Retrospective Review: The Cutie Mark Chronicles and Owl's Well That Ends Well · 4:43am Mar 16th, 2021
S1E23 The Cutie Mark Chronicles
Fans really seized on the idea of the Cutie Mark Crusaders and tree sap.
I have to think that, by a certain point, Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle were deliberately not naming Rainbow Dash to mess with Scootaloo.
"I never told you that story?" Because, frankly, it's ridiculous that Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle don't know their own sisters' cutie mark stories. I imagine, in this world, it's similar to asking your parents how they met--a story that gets talked about in family gatherings.
I like the appearance of the young Mane Six, in particular Fluttershy with her gangly legs.
Loyal Rainbow Dash apparently didn't notice that her friend was no longer in Cloudsdale.
In the young Twilight Sparkle scene, all the background ponies are still adults. And the test scene inspired a lot of good fanfiction.
In my opinion, this is one of the best episodes of the first season. It fleshes out the Mane Six, and the idea that these characters were linked before they even met was something unexpected, and a good demonstration of the Magic of Friendship.
S1E24 Owl's Well That Ends Well
On the other hand, this was a terrible episode, the first in many bad Spike-focused episodes.
The idea that there's a meteor shower that occurs once every 100 years is a stupid plot device when Luna (and for 1000 years Celestia) literally controls the heavens.
Spike is just stupid in this episode. At its most basic, he should have welcomed someone to share his workload. He's largely acting like the child he is (perhaps younger than his maturity suggests), but it's an awful contrivance for him to immediately think he's going to be replaced, when just what does he think Twilight Sparkle is going to do to him? Kick him out of the house?
With this episode and Dragonshy, we see bestial dragons, more like you might see in typical fantasy worlds. It's interesting that this changes once we visit the Dragon Lands and see dragons talking.
At the end, the quill shown is one of the normal ones, and not the one from Owlowiscious.
Scootaloo did say "surprisingly often." That was far from the first time.
There was a race. Tunnel vision was in full effect.
Mind you, both of the S1 dragons do say something. But yeah, "Owl's Well That Ends Well" is easily my least favorite episode of the season.
I've always gone with "the night sky isn't Celestia's domain, so for a thousand years it remained as-is because she either couldn't or wouldn't change it". But yeah, it could have been a good opportunity to remind everyone Princess Luna exists. :B Really agree with you on both of these.
On the other hand, the idea that Luna controls all of the night sky is one of those Writers Have No Sense Of Scale bits of whimsy (or maybe the kind of Early Installment Weirdness that often happens in the early episodes of an episodic TV series) that kind of breaks down if you look at it too closely. (Kind of like the notion that the pegasi at the weather factory individually craft each snowflake by hoof -- given that even just one good-sized snowball contains hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of individual snowflakes, even the entire pegasus population of Equestria working 24/7 couldn't possibly hoof-craft enough snowflakes for even a single day's snowfall, much less an entire winter.)
If Luna literally had control of thousands or millions of stars, as well as the moon, vs. Celestia only having control over the sun, then Luna would have been so much more powerful than Celestia (with thousands of suns to draw upon) that it stretches credulity to think that Celestia, even with the Elements-powered Rainbow Cannon at her disposal, would have been able to defeat and imprison her in the first place, much less keep her locked away for a thousand years in the very night sky she supposedly controlled. Seems like it would make a lot more sense for Luna to only control the moon, just as Celestia only controls the sun.
But being able to say Fluttershy is faster with a straight face is still interesting.