Episode Re-Review: Yakity Sax · 3:45pm Saturday
It looked like Season 8 might be finally getting back on track after it fell hard from grace with "Non-Compete Clause". We had an honestly good episode in the form of "The Hearth's Warming Club" that finally painted the school in a good light, then we had "Friendship University" which at least gave us a proper RarityxTwilight episode, and then we had "The End in Friend" which managed to salvage itself in its third act. However, this episode ended up getting an early airing in the states, on a Friday of all things in the middle of summer. And while this episode is no "Marks for Effort", "The Mean Six", or "A Matter of Principals", it's still up there as one of the worst episodes of Season 8. Why is that? We had the Fox Brothers Michael P. and Will returning to pen this episode solo, and they had previously written a Pinkie Pie episode with the help of Josh Haber. By now they had penned two specatcular episodes in both "Forever Filly" and "Discordant Harmony", so it looked like they were coming into their own. They would pen another Pinkie Pie episode a season later. So what exactly happened with this episode? Well, let's find out.
The episode begins with the mane six (minus Pinkie Pie) investigating a sudden disturbance in the form of very loud and off-key music. It turns out to be Pinkie Pie, who is playing a very large and strange instrument called the yovidaphone. It appears to be the yak/pony equivalent to bagpipes given that it has a belly and large pipes. And bagpipes are apparently an instrument that can be very difficult to play right. So it seems this episode is going for the cliche joke of someone playing the bagpipes really badly, torturing everyone around them.
Where did Pinkie get the yovidaphone, and why is she so interested in it all of a sudden? Well too bad, the episode's not going to tell you. Pinkie's interested in this never before mentioned instrument because potatoes. But her interest seems to be an obsession, to the point where she seems to more or less carress the yovidaphone in a very suggestive way.
So Pinkie Pie goes back to playing it poorly, and the other mane six express their worries about how awful it sounds. When Applejack asks a question about it, Rarity even replies with "Applesolutely" before correcting herself. I think this was probably a flub on Tabitha's part, and they kept it in to try and be funny. It wouldn't be the first time one of her ad-libs made it into an episode. From there, we get a montage of Pinkie continuing to play the yovidaphone badly, and showing up uninvited into her friends' lives just to ruin everything they're doing with her bad playing.
And yes, that is the only joke and the only thing of substance that happens for a good chunk of the episode. The same unfunny joke again and again that assaults your ears. Didn't we learn this lesson already back in Season 3? Pinkie Pie doesn't magically make everything funny just because she's in it, real comedy takes effort. Repeating the same joke again and again isn't funny, it's low effort and uninspiring. Besides, there's more to Pinkie than just being funny, multiple episodes have made that perfectly clear.
Ultimately, the mane six (but no Spike or Starlight despite when this is clearly taking place) decide to stage an intervention outside Sugarcube Corner after Twilight briefly proposes casting a sound proofing bubble over Pinkie. And Applejack retorts about reminding Twilight about the events of "Horse Play". So they all opt to tell Pinkie outright that she sucks at playing the yovidaphone and decide to take it away from her. They don't consider maybe signing her up for music lessons or asking her to go practice somewhere where she won't be a bother to anyone. Nope, they decide to just jump straight to the nuclear option. Even Rainbow Dash is onboard with this despite twice being subjected to the nuclear option from her friends and twice having it arguably backfire on them.
Still, it works, and Pinkie parts with the yovidaphone. So because the episode isn't over yet, what do they decide to do to extend the episode? Well, completely out of the blue the next day, Pinkie Pie is dulled and grayed, completely depressed. And all because she can't play the yovidaphone anymore. That's right, Pinkie now cares so much about this instrument that she never played before this episode that nothing else can make her happy. Honestly, though, this is just lazy fanservice and an attempt to channel Pinkie's depressed state of "Party of One". What made that work, however, was that it was brief and mostly played for laughs. Plus, they showed hints that Pinkie might be borderline scizophrenic in that time. Here, we get none of that. We just get a bunch of lazy montages of her friends trying to cheer her up with different activities, even down to having Rainbow Dash bake cupcakes with Pinkie. As if her showing up during Pinkie's mental breakdown in "Party of One" wasn't already enough of a reference to that infamous grimdark fanfic.
Nothing seems to work, so Twilight decides to throw a party for Pinkie and declare an official "Pinkie Pie Appreciation Day". However, Pinkie doesn't show up to the party. Instead, the mane six go to Sugarcube Corner only to find Maud packing up Pinkie's things, and following a series of literal minded jokes from her, she reveals that Pinkie has run off to Yakyakistan. Yes, that's right, Pinkie is not just depressed and obsessed, she's also insanely selfish. She's willing to run away from the town that she knows she's important to, and abandon her friends that supposedly meant so much to her, all because she was told to stop playing an instrument she wasn't good at playing.
So her friends go to Yakyakistan and find Pinkie watching yaks playing the yovidaphone properly, all the while she's drowning her sorrows in ice cream the same way Spike was acting at Donut Joe's during "The Best Night Ever".
Apparently, playing that instrument is the only thing that will make Pinkie Pie happy again, nevermind the fact that she can do so many other things and do them better. Even Rainbow Dash, who helped Scootaloo get over her fixation on trying to fly, is onboard with encouraging Pinkie to play again without any effort to improve or any effort to learn how to play the yovidaphone properly. Instead, she and the rest of the mane six shout down the yaks who critcizie Pinkie's yovidaphone playing, and at no point do they think of maybe letting Pinkie take lessons from them. I mean, she's an honorary yak, so the yaks would probably be glad to teach her if she asked. I should also mention that neither Prince Rutherford or Yona appear or get mentioned at any point in this episode even though you'd think this would be the perfect time to include them.
And that's the story, so what do I think of the episode? Well, they obviously realized at some point that they couldn't stretch a twenty two minute plot of the same unfunny joke about Pinkie Pie sucking at playing the yovidaphone. But instead of reworking the episode or even just dropping the concept all together because of how lazy and uninspiring it was, they instead opted to throw in some lazy fanservice that just served to paint Pinkie in the absolute worst light possible. I can't believe how selfish she is here, this is worse than even her worst of portrayals before. At the very least if the episode was just her playing the yovidaphone and not realizing how bad she was at it, it would believable because Pinkie doesn't always have the best situational awareness. The real problem is that the episode never bothers to explain why Pinkie is so attached to this random instrument that never appeared before. For crying out loud, it's an unhealthy obsession. The least they could do is give us a reason for it, even just a line or two of dialogue. Perhaps the biggest disappointment though is that even though this episode practically gift wrapped a chance for Yona to be in it alongside one of the mane six, they never even considered it despite having Yakyakistan appear in the climax. Maybe this was a holdover script from Season 7, but if that was the case they had all the time in the world to realize this was a bad idea and scrap it. Again, going back to the leaks, there were at least a half dozen or so ideas that sound infinitely better than this: The FlutterPie flashback episode, an episode dealing with the Crystal Empire's lost customs and traditions, Rarity teaching Pinkie Pie about business, or even the beach episode. Ultimately, this episode gets an E, I can't give it an F since it not only switches direction to a worse plot, but it also never explains what needs to be explained to make this concept work: Why Pinkie is so attached to the yovidaphone to the point where nothing else matters.
And it's not going to get any better from here for the re-reviews, at least for Season 8. Next up we have "A Rockhoof and a Hard Place", which just proves how quickly they tossed the pillars aside after "Shadow Play" without bothering to do anything with them.
Pinkie Pie being obsessed over a new instrument made sense to me. She takes to learning instruments with a gusto, that’s the only way she could pull off her one-man-band routine so well. And she’s gone her whole life succeeding at each one.
5789227 Maybe, but to be so obsessed that nothing else matters and she would run away from Ponyville just because she couldn't play it anymore is a real stretch.
If Filli Vanilli is Pinkie Pie's worst supporting role, then this episode is her worst starring role. Say what you will about her other episodes like A Friend in Deed and Rock Solid Friendship; at least they didn't try to completely justify her annoying antics. Not to mention she did eventually realize her mistakes there and made an effort to fix them. Here however, it honestly feels like an episode from the seasonal rot era of SpongeBob SquarePants, with Pinkie in the role of SpongeBob and/or Patrick and the rest of the Mane Six sharing the role of Squidward.
If I have to stretch for a positive here, the call-back to Horse Play when Applejack reminded Twilight not to beat around the bush with Pinkie like she did with Celestia was a nice little subversion of the "Aesop Amnesia" trope. But even then, that leads right into the issue of Pinkie's friends telling her to give up on playing the yovidaphone instead of simply encouraging her to take lessons or at the very least play somewhere privately. To me, it just felt like a lazy attempt by the writers to trick the audience into taking Pinkie's side over the other Mane Six's.
Bottomline, I'm glad the Fox Brothers got to do one more episode after this, and coincidentally one that also stars Pinkie Pie, because it would've been a shame if this is how they ended their tenure with the show.
5789264 Well said. Some are even saying this episode's aesop was lifted straight from Caioul, and that should be setting off alarm bells.
5789282
Thanks. I know for a fact The Hero of Tomorrow wondered if the creators of Caillou wrote this episode when he talked about it in his Top 17 Least Favorite MLP:FIM Episodes list.
Yep, easily one of the show's worst episodes.
Weird how Pinkie was bad at the yovidaphone considering this is the same pony who could play multiple instruments without a mouth in Magic Duel.
I wouldn't say that the ReMane 5 bluntly telling Pinkie to stop playing the yovidaphone isn't the same as the nuclear option they did in the Mare do Well episode. At least in this case, they were way more honest and upfront with Pinkie rather than outright tricking and deceiving her on the first attempt.
5789554 I still consider it the nuclear option because it removes all other solutions without even attempting to see if they will work. And like a nuclear weapon, it's a solution that feels like it should only be used as a last resort if all else fails and nothing else is possible, rather than as the first option that comes to mind for solving the problem. And just like with Mare-Do-Well and the zombie prank, none of the mane six really try to have a conversation with Pinkie Pie before outright taking the yovidaphone from her.
5789559
Fine and fair enough on that. Though technically they didn't try the nuclear option first in 28 Pranks Later. The ReMane 5 kept trying to talk to Rainbow Dash about her pranks and tell her to stop multiple times (right after she scarred Fluttershy in the beginning and again when Pinkie tried to talk to her after she pranked the entire town), but she kept refusing to listen, so the zombie prank was the last resort rather than their first idea.
5789564 Maybe, but it still felt really extreme to resort to that to make her learn her lesson instead of trying something that didn't carry such huge risks if Rainbow chose fight over flight.