@TexasUberAlles
They were well aware Mare Do Well’s constant outdoing of Rainbow Dash was making RD more and more frustrated.

Her realization that she’d been an ass was real and unforced

And that Wacky Scheme™! That was vintage Twilight Sporkhole! Her go-to solution for any situation she can’t solve by quoting trivia at it is to concoct a wildly inappropriate caper

The storyboarding and directing were just aces from top to bottom, with fast-paced action scenes and seriously thrilling and exciting calamities; the collapsing building was like a nerve-wracking level from a video game, and the whitewater log ride was a whiteknuckle seat-of-the-couch ride that looked exactly like actual Black Diamond rafting footage. The music throughout was also top work, going full Elfman/Walker during all the MDW scenes.

Bucky McGillicutty and Kicks McGee was one of the funniest gorram things the show has ever done, it was just so dumb and funny and total Applejack, and the way Cherry Berry tried to get back at Dash for almost letting her get gibbed in the busted balloon by “accidentally” dropping a rainbow-seeking potted plant out of an upstairs window was subtly brilliant. That was the second occurrence of Pinkie Sense in the episode, marking one of the earliest S1 callback continuity moments.

MMDW had everything that makes a great episode— action, drama, pathos, growth and development, continuity, goofy gags and subtle comedy, great design and animation— and for a new writer, was a brilliantly insightful look at the inner workings of a character who’s very easy to get wrong.

@Durabiznik
Rainbow Dash was the best thing in MMDW. The episode just had a really botched moral in how they decided to tell it.

Her realization that she’d been an ass was real and unforced

And that Wacky Scheme™! That was vintage Twilight Sporkhole! Her go-to solution for any situation she can’t solve by quoting trivia at it is to concoct a wildly inappropriate caper

The storyboarding and directing were just aces from top to bottom, with fast-paced action scenes and seriously thrilling and exciting calamities; the collapsing building was like a nerve-wracking level from a video game, and the whitewater log ride was a whiteknuckle seat-of-the-couch ride that looked exactly like actual Black Diamond rafting footage. The music throughout was also top work, going full Elfman/Walker during all the MDW scenes.

Bucky McGillicutty and Kicks McGee was one of the funniest gorram things the show has ever done, it was just so dumb and funny and total Applejack, and the way Cherry Berry tried to get back at Dash for almost letting her get gibbed in the busted balloon by “accidentally” dropping a rainbow-seeking potted plant out of an upstairs window was subtly brilliant. That was the second occurrence of Pinkie Sense in the episode, marking one of the earliest S1 callback continuity moments.

MMDW had everything that makes a great episode— action, drama, pathos, growth and development, continuity, goofy gags and subtle comedy, great design and animation— and for a new writer, was a brilliantly insightful look at the inner workings of a character who’s very easy to get wrong.

To begin with it was a poopton of desperately needed character development for Rainbow Dash; it not only expanded on her glass jaw confidence from Sonic Rainboom and willingness to get over herself from Fall Weather Friends, it also reinforced that her default mode is Do What’s Right And Needs To Be Done Right Now, but that for all her flying prowess she still has hooves of clay and can be blinded by the limelight into forgetting What’s Really Important. When she heard a foal crying for help, she didn’t hesitate a moment, she just charged right in with no regard for her own safety– like she showed when charging into a similarly tight space in Wonderbolts Academy– and saved the kid without stopping to think about how dangerous it was. I regained all the respect I’d lost for Dash after The Cheaterpony Episode with that one scene, because it meant she was, deep down, a genuinely good and selfless person regardless of her ego and public braggadoccio. For all that she started out blowing her own horn with her fan club in the intro, she shied away from the spotlight when she was being praised for something she had done reflexively just because it needed to be done. Seeing her succumb to the adulation was a grueling yet utterly believable fall from grace, because man, how many times has that happened to actual superstars? Her realization that she’d been an ass was real and unforced, and it was obvious that it really cut her when she understood the lengths to which her friends had been willing to go to get through her thick skull.

And that Wacky Scheme™! That was vintage Twilight Sporkhole! Her go-to solution for any situation she can’t solve by quoting trivia at it is to concoct a wildly inappropriate caper, and Mare Do Well was a doozy of a dopy debacle, one that got us some feckin’ brilliant riffs on Batman: the Animated Series and Darkwing Duck. Having all of them be MDW at different times was really clever, and the sort of thing Target Audience might have been genuinely surprised at. The storyboarding and directing were just aces from top to bottom, with fast-paced action scenes and seriously thrilling and exciting calamities; the collapsing building was like a nerve-wracking level from a video game, and the whitewater log ride was a whiteknuckle seat-of-the-couch ride that looked exactly like actual Black Diamond rafting footage. The music throughout was also top work, going full Elfman/Walker during all the MDW scenes.

I love all the weirdly anachronistic technology that any well-realized magical fantasy universe would logically accrue– like microphones and DJ turntables alongside crank phonographs, or airships and pedalcopters alongside steam locomotives– so I loved the hydro dam and the construction Ponies using a magic-powered crane to erect a girder frame building… with timber. And that has to be a hydro-thaumic dam, since they use spot-magic to power their appliances instead of electricity, which is a whole new line of worldbuilding extrapolation.

Episode was funny, G.– Dash has always had a Bugs Bunny vibe about her, where it’s hilarious when she falls flat on it because she usually wins all the time, and she fell on it hard– and comeuppance is a lot funnier when you know the one with the swole head is gonna learn something from it. Bucky McGillicutty and Kicks McGee was one of the funniest gorram things the show has ever done, it was just so dumb and funny and total Applejack, and the way Cherry Berry tried to get back at Dash for almost letting her get gibbed in the busted balloon by “accidentally” dropping a rainbow-seeking potted plant out of an upstairs window was subtly brilliant. That was the second occurrence of Pinkie Sense in the episode, marking one of the earliest S1 callback continuity moments.

MMDW had everything that makes a great episode– action, drama, pathos, growth and development, continuity, goofy gags and subtle comedy, great design and animation– and for a new writer, was a brilliantly insightful look at the inner workings of a character who’s very easy to get wrong. The only sour note in the whole thing was that cornball wink at the end, but Dash is the sort of dork who would do that anyway, so it’s not much of a slight.