adorable throughout this whole episode. I can totally understand how, if you’d already watched those other episodes we were meant to have seen first, the self-conscious badass Twilight of Boast Busters and the assertive, de facto community leader Twilight of Applebuck Season appear to have been sacrificed here for the sake of plot contrivance; she spends the whole of Look Before You Sleep at her absolute nerdiest and most socially awkward, pushing the bounds of believability at times, and on the cusp of infantile regression even before she gets smashed in the head by a giant tree branch. But I can’t retrospectively try to work out how this episode would then have made me feel once I got over that particular hump, because I was never stuck behind it.
Anyway, I really like the Twilight of Look Before You Sleep as a direct follow-on from the Twilight we saw taking her first tentative steps into the exciting world of social interaction, learning to make friends in Mare in the Moon, and – let’s not underplay this – having friends over for the first time in her life, and with no Spike around to anchor her to the real world. She’s a caricature here, yes, but she’s not so outlandishly out of step with what we saw in the pilot that she becomes an implausible one. It works for me, anyway.
As for how that Twilight squares with the unicorn we’re already meant to have seen taking giant strides in that direction, well, that’s harder to answer but the outcome is much the same. I think most sitcoms (and that’s the genre Friendship is Magic most commonly falls into, if we have to do the pigeonholing thing) operate on a kind of scale, with “everyday stuff that could happen in so-called Real Life” at one end, and “crazy antics that could really only work in a TV sitcom because in real life you’d be hospitalised/arrested/fired/shunned for doing that” at the other, and the place any given scene of any given episode of any given sitcom is meant to fall on that scale depends on how funny it has to be (and occasionally vice versa). Is this making sense? Oh, look, here, I’ll draw a diagram:
When it comes to My Little Pony, though, there’s another axis to that graph: how much the show’s setting impinges on, colours or outright guides the plots. So, as well as the realistic-unrealistic axis above, there’s also a second scale, with “largely reality-based sitcom that just happens to be set in a world of colourful cartoon horses rather than, say, a Dallas orthodontists’ practice or indeed a quasi-human high school” at the one end, and “outright cartoon fantasy that could only take place in a magical and explicitly unrealistic world” at the other, and bearing no practical relation to that first axis so long as the routine or wacky behaviour is consistent to the rules of the world it’s taking place in. Here, have another poorly-drawn diagram!
Each episode (or each scene, or even line) should be capable of being plotted somewhere on that 4-way graph, and the closer each episode (or scene, or line) lands on the graph to the one that preceded it, the more consistent a show’s “feel” will be. Now, I’m not saying My Little Pony always gets this right, but it’s clearly a consideration each and every time out; for a children’s show to even be mindful of this four-axis setup is really refreshing, especially for a parent like me who’s sat through more than his fair share of carelessly-handled dreck. I think that’s probably one of the things that hooked me in so quickly; as I’ve alluded to before, this show really has no right to be good, let alone this good.
Anyway, my point is that while the AJ and Rarity scenes of Look Before You Sleep, by and large, could be transposed to the sitcom or stage comedy setting of your choice without losing too much in translation, the inclusion of Twilight Sparkle pushes this further towards the Only Ponies part of the scale. Twilight’s depiction here takes full advantage of the ambiguity over how old she (and the other ponies) are meant to be, when putting forward a definitive answer anywhere between eight and thirty would probably ruin it; the point is, she’s not meant to be any particular age, because she’s not human and any age comparison with how equivalent humans behave is… not meaningless, but only informative, not definitive.
See, the plot of Look Before You Sleep hinges on us suspending disbelief with regards to the age question, and also – implicitly – questioning what “realistic” even means in a show about cartoon horses. That’s not me being lazy or giving the writers carte blanche for sloppy characterisation; rather, it means the world of My Little Pony (and, taking it further, it’s one of my favourite things about the world of My Little Pony) is a place where a character can be presented in an internally-consistent and believable way that would nonetheless be seen as unrealistic in a show set in our world.
Twilight is an intelligent, self-reliant young woman who has never had a slumber party and who finally senses the opportunity to live out a childhood experience she never got to experience the first time round. To me, the way she lives that out is true to the Twilight we saw in the pilot, in the same way that Pilot Twilight was simultaneously and impossibly a child and a veteran scholar and a powerful mage and a clueless ingénue, in exactly the way a human couldn’t be. Her childlike sense of wonder at each development is a big part of her appeal to me in this episode, and her insistence – not only insistence, but firmly held belief – that the correct way to “do” a slumber party is, as with everything else in life, to rigidly follow the written instructions to the letter, is hilarious.
In a setting as alien and contrived as Shakespeare’s England (or Venice), with the “rules” of this world still up in the air, we have to trust the show to tell us what’s weird and what’s normal when it comes to expected behaviour in Equestrian society, especially bearing in mind that the show’s whole fictional world and all its inhabitants are geared towards the delivery of morals about human friendship; at no point do Applejack or Rarity point out hey, Twilight’s acting like a confused child here, but we’re meant to laugh (gently) at as well as with her, I’m sure; the reactions of both Applejack and Rarity to Twilight’s odd behaviour throughout the episode are in part what drives their own behaviour in turn.
But first, you have to accept that anyone could be quite as naive as Twilight is here; that’s really the key to unlocking the brilliance of the rest of this episode (and for me, it is brilliant, sailing easily into my top ten episodes of the first season; I’ll be doing a definitive rundown of my favourites, worst to first, once we get to the end of each year. Won’t that be fun?)
I reckon that acceptance was probably a heck of a lot easier for me and my family than for anyone who saw this in its correct place in the running order, but (unusually) the advantage is definitely with us latecomer DVD-watching Brits in this instance. Well, us, and Look Before You Sleep itself, of course. Let’s watch!
In which Applejack and Rarity get caught in the rain,
and get each other’s backs up
I love the opening of Look Before You Sleep. The three episodes we’ve seen so far – indeed, without checking to be sure, I think all the episodes so far, barring one comedy scene in The Ticket Master? – all took place in fine weather. Look Before You Sleep, on the other hand, opens with a sunny sky that’s quickly obliterated by pegasi, pushing great soft blobs of cloud into place like a squishy jigsaw puzzle blotting out the sun. The intro here gives us some great imagery:
This one silent visual sequence does more for world-building
than a paragraph of expository dialogue ever could.
…Dark skies and an approaching thunderstorm, and Applejack working hard to secure some of Ponyville’s many tall trees by lopping off loose branches, in one of those amazing animation jumps the show does so well you don’t even question how an animal with no arms would tackle emergency arboriculture – because it’d look like this, obviously:
The action is blocked out so well on screen it’s hard to capture an illustrative shot.
It’s a beautifully set scene, but it also raises a further question right away; if we’ve already established the ponies control the weather, well, why would you ever deliberately schedule a thunderstorm? And true to form, the show pre-emptively deals with those nitpicking questions, this time by answering them directly.
I simply cannot imagine why the Pegasus ponies would schedule a dreadful downpour this evening, and ruin what could have been a glorious sunny day!
Ghhhh… Think more practical-like, will yer? They accidentally skipped a scheduled sprinkle last week, and so we need a doozy of a downpour to make up for it, is all.
This opening scene is the best cold open so far, because it just throws us right in at the deep end with these two characters and assumes their archetypal and stereotypical traits will carry any new viewers through what follows. Applejack, the first pony you want on your team in a crisis requiring hard work, is all business when the chips are down. She’s a farmer, tough as nails, the embodiment (we’ll later discover) of the earth pony tribe/subspecies.
Rarity, on the other hand, is a dainty, pretentious fauxristocrat; not only is she literally afraid to get her hooves dirty, she’s actively hindering the storm preparation works by magically retrieving the severed branches and reattaching them again (with the added “benefit” of ornamental topiary), meaning an unimpressed Applejack has to go back and pull them back down once more:
You had one job, Princess Platinum.
I’m on AJ’s side here, frankly. I see people complaining about Twilight acting uncharacteristically dully later in the episode, but for me that pales in comparison with whatever the hell Rarity thinks she is doing here. I’m going to assume, based on Applejack’s dialogue, that the town urgently needed volunteers to clear up and Rarity obviously stepped forward immediately (which we’ll later discover is entirely in character, but right now feels unlikely), without anyone bothering to check her credentials or make sure she was properly briefed.
Again, this points to later episodes like Winter Wrap Up and Magical Mystery Cure where it turns out the Mane 6 and the Apples are seemingly the only competent ponies in town, and even then often only with Twilight Sparkle directing; meanwhile, you wouldn’t feel confident asking most of these other background ponies to get you coffee, let alone leaving the fate of the world in their hands. Right now, Rarity hasn’t made the transition (in the audience’s eyes) from liability to superhero. And I don’t just mean in terms of the action, but the show itself.
(Don’t ask, incidentally, where Rainbow Dash, the other pony you want in a crisis requiring hard work (not to mention the show’s actual resident weather expert), is during this scene; she doesn’t appear in this whole episode, along with Fluttershy, Pinkie Pie, Spike or anypony else beyond a couple of unnamed background pegasi (and one wall-eyed one in particular) at the start. Whether we’re four or eight episodes in, well, either way, it’s striking that the show already feels comfortable leaving out some of its major characters altogether. Which incidentally also dispels any fears about Hasbro pulling those controlling strings too hard to ensure every toy’s inclusion at the expense of the plot. But I digress.)
The Old Mill, Eat Your Heart Out
So, time is wasted with Applejack having to retrace her steps and re-do the work Rarity just undid; tempers are running hot with the storm fast approaching, and inevitably, the rain starts hammering down before the task can be finished. It looks amazing, rain sleeting down, leaves and debris blowing in the wind; it looks more hand-drawn than Flash, and it’s a real testament to the quickly-advancing skills of the animators, especially when you compare it to things like the raging water in Elements of Harmony or the billowing black smoke from Dragonshy.
Anyway, AJ wants to carry on (ill-advised in a thunderstorm, but Applejack putting finishing the job she’s promised to do ahead of common sense effectively foreshadows later events, both in this episode and further ahead). Rarity, in a hilarious bit of animation, instead starts having a full-on freak-out the moment she gets even a little bit wet:
Massive hats off to Tabitha St. Germain here, it’s not easy to make “prissy drama queen noises” sympathetic.
Okay, so their reactions are stereotypical, but then they have to be, for maximum economy of storytelling in this expertly compressed little scene. I love that we’ve barely had a minute of screen time and already we know these two inside out; neither of them is perfect and neither of them has the capability of seeing this situation from the other’s point of view, leading very quickly to the point where they both genuinely see the other pony as actually being insane. Rarity rejecting Applejack’s suggestion of hunkering down under a bench (in a mud puddle) is the last straw, and conflict erupts.
Most shows would struggle to realistically incorporate a proper argument (and one which at any time feels like it could explode into a conflagration, one poorly-chosen insult sparking a full-on shouting match) in the first two minutes of the episode, certainly not without it feeling unbelievable or tacked-on, but actually this came across as completely natural. It really feels like the culmination of weeks – possibly even years – of mutual distrust, passive-aggressive hostility, and (barely) tolerating each other from a distance, but we’re only seeing the final two minutes which broke the camel’s back, as Applejack finally snaps in Rarity’s face:
Gah! There is just no pleasin’ yer, is there?! Everythin’s got to be just so.
Chuh! Well, and how does muddying my hooves serve any useful purpose?
Y’all wouldn’t know “useful” if it came up and bit yer!
[snigger] That doesn’t even make any sense.
Things quickly descend into childish squabbles – whether it’s meant to or not, it works on two levels, using the familiar language of the target audience (it’s always funny for kids to see supposed grown-ups acting like children), and also illustrating just how much these two have managed to get under each other’s skin that they actually get to this staple of many a grade-school playground “debate”:
…before both ponies get a hold of themselves and square off in a more adult fashion. Without me really realising it, the scene transitions quite subtly from silly playground bickering to carrying an actual threat – not that these two are going to be violent to each other in any fashion (Griffon The Brush Off already definitively established that only complete jerks try to solve their differences that way), but rather that their bickering could ruin their relationship for good, and with it the all-conquering, world-saving harmony established in the opening episodes.
What we have here is an Equestrian standoff.
And all the time, the rain is falling and the storm is getting worse, and these two idiots are trading barbs with each other in the (now deserted and rapidly flooding) village green:
They both slink off backwards, each retreating offscreen with an imposing snarl, never once breaking eye contact, but we can be pretty sure where this “duel” is headed, because the camera stays central while both ponies exit to the sides. Sure enough, a few seconds later, there’s a loud clap of thunder, the rain gets exponentially worse, gale-force winds blow leaves past the screen, and AJ and Rarity do a time-honoured Scooby-Doo leap into each other’s arms in fright…
Alright, so it’s not exactly The Old Mill, but
it’s an astonishing use of Flash all the same.
…before tentatively agreeing to seek shelter together (and resume hostilities when they’re a bit less likely to get killed arsing about in a thunderstorm). Cue theme music.
In which AJ and Rarity get out of the rain and into the, um, fire
(I found it hard to choose where to put the act breaks for this one – in a sense, the whole of the rest of the episode is one act! – so do bear with me.)
A less good show might well have gone with a different, easier and more obvious choice at this point. AJ and Rarity have had their falling out (and it’s not an out-of-nowhere manufactured quarrel for the sake of moving the plot along; we’re fully on board, they genuinely don’t like each other very much). Where do we go from here? Do we pick up the action later on, use the lingering acrimony from the night of the storm to push them into another fight? Or do we follow them through the storm as they take shelter in a convenient cave or hollow or something, Rarity needing AJ’s survival instincts, AJ needing Rarity’s human pony touch to make the experience more bearable, secrets coming out, appreciation growing etc etc as everything plays out in adequate but predictable fashion?
Both of those plots would have been good enough to produce a workable result, it’s true. But just as we saw in Griffon the Brush Off, when it comes to Friendship is Magic, “good enough” is never good enough. Instead, while the action resumes almost directly after the cold open, with Applejack hiding in the mud under the table and Rarity prancing around in hilariously prissy fashion, risking getting struck by lightning for the sake of her coiffure and manicure and various other words ending in -ure…
“Seems fine to me”, thought AJ, obliviously.
…the decision to make this “odd couple” episode a three-hander kicks in, as Twilight Sparkle – whose library/house is implausibly within visual range of Applejack and Rarity’s hiding place – invites them in out of the rain.
The wheels are now set in motion for a series of events where all three participants are acting in a way that, in any other episode, could be transplanted to make them either the “straight pony” or the zany one depending on context. For the rest of this episode, all three are the straight pony and all three are comic relief.
It’s not as simple as the characters just passing the famed Idiot Ball around for the requisite number of lines before handing it on for the next joke, it’s much more well-engineered than that. As I said before, this is part farce and part comedy of manners, and the underlying joke, the premise of the episode, is that none of these three has it right just yet: they could all stand to learn something from each other about what friendship really means.
Gimme Shelter
When Twilight gets involved, the whole tone of the episode changes. The danger of the storm is taken out of play for the time being (though the directors are smart enough to make sure we note Chekov’s Precarious Giant Tree directly outside Twilight’s bedroom window!), also possibly explaining why AJ didn’t think to come here for shelter sooner:
Whoa, Nelly! Is inside a tree really the best place to be in a lightning storm!?
It is if you have a magical lightning rod protecting your home, like I do! Come on in!
Following a hilarious little bit where Rarity takes it upon herself to stop Applejack (whose forelegs are literally caked in mud) from coming in before she’s cleaned herself off (she’s next seen through the window having a battle with an uncooperative garden hose, one of the few background animation gags this stripped-down setting allows for):
Some proper Buster Keaton slapstick in (or rather outside) the house.
…Twilight Sparkle’s extreme social awkwardness comes to the fore in a complete volcano of geeky bliss.
Twilight, clearly uncertain of herself, invites her friends to stay over at hers for the night – and then the implications of that suggestion hit her. Friends? Staying overnight? With her? That means a slumber party!!
Twilight pulls a giant, leather-bound, gilt-edged hardback tome off the shelf (the kind of book that should make a satisfying “thunk” noise when you put it down on a desk), and explains to Rarity she has the ultimate reference guide to slumber parties (taking pains to point out to Rarity that this is her own personal copy, not something the library had in stock!)
The way Twilight rears up in spontaneous delight… honestly it’s so adorable, I can forgive all alleged poor characterisation.
(I can only imagine the writers wanted to give the people at Standards & Practices a good laugh before that line was inevitably censored out, and never expected it to survive into the actual episode. Naughty!)
You can’t help but feel sorry for Twilight in a way, as this sheds more light on her isolated childhood before coming to Ponyville; it’s not that she was never invited to parties before (we saw it happen in the very first scene of Mare in the Moon!), but rather that she’s never wanted to go, and never felt wanted there before. Now, she gets her chance to do things on her terms – new girl in town starting over, new friends like she’s never had before, she hasn’t managed to blow it yet by talking about homework or equations too much… it’s time to start checking off some of those vital life experiences she’s missed out on, having surrounded herself with books.
But literally the only things she knows about spending time with friends have come from those books, and so she approaches the idea of a slumber party like some sort of hipster anthropologist trying – really trying, there’s no intended condescension on her part – to get involved in the “authentic” rituals of some primitive tribe she’s observing.
Or perhaps a better analogy would be that she’s treating it like a spell. Friendship is Magic, right? And Twilight knows spells – do A, then B, and the outcome should be C. So, if she does all the things in the book, mechanically, then her party will be a success. Fun, fun, fun!
“…Yay.”
As for the other two? They now face a difficult choice, both Rarity and Applejack deciding that being forced to spend the night in each other’s company – and at a slumber party, something they both regard as unappealing and which (I think) we won’t see the Mane 6 (without kids present) doing again until Rainbow Rocks (where the characters are explicitly meant to be teenagers, which only raises further “how old are our ponies?” questions) – is, on balance, a marginally better option than hiding under a bench in a raging thunderstorm for eight hours.
Marginally.
D’you think they bought it? Ah reckon they mighta bought it.
Both Rarity and Applejack have amazing reactions to the prospect of being roped into Twilight’s slumber party, but Applejack’s is particularly great, the realisation visibly dawning on her face mid-sentence, followed by our first (hilarious) look at her being just plum awful at lying:
But the storm’s too bad for her to actually leave, and nor does Rarity. They’re at Twilight’s mercy now.
And so the birdcage of the plot is locked shut. Twilight has regressed to being the tween she never actually got to be, finally giving herself license to enjoy being eleven – but a very particular version of eleven, where the textbook needs to be consulted at all times to make the fun official. Meanwhile, Rarity and Applejack, who at this stage are both deeply unimpressed with the idea of spending time in each other’s company, have not one but two very good reasons not to simply walk away from the barrage of insults they’re about to undergo: not only because it’s dangerous, but also because they don’t want to upset Twilight, so things need to stay on the passive side of passive-aggressive.
Are they up to the task? Of course they aren’t.
In which Twilight Sparkle hosts her very first slumber party
What I especially like about the first party scene – liked it on first viewing, like it even more now – is that Applejack and Rarity (at this point, anyway) genuinely aren’t actively trying to get on each other’s nerves, they’re both just doing their usual thing – but they couldn’t be winding each other up any more if they were doing it on purpose.
So, when Applejack proposes they seal their deal by hocking up loudly and then gobbing onto her hoof before offering it to an ashen-faced Rarity (and it’s animated in especially disgusting fashion, the viscous spittle dripping off AJ’s hoof and onto the floor in a horrible gloopy dribble – while this might just be an artefact of the animators not being able to convincingly depict liquids yet, it’s almost perfectly revolting), Rarity is understandably horrified, which in turn only cements Applejack’s opinion of her as a fussbudget.
Ewww.
That’s what drives these party scenes: it’s a character piece. None of the three people ponies at this party knows how they’re meant to behave – partly because Twilight’s neurotic book-worship undoubtedly makes it hard for AJ and Rarity to catch the correct tone of the occasion, for sure, but also partly because they’re both acting like idiots trying to one-up each other in front of Twilight in some sort of deranged (but also kind of polite) bid to prove which of them is less hysterically anti-social.
It really helps that nopony can claim a monopoly on the moral high ground here – there’s no “heroine” of this piece. Leaving aside Twilight Sparkle’s weirdness for a moment, Applejack is messy and inconsiderate, playing up to the uncouth hillbilly stereotype (and going against the way we were first introduced to her in Mare in the Moon, where – despite obviously lacking any concept of personal space – she was surely considerate, taking pains to put a rude Twilight Sparkle at ease). And Rarity is unbelievably fussy and pernickety about things, almost automatically taking on the role of hostess uninvited whenever Twilight leaves more than a few seconds’ gap in proceedings. And to start with, neither of them really accepts what they’re doing is wrong, at all.
But AJ and Rarity not getting along is a symptom of their personalities clashing, not a cause. When they inevitably resolve their differences, it won’t be by changing who they are at heart, but rather by realising that their personalities aren’t in fact incompatible after all. With a bit of give and take when it comes to being considerate, showing both basic decent manners and good old fashioned common sense, these two can be friends. Close friends, in fact – they’re one of my favourite pairings on the show, largely because they end up going out of their way so much to accommodate each other’s quirks and foibles. They remain, deep down, the fashionista and the farmer, and that characterisation doesn’t just wash off because of one little tea party, it’s permanently dyed in their DNA.
The show doesn’t iron any of that out. Taken too far, that process could leave us with a bunch of identikit Friend Ponies with interchangeable personalities, only distinguishable by their vocal mannerisms and hairdos, and bringing about a surefire cancellation with nowhere new to go. Instead, My Little Pony gives us six properly fleshed-out characters, and then explores how those characters could realistically ever become friends without sacrificing their very essences, a journey which involves all of them venturing outside their traditional comfort zones and trying new things, hanging out with the types of ponies they’d previously shunned on principle.
For that reason, this is one of my favourite episodes of the first season. Before, during, and after the events which on any other kids’ show would be “life-changing”, Rarity remains Rarity, and Applejack remains Applejack.
And Twilight Sparkle? We don’t really know who Twilight Sparkle is just yet. I doubt even she does at this point.
I’ve Been To A Marvellous Party
So Applejack gets in from her bout with the hose, only to encounter Twilight and Rarity wearing mud masks. After a nice little joke, AJ asking what the deal is with her having to hose herself off in the freezing rain to get rid of mud, when these two are slathering the stuff all over their faces, Twilight gives the first of several brilliant turn-on-a-dime moments – first she explains in giddy, squeeing tones, smile wide as a mile:
And then suddenly falling absolutely flat in character:
The surreal atmosphere is only embellished when, as soon as Twilight declares the makeovers complete and ticks it off her checklist, all the make-up stuff suddenly disappears with a bang to leave the ponies looking exactly as they did before – there was literally no purpose to them doing that at all, except that Twilight wanted to check it off her list, having comically missed the point.
The acting throughout this episode is just outstanding – Tara Strong, Tabitha St. Germain and Ashleigh Ball all give great voice performances (although going back to this episode now, having watched four full seasons in five months, the accents – and AJ’s voice in particular – seem very different than the voices we’ve gotten used to later in the series’ run), but I’m not just talking about the voice acting, I mean the marriage of the voice cast with the brilliant animation to really convey the essence of these characters. My favourite moment comes when Twilight declares the next item is for the girls to tell each other ghost stories, and Applejack tells…
Whooooooo!
The way she waves her arms about on that last “whooooooooo!” absolutely cracked me up, her ears folding down to emphasise both her facial expression and her mental state (is this the first time we’ve seen that? It’s an awesome bit of design, anyway). And Rarity’s response is just a childish echo, and very nearly just as funny (amplified by her awful attempt at mimicking Applejack’s ending:
Then, the power goes out (which… I don’t know how that works?) and Twilight tells a real scary story in the darkness, resulting in Rarity and Applejack being genuinely frightened; Twilight might be doing this strictly by the book, but it’s the only aspect of the slumber party she pulls off completely perfectly. And then, as soon as her guests are quivering in fear… she immediately snaps the lights back on again and trots nonchalantly over to her book to check off another item. Achievement unlocked.
Call Me Mallow
Poor Twilight, she’s not having much luck at her first slumber party, given her two guest-mentors are engaged in an unspoken competition to out-guest-mentor each other. So, for the smores portion of the evening, Rarity painstakingly produces the most ridiculous party snack in history, with us joining the process near the end and her lecturing like a TV chef:
(This is both a nice callback to the cold open, where “prettifying” took priority over practicalities, and a nice foreshadowing of Rarity’s ill-fated nest-making in Winter Wrap Up – but it also foreshadows events later this very episode by flagging up her extraordinary attention to detail.) Applejack, of course, has a rather different approach to toasting marshmallows
(revolting slurping and gobbling noises, followed by extremely loud belch)
This, I think, is where the subtle digs spill over into rather less-subtle little attacks; as the night progresses and Rarity and Applejack annoy each other more and more, the thin veneer of Not Upsetting Twilight cracks and peels until we just have the two of them out and out bickering. The rest of the act is taken up with their increasingly amusing, increasingly immature attempts to one-up each other, and it’s full of set-pieces which are just fantastic on their own, even if there’s not a lot of analysis to be done here because they’re really just underlining the same point over and over, simply upping the ante each time.
This Is My Truth, Tell Me Yours
So, firstly, we get the world’s worst game of Truth or Dare; it’s not really something we have in Britain (or had when I was a youngster, at any rate, though maybe – like proms and high school graduation ceremonies – it’s another one of those things which is gradually creeping across the Atlantic to become part of the British teen landscape too?), but even with my limited knowledge, on initial viewing, it was clear Twilight has misunderstood the rules of the game: no truths are involved in this version, so the game is basically… “Dare”.
She’s also so clueless that she firmly, and adorably, believes Rarity and Applejack are also confused, rather than them just taking the opportunity to get in a few digs at each other’s expense:
AJ, quick-thinking as ever, turns the situation to her advantage first, jumping straight in with a specific dare rather than the woolly concept stuff (gambling, correctly, that Twilight will instantly back her up out of gratitude that the game seems to be back on track, and that Rarity will be powerless to resist).
Some fans apparently see Applejack’s choice of dare – for Rarity to go and stand out in the rain, getting soaked through and wrecking her mane in the process – as unnecessarily cruel, but I didn’t and don’t take it that way; Rarity has already forced AJ to stand outside with the hose, it’s Applejack’s firm belief that Rarity could stand to get a bit dirtier and less pristine in the hope it’ll rub off on her personality, and in any case, Rarity has the perfect riposte to get her own back:
…Why does Twilight have these clothes in her house anyway?
Poor Twilight has no choice but to watch this unfolding. Presumably her book didn’t prepare her for what happens when two of your guests are failing to get into the party spirit, or just being plain jerks to each other. Her plaintive little rejoinder:
…is just heartbreaking, like she’d almost want to be ordered out in the rain, just to be taking part. But no, she’s being ignored again; the party’s effectively going ahead without her, just like every other party she’s ever (not) been invited to. As the bickering intensifies and the ponies start raising their voices, she makes a bid to take back control again on behalf of her book:
Oh dear.
From Pillow To Post
This is a hilarious little scene; if it’s hard to suspend disbelief and accept that even a pony with as geeky and cloistered an upbringing as Twilight would misunderstand what a pillow fight is (man, Princess Cadance must have been a pretty strict foalsitter!), the actual action is outstanding. Firstly, there’s Rarity’s best line of the series so far (and I’m including the “missing” episodes in that):
(…takes direct hit in the face)
And then the pillow fight becomes a high-tempo artillery battle between Applejack and Rarity, launching barrages of pillows at each other, AJ tossing them in the air and bucking them at Rarity’s head at full speed, Rarity lining them up in an orderly fashion and launching them with her magic. And poor Twilight is caught in the middle, watching in fascinated horror before she takes one full in the face herself (and thereby amusing my kids, who have been laughing hysterically throughout this whole scene, even more):
(thwack!!)
Not the last time this’ll happen today. Maybe Twi should get a CAT scan.
Poor Twilight Sparkle; Pinkie isn’t around to enforce the promise these two both made not to ruin Twilight’s very first slumber party, but you can bet she’d be furious, because it’s definitely being ruined. And the worst is yet to come. Although for the audience, it’s maybe the best.
Oddly, No Actual Sleeping Takes Place In This Episode
The library apparently has no guest bedroom and only one big guest bed, so Applejack and Rarity need to share, leading to some of the silliest scenes of the show’s early days; between this and Applebuck Season, the amount of experimentation with animated comedy (and especially knockabout visual humour and slapstick gags) is probably at its highest peak, before things begin to settle down with a defined “style” for the show.
So, this scene brings us, in turn, a squabble over whether Applejack’s hooves are muddy or not which culminates in her shoving them in Rarity’s face:
Do remind me again which finishing school you went to?
…then a bit of classic “stealing the blanket” comedy leading to Rarity physically headbutting Applejack off the mattress, remaking the bed, and demonstrating the “correct”, ladylike way to ease oneself under the covers: kind of a 14-point turn, self-consciously dainty (I like the idea that back home, she goes through this absurd ritual every single night)… except, inevitably:
I always forget just how much physical comedy there is in this episode.
As if to make up for it, we then get some top-class comedy bickering in the dialogue too – kudos again to Tabitha and Ashleigh for the way they handle this. I don’t know if it was actually recorded with them both present, or how much of this was ad-libbed and how much of it scripted, but it’s just superbly childish, and both actresses do a sterling job of playing a pair of grown-ups who know they’re being petty and petulant.
(…incredibly fake “snoring” noises)
Rarity demands AJ get out of bed, the demand is refused, Rarity whips the covers off Applejack anyway (presumably in retaliation for the “Geronimo!” thing)…
I can’t pinpoint exactly when we reached “out of hand”, but we’re past it here.
… and a spectacularly immature tug-of-war ensues, before we get the kicker that all of this was taking place, very loud and very late, with Twilight Sparkle three feet away and wide awake.
“ENOUGH!” Poor Twilight. Although she looks hung over in this frame.
Twilight unloads on the pair of them, and for a moment it’s just like we’ve got our geeky, irritable first-episode purple unicorn back again. All the ponies in this town are, indeed, crazy, or at least guaranteed to become awesomely awful houseguests the minute they step over the threshold of the library.
I love this scene, because it hints at Twilight not being quite so clueless as she’s been portrayed so far – was she fully aware of these two acting the goat all night, but trying to overlook it for the sake of her party? In any event, she’s right – even if she was a dictatorial and generally clueless host, Applejack and Rarity both explicitly promised each other they wouldn’t ruin Twilight’s night for her, and they got so caught up in their little feud that they failed their neurotic new friend miserably. And they’re still doing it (and Rarity is still scoring points off Applejack’s dialect grammar):
Twilight already said “enough”, you guys. Suddenly Rainbow Dash slamming into a rockface while trying to get away from Pinkie Pie feels almost trivial; Twilight might well be tempted to order them both out of her house, though of course she doesn’t, because deep down she’s more hurt than annoyed.
We feel for her – and then she goes and commits the cardinal sin of fate-tempting. Now, I should probably be rolling my eyes at the cliché here, especially when it basically cuts off Twilight’s (justified, if probably not really helping matters) lecture mid-flow… but honestly, by this point it would have been a disappointment if the writers hadn’t brought the storm back into play, and so I forgive them:
(enormous crash of thunder and flash of lightning which genuinely made me jump)
Oh, Twilight Sparkle.
In which Twilight Sparkle’s party is interrupted
by some impromptu gardening
The Big Event that brings matters first to a head and then to a conclusion is a dangerously unstable tree which, thanks to another lightning strike, is now overhanging the library and liable to crash through the roof at any moment.
I love that throughout the following scene, the balance of power swings back and forth like a three-way pendulum. Initially, it’s Applejack who takes the initiative; she berates Rarity for not having done the pruning job properly at the start of the episode, and judging by Rarity’s shamefaced reaction, it’s not a criticism without some merit. The script underlines what we’ve learned already by getting a bit too on-the-nose about what differentiates Rarity and Applejack, presumably for the benefit of younger or duller children:
But then Applejack takes things too far, as she is wont to do; she takes charge of the situation over the others’ vocal protests, opening a window (and letting loads of driving rain come sheeting in, a lovely effect) and aiming to lasso the tree and pull it down to the ground safely. Above Rarity and Twilight’s howls of dissent, Applejack gets the rope around the tree with superb skill and considerable effort, only pausing to bask in the glory of a perfectly-executed “told you so”…
Acting recklessly without bothering to think things through is BOUND to pay off. Right?
…except she then gets carried away. In her hubris, and enjoying having shown up Rarity once and for all, AJ gives the rope a yank to finish the job, without first watching where the toppled tree is going to land. Inevitably, the entire top half comes crashing through Twilight’s bedroom window, leaving Applejack (with the rope still in her mouth) dangling over the mezzanine balcony with a priceless startled expression on her face.
Y’all saw that? …Uhhh… Oops?
Massive Bed Trauma
Sometimes I’d come to these little conclusions when I was watching the show for the first time, and I’d think over them afterwards, and they seemed really obvious – like, to the point I hadn’t even questioned them – and then when I eventually went online, I got really confused, not just because some bronies had a different interpretation of a particular scene, but because I hadn’t realised there was room for doubt.
This is maybe the first example of that. Twilight gets hit quite hard in the head by a tree, and the animators make sure we notice, googly eyes and comedy sound effects and all:
Concussion is magic!
…and after a great semi-lucid rant which really endeared her to me even more – Applejack apologises for trashing her house, and true to form Twilight automatically starts to brush it off with a meaningless platitude, It’s okay!, before stopping herself mid-sentence and declaring that actually, no, it isn’t okay at all, there’s a freaking tree in her bedroom thanks to AJ’s stupidity – well, she then immediately starts talking nonsense, and spends the rest of the scene largely oblivious to what’s going on around her or the fact she’s being battered with rain, frantically looking things up in her party book, her role now reduced to providing well-timed comic interjections.
So, I just assumed, oh, okay, she’s meant to be either concussed or deeply traumatised or something, right? And then I find lots of criticism of Twilight acting stupidly at the end, and thus being badly-written. But I can’t believe either Charlotte Fullerton or any of the script team would be so lax as to completely abandon the show’s ostensible heroine to sit there holding the idiot ball for the culminative scene for no justified in-universe reason – that’s the sort of thing that doesn’t usually happen in My Little Pony and it’d be hugely, hugely off-model for these writers to just designate one character to act stupid for a bit. Alright, so, maybe I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure we’re meant to take it that Twilight is basically MIA for the rest of the scene, having been sidelined by the tree, leaving AJ and Rarity to fix things themselves.
The effort gets off to a poor start; Rarity exasperates Applejack by refusing to help shift the giant tree and instead picking up some displaced knick-knacks and rearranging a few knocked-over books, while AJ on her own makes no progress at all trying to move the tree despite a high-speed mini-montage of failed ideas, and Rarity quite deliberately ignores her.
And then things change a little unexpectedly, and I remember even on first watch being impressed that this show is willing to sort out shopworn plots in surprisingly mature ways.
Beds, Snobs and Broomsticks
Just as with Rainbow Dash in Griffon the Brush Off, Applejack has a particular way to her heart that involves you earning her respect; in Rainbow’s case it was being able to take (and make) a joke at your own expense, while for AJ it’s not shirking hard work.
There’s probably a lot more to write about this topic, and I’ll get into it a lot more when we get to Applebuck Season, but it casts a lot of light on Applejack’s character: she’s someone who’s always had to work hard, as a matter of survival, and so it’s understandable she’d have disdain for someone who doesn’t want to dig in and help out for fear they might get their spotless hooves dirty. (And this is only heightened further when we discover Applejack actually has experience of being a debutante socialite moving in the circles of the super-rich, but that’s a story for another day, too.)
But Applejack is my favourite pony, and this is pretty much where that starts. Not because she screwed up badly and thus proved she isn’t perfect; not even because she admitted to screwing up badly, and thus proved she’s big enough to admit when she’s wrong (although the fact she’s the one to step up and break the deadlock was what impressed me the most initially); but because of the way she reacts to realising she’s in charge now. She calms herself down, figures out what she has to do, and gets to it.
All the way through this episode, she’s been working out – calculating, you might even say – how to get things to go her way in her little battle with Rarity, and now she suddenly realises the “battle” was pointless and destructive (literally, in this last instance), and it’s gone too far. She understands what she has to do to get this mess cleared up. She needs to work out how to be Rarity’s friend, to figure out what Rarity needs from her – and thanks to the less-than-pleasant evening they just spent together, AJ finds she already has the answer.
Rarity isn’t just a narcissist. She needs to feel like she’s being listened to, taken seriously, valued; up until now (and I firmly believe Applejack gets this before anyone else), Rarity has been treated in-universe as an ineffectual joke of a character, the token vapid one, entertaining but ultimately less credible than even Pinkie Pie. Now, she needs to know she’s needed – and not just as another pair of hooves on the ground, but that she is needed. And trusted.
And AJ has to be the bigger pony and make that first conciliatory move, because Rarity’s feelings are hurt and she’s feeling vulnerable and liable to keep on lashing out like a child, except now it’s not funny. And it’ll carry on this way unless Applejack puts it right. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the night so far, if Rarity thinks they’re still tussling, then Applejack needs to forfeit.
A less-good show would have that work instantly, but Charlotte Fullerton knows we’ve invested too much in this conflict to have it resolved at the drop of a hat by Rarity having to betray her very nature, and so we get this eminently quotable bit of dialogue, one of my favourites of the whole first season and something which planted the seeds of my Applejack-love all the more firmly:
Consarn’it!! What… You… (sigh) I mean, yes. Ickiness is often a side-effect of hard work. But y’all need to get over it, on account of I just can’t fix this mess I made myself!
And so they set to work fixing the mess; Applejack smashes the wood into manageable chunks, Rarity does her magical topiary spell from the intro to turn the branches into cute little bonsai bushes, and poor confused Twilight pipes up with nonsensical non-sequiturs instead of watching:
I love the end of this sequence – Applejack is about to buck the last remaining piece of trunk out of the window (and probably into the neighbouring county) with her hind legs, but just as she’s rearing up for the kick, Rarity glares at her, and without a word (and indeed, without breaking eye contact!) Applejack, busted, checks herself, lowers her legs, turns round and gently lifts it out of the window with her mouth instead:
“Yes, I can see you, and I urge you to reconsider. With my eyes.”
A sweet little moment, followed by an even sweeter one. The window is closed, the rain’s no longer belting in, Rarity and Applejack share a look and acknowledge a job well done, and for the first time in their lives, they each find they have respect for the other.
Just at that moment, Rarity realises in horror that she’s absolutely caked in mud, leaves and other crud. Rather than taunt her for being so fussy, Applejack thinks for a moment, and then comes up with a way to make Rarity feel less self-conscious about being muddy, and it’s perfect:
Awwwwwww.
It’s a lovely moment; a clever idea in itself on the writers’ part (put cucumber slices on her eyes, so she can pretend she’s having a mud bath and doesn’t have to see the state of her mane and coat), and it’s such a sweet gesture, because it’s clear Applejack has really put some thought into it. Kids’ shows throw out hugs like confetti. It’s rare to find one I actually feel has been properly earned.
At which point, Special Edition “Head Injury Power” Twilight decides to rejoin us, having noticed the rain has stopped, the tree’s gone, and she’s instead surrounded with little ornamental bush things:
Ooh, pretty! …Where did these come from? They’re not in the book either!
The Morning After The Night Before
If I was asked to pick just one recurring theme of this first season so far, this next bit really sums it up: a vision of a much less good show rearing its ugly head just long enough for the viewer to worry that’s the way things are going (and especially if that viewer happens to be, say, a parent who’s sat through more than their fair share of sloppy will-this-do kids’ programming), before pulling a switcheroo and leaving us even more impressed than ever.
So, everyone’s had a hot bath and washed their manes, and now they’re sitting around in their curlers giggling and playing Twenty Questions and having an actual slumber party (although it feels less like the tween party the book was laying out, and more like a girls’ night in, sans wine!)
See? We could have been having fun like this all along.
And it’s cute and funny, Twilight revelling in seeing two of her new friends getting along so well; it’s kind of lovely, even when Twilight contrives to misunderstand “are we getting warmer?” as a criticism of her control of the thermostat, and even when AJ and Rarity come up – together, collaboratively – with a deliberately stupid Hail Mary final question which is ever so slightly jarringly infantile for adult viewers, but which had my kids in stitches:
But then things take a downward turn when the two of them get into a bout of competitive apologising, each apparently trying to outdo the other in contrition for having ruined the evening earlier on:
…So, honestly, I worried that after all the knockabout comedy and the deeply bonding shared experience, and knowing we must be fast approaching the end, the show was going to undo so much of its good work by fading to black with these two back to bickering again.
But no – turns out they were just trolling Twilight, and their newfound friendship is solid. AJ likes making friends, and now she knows Rarity can be a good friend to have in a pinch, however prissy she comes across; Rarity realises that AJ isn’t just a mouthy hick, she’s honest and strong, however messy she can be. And neither of them has changed one bit, they’ve simply realised that they can be friends with their polar opposite and not have that stuff matter.
Twilight was as nervous as I was, but her beaming smile on realising she was just being gently mocked could melt the ice caps.
I declare my first slumber party a success! Have fun: check!
So, instead of undermining what went before, the final moments of the episode are a well-earned payoff for all the bickering these three put us through. As we see AJ and Rarity genuinely having fun with some sort of blindfold game in the background (obviously they’re not meant to be drunk, though the scene is certainly capable of being read that way!), and Twilight jots down her memo to Princess Celestia, I’m struck yet again by the show’s realistic approach to its titular core subject; this is a more believable depiction of friendship than I’ve ever seen on a children’s show, possibly any show. Moral time!
Ponies Are As Ponies Do
If it wasn’t already obvious, I really, really liked this episode. As I said at the start, I think I probably benefitted from seeing this before Boast Busters and Applebuck Season moved the stories (and our understanding) of Twilight and Applejack forward from where we left them the end of the pilot, and I know I appreciated some of the slightly more outlandish animation sight gags that are a feature of these early episodes, but even in hindsight I think it’s one of my favourite episodes of the first season.
Why? Time for a litany of praise. It’s well-written, the jokes are good, both the central conflict (AJ and Rarity) and its resolution are believable, it takes a novel approach to a one-room, minimal cast sitcom setting, it (again) avoids several easy ways out, and it’s clearly been made with great affection by everyone involved – acting, directing, design, animation, everyone seems to have gone into this just wanting to make it good.
I can see why this episode might be unpopular, why people would consider it to be badly written, or contrived, or silly, or implausible. I don’t think it’s really any of those things (well, unpopular maybe!); it’s remained one of my children’s favourites and I very much enjoyed watching it again to write this.
One day, soon, I’m sure I’ll come across an episode that completely falls apart in my hands when I start picking at it; Look Before You Sleep isn’t that episode. Although it probably works best when you see it fourth like we did.
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I’d love to hear your own thoughts and comments below – all opinions are welcome and dissent is encouraged!
Alternatively, there’s a lot more discussion and comments on the Reddit post for this essay:
Reddit – /r/mylittlepony on Ponywatching 1.08
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