Well, let’s take a look at #45, “Dragon Quest.”

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TECHNICAL SPECS:

Season: 2
Episode: 21
Written By: Merriweather Williams
First Aired: March 17, 2012

SUMMARY:

The Great Dragon Migration, a…dragon migration, is passing over Ponyville, and the Mane 6 (minus Fluttershy) have all come out to watch. Of course, the giant, fire-breathing beasts are terrifying to behold, if only compared to the miniature version serving tea and cookies. When Spike comments on how awesome dragons are, Rainbow Dash points out that he’s not scary or threatening in the slightest. Everypony else’s attempts to console him only make things worse, praising him for not being at all like the rest of his species. All this does is kick off an existential crisis, and despite Twilight’s attempts to help him find some answers, not a single pony has ever recorded anything about dragons.

Rainbow Dash and Rarity arrive to invite the two out to breakfast, but Spike has other plans. Since there are no answers to be found in Ponyville, he’ll be going off to join the Great Dragon Migration. Dash and Rarity try to talk him out of it, but Twilight encourages him to go…if only so the three can follow him. And so, after a long, exhausting journey and an epic battle with a metal slime, Spike reaches a volcano where the dragons are roosting. Spike starts to have second thoughts…until he notices a group of teenage dragons fighting each other down below. Meanwhile, Rarity has sewn together a rather poor costume, but as luck would have it, it’s a perfect match for another dragon, Crackle, so they manage to bluff their way in.

Unfortunately for Spike, a little baby dragon isn’t really all that impressive to the teens. It gets worse when, during a fire breathing contest, he burps up a letter from Princess Celestia, thereby getting him branded as being friends with a pony princess. Still, Spike keeps sticking to the challenges, while the others use their disguise to help him along. Finally, Spike wins their respect after belly flopping onto a pool of lava, and after bonding with the group, decides this is where he wants to stay. Twilight, Dash and Rarity are horrified at the thought of losing Spike, but there doesn’t seem to be anything they can do.

Fortunately, fate smiles upon them as the dragons, being jerks, take Spike on a raiding mission to a phoenix nest. Spike’s job is to throw a rock to distract the parents, while the others take and smash the eggs. Reluctantly, Spike does so, but when the dragons go to the empty nest, they discover that all but one egg (which fell out and landed next to Spike) has already hatched. They still decide to kill the chicks, but mommy and daddy come back, round up their young, and soundly defeat the dragons. Meanwhile, Spike finds the egg just before the others get back, and they tell him to smash it to prove himself.

Spike, of course, refuses to do so, causing the other dragons to turn on him…until Twilight, Dash and Rarity jump in, ready for a big fight. Unfortunately, Spike kills our action climax by running for his life, and without a reason to fight, the ponies follow suit. Twilight barely manages to mass teleport the group out of danger, with the dragons crashing into a tree.

Now back in Ponyville, Spike writes a letter to Celestia, telling her that he’s learned that while he’s a dragon, his real family are the ponies that love and care for him. The phoenix egg also hatches, giving Spike his own pet, Pee-Wee.

REVIEW:

“Dragon Quest” is not one of those episodes I have a lot to really talk about. It’s actually kind of dull to be honest, with much of the plot revolving around Spike trying to ingratiate himself with a gang of bullies. Still, I have a review to do, so let’s do it.

The prologue gives us our only appearance of Fluttershy the entire episode, as she refuses to go watch the Great Dragon Migration. The scene itself is funny, albeit in the usual Merriweather Williams way, with the characters behaving somewhat off and the humor being more slapsticky and anti-Rainbow Dash than anything else. I loved Dash’s face in the photo for the Butterfly Migration, and Fluttershy charging to the window, stopping, opening it gently, and then jumping for her life was more amusing than it should have been. Still, it’s just a funny scene with no real consequence.

The actual episode begins with the ponies in a trench, wearing their best camouflage in an attempt to not end up as appetizers on a dragon’s dinner menu. Unfortunately, this is where we run into one of the episode’s gaping weaknesses: Rarity. Ye Gods, she’s written horribly in this episode. She loudly announces her presence, unfurling a massive red carpet (with fireworks) while wearing the exact wrong kind of outfit for this trip. Even worse, this behavior continues throughout the episode. She’s constantly shouting “darling,” treats Spike like something between a baby and a puppy dog, and is just aggravating to watch. By contrast, Rainbow Dash is actually written fairly decently for once, with most of her issues actually relating to her established character flaws and not stereotypes about her character archetype.

The actual migration is visibly impressive, with all sorts of winged beasts flying overhead while raining fiery death upon anypony they see. Of course, this is immediately contrasted with Spike, who’s wearing an apron while serving refreshments. Naturally, Spike wants to act like he’s as strong and powerful as those dragons, but as the ponies (especially Rainbow Dash) remind him, he’s cute and adorable, not big and scary. All this does, however, is cause Spike to storm off, humiliated at his lack of dragonhood.

Next comes the big dramatic scene of the episode, and the one that raised my hopes so they could be especially crushed. That night, Spike raises some big questions about himself, wondering who he is and where he came from. All Twilight can do is tell him that he came from an egg she hatched, and that she doesn’t know anything about his past before then. So she tries to solve it her usual way, but research and studying fails them both, leaving Spike with no knowledge of what his past is. The writing here is very overwrought, but it’s also a strangely effective scene, and highlights Spike’s loneliness. I even liked it when Twilight, Dash and Rarity waved him goodbye, encouraging him to discover the truth about himself…while ending the first act with this line.

Spike has his own epic travel montage, complete with Cranky Doodle Donkey rowing him down the river. (Either things didn’t work out with Matilda, or they just reused the character model to save cost.) Finally, Spike reaches the volcano where the other dragons are hanging out, and decides to fit in. And immediately, any hopes of real development, insights into dragons, or just about anything else are ground into dust. The teenage dragons are just…well, psychopathic jerks, with barely any sort of character beyond just tormenting Spike and each other with various sadomasochistic contests of machismo. The adults, meanwhile, just watch the spectacle silently, which makes sense considering how most reptiles treat their young, but at the same time, it just feels…disappointing. The first act raises a lot of questions about Spike’s past, but then the rest of the episode flat-out ignores any of them in favor of a series of having the dragons hazing Spike over and over again.

It doesn’t help that the dragons are not only all bullies, but also all male. Remember all that stuff I said about Spike episodes being about how boys are icky and gross and not as good as the girls the show’s aimed at? Imagine that, but on a whole other level. The dragons are basically portrayed as being self-obsessed about their macho image, to the point where they call Princess Celestia a “namby-pamby pony princess.” (I did like how Twilight was ready to go medieval on them after that, though.) It’s basically the same flaws Spike has shown in previous episodes, but rather than play them for laughs, they’re shown in a highly disapproving light, magnified onto several characters, and pushed over and over again to the point of annoyance.

Still, there are two things I really like about these sequences. The first would be the music, especially during the “Kind of the Hoard” sequence. It’s very rare that you get rock on any My Little Pony soundtrack, and here it works perfectly. It also matches up with the personality of the dragons, showing their devotion to being hard-as-nails and the toughest around. The second would be Twilight, Rainbow Dash and Rarity in the dragon costume. I love how they actually justify the dragons falling for the stupid costume with Crackle, and the various things they do to try and prop Spike up in the eyes of the other dragons, such as throwing the tail wrestle (which Spike still almost loses). They’re even smart enough not to even attempt to dive into the lava…which is when Spike actually earns their respect by surviving a belly flop, thus bringing this long, drawn-out nightmare to an end.

For just a moment, the episode actually seems like it might be starting to shape up into something different. The dragons accept Spike into the gang, albeit in their typical wild, testosterone-poisoned way, and it seems like the little guy’s going to stay. This causes all three ponies to start fretting and blaming each other for letting things get this far, and it seems like they’ll have to do something to convince Spike to return. But no, the story does it for them by making the dragons even worse. The raid on the nest is simultaneously visually entertaining and downright frustrating in just how shallow the writing is this episode. On the one hand, the phoenixes are animated beautifully, and the scene where one uses a Solar Flare to blind the dragons and send them into a tree was funny. On the other hand, it continues the trend of just not using the teenage dragons in any sort of way beyond being straight bullies, only now they’re willing to murder baby birds.

And of course, Spike doesn’t smash the egg, the other ponies arrive, and everything seems to be building up for a fight. However, in one of the few clever moments in the entire episode, the four wisely bolt rather than face opponents that could flash-fry them without a second thought. While it would have been cathartic to see them get their butts kicked, it’s still pretty clear that the ponies and Spike were just horribly outclassed. Twilight mass teleporting the whole group was a bit of a stretch power-wise, but otherwise, it was fine. As for the dragons crashing into the tree (and reusing the same animation, at that)…it just felt lazy.

And so we get to the moral, and I’m sorry, but I have to take this one to task. The actual moral is a good one, and I can’t fault it for the most part. No, my problem, once again, is how the message is presented. The idea is that Spike is much better off with the ponies; after all, now that we have proof that all dragons are soulless monsters who deserve nothing but contempt and death. And yet, the episode itself undermines the message by panning through the pictures, stopping when it gets to one from Twilight’s birthday party in “Sweet and Elite.” Guess who wasn’t at that party? Even worse, Spike’s clipped out a picture of himself and shoved it into the side of the photograph. For all the talk about being friends, the ponies continuously neglect him, and when they do notice him, they often use him for hard labor or just treat him like garbage. Not that the dragons were any better, but still, Spike’s pretty much screwed no matter where he is.

The story ends with Spike getting his own pet, Pee-Wee. This is actually really sweet, especially considering Spike’s lifespan issues and the immortality of phoenixes. Like Tank, he’s never seen or mentioned again, but considering how late this was in the season, it’s a bit more understandable.

CONCLUSION:

Whether you bought into the hype or not, this episode was just a disappointment. If you wanted the dragons to actually be expanded upon and not be reduced to an Always Chaotic Evil race, then you were out of luck. The teenage dragons are incredibly one-note, and since they end up carrying so much of the middle part of the story, the entire episode feels weighed down. If you just wanted an entertaining episode, this one just comes off as being very dull and boring. Outside of the awesomeness of Crackle and a handful of jokes, the humor just never takes off, far too much time is spent on the hazing, and by the end, I was screaming for the episode to end already. All in all, not a great one, and my pick for Williams’ second-worst episode this season.

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Well, that wraps up all of Merriweather’s contributions to the show so far. Will she continue to improve in the third season? Will she give us another MMDW? Only time will tell.