Hey everypony! After the two week hiatus, I'm back again to give you my thoughts on the newest episode of My Little Pony, Lesson Zero.
I'm going to be doing this review a liiittle differently. While the previous ones were strictly first-impressions, deliberately written after I watched the episode on TV, before watching it a second time via internet means. This time I'm going to go ahead and watch it the second time while writing this post. What does this mean? Well, it means I can think more about the content of the episode as a whole instead of just as a first impression, which I figure will be good. Is that good? I think it's good.
Watch this episode on YouTube here.
As usual, SPOILERS.
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While it's a well-known fact that all of the Mane 6 have had a mental breakdown at some point or another in season one, Twilight's was probably the shortest, as it only lasted for a minute or two before Princess Celestia arrived and Pinkie solved their problem. This episode serves to fix that issue, and give Twilight the full episode of mental breakdown that she deserves. So yeah, Lesson Zero is basically Party of One except with Twilight instead of Pinkie.
This, as you may imagine, is completely awesome.
The episode starts us off with the Best Pony demonstrating to us exactly how massively OCD she is, running through a checklist of things she needs to make a checklist. Recursive checklist-making is something only Twilight could pull off, I think.
After this short little scene sets the mood, we get to see the opening, newly remastered! It's not all that different, but the music is more vibrant and exciting, and a train has been added to the scene with Twilight walking, housing the Cutie Mark Crusaders and Ditzy Doo/Derpy Hooves. I'm a little disappointed that that was basically the only visual element that was changed, but the new music is pretty great so it all works out!
Back to Twilight, who has some deep distress over cupcakes that she ordered for a picnic, because it's possible that one cupcake may have more icing than another. Did I mention that she has some incredible OCD in this episode?
Oh, and Spike's there too. Even if he's not the main focus of the episode, he's still completely great, acting more or less as a foil to Twilight's need for insane quantities of preparation and perfection. Also he is shown to have a forked tongue for the first time, which is minor but cool.
It's about this time that everything goes to crap, as Spike casually mentions that they "don't need to send Celestia a letter this week", and Twilight proceeds to flip out. She insists that it's absolutely vital that she sends Celestia a letter about her findings in friendship every week, else Celestia will fear that Twilight isn't taking her studies seriously, will make Twilight come back to Canterlot and take a test, which Twilight may fail and then be forced to go back into magic kindergarten.
Twilight's bad habit of taking everything to its absolute worst possible conclusion has gotten even worse since A Bird in the Hoof, it seems.
Spike, of course, tries to talk Twilight out of her nonsensical train of thought, even resorting to amusingly breaking the fourth wall a few times, but Twilight will have nothing of it. She must find a friend with a problem she can solve before the end of the day so she can learn something about friendship!
Naturally, she fails spectacularly in this regard. But while she does, we get to see Rarity be incredibly overdramatic (even more-so than Twilight), Rainbow Dash obliterate a shed of Applejack's with an Atomic Sonic Rainboom, and Fluttershy use crazy fighting moves to massage a bear. It's all incredibly fun to watch, due in no small part to the animation.
The entirety of this episode is animated beautifully. Friendship is Magic is known for its top-notch animation, but this episode raises the bar quite high with some brilliant transitions, awesome animations, and just downright looking incredibly sweet in motion. If this becomes standard for season two, I am prepared to be very impressed.
So anyway, with Twilight being unable to find a friend that needs her help, and apparently forgetting about Pinkie Pie, she begins to completely lose it. To the point of hallucination. It seems like she must've had some kind of insane childhood trauma during magic kindergarten. Poor girl, we can all relate to that.
Spike reminds Twilight about the picnic they're having with her friends, and Twilight makes a plea to her friends to help her out. Unfortunately, her friends shrug her off as being completely ridiculous. Twilight responds with copious teleport spam, which means that Twilight has already demonstrated her teleportation in two-thirds of season two, much more often than she used it in season one. Just amusing to note.
With her friends not helping her, Twilight takes a spectacular dive head-first off the deep end. Observe:
Yeah, I think that speaks for itself. Twilight decides that, if she can't find a friendship problem, she'll make one! And so she proceeds to absolutely terrify the Cutie Mark Crusaders by being completely insane. Frankly I think she ends up being more frightening than Pinkie in Party of One, especially when she starts acting almost Discord-esque with her appearances and logic.
Ultimately she ends up enchanting an old, raggedy doll of hers named Smarty-Pants to make anyone that looks at it fall in love with it and fight over it. This goes approximately as well as one would expect, causing the CMC to become uncontrollable. Then Bic McIntosh (for that is how it's spelled, weirdly enough) shows up and Twilight pleads for help. McIntosh also falls in love with the doll, utters a particularly memetic phrase, and eventually the entirety of Ponyville needs to get their hooves on Smarty-Pants.
With the day reaching its end, and chaos abound, the sun sets and Princess Celestia appears before Twilight and her friends with incredible drama befitting Her Royal Majesty. With a glowy flash, Celestia removes the enchantment and the inhabitants of Ponyville disperse. And Big McIntosh runs off with the doll in a scene that I'm sure TwiMac shippers will latch onto, especially after "Dig Mac" licking Twilight last episode.
Celestia commands Twilight to meet her at the library, where she explains to Twilight that, surprise surprise, she doesn't particularly care that Twilight failed to meet her weekly deadline. The rest of the Mane 6 burst in to support Twilight, explaining that they should have taken Twilight's feelings seriously earlier instead of just laughing them off. Celestia degrees that the Mane 6 should all report their findings on friendship, but only when they discover them, to much cheers. Celestia heads back off to Canterlot, mentioning that she showed up because Spike let her know what was going on, and the Mane 6 write a letter to Princess Celestia together.
Let's just get this out of the way - this episode was great. Great animation, fun story, focusing on the best pony... and, perhaps most importantly, it went in a completely different direction than I expected. It would've been easy to write the lesson-of-the-day as "don't let your fears get the best of you and make mountains out of molehills", but instead that was just the secondary lesson. The main lesson being about taking your friends' troubles seriously, even if they seem silly, is an excellent lesson, and frankly strikes me as one that's much more advanced than what you typically see in a kids' cartoon. It's really a lesson that everyone can benefit from at least somewhat, and it perfectly exemplifies why this show is so much better than the usual "lesson to learn" type of shows.
Only time will tell how Lesson Zero will hold up to the rest of season two, but it would be an injustice at this point to give it anything less than a
9/10
Pros:
-Much deeper plot and lesson than the scenario would have seemed to lend itself to
-Generally hilarious
-Fantastic animation, even for Friendship is Magic standards
-The focus on Twilight and Spike, especially Spike, was done very well
Cons:
-Twilight's personality seems somewhat hyperbolized
-Celestia showing up to fix the problem seemed a little deus ex machina-ish
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I must say, I was really impressed with Lesson Zero, as you may have garnered from earlier. I wasn't expecting much more than an average episode to hold us over until next week, when a particularly hyped episode airs...
So I'll see you then, when we'll finally find out what canon-Luna is like. And, inevitably, the entire MLP fandom will flip out and go insane.
Personally, I'd just like to see her with an abacus.
~C.O
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