I Just Rewatched Spike At Your Service... · 6:49am Dec 15th, 2015
...for the first time since it aired.
The following is my full, unedited reaction upon reaching the credits.
[10:15:28 PM] Bookish Delight: ....WHAT THE FUCK
[10:15:38 PM] Bookish Delight: THIS EPISODE IS EXCELLENT
[10:19:25 PM] Bookish Delight: It's funny. Like, actual slapstick funny without going into cringe.
The silly things that Spike does are minor compared to the Idiot Balls that get usually get passed to the actual M6 during their pre-S5 focus episodes. Some of them are even adorable.
The fact that the episode doesn't completely center on Spike is a boon--we get to see him do something silly, then instead of the camera/plot staying on him and expecting us to laugh, it cuts away while we're still entertained and shows us the reactions of the M6 in ways that don't demean Spike or themselves.
The others actually care so much about not hurting Spike's feelings and letting him be true to himself that they set up an elaborate life-saving reversal plan. This includes Rainbow Dash.
The M6 are genuinely hilarious the whole time through.
[10:19:25 PM] Bookish Delight: Spike actually gets to be super-competent when it counts and save the day anyway.
And then he and AJ have one of the smartest talks I've ever seen on this show.
[10:19:43 PM] Bookish Delight: HOW IS THIS THE WORST ANYTHING
[10:19:52 PM] Bookish Delight: ...for that matter
[10:20:04 PM] Bookish Delight: HOW DID THIS COME OUT OF MERRIWETHER WILLIAMS
Maybe I'm the last one to the party again, but I've always been under the impression that this is one of the more disliked episodes. Back when I used to be in the Spike group I remember seeing as such (this was years ago though, like right when it aired) but even outside of that, whenever it got brought up in casual online conversation I would just kind of see people get mad at it. So I went into this with... trepidation, to say the least.
And yet, this is now officially tied with Dragon Quest as my favorite Spike episode, and in the grand panthenon of eps, I think it's solidly above middle-tier. The lesson is also pretty much the same one as Equestria Games, but handled with a defter, subtler hand which renders the former episode rather redundant if you asked me. And I like Equestria Games. This just knocked it down a couple pegs.
If you're like me and you haven't watched this episode in some time but have heard the "horror stories", as it were, I implore you to give it a second look, now that it's years on. It's a great episode for Spike, a fantastic episode for AJ (who seems to get the Idiot Ball A LOT), for anyone who wants to see all of the M6 be silly/adorable, and for children in general. This is a perfect slice-of-life episode by all accounts.
And it came from the frickin' writer of "Bats!". Wow, she really was 50/50.
Also, Rainbow knocks down a phracking tower of rocks with her head.
~B
No, you're not mistaken. It is in fact one of the most disliked episodes of all time. I, for one, consider it almost 100% cringe by volume.
3619588
Oh. Well, then.
It'll sure be fun to read this comment stream in the morning!
3619588 Pretty much this. Spike being used as slapstick humor is nothing new - it happens nearly every episode of his, or even in episodes where he's not the focus. But, in those times, it's usually not his fault.
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For example.
With Spike at your service, everything he did wrong was his fault, through sheer sudden incompetence he normally doesn't display - or if he does, nowhere close to the degree shown in this episode. Because of that, it's painful to even watch.
Yeah, a lot of people don't seem to like this one all that much.
As for me, it's just above being in the middle ranking of Spike episodes and right in the middle ranking of season 3 episodes.
Though I consider Equestria Games to be better and Dragon Quest to be weaker
Although, I say Bats is a better episode.
Heck, here's how I rank the episodes written by MW:
1. Mysterious Mare Do Well.
2. Wonderbolts Academy
3. Bats!
4. Hearth's Warming Eve
5. Spike at Your Service
6. Putting Your Hoof Down
7. Dragon Quest
While I'm still not a fan of that episode, it does have its moments. And "Spike at Your Service" did provide us with this adorable gif.
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3619596
Simple Ways is also painful to watch. For me, anyway, as a member of the School of Rares.
But neither of those episodes are OOC or far-fetched. They're just painful for superfans of the character because we prefer seeing our character be 100% awesome all of the time. But they're not 100% superawesome all the time. Sometimes Rarity's believably a fuckin' idiot, like in Simple Ways.
And same here. Sometimes you have to make dumb mistakes to learn a good lesson, and Spike's dumb mistakes both make sense ('cause he's a frickin' kid who needs to learn these things) and hurt absolutely nobody. And he comes out like a boss after all of it. I wish he'd stayed this smart after this episode.
So to "yeah, it's his fault," the only response I can deign appropriate is, "...so?"
3619603 see, I don't actually care for Spike much. I think he's mostly annoying. However, the biggest problem I have with SAYS is the fact that he demonstrates utter incompetence at tasks he's performed competently in the past.
In that way it's very OOC.
I'm pretty sure the crazy amount of hate this episode gets won me a trivia contest.
I mean, if people only watch something once and then try to forget it ever happened, who else is going to remember that there are 24,567,837 blades of grass on Sweet Apple Acres?
3619603
"So?" Is a valid counterpoint, sure. I like his slapstick moments, even when it's sometimes his fault - but that's the key word here, sometimes. In this ep, he goes from 'usually competent with occasional goof' assistant to 'complete inability to perform any task without screwing up' throughout the entire ep. He absolutely cannot do anything right, and no outside power or anything has affected him to do so. Like, say, being hit on the head a few dozen times. An invisible switch was flipped and he now sucks.
It does him a disservice, and it's completely unbelievable to me. He can't even mop the floor? Please.
As for Simple Ways... I agree. I laughed like a maniac the first time around, but it's so painful to watch because Rarity is such an idiot in that ep. But as you said, it's believable there (she wants the D!
). Spike's sudden uncharacteristic incompetence isn't, and makes that episode fail, if not for the performances of the m6.
I wasn't a huge fan of it mainly because Spike somehow forgets all the basic cleaning skills he's learned at the library and manages to ruin everything over and over again. I do like the concern for him coming from the main characters, and Applejack was awesome.
Merriwether Williams is pretty all over the place. I wasn't a huge fan of this episode and I didn't like Mare-Do-Well. Bats I was more indifferent to. Wonderbolts Academy on the other hand was really good.
3619604
Nope. It's part of the episode and completely consistent with who he's always been. I mean, I'm guessing you're thinking of how Spike manages to screw up things like cooking and cleaning and general mundane task help when he's basically Twilight's maid. (Re: 3619607 : looks like I'm on the right track!)
The running thing about Spike (and where most of his good lessons come from) is that every time he has an inferiority complex about being "useful" and bigger than he normally is, he screws up big time. The second he stops, we see that he's always had it in him.
This is consistent. Equestria Games reinforces this. Dragon Quest reinforces this. Princess Spike reinforces this. (Power Ponies actually set out to reinforce this instead of letting it come naturally, thus resulting in a lackluster episode depending on who you talk to--there's your meta). When the chips are down and he starts thinking about what's right instead of how it'll look to whoever else or of his own self-image/self-worth, that's when Spike shines. And when he's just being normal, be it being Twi's gofer or helping Rarity out, he's just fine. But in this episode, he obsesses over a perfectly-believable-in-lore-but-clearly-not-suited-to-him code, so he has to flub his way out of it.
There's no OOC in this. It's just Tuesday.
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3619624
(I think I might just have to start copying everyone in on this reply :D)
My beef with Spike at Your Service wasn't that Spike was being an idiot. It's just that he's messing up household chores. Y'know, the stuff he's been doing for Twilight for the better part of his life?
I do have fond memories of parts of the episode too, don't get me wrong. Applejack was great. Her resourceful handling of the timberwolves was great, and a treat for those of us who liked other action sequences of the show. Plus, I loved everything Dashie did in the episode. (Which, being as much of a superfan as I am, is simultaneously really easy and impossibly hard to accomplish.) But breaking my suspension of disbelief is the fastest way for an episode to sour for me.
This episode's "cardinal sin" was not giving Spike the idiot ball. It was giving him one that completely clashed with the color of his scales.
And while we're on the topic of Merriwether Williams - She's actually the writer of my second favorite episode, Wonderbolts Academy, what I consider to be the best Dash portrayal in the entire series. The only one that tops it on my list is Crusaders of the Lost Mark, which is probably going to dip to #2 once the hype in my braincase wears off.
I don't know. I think I'm going to have to rewatch Spike at Your Service again... Maybe I'm missing something. Having seen it three times by now, though, I kind of doubt it.
3619624
Rainbow was utterly priceless in this episode. I loved everything she does in it x10.
I've got the same general problem with it as I do with A Canterlot Wedding Part 1, in that the core of the plot relies on a character trait which is presented as being so important to the character in question that it makes zero sense that it hasn't come up before. Stuff like that tends to come hand-in-hand with being an episodic TV series, but it's still not especially good writing and really takes me out of the experience when it happens.
3619630
Coming from you, that means tons!
3619632
Huh? Why--ohhhh, gosh, that's right, no one knows yet.
We need to talk, and soon.
Definitely a good episode.
3619631
(nods) I would actually consider this an actually valid grievance.
Though I still posit that it's nowhere neaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar in the same ballpark of severity as "WHOA HEY CHECK OUT THIS DIRECT FAMILY RELATIVE WE HAVEN'T MENTIONED FOR TWO WHOLE SEASONS."
Or anything else that came up in that episode, really.
3619657
I have so many other problems with ACW don't get me started
I'll reserve comment on the episode. It's bad mojo for me historically. I will focus on this, however...
Most folks don't understand Merriwether Williams' work. She does very well, depending on the content matter and the show. I've never seen Camp Lazlo, but she's a big writer on Adventure Time and that show is awesome. I don't think there's a single episode I don't like.
As far as her work on Friendship is Magic, I think her reputation is pretty unfair. She's got more hits than misses.
3619684
I... don't like Adventure Time. Its humor, while perfectly proven and valid, is sooooooooooooooooooooooo far away from the brand of humor I like to watch you'd need a spaceship to commute between the two. And yet, to say that MW is a writer there? Makes perfect sense to me. Her humor definitely fits in there. Not a dig, I really mean that.
At this point, I exaggerate on MW. Sure, I dislike... one and a half of her episodes, to the point where I think they should be stricken from the record, but I think the rest range from pretty good to great!
While it's true that I don't think I've seen this episode since around the time it was still new, I don't know that I've heard any "horror stories", either. (And I tend to disregard a lot of hate-buzz that follows in the wake of new episodes anyway, just 'cause each and every one gets some of that.)
I just remember that I didn't find it that entertaining. I suppose maybe at some point I could try it again, though...
I don't hate this episode, it just frustrates me because it could've been so much better. For a lot of reasons others have already talked about with Spike's competence, but also because the episode did basically nothing with Applejack. Sure she didn't get handed the idiot ball, like has happened, but that's not a mark in the episodes favor, it's just a pitfall it avoided. As is of course she wanted things to go back to the way they were, Spike was an active detriment to her life, anyone would want him gone.
If they'd just let Spike be competent for once (still pretty salty over how rarely he gets to actually shine) it would have made Applejack shine even more because then Spike would instead be an active benefit to her life. Making things easier for her and generally being useful around the farm. She'd still want him to go back home and forget the life debt not because he's a pest but because it's the right thing to do by her friend. Letting Spike continue slaving himself to her in that situation would be taking advantage of him and AJ wouldn't stand for that no matter how useful it is to her personally. This lets her honesty and integrity shine through in a way the actual episode couldn't.
It would also make Spike's dragon code feel less like a contrived plot device, because the existence of the code would be the conflict more than what Spike is doing. As is the main conflict in the episode is basically that Spike is being a pest. His code is just a segue into that. Which makes the code itself forgetably unimportant to what's going on. (to me at least)
3619696
...your alternative turns this into an AJ episode, and a one with a stilted lesson at that.
Spike says that the code is important to him being himself, and AJ's conflict is the fact that (as she says outright) she respects that this is Spike's way as a dragon. It's the whole reason why she's conflicted over Spike's overhelpfulness, and why she doesn't ever, say, blow up at him.
If Spike were competent, it wouldn't help matters--AJ would just come off looking like an asshole, and Spike might even have come off looking genuinely creepy instead of slapstick-silly. Spike was incompetent because he needed to realize that the code was holding him back. Which he does at the end of the episode. Meanwhile, AJ learned that she needed to lay down the law at times like this (while, again, not being disrespectful).
Ah. S.A.Y.S. A curious episode, if I do say so myself...
Hmm. I still think it's a bad episode, but it does have its moments.
I love RD's self-insert fanfic in this one. She's hilarious at a couple points, actually.
Anyway, the rumor floating around is that the initial draft of SAYS had the life-debt owed to Rarity rather than AJ and that this was later changed in revisions. To me, it makes more sense that Spike would futz up (unidentified chore now lost at revision level) at Carousel Boutique because it's just slightly more out of his comfort zone than the Apple household, but even preserving the Apple nature of the episode, I'd prefer to see him failing at the farm chores rather than the household ones. Instead, he does the stuff he's never done before perfectly and trips over the stuff he has. If he was merely choking under the pressure, this ought to have been made more clear somehow. As with many problems this show has, you could probably fix it in a thirty second scene, but to not mention it at all shows a fundamental overlook of Spike's everyday quality. Judging by the thread, this is everyone's problem with it. It's a shame, because as you note, it's otherwise pretty friggin' funny. Far from my least favorite ep.
I think I will skip the discussion of the episode's overall merit, and simply comment that Applejack nudging an ink pot to get bookhorse's attention was unbelievably adorable.
Well, this is timely. I consider "Spike at Your Service" my least favorite episode of Season 3, but I'm going to be rewatching it this Saturday for an ongoing blog series. Now I'll try to go in with fresh eyes. Thanks, Bookish.
Spike's sudden lack of competence could easily be chalked up to him being outside his comfort zone; both in that he's trying to work in an unfamiliar household as opposed to his own (items being in different places from what he's used to, ponies used to different routines, and most importantly ponies not used to him just stepping in and taking over; Twilight would habitually step back and let him do his thing, but Granny Smith would not), and because he's trying to prove his worth new ponies and feels a need to excel. He's overthinking it, and thus messes up.
Furthermore, the klutziness is important for the episode's dynamic. Applejack's reason for squaring his debt and getting him back to Twilight isn't because his clumsiness is making a mess (she's friends with Pinkie Pie and deals with the Crusaders on a daily basis, after all), but because the setup is wrong and awkward and he's unknowingly hurting inside and it jus' ain't right, doggoneit! And the mishaps make this much clearer and gives a sense of urgency to the need to set things right, whereas if he worked flawlessly the need to set things right would feel so much more arbitrary. There would be no point to showing him working well because that doesn't mean anything to the main plot and would take away time from the things that need to be shown, i.e. a (different) reason for AJ to be concerned about Spike.
I'll admit that reversing an established strong (and positive) character trait for the sake of a plot point isn't the best writing, but the alternative would probably have been worse. Sometimes sacrifices have to be made to drive a strong narrative.
Yes! I actually really like SAYS. I mean, AJ nudging the inkpot? Rarity and AJ and Dash in Rarity's kitchen? Dash and the rock tower? Pinkie's plan and her moustache? Well, I still laugh every time I watch it, and I smile at a lot of the little interactions. It's probably one of the funniest episodes, to me.
I get why people aren't happy with the episode and think it's full of wasted potential. But those factors just don't affect my enjoyment of the episode. I mean, I don't know why more people don't like it for Rarity alone:
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I'll admit, I haven't re-watched MOST of the show's episodes in a long while (with the exceptions of "Luna Eclipsed" and "Hearth's Warming Eve", both of which join their respective Holiday's rotation of Specials I Watch Every Year, and both of which consistently hold up), but I suspect this would be one that would benefit greatly from it. At the time, I found it boring, and predictable; no, no one was out of character or anything (though Spike's incompetence did stretch credibility for me a little at times), but I have also always found this episode template ("you have saved our lives, we are eternally grateful!" and all the aggravation that comes with it) to be tedious to the extreme for how rigidly it plays out, beat for beat, exactly the same, every friggin' time, and at the time, this episode did nothing to change that.
But?
Predictability in and of itself need not be the thing that ruins an episode, and at the time we really had not yet seen the very worst the show could offer (even "Best Night Ever" had some redeeming qualities to it, That Song chief among them), nor for that matter had we gotten the kind of mileage on these characters that would help us to broaden our view of them. So while I may have been underwhelmed with it at the time, I remember liking enough about it (Applejack in particular) that I suspect a rewatch would in fact do it wonders. So thanks for giving me the inspiration; I dunno when, but I think I may just try to find some time for it sooner rather than later.
...outta curiosity, what prompted YOU to re-watch it?
I liked the worldbuilding this episode introduced (we meet the closest thing Equestria has to a Parliament/Congress, Fancy Pants is once again both charming and scheming, how no one else recognizes him as the Tywin Lanister of Equestria boggles my mind).
But a lot of what you cited is why I and many other people hate this episode: Spike is a ten year old kid put in charge of a major conference, and does a pretty darn great job, but he's still treated like a complete screw-up. Cadance, the pony who put a child in charge of managing the equivalent of Congress, gets off scot-free on the Karma meter and once again Spike is holding the bag.
Imagine how this episode would have gone if Spike was replaced with one of the CMC. How well a job would they have done, and what (if any) consequences would they face?
3620913
1)
You're thinking of "Princess Spike."
2)
This is not how Princess Spike went.
3)
Spike was forgiven by absolutely everybody at the end of the episode.
3620926 1. Ooops, I am, my mistake. I apologize for the confusion.
2. I meant relative to what you would expect any other child given such responsibilities to perform.
3. He was forgiven (everybody is), I just felt like the kid left in charge by adults shouldn't be shouldering the blame in the first place.
Wait a minute. The episode that had as its moral that Spike doesn't identify with dragons and feels like he is a pony instead you like just as much as the episode that threw that moral completely out of the window and pulled a made up dragon code out of nowhere and the entire premise of which was that Spike wants to desperately be a true dragon? What? What? What? That does not compute. That is, like, what? What? I have never before met anyone who could like one of those episodes without disliking the other, because they completely contradict each other, and you- what? What?
...
What?
3621899
Given my druthers, I would have swapped the airing order, yes.
3621899
Also, your avatar is the only FiM villain I've ever liked.
You should ask me about that sometime!
3620591
Reasons, which I'll likely share very soon.
3621905 Why didn't you like Discord and/or the Dazzlings as villains?
Starlight as a villain was my #2 favorite overall, finally a villain who is not generic magical monster #23597 bent on WORLD DOMINATION (OF COURSE!) but a regular old unicorn with a messed up ideology she believes in. I am however really really really peeved about her lackluster backstory. Also I don't like how she seems to be taking the spot I had hoped Sunset would fill.* If there is no Equestria Girls crossover somewhere in season 6 with Sunset having a nice talk with Celestia there will be hell to pay. Freaking Brad got two cameos, Flim and Flam got their own dystopian timeline in the season 5 finale (How did that even happen? Someone needs to get on that.), but Sunset does not only not get her own timeline, no, we never see Twilight writing in the journal in the background somewhere during the season either.
*The episode gets brownie points in my book for talking the villain out of being evil instead of blasting them with magic rainbows as usual, even if the exact way it happened could have been better and had the reason for being evil not literally been "I had a friend once, but he left, so I became pony Stalin and then wanted to literally end the world because my totalitarian utopia fell apart".
3621913 Ooh, foreshadowing. I'm excited. 83
I've been saying this for eons. Honestly, if you were to ask me, I'd say this is one of the better episodes of Season 3.
Now that's not saying much because if you ask me, most of the S3 episodes are complete garbage, but I would rank this episode about fourth best of the season. Because you're right, it IS funny. All of the ponies are delightfully in character, the jokes are remarkably on point, and the conversation at the end is really good. The only real problem is how incompetent they made Spike which, unfortunately, is a big part of the episode.