terrycloth

Okay, this episode was bad. I didn't like it. I only watched it once and I don't want to watch it again. This makes it roughly on par with Mare Do Well (although that had some scenes I liked) and Owl's Well which are my previous least favorites, but it's worse. It wasn't just boring like Apple Family Reunion, it was actively uncomfortable to watch.

Instead of being subtle about how this was happening at the same time as Spike's pet-sitting misadventures, they were really unsubtle about it. Yeah, okay. Not a promising start. But then...

Sitcom cliches. ALL the sitcom cliches.

This is our only chance to impress an official and fulfil a lifelong dream by putting on a painfully awkward amateur performance, showing them on a tour of a castle we don't know anything about and ignoring their obvious claustrophobia! Only it's the wrong pony! The real inspector is the pony we've been negligently abusing all this time! And oh no, Rarity's attempt to replace the master hairdresser went comically wrong and now Cadance looks awful, so keep the inspector away from her until it can be fixed. Watch out, they're in the same building!

But in the end it turns out okay because of... actually, I kind of blinked and missed it. I think it was something like 'I heard from an unbiased source how welcoming the crystal empire is' but that's stupid because she was in the room when they were explaining how they'd accidentally gone to extreme lengths to welcome the wrong pony.

Also... shouldn't deciding who should host the pony-lympics or whatever be determined by something other than how much trouble they go to to influence your decision with irrelevant pandering? I'm pretty sure there was a business ethics movie I was required to watch that basically said 'Don't do this!'

Then it ends with a really unsubtle callback to the previous episode.

Best line: "I thought step 12 was optional. IT WASN'T."