OH MY GOD YOU GUYS THIS EPISODE
...Ahem.
This was
unusually good. I don't mean necessarily on an emotional level or storytelling level, though both of those were great and a cut above what the season has been so far too. I mean on an
execution level, and that's my main takeaway since most of the thread so far has been about the story.
What struck me so much about the ep is the level of
detail—not just in animation and character design and continuity (haha Mare in the Moon, remember when we used to get annoyed that flashback episodes didn't show the moon correctly), but in stuff like
dialogue. The stuff they wrote for Shatner to say, and Goldie Delicious especially! Did you hear some of her lines? Pointing out how a cutie mark of apple butter wouldn't be distinguishable from pear butter? Neatly resolving a plot difficulty that I had just been wondering about a minute before. They were
on point. And all the texture that the dialogue gave to the characters of Grand Pear and Granny Smith, like how they called each other "prickly old pear" and "crabapple" at the end. Perfect. The kind of stuff you wonder why it took them this long to get around to, it's so obvious in retrospect.
And the acting! Like at the wedding especially! Everything Bright Mac said and did was just so full of life, and the same goes for Buttercup; lots of physical acting, lots of emoting, all kinds of character design changes and hairstyle changes and stuff that conveys just what it needs to convey
wordlessly—like when the sneeze puts all the flowers in Buttercup's hair and she looks all disheveled but still really pretty, like that was the whole point, and she's totally cool with it, because that's the kind of person she is. The tearful goodbye, the
are you making me? line! God damn! That's some densely written,
heavy stuff. It seems like the show recently has been a lot more light and fluffy in its subject matter, and this is such a huge departure thematically it feels almost jarring.
But that song, man... okay, so they brought out the big guns and the star power for this episode, and it really shows. If this was the season's showpiece episode, it goes a long way toward elevating S7 to near the top of the heap just on its own merits. Those good old-fashioned watching-pony-show tears, they did flow freely.
Okay so sure, the framing story was on the implausible side, and the wrapup was brief, but I consider those pretty minor gripes. We've already had an awful lot of reimagining of the show's core premises lately for the sake of better storytelling, and I'm glad they waited this long before giving us the backstory that we've been waiting on for so long, because only now do the writers seem to have a sense for which parts of the show's world are set in stone and which parts can be safely massaged a bit if it gives us a bigger storytelling impact.
But just as interesting, for me, is the clear fandom influence. I don't think it's coincidence that
an Apple/Pear feud is the basis for this story; it's a gag that's been part of fan-art since the early days, and I laughed pretty hard at the battling fruit stand vendors for that reason. (Why can't I find that John Joseco pic with AJ and the pear vendor, you know the one I mean) And for that matter I think they didn't really
need to tell this story at all; the show seemed pretty content to leave well enough alone with the Apples' parentage, but it's such a persistently interesting meme among fans that I think the writers simply couldn't resist.
And yet they
did manage to resist saying anything definitive about the fate of the parents... except they didn't, did they? Sure, they've still never said explicitly that they're dead, but there are quite a number of references to the parents in the past tense—talking about states of being, like "my mother was a Pear" and so on, but all tinged with a clear shade of "they aren't anything anymore". Not to mention them leaving the trees
to remember them by. But the biggest kicker for me, which people are either overlooking or taking for granted:

IT'S HER DADDY'S HAT YALL
I mean if that isn't the fandom's oldest "what is the show telling us about the Apple parents" meme ever, I sure don't remember another one, and the show's pretty explicitly giving it the nod of approval
I have a few more details to point out, if I can remember to come back to this, but there's one that I wanted to give special recognition:
Grand Père is a fucking stellar pun.
