This morning I found myself unable to wait for this new episode to air, and I was going nuts counting the minutes down until 9AM. I ended up sitting in front of my TV and turning on the HUB channel early, and I caught the last 15-minutes of Strawberry Shortcake by doing so. While I was sitting in my recliner chair, bored, resting my chin on my hand, and killing time by watching the end of Strawberry Shortcake, I thought to myself how fortunate it was that My Little Pony didn't turn out like that show, and that it had so much more real humor, action, and creativity behind it... except that when Strawberry Shortcake ended and the new episode of MLP:FiM started, well, I still ended up resting my chin in my hand.
You caught what I wrote there correctly-- I hate to say it, but after watching "Sisterhooves Social," I found the episode kind of "Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz."
I even watched the episode a second time through during its encore showing, and I still thought that it was primarily a yawner.
Granted, the episode started out pretty promising. I actually chuckled a bit when Sweetie Belle attempted to cook Rarity breakfast, and managed to burn the juice. I also thought Rarity's parents were kind of funny-- here you have Rarity who is this well-mannered, sophisticated, and fashionable socialite, and yet her parents kind of remind me of blue-collar people from Wisconsin. How does that work out? I can see Sweetie Belle being related to her parents, but Rarity doesn't really resemble or act like either her parents or her sister. It makes me almost wonder if Rarity was adopted and has no relation to her other three family members at all! Anyway, I digress-- after you see Sweetie Belle's comically burned breakfast, the comedy seems to completely shut off for the rest of the episode. I had a bit of a grin when the sheep told AJ and AB that they "could have asked them" to go into their pen, and I thought that it was kind of funny when Rarity said "As Celestia as my witness!" instead of "As God as my witness" at one point during the episode, but these were very little things, neither of which made me take my chin off of my hand in excitement.
In other words, this episode was wayyyyyyy too "slice of life" and too little funny. It's as if the writers completely forgot to storyboard some jokes into the plot. Had this been the only episode of MLP:FiM that I had ever seen in my life I would have labeled it as a "little girl's show" just like the episode of Strawberry Shortcake that I caught the end of before it, and would have probably never felt very inclined to watch MLP:FiM again. (Luckily, this was not the only episode of MLP:FiM that I have ever seen!) Despite the fact that the credited writer for this episode, Cindy Morrow, had written some very good episodes for Season 1, this one was so underwhelming that for me this is "strike one" against her in my book. For whatever reason, this entire season has been dramatically up-and-down with its episodes-- "Lesson Zero" had its funny moments but overall left me cold, "Luna Eclipsed" was an extremely fun episode and one of my all-time favorites, and now "Sisterhooves Social" got so wrapped up in its whole slice of life plot that it completely forgot about the funny and nearly put me to sleep in my chair. Let's hope that this pattern means that the next episode, "Cutie Pox," will be truly spectacular.
I realize that I have become notorious for writing massively-long deeply-analytical walls of text for every episode of MLP:FiM that I have seen because I am so enthusiastic about the show, but I didn't really care for this episode all that much so this is all of the text that it is getting. I would much rather have all of you go back a few posts in this thread and read and comment on my very long list of thoughts about the episode "Luna Eclipsed." With how great that episode was I could easily discuss it for another whole week!
