Episode written by Lauren Faust
Entirely unofficial reflections by sixcardroulette
This is The Shorter Ponywatching. For a really long, in-depth essay
on this episode, check out the full length reflection!
The second episode my family and I ever saw – or, depending on your viewpoint, the second half of the first one. This is the concluding instalment of the show’s opening two-parter, and apparently much less well-regarded than the first (though there are dissenting voices, and anyway we didn’t know about any of this cueing up the DVD very for the first time this past Christmas).
The first half had set a fairytale plot in motion at the very start, something about an ominous evil imprisoned in the moon for a thousand years returning to bring about eternal night – but that then took a back seat to the “main” story: nerdy intellectual unicorn Twilight Sparkle being stationed in a new town under orders to make friends, and meeting some strange locals.
Lauren Faust, the show’s genius creator, had – correctly – put off a lot of this epic stuff for the second half so she could spend the first part properly setting up the (brilliant) show and introducing the (brilliant) characters, knowing they were making something special, not wanting to rush it for the sake of cramming in a high-stakes adventure storyline too. Now it’s time to repay those debts.
This episode follows a linear quest narrative for most of its running time; the six new companions (the Fellowship of the Ring-Bit?) venture through a dark forest, they encounter five obstacles which give each of the group a chance to demonstrate to Twilight a facet of what friendship really means (bearing in mind she’s apparently never had any real friends before, not counting her ward and assistant Spike the baby dragon, conspicuously absent here), followed by an epic showdown in a ruined castle where Twilight gets to use what she’s learned in order to unlock some mysterious magic and save the day.
This being a kid’s show – and on first viewing, that’s all My Little Pony was to me, complete with the low expectations of every parent who’s been forced to sit through too much half-arsed, lowbrow pabulum – it’s a given from the start that the quest will be accomplished, the baddie defeated. So, the success (or otherwise!) of the episode really depends on the details: of how the day will be won, and of what we see on the way there. On that score, does Elements of Harmony (to give it its snappier title) come out on top? I’d answer with a resounding “sort of”.
The episode picks up immediately from where the first half left off, panic and chaos as the villain Nightmare Moon terrorises a party (in what I later realised was adapted almost shot for shot from Disney’s Sleeping Beauty!); it’s genuinely unsettling in places, especially when it becomes obvious the authorities are powerless.
Following a recap (which is almost entirely taken up with scenes concerning the Nightmare Moon plot, and doesn’t bother reintroducing the main characters – I had assumed this was because the episodes were originally aired back-to-back, but since writing the full length essay I’ve been informed they actually weren’t!), Rainbow Dash and the other four newly-introduced main characters interrogate Twilight Sparkle, with Applejack intervening as the voice of reason; having established she’s not a spy (although we later learn her arrival was anything but coincidental!), the six then head off into the woods to track down Nightmare Moon and the McGuffin Elements of Harmony, whereupon the script puts them through five very artificial tests.
These mini-quests make varying degrees of sense (as do the ways they’re resolved); the idea is sound enough, each obstacle theoretically enough to defeat the group, except for one member who steps forward with an unexpected solution, in the process teaching Twilight something about what it means to be a friend. The show had built up a juggernaut of goodwill by this point, and so many of the plotholes weren’t too obtrusive on first viewing; we were carried along for the ride, but the clever, well-written character piece we saw in the first half taking a back seat to more standard Saturday morning cartoon fare left a slight but gnawing disappointment during most of these scenes.
So, firstly we get Applejack proving her honesty to Twilight by telling her to let go and let herself fall over a cliff edge (without explaining why, which she had ample time to do); we get Fluttershy demonstrating kindness by pulling a thorn from the paw of an angry manticore…
How did you know about the thorn?!
I didn’t. Sometimes, we all just need to be shown a little kindness.
…we get Pinkie randomly bursting into song, lifting the others’ spirits in the face of some scary demonic trees to demonstrate laughter, which sits uneasily with the rest of the episode; I actually like the song, although the show isn’t sure whether we’re meant to, and has it both ways by lampshading an adult viewer’s likely natural reaction to spontaneous musical numbers:
Tell me she’s not.
…we get Rarity showing generosity (and hidden depths!) by sacrificing her beloved tail to pacify a vain, campy sea serpent, and finally Rainbow Dash showing loyalty by… not letting her friends die in exchange for a job on an obscure aerobatics team. (That last one really stuck out even on first viewing – that’s not a test of friendship, it’s a test to make sure you’re not a treacherous psychopath!)
The five protagonists each getting their own scene mirrors the structure of the first episode, but that mirroring also highlights these scenes aren’t as memorable, or as good, as their earlier counterparts.
We get to the castle, and there’s the obligatory battle, and it’s actually unexpectedly epic. The well-staged action and exposition comes thick and fast, and it’s a genuine thrill ride that papers over a lot of the cracks from the woodland quest scenes. Deep breath:
…Twilight tries to go it alone, shows great bravery and inventiveness, gets to the Elements, they don’t work, Nightmare Moon smashes them to bits before Twilight’s eyes, and then right at the lowest moment, her friends appear, ready to fight alongside her. Twilight feels a spark, the Elements are activated, magic lasers ensue – specifically the power of friendship, as opposed to random handwaved magic! – Nightmare Moon is destroyed, Princess Luna emerges from the wreckage, Princess Celestia appears in her godlike glory (albeit filmed from an unflattering angle!), they’re revealed as sisters to everyone’s surprise, Luna is tearfully reformed, there’s a huge party, Twilight is sad at the thought of losing the first friends she’s ever made, Celestia posts her to Ponyville permanently to learn about friendship. The show proper has begun.
It’s a lot to take in, the absolute maximum amount of plot that could possibly be squeezed into these 22 minutes without losing the target audience, without everything getting bogged down in tedious mythos-building, and it has to be skipped over at breakneck speed to fit it all in (especially given the compromise we made in letting the first half be almost entirely character-driven). It’s the reason this “quick reflection” has so much to recap, and has come out so long as a result; some cartoons would eke out those storylines over an entire season, not belt through them all in one episode.
But it works; even if I have grumbles over the details of the execution, the central ideas are all sound, and they’ve been conveyed well enough that we all understood broadly what just happened, or at least what it meant.
Was it any good, though?
Unlike almost every other episode of My Little Pony I’ve watched and re-watched (which is all of them, so far… I’m lucky my kids love the show too, and request it often, so our Sky+ box is full of ponies!), unusually this one seems to diminish when I’m not watching it, and get better when it’s actually on.
The five tests, other than Fluttershy’s and possibly Rarity’s, are guilty of some handwaving and bad writing, easier to pick apart on a cold page than on screen, and which I always remember as being more jarring than it is. These scenes still work, though, if we take the right messages away from them. My theory is that the five friends each represent the particular element of friendship that they first taught Twilight about, not that they necessarily epitomise that aspect of friendship – much like Twilight, who (spoiler alert!) ends up representing the Element of Magic, isn’t automatically the most powerful unicorn in all of Equestria.
(That last sentence is a pretty big indicator of how far I’ve come in four months, in that it doesn’t look weird to me any more. But I digress.)
Despite the epic quest setting, for me this episode is stronger when it’s a show about six very different friends finding each other (a solid old story upon which to build) than when it’s about a magical quest (where the story is still vital, but now the writers need to actually come up with it afresh). Confusion then arises over the sort of show this wants to be, not to mention the ages of the protagonists and the sorts of challenges they’ll face (are they audience avatars? Authority figures? The later introduction of the Cutie Mark Crusaders helps distance our Mane Six heroines from explicitly childish dilemmas.)
Perhaps this episode, taken as a pilot, an experiment, helped resolve things a bit more – whatever Lauren Faust’s original vision for the show (which I’ve read was supposedly weighted more towards the epic than the domestic), for me, in practice it works best when it’s character-driven. Or perhaps it’s just that the show never has to introduce seven more main characters all at once; indeed, we see the show wobbling uncharacteristically again in future when new, sympathetic cast members (as opposed to one-off villains) need to be introduced alongside a fantasy quest plot.
This is My Little Pony, and there are enough awesome moments in every episode so far to make each one worthwhile; this one is worth it just for the character building stuff. That, and the finale, which is pitched at an excellent level.
Tempting to give this to either the early library scene, where a group of ponies who may or may not know each other burst in on Twilight and start to interrogate her before Applejack calmly takes control with a show of trust, or the Fluttershy test scene (for its solid old plot allowing better characterisation, the lovely ending quote, and of course Rarity kicking a manticore in the face).
Ultimately, though – cheesiness be damned! – I have to go with the defeat of Nightmare Moon, after Twilight realises she’ll never be alone again. It’s just so heartwarming, enough to break down an old cynic like me, and the actual deployment of the Elements is six kinds of visually awesome:
It’s got to be done.
I felt it the very moment I realized how happy I was to hear you, to see you, how much I cared about you. The spark ignited inside me when I realized that you all… are MY FRIENDS!
What? No, you’re tearing up at a manifestly exploitative moment in a cartoon for little girls. I like football.
This has to go down as one of the weaker episodes of the first season for me, loath though I am to be overly negative, simply because there are too many misses, too many scenes which could have been either better-written or replaced entirely. But watching it again was still a blast, the ending scene was still thrilling, and those misses are outweighed by the hits: the opportunity to spend more time getting to know these ponies better.
Me me me me me, though, right? This blog isn’t just about me. There were four of us watching this episode for the first time. Two of them absolutely loved it: the youngest two. So that’s worth bearing in mind as well: Lauren Faust conceived of the show generally, and this episode specifically, as recreating the spirit of the epic adventures she used to take her own My Little Pony toys on of a rainy afternoon back when she was eight. Playtime, validated on the big screen. On that level, this is a rip-roaring success.
Even if I think all the criticisms about pacing and nonsensical plot developments still stand, this was enough to make me a future brony; never mind what else was good about Elements of Harmony, for that alone I’ll be forever grateful.
Still always better than I remember it, occasionally epic, certainly not enough to put me off.
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