On first watch, there were some wonderful moments - I
loved both the songs, and Twilight struggling to control her magic was great. A lot of the visuals and set pieces were amazing, but I felt like the characters were subordinated to the setting, a little.
Like in Return of Harmony, there's a lot of exposition to wade through in the first half of episode one, but then the focus snaps back to the characters and their reactions to what's going on. The visuals in TK are
amazing, but I feel like the exposition overwhelmed the interpersonal. It was like the mane six were wandering through a gigantic set that they were lost in. Like the storage warehouse of an IKEA. Is that the exit behind all those sofas? Nope, turns out that tree is inside the store.
And because there was so much to get through, it never really eased back to give us the Rarity/Pinkie/Twilight line that turns it into the mane six reacting to this situation instead of Aragorn or Luke Skywalker or whoever reacting to it. The more the pyrotechnics are amped up and the more widescreen the focus gets, the harder it gets for the characters to be heard over the noise.
There's an inherent absurdity to the more epic stuff in MLP that I sort of love, that this is a proprietress of a small fashion boutique or an outgoing bakery assistant trying to save the world (also they are pastel horses), and when that gets lost entirely and they're just throwing down with a supervillain like there is nothing ridiculous about that at all, it can feel more generic.
The fight between Twilight and Tirek was awesome and the landscapes surrounding it were incredible - like when Twilight comes ploughing through the earth and everything around her is black and red and blasted - but I preferred the rainbow ponies section just because the colour scheme and the music shifted back from the sturm and drang of the previous scene to a kind of symphonic MLP theme and pastel colours, and all of a sudden we are in an episode of My Little Pony and some brightly coloured horses are throwing down against a giant centaur. As great as the blasted, windblown hellscape of the previous scene was, it felt like it could have been in any show where such things take place.
A lot of this is down to preference, I'm not huge on the Lord of the Rings movies (the books are cool) or Star Wars or anything else like that, so when the epic fantasy gets too epic I get a little less involved. And man I cannot take it seriously when huge demon creatures are yelling GIVE ME YOUR ALICORN MAGIC.
But I loved parts of it, and Fluttershy's trust in and betrayal by Discord and everything around that, and even though I wasn't a huge fan of the episode I was still totally captured by the end song, and the way it just tied up the whole season and everything they'd been through over the last 26 episodes in that 90 second song was so great. And the princesses singing? God, call a doctor, honestly.
And I loved the season, and I can't wait to rewatch it all over the arid ponyless future we are currently perched on the event horizon of. So shit got maybe a little too real for my taste, and there was a little too much "the nazgul are storming Rivendell"-type dialogue for my taste, but you still rock, pony show
