“Hoo! ”
Episode written by Cindy Morrow
Entirely unofficial reflections by sixcardroulette
This is a full-length Ponywatching essay. For a condensed review
of this episode, check out The Shorter Ponywatching!
This, for various reasons, is my least favourite episode of the first season; to be more specific, it’s the episode I enjoyed the least on first viewing (again, for various reasons), and also one we haven’t often been back since to revisit. But here I am writing another really long recap/reflection thing about it – is this just going to be thousands of words piling on negativity?
No, absolutely not. I don’t want to become the Pollyanna of the brony analysis community, but quite honestly I don’t think there are any bad episodes of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, at least not so far. With 99 of them now under our belts, I can say even the ones that rank near the bottom of my personal pile (and surely mine will be different to yours!) still have plenty of good things to commend them. This one certainly does.
See, I’m happy to be doing this blog, because I love the show. Does that affect my judgement a bit, I wonder? Do I give less-good episodes an easy ride because I’m so fond of this crazy show which came out of nowhere to win my affections so quickly – or did this crazy show win me over so quickly because, for me, even the less-good episodes are just that, “less-good” as opposed to “bad”?
Don’t Fear The Recap
For readers just joining us, Ponywatching is the story of how my family and I, a proud dad to two wonderful children, came to love My Little Pony: part blind reaction, part episode recap, part personal reflections, part analysis.
We started to watch the show because someone got my daughter the Season 1 DVD box set for this Christmas just past, while we were all staying at my parents’ in a remote part of Wales for the holidays. Hesitant at first, because we were roughly as keen for our daughter to like My Little Pony as we were for her to take up Barbie or smoking, on December 28th we finally relented and put it in the DVD player.
We watched three episodes that first day – the two-part “pilot” (it isn’t really a pilot in the traditional sense, but its relationship to the rest of the series pretty much makes it one anyway), Mare in the Moon / Elements of Harmony, and then what we thought was the third episode, Griffon the Brush Off. By the end of that little lot, we were already feeling much reassured this wasn’t the My Little Pony of old, not that either of us remembered all that much about the My Little Pony of old in the first place; this new version had epic lore, well-written characters, and surprisingly excellent gags that didn’t rely solely on winking non-stop to the adults in the audience.
It turns out that the British DVDs have the episodes in completely the wrong order, but we had no idea – any continuity inconsistencies so far we’d (entirely unfairly) chalked up to the widespread (in our experience) problem of kids’ TV by and large simply not caring about such things, rather than it actually being down to the laziness of the DVD compilers finger-painting all over Lauren Faust’s big picture. Hold that thought, it’ll be important in a minute.
That was day one.
On day two, we watched what we thought was the fourth episode (actually the eighth), Look Before You Sleep, a superb little three-handed character piece, well-written and very funny.
On day three, we watched what we thought was the fifth episode (actually the tenth), Swarm of the Century, an out-and-out farce which – while also very funny – seemed slightly to go against the grain of what we’d thought the show was trying to do. It was still excellent, but while we ended the episode liking the show more, we also felt a bit less sure of what it was going to be, if that makes sense.
We were still “rationing” episodes by this point – however much we were enjoying it (and I was starting to recognise how much I’d enjoyed it for myself, never mind that it made the kids happy), we didn’t necessarily want to spend the entire holiday watching episodes of My Little Pony.
Day four was New Year’s Eve, and in a bid to keep the children awake long enough to see in the New Year (and celebrate their grandfather’s birthday, which happens to fall on January 1st), relatively late in the evening, we watched Owl’s Well That Ends Well. The children were keen to watch “more Ponies!”; my wife and I were keen too, because so far the show had had a very good run, and not just by comparison to the horrors we might have been expecting.
But, and this is kind of important, we were all starting to feel a bit tired. I don’t mean tired of the show, I mean literally that we were getting a little sleepy. I think it would have been around 9 or 10pm by this point (our sort-of-tradition of watching It’s a Wonderful Life as the year runs out the clock was still to come, the rest of the New Year’s Eve TV had been checked off the list, we were staying in). We were all full of party food and fizzy drinks, and the adults had had slightly too much caffeine, and the children were up past their bedtime. We weren’t in bad moods as such, but we weren’t exactly sprightly and on the ball either as we hit “play” on this final episode of the disc.
Silver Planet
Okay. The disc. Yes.
Britain has been poorly served in terms of being able to watch My Little Pony properly and legally. My daughter got the Season 1 DVD for Christmas 2014 because that’s when it came out. That 2014 is no typo. We still can’t buy any newer episodes digitally, or in HD, and the Season 2 DVD hasn’t been timetabled for a British release yet.
(As I explained when talking about Griffon the Brush Off, there’s a convoluted explanation which involves a distributor releasing the season 1 episodes in batches of five- or six-episode compilation DVDs, the company going bust, and then a new distributor belatedly picking up the rights (for which we’re all grateful!) – but only having access to the masters for those compilation DVDs, which were then packaged up in a “best we could do” Complete Season 1 box set. As a result, the box set keeps the running order, plus the menus and bonus features, from those first compilation releases. We didn’t know any of this at the time.)
The first of those single-disc UK compilation DVDs, resurrected exactly as-was here as Disc 1 of the box set, was apparently conceived as an introduction to the show, released at a time when it hadn’t yet aired on British television (the first four seasons are now in rotation on a splendidly obscure cable channel called Tiny Pop! TV, which I’d never heard of before.) Entitled “Welcome to Ponyville”, it comprised these first six episodes we’ve discussed on Ponywatching so far.
For the first four episodes we’ve talked about, the choices have been understandable in hindsight – the pilot two-parter comes first to introduce all the characters, and then we get episodes focussing on one particular pairing from the main cast: Pinkie and Rainbow in Griffon the Brush Off, Rarity and Applejack in Look Before You Sleep.
All in all, nothing was really lost in watching those four as the first four; indeed, there’s an argument to be made (by me, here) that they actually work better in that capacity than the actual first four episodes.
Putting Swarm of the Century fifth is more problematic, not least because it throws in a few characters we’ve not actually met (Zecora being the most glaring example), before their introductions have been properly made. I get the strong feeling someone included it mainly because it opens with a solo Fluttershy scene and they didn’t watch the rest of the episode to see it develop into an ensemble farce instead, unlike the other “slice of life” episodes they picked which actually do keep focus on the pair introduced in the cold open. But, still, no major harm done.
Which is rather more than can be said for Owl’s Well That Ends Well being drafted in to round off that crucial first disc.
You Gotta Care
What in Equestria is this doing sixth up? It’s easy enough to guess (the compilers wanted a Spike episode to complete the set?), but actually what it shows is a kind of carelessness bordering on contempt for the younger viewers. And contempt for the younger viewers is the polar opposite of Lauren Faust’s avowed intention in creating this show. Put simply, by watching this one sixth, you run the risk of largely ruining one of the great surprise reveals of the show, which comes in the episode these geniuses put seventh.
Spoiler alert:
Nice going, idiots.
But this is where we were very, very lucky. Whether it was simply because we were kind of tired and therefore not paying attention, or because the setup of the episode thus far hadn’t really grabbed us enough to make us pay attention, we didn’t notice.
Oh, I remember being mildly irritated that the show was apparently throwing in more random characters we’d never seen before, again, without any kind of introduction – and that feeling of being ever so slightly and uncomfortably lost is what always comes to mind when I see people start demanding background ponies be given more prominent roles as fanservice.
But the fact that Apple Bloom (a) doesn’t have her cutie mark, but (b) is friends with some other ponies who also don’t have their cutie marks… that sailed over my head on first viewing because I wasn’t watching closely enough, and because we hadn’t seen Call of the Cutie and didn’t know what a cutie mark was, or indeed remember Apple Bloom from the pilot at all.
And I’m so, so grateful it went over my head like that, because (as I’ll expand next time out!), I think the setup of Call of the Cutie is genius, and the ending is an outstandingly lovely moment, and since we only get one chance to see each episode for the first time, I’m very glad that one wasn’t trampled over by careless compilers.
Do you think I’m being too harsh on the said compilers? Well, don’t. Whoever signed off on that first disc couldn’t give two hoots (no pun intended) about the extremely careful storytelling employed by the show, or the importance of keeping surprises surprising (because, hey, they’re just kids, right?) – one of the DVD extras on that VERY FIRST DISC, which again thank Celestia we didn’t look at on first viewing, is this little character profile inviting us to “Meet Twilight Sparkle”, which manages to contain major spoilers for future plot events in the opening two seconds and just gets worse from there:
DO NOT CLICK unless you’ve seen the end of Season 3! And if you have, marvel at the insensitivity!
I mean… really?
That’s so careless, so thoughtless, it’s bordering on the actively malicious (especially when it appears from that website that there’s a perfectly innocuous non-spoilery version of the same video which could have been used without issue!)
Once again, I’m so, so, SO glad I didn’t watch that at the time. One of the things that really made My Little Pony stand out when we first got into it was just how much care really has been lavished on it, how much respect it pays to its audience old and young, when so many children’s shows positively reek of “will this do?” as everyone involved – actors, animators, writers, distributors – collect their paychecks. (I remember Lauren Faust herself saying something similar about one of the attempts to reboot Strawberry Shortcake). While I don’t want anyone’s job to be in jeopardy, I can’t help but feel there was some karmic retribution that these people went out of business. Kids notice and get upset by this sort of crap.
Unless it’s late at night on New Year’s Eve and so you happen to get away with it because the audience aren’t watching the episode closely enough, that is.
Oh, right, yeah, the episode. Almost forgot for a moment there.
In which Spike displays all the competence and attention to detail of a British DVD compiler
My wife enjoyed Owl’s Well That Ends Well more than I did, and our children somewhere in between; but all of us nonetheless enjoyed it. (Mostly on later viewings, I mean. I’m not sure any of us were really paying enough attention (to the episode, or to each other and our reactions) that first time.)
So, to go back to that question I posed earlier, is it affection for the show that leads me to conclude there are no truly bad episodes, or is it that there are no truly bad episodes which drives my affection for the show?
Turns out it’s the latter, as far as I can say. I don’t really think of the most commonly-cited flaws with bronies’ least favourite episodes – script structure issues, continuity mistakes, slightly “off” acting, jokes that don’t land – as dealbreakers when the overall result is still such good fun.
Now, I’m not giving Friendship is Magic credit for simply existing and being less bad than it could have been, but rather because the show is never trying for an acceptable mediocrity. Every episode so far – 99 to date! – has evidently started out aiming to make a good episode of a great show, looking and sounding wonderful, including at least one guaranteed excellent joke. If some of them are sitcom masterpieces, there’ll invariably be others at the opposite end of the (entirely subjective, wholly personal) quality scale – but even those “lesser” instalments merely lose points from a high starting total, rather than struggling to build on a hopeless foundation.
A conversation I had on Reddit with NoobJr really helped crystallise exactly what I wanted to say here. It’s not that most cartoons are bad, far from it. There are lots of very decent animated kids’ TV shows, some of them well-written, or with excellent songs, or great acting, attractive animation, perceptive direction… you just don’t often get a show that combines all of those achievements, and if you do, they likely won’t manage it on a regular basis.
That’s what My Little Pony does pretty much week in, week out, and is still doing after 99 episodes. When it (subjectively) falls noticeably short of the standard it’s set itself in any of those departments – which for me is really rare – the show doesn’t become “bad”, it simply fails to distinguish itself from the surrounding pack as much as it could.
Even in its weaker moments, and again I’d argue there really aren’t that many of them, not really, well, at worst Friendship is Magic becomes an average cartoon: still fun enough to pass the time as a preferable choice, with the bonus of some guaranteed beautiful animation and scoring. What it doesn’t become is an unwatchable train wreck; its hit/miss ratio is still better than many excellent live-action adult sitcoms, and even in those weaker moments it’s still better than some shows’ best efforts.
I’m not exaggerating there. Bronies without children are at a disadvantage (if you can call it that, some might prefer to think of it as a boon!) when it comes to first-hand knowledge of just how much kids’ TV is apparently happy to be subpar or merely adequate. Unless something’s gone badly wrong, your family won’t buy you a DVD of Make Way for Noddy, you won’t find yourself coming home from a drugstore with a shoddily-animated poorly-dubbed budget straight-to-DVD Latvian cartoon you’ve never heard of because your child liked the crudely-drawn animal on the front and wouldn’t put it down, you won’t face a tantrum if you don’t turn the TV back over to Animal Mechanicals (which, hilariously, I’ve just discovered is a DHX Media stablemate of My Little Pony. Hah.)
That isn’t me suggesting I find all children’s TV to be of similarly poor quality, or (again) that My Little Pony gets extra credit simply for not being awful, but rather that there’s nothing like context to make the good stuff shine even brighter. Even when the show drifts out furthest from its A-game – which, in first season terms, for me, means this episode – My Little Pony is definitely Good Stuff.
#1 Dream
Owl’s Well That Ends Well – bonus “confusing allusion” points for anyone familiar with the highly inappropriate for children Shakespeare play that shares a similar title (though the phrase as an idiom predates that by about 350 years, boring trivia fans) – opens with a short scene of Twilight and Spike preparing for a night of stargazing. Twilight wanders around the library talking to nobody in particular, and Spike runs around behind gathering supplies and tossing them into a handcart.
Spike at your service!
Right away, there’s something a bit weird and ever-so-slightly stagey about the way Tara Strong delivers her Clunky ExpositionTM lines here, and indeed for a few of her deliveries in this episode. It’s not that they’re bad or anything, just that she sounds slightly “detached” from the rest of the action (I found out much, much later that she regularly records her lines alone, in her own home studio, rather than schlepping up to Vancouver to join the rest of the voice cast, but from memory this is the only time it really jumps out, and anyway criticising one very very mildly unusual performance in the light of 100 other exceptional ones (including the movies) feels kind of churlish. Still, here we are.)
Nonetheless, it’s a small thing, and quickly redeemed (for me) because Spike seems to be doing a “replying but not really listening” thing that feels just right for what we’ve seen of their relationship so far. (Also, he’s much better at it than Twilight, who could only muster the occasional “Uh-huh” when Pinkie was prattling at her back in Griffon The Brush Off):
This meteor shower tonight’s going to be amazing!
Awesome!
(Looking at it written down, I realise it actually reads like the dialogue from a handheld video game, like the Phoenix Wright series or indeed Gameloft’s own My Little Pony app.)
Anyway, ironically for an episode in which his competence is repeatedly called into question, Spike starts out giving full value for money as a superb PA to a demanding boss; he’s got everything prepared for the trip, and he’s also baked some (apparently delicious) cookies too.
This is the kind of interaction I like to see between the two of them. Twilight may have made lots of new friends since she came to Ponyville, but a part of her will always be the nerdy, awkward wallflower that only had her baby dragon for company. Of course, a rather larger part of Spike will likely always be bound to Twilight, possibly pining for the days when Twilight didn’t have anyone else to confide in, and that’s something the show hasn’t really explored yet, though the writers have scratched at that surface on multiple occasions (including this one) without really providing any answers.
For now, their relationship is just nice to see; I’ve said before that scenes between Twilight and Spike provide a rare window into what both of their lives were like before leaving Canterlot, and the back-and-forth repartée they enjoy gives us a glimpse of an extremely comfortable friendship. There’s a nice moment here when Spike gently tricks Twilight into giving him extra compliments; not because he’s an egotistical jerk, but because he loves to hear how he’s made Twilight proud:
I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you…!
The character models have advanced a bit since last time, haven’t they?
It occurs to me watching this again now that Spike’s relationship with Twilight shares a lot of similarities (though also a lot of differences) with Twilight’s own relationship with Princess Celestia. Unfortunately for Spike, one of those shared similarities is a tendency to have meltdowns whenever they think they’re about to disappoint their mentor, and that’s the theme of this cold open.
Twilight asks Spike to get a dusty old book down from the shelf; Spike breathes in the dust, thinks he’s going to sneeze, doesn’t, opens the book, and, well, it turns out dragons sneeze fire.
Oops.
Panic sets in immediately (not helped by a great animation touch when he holds the book upright and three ounces of charcoal powder pours out). Naturally, and wholly in keeping with what we’ve seen so far, Spike’s first instinct is to tell Twilight straight away put the book back on the shelf and pretend he couldn’t find it.
If I were an impartial insurance agent, I’d be saying some of the blame rests on Twilight for employing a fire-breathing baby mythological creature as a library assistant, and surely she anticipated a few possible incidents like this…? Being serious, from what we’ve seen of Spike and Twilight’s relationship so far (from what we’ve seen, I mean, never mind after virtually an entire season like we should have seen), I didn’t get the feeling she’d react too badly to an accident like this. Maybe we’re just seeing panic making him irrational.
But it’s not only about why he lies, it’s about why he’s so bad at it. Didn’t Spike think to cover his tracks and obtain a replacement copy? And why leave the evidence – the burnt shell of the book – on Twilight’s shelf and in its correct place, just waiting to be discovered? Silly dragon.
Characters being stupid for plot reasons is never fun, and poor Spike will get the rough end of this deal on more than one occasion in future episodes; for now, this is a whole story which leans quite heavily on contrivances like this, which is why, I think, I’ve never really taken it to heart.
Cue the happy theme music!
In which Twilight gets a new action figure assistant
All my memories of our first time watching this episode so far have been about context, or big-picture stuff, personal recollections of the circumstances in which we first saw it and the overall impact. I haven’t done my usual thing of commenting on what we liked before going back to analyse why we liked it; if you’re wondering why, it’s because I really don’t have that many first-time memories of Owl’s Well That Ends Well.
Initially, I thought that was simply an artefact of the weird environment in which we first watched it – and since few things annoy me as much as half-arsed “reviews” from people who freely admit they weren’t really paying attention, I believed that my relatively lukewarm feelings towards this one might have more to do with me than with the episode itself, and that’s not fair at all.
But it’s always been one of the less popular episodes with the family, too (even on this first disc, my children often ask to rewatch one of the others rather than play this one), and I hadn’t been back to watch it again at all before I started making more of an effort to marshal my thoughts a few weeks ago in preparation for starting this blog.
When I went back to rewatch Owl’s Well That Ends Well, this time very much as both a confirmed fan of the show and as someone with a positive, rather than hostile, disposition when it came to My Little Pony, I was honestly kind of surprised that when the end credits rolled, my initial feelings (tl;dr: “some funny stuff, some poorly-conceived stuff, overall: meh, ‘s’okay”) still largely held out, though as with pretty much all the “troublesome” episodes of the show, I do find myself liking this one more the more I see it.
Welcome To The Show
So before we get into the usual Ponywatching scene-by-scene breakdown, I’m going to do this backwards as far as the essay is concerned, and start off with my conclusion: This simply isn’t a very good idea for an episode.
It might have sounded promising on paper, or even when it first started being batted back and forth in the writers’ meeting. It’s simple, high-concept stuff, boiled down to 3 words: “Spike gets jealous”.
But jealousy isn’t inherently funny or sympathetic on its own, and Spike hasn’t had enough of a spotlight to make us automatically take his side against a blameless outsider (compare and contrast Pinkie Pie with Gilda in Griffon the Brush Off). We’re not as invested in Spike as his creators are (and certainly not, in our particular case, after five episodes!), and ultimately we have to be given a reason to care, or rather to sympathise, that he’s jealous.
A better premise would be “Spike feels inadequate”; inadequacy can be internal and illogical but also easily fixed with a clear display of approval from the mentor figure. Jealousy requires a rival, and for it to be funny it requires a rival with a distinct personality, preferably giving us a valid reason for Spike to be jealous as opposed to merely threatened or selfish. Instead, Spike’s “rival” is a cute, defenseless animal, a newly-introduced character who doesn’t speak or emote, and so Spike’s jealousy is very quickly shown to be baseless paranoia.
So, okay, let’s work with Spike’s baseless paranoia. If that’s going to be funny, the comedy then has to come from Spike himself, watching him unravel as he becomes more and more unreasonable, seeing his wildly exaggerated fears over what’s going to happen next. But that isn’t really explored either; the unravelling just happens almost out of nowhere, and it’s never made clear exactly what it is Spike fears will unfold if his place really is usurped.
Not only does he have a workplace relationship with Twilight that overlaps but doesn’t exactly mirror their friendship (something that really muddies the waters in terms of what’s appropriate within the context of that relationship) he’s also only ever been shown as loyal and quick-witted, putting Twilight’s needs above his own, which makes his sudden descent into acting like an irrational jerk a confusing and unwelcome surprise.
The plot of this one is very simple: Twilight acquires an owl as a helper, Spike feels threatened and tries to prove his worth as Twilight’s assistant, but his increasingly desperate attempts (usually intended to be at the owl’s expense) only make him look worse; eventually, Spike flips out and runs away from home, Twilight and the owl rescue him, hugs are exchanged.
But I don’t really care if Spike’s good at his actual job or not. In fact, we don’t much know either way (and the writers address this right from the start, with everyone queueing up to tell us what a great assistant he is), but actually that’s by the by because it makes very little difference to the show whether he makes a good PA and general dogsbody (I’m thinking in particular of one future episode where he appears to be dangerously flat-out inept). Spike’s importance in these opening episodes has been as a friend to Twilight Sparkle, her only friend, someone she can be totally comfortable around to the point they mildly rib each other.
That’s the Spike we care about, the valued life companion, not the guy who cleans her house and files her paperwork. The big, honking problem with Owl’s Well That Ends Well isn’t so much that it conflates those things (as Spike himself does), but rather that the conflation is done poorly, established in service to the chosen “jealousy” plot rather than being the plot driver in its own right. More than any other episode in the first season, I feel like this one is heading in the wrong direction from the get-go, and that it needed a major conceptual rethink before anyone even began to put pen to paper.
There’s still a great story to be told about Spike’s very real insecurities, his deep-seated fear of rejection when the day comes that Twilight no longer needs him, his fears over what the future will hold if his supposed inherent dragon nature (all the older dragons we ever see are portrayed universally as oafish monsters) overwhelms his sweet personality. Whether it’s played for drama or comedy, the potential is there for that story to be awesome.
This is not that story, and Spike turns out to be a bad choice as a peg for a standard-issue cartoon jealousy outline concept.
The problematic details of the plot – the “rival” being basically devoid of personality, or Spike apparently having no friends other than Twilight who are close enough to discuss his fears – feel like storytelling mistakes built on top of that original conceptual mistake. The specific problems with the script – a running joke that should have been scrapped in the first draft, some laughs at the expense of keeping a coherent tone – feel like they flow from the kinks in the story. The issues with the voice acting (Tara Strong sounds like she’s quite literally phoning it in) feel like they flow from the script’s tendency towards the clunky. In short, this is one of a very rare breed of My Little Pony episodes based on a weak idea which somehow managed to get through the whole process without being – no pun intended – spiked.
(There’s an alternate explanation which could possibly be in play here, though I don’t know, this is just an idea I had. It’s possible that this storyline came about as a result of corporate pressure from Hasbro, wanting an adorable “brave little owl with antiquated name” toy to be their nerdy magician’s companion, all similarities to other money-spinning franchises wholly coincidental. If – if – that were the case, it doesn’t excuse the core confusion at the heart of Owl’s Well That Ends Well, but it would explain how it got made in the first place.)
Sunday In The Park With Twilight Sparkle
On screen, the meteor shower itself isn’t exactly the stunning spectacle all the characters make it out to be, oohing and aahing over some distinctly bog-standard animated shooting stars, but it doesn’t really matter; it’s nice to see all the ponies filled with wonder even if we can’t see what they’re seeing.
So many wonders… and such lovely shading.
This whole scene is kind of a mixed bag. Rainbow Dash and Scootaloo have what I now know to be a great little moment, building (not that we knew it) on Scoots’ hero-worship as seen in The Cutie Mark Chronicles and laying more groundwork for later stories:
Wow, Twilight! You’re lucky to have such a rad assistant. I wish I had someone to do whatever I told them.
Ooh! OOH! Me! Me! Me! I’ll do whatever you want, Rainbow Dash!
Yes ma’am!
That’s your Hearth’s Warming Eve present, Scoots!
Her giddy little grin at the thought of getting rid of Rainbow Dash’s apple core is adorable, and was adorable even when we had no idea who she was or what the hell was going on. (Of course, we never actually see her get rid of the apple core, so it’s entirely possible it’s been kept as the centrepiece exhibit of Scootaloo’s private Rainbow Dash Museum and Archive).
See, there’s loads to like about this episode.
Anyway, there’s also a bunch of less fun things. Everyone fawns over Spike’s brilliance (Rarity even gives him a garish bow-tie encrusted with jewels, though he neither eats it nor swoons over her, so we assumed the latter plotline from the pilot had been quietly dropped), and it very quickly goes to his head. This bit feels like it should be funnier than it actually turned out; Spike’s entertainingly snarky demeanour when he’s nominally in a subordinate or equal position with Twilight doesn’t really translate to him being big-headed, so for me the humour was, and is, kind of lost in the shock of him pushing his luck a bit:
Do we have Spike to thank again for this amazing spread? Isn’t he simply amazing?
(beat)
He keeps on going, milking the praise, and it’s not particularly edifying, which may be why Twilight puts an end to it:
(gently admonishing) Spike, that’s enough.
I still don’t really understand that last line, to be honest.
Anyhow, everyone congratulates Spike on the work he’s done putting the picnic together, only to find him passed out from exhaustion in the punch bowl:
I love the breath effect on the inside of the bowl.
The punch has been…
…(wait for it)…
SPIKED!
Strix Aluco
Back at the library, Twilight puts Spike to bed in a tender little domestic scene, and then settles in for a night of studying by the window. (She appears to be writing a report about comets, but we don’t get to find out why; then again, we don’t really know what she’s been studying with Princess Celestia all this time anyway, so it’s entirely possible she has other, non-friendship related studies to complete, and this is more about the acquisition of knowledge. Or maybe I’m overthinking this.)
She works by an open window, getting some fresh night air, and it’s very quiet and very atmospheric… and sort of impractical. At some point in the night, a gust of wind blows her scroll away –
“Shoot!”
– but a friendly little owl returns it to her. Touched, Twilight lets him stay on a convenient perch while she finishes her work.
The next morning, Spike wakes up late, and starts panicking – his rambling attempts to suggest things he can do to make it up to Twilight is a nice “she’s a horse” touch:
…Oh, please don’t be upset, Twilight! And what do you want for breakfast? Oatmeal? How about a sunflower smoothie? Grass pancakes?
…But then he discovers his chores are already done, thanks to the little owl. Twilight names him “Owlowiscious” (I’m taking the spelling from the Elements of Harmony book), and has apparently taken him on full-time as a helper.
Spike’s introduction to Owlowiscious could have been done so much better. He makes asides throughout this episode, except here when it could have really helped – had he done a little soliloquy about his insecurities, his fears over Twilight replacing him, his guilt over trashing the book, this could have been a lovely moment. Instead, what we mostly get are a series of feeble owl jokes. And a faintly unsettling moment as Owlowiscious swivels his head through 180 degrees to look at Spike:
More awesome shading at work here. If nothing else, this episode looks great.
There was a bit of tension here, as the show has a tendency to play fast and loose with the “rules” regarding which animals get to be sapient and which ones don’t; having not seen Applebuck Season we didn’t know about the cows, but it wouldn’t have been a surprise for Owlowiscious to have a conversation with Spike at this point. Instead, all he does is hoot, and the episode spends an inordinate amount of time hanging more and more bells on a joke that can’t bear the weight: an owl’s hoot, you see, sounds a bit like the word “who”, and that’s a recipe for hilarity. You know, if you’re a Vaudeville children’s entertainer circa 1916.
I’m SPIKE! And who are you? What are you?
(I like the idea that griffons and manticores are commonplace in Equestria, but owls are comparatively rare.)
This bit felt like it was going to carry on for the next four hours, so it was actually a relief to have it interrupted with some physical slapstick instead. Similarly childish and a predictable old chestnut, but at least this one got a laugh:
(It being telegraphed a mile off doesn’t make it less painful, as Rainbow Dash can attest…)
Not the first time Spike will accidentally back into something today.
In which Spike goes off the deep end
The takeaway from that little scene, which kind of feels like a summary of what Spike’s learned from events thus far, is that he gets extremely jealous, extremely quickly:
Um… okay?
Spike’s jealousy comes across to me as territorial and weird, and probably plays a large part in why I haven’t gone back to the episode; put simply, I like Spike, and I don’t really enjoy seeing him being a jerk. My wife’s the perceptive one – she read this whole act differently, an interpretation centred on Spike’s status as a “baby dragon” (is he the equivalent of a toddler, a teenager, or what?) and his relationship with Twilight as being like that of an only child, who’s suddenly presented with a new sibling. In that regard, Spike’s behaviour is the same as any child who finds themselves having their space invaded and their time with their “parent” taken up by another, younger, more helpless baby (and this is a great point, as it’s only amplified by Owlowiscious’ almost complete, wordless inertia as a character before the final act).
There’s a brilliant moment to open the act – the Mane Six are all cooing over Owlowiscious while Spike watches from a nearby tree, apparently out of earshot:
He’s just wonderful.
…at which point everypony turns to look at him, having heard him perfectly.
Awkward… What is he reading, anyway?
With them all staring, he backtracks furiously:
And so the two “rivals” start a protracted game of one-upmanship, except Owlowiscious doesn’t actually do anything in the first two acts, and Spike simply gets more and more unhinged for no very good reason. That there’s no good reason is immediately underlined:
What’s he all saddle-sore about?
I get the feeling that was probably meant to be the key at the heart of this episode – if only Twilight had taken the time to spell out her feelings, instead of just assuming Spike knew how valued and loved he was, and how irrational his fears were! – but it’s undermined because the episode just keeps piling up Spike’s resentment and jealousy higher and higher without ever flat-out confronting either Twilight or Owlowiscious about it.
Sigh.
Quill Quest
This middle section of the episode, where Owlowiscious repeatedly outshines Spike in his competence as an assistant, is kind of played in contrast to the opening scenes where Spike’s abilities were being trumpeted to the rafters.
The show will later make great capital from keeping us in the dark as to just how competent an assistant Spike is, so he ranges from a hyper-competent super-organised sidekick to an inept bumbler who can’t wash a plate without somehow ripping out the plumbing, depending on the needs of a particular script. I’m largely fine with that, actually – it’s one of a few continuity blind spots the show repeatedly revisits to get the best laugh, but it stops the writers retconning something more important and load-bearing if their need for a fluid past can be satisfied by whether Spike can cook – but, goodness me, don’t then make that variable competence the central plank of an episode!
This is just… strange.
If Owlowiscious wasn’t here, Spike wouldn’t be “shown up”, but he’d still look inept: he falls off a pile of books balanced on top of a ladder, he lets Twilight run out of quills, he ransacks the library looking for a spare (including a confusingly surreal moment where he walks in on Owlowiscious taking a bath) and then can’t procure replacements despite what looks like at least half an hour’s worth of trying. Owlowiscious isn’t setting him up for a fall, but the script sure is.
Anyway, his extended quill quest does lead to one of the show’s all-time great comical “wait, what?” mini-scenes:
And yet business is apparently booming.
Sorry, junior – all out of quills until Monday.
(beat)
Everything about this little scene is just perfect. A store called “Quills and Sofas” is such an epic flight of surreal imagination I kind of want to applaud whoever came up with it. Meanwhile, if Spike’s rapid descent into craziness in these early scenes comes similarly out of leftfield, it’s at least well-depicted, if not necessarily well-explained; Cathy Weseluck, who I’m sure had fun doing this whole episode, not only conveys Spike’s mounting frustration perfectly but also manages the exact right amount of lampshading the random silliness of the joke. And that little beat at the end – and the accompanying awkward looks (pictured) during it – before the clerk delivers his killer punchline is like a masterclass in comic timing. If the rest of the episode was this good, it’d be one of my all-time favourites; as it is, that’s one of the season’s best scenes of standalone silliness. Brilliant.
RULE #59.16: Field goals are not valid if a quince is used instead of a ball.
This, on the other hand, is another one of those jokes that doesn’t really work, isn’t it? I did like the very first one, where it’s implied she’s been rummaging around for some time before proudly surfacing in triumph with… a quince, having forgotten what it was she was looking for. I just think it wasn’t necessarily a good foundation for an extended skit.
I mean, I’m not smart enough to dissect it and explain why I can freely believe Pinkie can construct a working pedal-powered helicopter or appear in the clapper of a bell, but not that she’d mistake the word “quill” for a bunch of other random words that also start with Q (one of which she comically mispronounces for no reason). I guess it’s because kids often like scenes where people quickly assemble piles of stuff (well, ours do anyway), but this one fell kind of flat; Spike’s exasperation in response is funnier and got a bigger smile.
Props to whoever was building the Flash, um, props, though, drawing something that actually looks a bit like a quince.
Anyway, after some impromptu chicken wrestling in the world’s cleanest henhouse (not a single feather to be found!), we return to the library, and a battered, visibly exhausted Spike bursts in brandishing a feather he plucked in a fight… only for Twilight to casually dash his (frankly slim) hopes of looking super-competent, and inadvertently enrage him yet further, as she offhandedly explains that Owlowiscious already gave her one of his feathers to use instead (and that she was trying to tell him this before he left on his crazy quest).
The feather he was carrying actually spontaneously incinerates. Now that’s angry.
Spike’s passive-aggressive little strop is hilarious, as is Twilight’s innocently-crushing response:
I’ve been a little critical of Tara Strong’s performance in this episode a bit, I know, but that’s a brilliant read – the way she thinks she’s doing Spike a favour.
Spike vows to complete all the chores before falling asleep mid-sentence on the stairs, leaving Twilight baffled.
Poor Spike. He’ll come around… He’s genuinely a good little guy.
She leaves him curled up on the stairs to sleep. It feels calm, like maybe the sleep will do him good, like maybe he’ll come to his senses once he’s fully rested…
The Let Down
…And then follows a really stark jump cut to several hours later, a furious Twilight standing over Spike and glowering.
SPIKE! What is this?! You said this book was missing! Well, Owlowiscious found it, right where it belongs – but like this. How did it get this way?
Instead of apologising and explaining, Spike comes to the conclusion that Owlowiscious set him up, and vows revenge.
And then things get a little… strange.
Cunning Stunts
Spike’s plan to frame Owlowiscious is both genuinely idiotic, and properly bizarrely executed.
He hatches his dastardly plan, which is signified by an ominous musical sting, and Spike donning a black cape, top hat and moustache, and laughing maniacally.
This feels like it comes from a completely different cartoon (and in a way it does, as I’m assured that apparently this is a reference to Snively Whiplash from Dudley Do-Right, although we didn’t really get that in Britain and I read it more as “generic villain”, but anyhow that’s not what I mean.) It’s a complete jump out of character, not just for Spike but for the entire tone of the show, and while it’s funny, it’s also really unexpected and jarring, like the wackier moments of Swarm of the Century dialled up to eleven.
“Mwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!”
Spike’s “plan”, such as it is, is to steal one of Opalescence’s toy mice (another new minor character apparently introduced out of nowhere? Thanks, DVD compilers!), dismember it, leave the remains for Twilight to find, and hope she’ll be so disgusted she gives Spike his Number One Assistant job back. There are so many things wrong with this scheme that, taken in conjunction with the unexplained villain costume, it’s effectively proof Spike has had a complete breakdown – but it’s played that way in-universe, at least. There is no way this is ever going to work, so all that’s left for us to do is watch it inevitably blow up in his face.
Accordingly, he pulls it to bits, squirts ketchup everywhere, and then for good measure, takes one of Twilight’s pillows and starts ripping that to bits too, all the while cackling to himself. Cue another fantastic moment: Spike, oblivious, walking backwards scattering feathers around in the ketchup mess (and while still wearing the villain costume – question, is it real (can Twilight see it?) or is it in Spike’s imagination?), bumps into Twilight. She’s apparently been watching, astonished, for some time.
Kaboom.
They exchange looks for a beat, and then Spike decides – much like Twilight herself in Swarm of the Century – the only way out is to just press on with the plan regardless and hope that somehow it works, even if at this stage the only way that would be possible is if Tirek turned up outside.
(another deeply uncomfortable beat)
(noticing Twilight is still not buying it)
It’s hilariously awkward, so pathetic it’s cringeworthy, as Spike looks on for any faint flicker of hope. Meanwhile, a stunned Twilight Sparkle just glares at him. For a moment, it feels like we’re back watching My Little Pony again, and not whatever bizarre show we just slipped into. For a moment.
Then, Twilight finally breaks her silence, and she’s furious:
It feels… a little wrong. While Twilight is right to admonish Spike for being silly, no real harm has been done, and she seems a touch insensitive considering Spike, her oldest friend, is acting massively out of character and that the Owlowiscious situation is clearly bothering him; conversely, Spike’s reading of Twilight’s last line is a fairly radical interpretation of the text:
Everything wrong with this episode in a nutshell. It was around this time on first viewing, I remember, that I started to get a little fed up with everyone acting like an idiot for no reason except to move the plot from A to B. What it really does is throw the skill that went into something like Swarm of the Century into stark relief: that one felt like certain aspects of the plot were contrived, but here’s what happens when the show properly commits to passing the Idiot Ball around.
And then Spike puts it in his knapsack.
In which Spike runs away from home, with dire consequences
Honestly, I don’t really know what to write about this next part. The third act, as I’ve divided it here (as always, entirely unofficially and not necessarily where the writers would put the act break!) mainly consists of a few brief scenes featuring Spike as the main or only speaking role. I’ve put it as a separate act because it feels thematically different.
Spike runs away from home, gets caught in a rainstorm, seeks shelter in a convenient cave…
DUDE.
…discovers a huge pile of gems, stuffs his face with them, and is then confronted by their rightful owner, a massive fire-breathing dragon who wants to barbecue him. (Hey, we’ve all been there.) Spike tries to talk his way out of it, fails, contrives to somehow insult the dragon yet further –
– and just when he’s cornered, Owlowiscious appears from nowhere to save him, a big heroic entrance to redeem him in Spike’s eyes…
Bubo ex machina
…distracting the dragon while Twilight helps Spike make his escape. All three charge off through the forest in a high-speed chase, with the owl leading the way through the trees in the dark, leaving the dragon to roar in frustration.
Break It Down Again
But that bald description really feels like it could come from any run-of-the-mill Saturday morning adventure cartoon. I think that’s the issue here – but it’s also the extent of the issue. It’s not bad, it’s just not extraordinary, and that contrast becomes even sharper when you compare it not only to better episodes, or even episodes which did this specific thing better (like the quest scenes of Elements of Harmony, which weren’t all fantastic but, for me, were still better than this), but the extraordinary moments from this same episode.
It’s weird to be writing this, but it’s almost as though, whenever Owl’s Well That Ends Well transcends the ordinary, it makes the rest of the episode feel less special, as though we’re being gently teased – like, here’s a glimpse of how good the show can be when everything clicks, and so by extension here’s a bit where the lack of clicking is more noticeable. Almost like I mentally mark the episode down for having moments of greatness.
Once again, the comedy scenes are better than the perilous quest ones – all of the aforementioned awesome moments are going for laughter rather than the heartstrings. Here’s another oddity: because we didn’t realise we were actually watching episode 24 and not episode 6, I was happy to chalk that up to the show still finding its way, still learning how to smoothly integrate its two poles (sitcom versus epic fantasy drama). But the first season’s almost over by this point, so… who knows? Interference from the Hub, restrictive adherence to the E/I standards, everyone simply still figuring out what works and what doesn’t even after 24 episodes…?
Whatever the reason, for me, the action scenes here aren’t a patch on the (good) comedy ones from earlier in the episode. Plus, Spike brought this predicament entirely on himself, and it’s difficult to work up too much sympathy for him; I also wasn’t really too worried, because the invigorating edge-of-the-seat “anything goes” approach of the previous episodes we’ve watched is conspicuously absent, and there never feels like there could be the remotest possibility any real harm will come to Spike. The only bit of this sequence that raised the pulse (and this is really only an artefact of my not having seen Dragonshy first) was when the adult dragon appeared on-screen and turned out to be massive, orders of magnitude bigger than I was expecting, making Spike look like a vole by comparison.
Spike drawn to scale. Check out the steam effects!
Otherwise, it’s kind of perfunctory; Owlowiscious does a little move clawing the dragon’s head that looks kind of painful, but everything else is as you’d expect. Twilight and Spike charge off into the dark forest (it’s a joy to see the high-speed gallop animation again, anyway) while the dragon stomps after them, Twilight declares she can’t see where she’s going, but Owlowiscious flies ahead of them to lead the way.
The chase isn’t particularly exciting – most My Little Pony chases aren’t all that exciting, really, because there’s no plausible danger a main character won’t escape their pursuer (although that makes it genuinely shocking when someone is captured by the baddie of the week), so it’s all about the individual execution, and that’s pretty basic this time. Here, the only character who could realistically be at risk is Owlowiscious himself, and he’s been drafted in by the script to be the hero of the day, so there’s never any doubt they’ll escape.
This probably looked incredible on the storyboard.
Now, none of that might be a problem for the target audience, except it doesn’t seem to really work for my children either; the chase unfolds in a dark forest and Twilight can’t see, but neither can we. A forest chase scene could still be visually exciting – the bike races from Return of the Jedi or the blindfold forest running in Intacto are thrilling examples of high-speed tree-dodging action – but this one looks flat by comparison, whizzing by in an indistinct parade of dark purple and black that doesn’t really feel dangerous. I definitely remember that on the night we first watched it, I found myself wanting to skip ahead, something that had never happened so far during my time watching My Little Pony.
So, Owlowiscious saves the day – but if anything, hindsight makes this even less effective, because we know that the show will find better ways to deal with both a comically expressionless character (Gummy) and a mute animal saving the day (Tank), rendering Owlowiscious somewhat redundant for future plotlines; save a few token scenes where he serves as Twilight’s pet, he’s barely ever featured again since this episode aired, and he’s not been missed. (Which isn’t to say he’s an unpopular character in himself, I’ve no idea – though I suspect most bronies tired as quickly as we did of the “hoo” business, something the episode hasn’t finished with just yet. But, hey, maybe I’m wrong; I’m just one guy, and I often misjudge the public mood.)
If You Want These Kind Of Dreams, It’s Reconciliation
The episode ends with a strangely awkward scene that reflects all of its key weaknesses, as well as its strangely uneven tone. Twilight and Spike enjoy a heartfelt reconciliation which ultimately strengthens their relationship (good) over something which was blown way, way out of proportion (meh), and punctuated by – joy of joys – more owl jokes (oh dear).
Spike! We were so worried about you! I was so worried about you! Why did you run away?!
Aww.
Then, the plugging of a plothole I hadn’t even noticed (though watching it back again, the animators are careful to include Spike leaving footprints everywhere before he gets to the cave):
Things We Learned Today
Moral time, and it’s a sweet scene – not because of the moral itself, which is one of the more obvious ones we’ll see this season (though “there’s plenty of love for every friend to share” is a pretty decent mantra, DO YOU HEAR, DISCORD?), but rather because Twilight lets Spike write this week’s letter to the Princess.
Happy times at Golden Oak library.
Oh, Spike…! 🙂
All through this Ponywatching experience, I’ve praised the show for not taking the easy or clichéd way out when a tougher but ultimately more rewarding path was available. Here, I wish they’d gone with Stock Sitcom Ending #24, having Twilight laugh as we fade to black. Instead, there are another few lines’ worth of time to fill, and guess which of my very favourite recurring jokes we’re going to get again? Hurrah!
If you’re going to end on a joke, you must, must, MUST make sure it’s a good joke. This one has been hammered into the ground so comprehensively you could use it as a gatepost, and it didn’t manage to elicit a single laugh from any of us on any of the times it was dusted off; if anything, I think it left a bit more of a sour taste than the episode deserved, finishing on a low. We were all a little bit nonplussed, I think it’s fair to say.
I’ve watched it since and found more to like about it, but the fact remains this is still my least favourite episode of the first season, and that has nothing to do with the context in which we first saw it; despite some lovely moments and a genuine keeper of a gag in “Quills and Sofas”, the poor concept and often mishandled execution mean it ends up bottom of my personal Season 1 pile.
Does that make it bad? Shoot, no. The context is everything. My parents were half-watching this episode with us that first time, and I’d hoped to share this lovely, offbeat show with them, but it turned out to be just another decent enough episode of a fun kids’ TV cartoon. Well, we’ll never turn down one of those.
Still, it was a confusing one – I won’t draw another diagram, but our enthusiasm for the show had gone from negative hostility to cautious optimism to outright enjoyment, and now… sliding back down that scale back towards apathy, I guess? It felt like… okay, well, if the show was competing to win us over as confirmed fans, boundless enthusiasm had built an unexpected lead over three quarters only for mild disappointment to mount a rousing late comeback, leaving the result open to doubt after all when that didn’t seem likely.
Maybe those excellent slice of life episodes were the anomaly, and this was the show’s standard level? Which is fine, but if there were a lot of these, the show would blend in with all the other shows we watched together on a regular basis – we’re talking the tier that holds the likes of Doc McStuffins, Sofia the First, that kind of thing. Not bad company to be in, all told, but a pity, because this show seemed to be aiming so very much higher.
But here’s where our story really takes off, because tomorrow is the first day of 2015, and I’m about to go full brony. Buckle up.
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