SoundMonkey44 wrote:Nitpicking over keys now too are we!?
Yea today's a good day to do yard work and ignore the internet.

Emptyquotin' this.
Man, these guys are on a
tear with Applejack this season, aren't they? The moment I saw her confront Flim and Flam and them shift seamlessly into Plan B mode ("So what if it isn't technically real? The placebo effect can be worth real money. Are your principles so important that they trump other ponies' happiness?"), I knew I was up against some next-level shit compared to "

Just let go, that'll show you how important honesty is".
Honesty is not a difficult theme to build a kids' show around. What's kind of incredible in retrospect is just how
little this show has made hay of it. This is the first time they've really made it the centerpiece of an Applejack story, and up till now I've been coming up with all these convoluted and needlessly congratulatory theories about how the intervening seasons of Pony have created character development stories about ponies' coming into conflict with their Elemental traits. Rarity has had episodes about greed and ambition, Fluttershy has gone overboard with her repressed rage, and Applejack's stories have frequently involved her hiding the truth or being diplomatic to spare someone's feelings—but it's never come right out and said "Here is a lesson about Honesty, starring Applejack". It's kind of amazing that the show has avoided being so direct about its basic premise for so long.
And I'm not sure whether it's a change for the better or for the worse, either. It just seems like this is the kind of episode the show
should have been doing all along—or at least the kind I would have
expected it to do, based on how everything was set up in the pilot episode. Seeing Applejack wrestling with the moral implications of allowing her likeness to be used in endorsement of something she doesn't actually believe in is kind of like if we were to see Hasbro suddenly flood the toy aisles with Twilight's Tree Library Playsets and Cutie Mark Crusader figurines with Magic Warm-Water-Activated Cutie Marks. Season Four seems like it's been about the show finding its footing again, and I've felt that way ever since Princess Twilight Sparkle and its return to the Celestia/Luna mythology after all this Crystal Empire diversion stuff.
And in any case, throughout this episode I was just giddy about how well and relatably Applejack's inner struggle was being presented. Sure, the show had to be a bit heavy-handed in scenes like the reveal of Silver Shill ("

GASP! You were in on it!" when it was obvious to anyone watching over the age of 12 that this was the case, and in a realistic scenario AJ and even AB should have declared the jig to be up the instant they saw him come out the tent door). But everything from the abovementioned confrontation scene onward was deliciously subtle, and even a target-audience kid would have been totally sucked in to the quandary. How
will Applejack get out of this? I
know she's lying.
She knows she's lying. And now every pony in town is taking her at her word! What'll happen when she gets found out? What would
I do if I were Applejack? Shit
Moooooom the TV is making me thiiiiiinkAnd it's fascinating how the episode danced around the very real possibility that Granny Smith would severely hurt herself doing what she's doing. It was the unspoken subtext behind all of Applejack's worry about her, and behind the tension of the climactic dive scene. Every little stunt she pulled, I could just
feel spontaneous sympathetic osteoporosis fizzing through my bones.

I'm not even going to point out the ridiculousness of AJ snatching her out of the air with a lasso, however that was physically supposed to have worked. But there's no way it's lost on kids either what the danger to Granny is of believing in the tonic. They have grandparents. They know it's not just because they're plagued by bad memories that they're not diving off the high board at the public pool.
Flim and Flam? They're as cornily likable as ever, and if we're really going to carp about whether they've been changed (whether for better or worse) by making them into snake-oil salesmen versus the more morally ambiguous "just good businessmen" role they played in SSCS6K, man I just don't even know how we ever got involved in this show to begin with. Is
that the kind of consistency we're going to demand? They had a marvelous song (drawing more on calliope-driven carnival barker/circus music than 50s showtunes), they were joyously self-possessed and able to turn on a dime tactically, and they had a plan with which to set up a business that (unless someone like Applejack came along to spoil everything) they could have kept going indefinitely, just like their real-world antecedents did. And they weren't redeemed into oblivion either. What's not to like?
So yeah. Great episode rich in essential AJ-ness, excellent song with real ambitious lyrics and musical interplay, and wonderful horse texture. (Love those Granny Smith-isms: "Nothin' to it but to do it!" "Hold your horsefeathers!" etc. —Not to mention "Leave the flyin' through the air to the pegasi!"

) I was constantly giggling through the scene of Big Mac and AJ desperately trying to save Granny as she kept swimming around all their efforts. (The yoke can be used as a flotation device

) And just in general it felt like exactly what this show has always
wanted to be.
...Shit, I suck at emptyquotin'.