Top 25 Episodes of MLP: FiM Season 1 – #17 – Episode 23: The Cutie Mark Chronicles
Summary
So the Cutie Mark Crusaders are doing something stupid and dangerous to try and get their Cutie Marks: Zip Lining. You got to wonder what sort of desperation drove them to this. The line snaps half way through because they all decided to go at once, but thankfully they fall through a tree that slows their descent. Yet again they end up without their cutie marks, and they half-heartedly brainstorm about what else they could try. Apple Bloom brings up the idea of asking their fellow towns ponies about how they got their cutie marks, and Scootaloo thinks that they should immediately start with her idle, Rainbow Dash. The other two agree and they set off.
The first pony they encounter is Applejack, who’s chasing some apple stealing rabbits. They ask her about her Cutie Mark and we start a flash back to Applejack’s child hood. At some point, Applejack had wanted to be a sophisticated city pony; she left Sweet Apple Acres, and her family, to go live with her aunt and uncle Orange in Manehatten. The Oranges seem to turn her into a proper Manehattenite, but at a fancy party she gets mocked a bit by some smug rich snobs when she mentions back home. The next morning, little filly Applejack is staring out her window, feeling homesick and depressed, when she hears a loud boom and sees a rainbow pointing all the way back to Ponyville. She returns back to the farm and the flashback ends with Applejack’s Cutie Mark appearing.
Present day Applejack finishes her story and then starts chasing after the rabbits again when they come back to taunt her. The CMC speed off again, Scootaloo unimpressed with AJ’s story, but soon run almost headlong into Fluttershy and some ducks she’s escorting. She asks why the three are in such a hurry and Scootaloo explains that they want to hear Rainbow Dash’s Cutie mark story, to which Fluttershy admits that she wouldn’t have gotten her own cutie mark if it wasn’t for RD. The CMC sit back for another flash back to Fluttershy’s childhood stay at summer flight camp. Filly Fluttershy isn’t a great flyer and after a bit of mayhem caused by her clumsiness, she starts getting picked on by some of the younger foals. Filly Rainbow Dash flies in to stand up for her and the bullies challenge Dash to a race. Fluttershy ends up waving the flag to start the race, but the speed that the three reach right out of the starting gate blows her right off of her cloud and she plummets to the earth below. She’s caught just before hitting the ground by a flock of butterflies, (Pegasi can walk on clouds, I can believe they can walk on flocks of butterflies as well) and in her joy at seeing them and the new world around her, she starts to sing about it. As Fluttershy finishes her song, a huge explosion of colour bursts forth from the horizon, scaring off all the creatures that have gathered around her. Fluttershy goes around to their hiding places and begins to comfort all the critters and what not, and they all gather back around her as her cutie mark starts to appear.
Scootaloo interrupts the Flash back, wanting to know what happened to the race and Rainbow Dash, but Fluttershy doesn’t know. The trio again takes off in search of the cyan Pegasus, going to ask Rarity if she knows where she is, but instead the fashionesta ropes them into helping with some of her designs. Inevitably we get another flash back of Rarity when she was a filly, working on costumes for the school play. For some reason little Rarity isn’t happy with the costumes as they are and continues to work on them, but as she starts to doubt her future as a designer the plot convenience fairy takes control of her horn and starts dragging her off across Equestria. Eventually her horn lets her go in front of a giant rock, and Rarity isn’t too happy about that since she assumed this had something to do with her destiny. That colour Explosion from earlier gets shown again, and the shock wave is so powerful it cracks open the rock and reveals a regular smorgasbord of gemstones. Rarity decides that the most logical thing to do with this hoard is to slap all of it haphazardly onto the school play outfits. The audience and her teacher seem to like it though and upon seeing their amazement her cutie mark appears.
Scootaloo is getting more and more frustrated that all these stories seem to be are sappy self-discovery. Uhh, Scootaloo? Didn’t you sing a song not 5 episodes ago about how that was the goal of the Cutie Mark Crusaders? I believe the line was something like “We are the Cutie Mark Crusaders; On a Quest to find out who we are!” Consistency! Some ponies have, others don’t! Anyway, the three head off again and get caught by Twilight next and we get yet another flash back. Twilight was inspired as a young filly to learn magic when she first attended the Summer Sun Celebration and saw Princess Celestia raise the sun in person for the first time. She studied the subject so much that her parents enrolled her in Princess Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns; the only thing standing in her way was an entrance exam where she had to hatch a dragon from an egg using magic. Though she tried her hardest, Twilight eventually gave up, but the Plot Convenience Fairy strikes yet again with the Colour Wheel of Loud Booms, which startles Twilight so much that she begins to loose control of her magic. The egg hatches, but Twilight’s magic also turns her parents into potted plants and wraps the examiners in a magic field, as well as turning the baby dragon inside the egg, which turns out to be Spike, into a giant, almost fully grown dragon that smashes through the roof and attracts the attention of Celestia. Celestia enters in and calms down Twilight enough that everything goes back to normal, and then as Twilight tries to apologize, Celestia offers her a place as the Princess’s personal Protégé in order to learn better control of her magic. Twilight accepts and then Celestia points out to the little unicorn that in the midst of all this she had gotten her Cutie Mark.
Present Day Twilight is getting a little too in to telling her story as her excitement as a young filly is now translating to her current self and she’s now bouncing around town as the CMC slip away. The three ride around a bit more, seemingly by themselves, still on the hunt for Rainbow Dash, when all of a sudden Pinkie Pie is in the wagon with Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle, offering to tell them her cutie mark story, so we get (Say it with me) another flash back. Pinkie Pie, it turns out, was raised on a rock farm, where all she and her family did was… grow rocks? How does one do that exactly? Anyway, young Pinkie lollygags in the fields while her family heads inside their homes and she’s left alone to witness the Plot Convenience Fairy in rainbow form. Pinkie is so overjoyed to see something so beautiful that she gives the biggest and most diabetes inducing smiles she could muster, then she throws a party for her and her family. At first she thinks the other Pies hate it, but as soon as their faces contort from their usual deadpan expressions to full on higher than a kite, they all join together in song and dance and Pinkie’s Cutie Mark appears.
As Pinkie finishes her story (and gives us a great replacement phrase for “Too long; didn’t read”) she and the Crusaders arrive at sugar cube corner and at long last they run into Rainbow Dash, who immediately dives into her story, starting at the beginning of the race at flight camp. Dash goes into detail of the feelings she was experiencing as she rocketed around the course, but that all of it was blown away by the feeling of winning, and as she continued to speed up, she broke every law of known physics and gave us the cause of the multicoloured explosion every member of the main 6 saw that day: Dash’s first Sonic Rainboom. As filly dash flew over the finish line, leaving a rainbow contrail in her wake, her cutie mark appears.
As her story ends, the other members of the main 6 start to put together the fact that Rainbow Dash is the reason that every one of them got their cutie marks, and that, as Rarity so … charmingly put it, “they’d been BFFs forever.” Gag me with a spoon. All of them, including the CMC, join in a group hug and Twilight returns to the library to give her Friendship Report, and further increasing the toxic levels of sappiness of this episode.
Artistic Design and Animation
On the visual side of things we have a lot of the same, but we also have a lot of new things to enjoy. All the main characters are shown as their younger selves for the first time and they all look as D’aww worthy as you’d expect, but I really wish they’d done what they did with Fluttershy and gave each of them a more unique appearance, because aside from hair, eyes, and colours, they all are basically the same.
We also have a few new locals, like Manehatten, Clowdsdale Campgrounds, Canterlot Fairgrounds, (Gee, I wonder where Shining Armor is), and the Pie’s rock farm (apparently it’s a thing now). WE also have a gaggle of new incidental characters, who all get great designs in my opinion: Aunt and Uncle Orange, Twilight’s Parents (I think it’s rather neat that they based her mom after the G1 Twilight), and the Pie family (No, I don’t think that’s filly Octavia).
Humor
Not particularly a funny episode, though funny isn’t really how this sort of story is supposed to be told. It’s mostly a bunch of “Origin Stories” interspersed with the reactions of the Crusaders. I think the only comedic line in the whole episode was, “And that’s how Equestria was made!” and really that’s only because of how random it is.
Continuity and World Building
This section alone is the purpose behind this episode; building the backstory of the main cast of characters, and boy does it do a lot of that. Not that I’m complaining though, I love getting backstory for characters, I just wish they would have spread it around the season instead of dumping it all on us in one go.
All the flash backs, as annoyingly many as they are, do get their point across though and provide great characterization for all 6, to the point where I’d almost recommend this as first episode. Almost, but I’ll get to that. It also gives us a few glimpses of what they were like as foals that are not only surprising, but also make sense in the context of what we’ve seen over the course of the season. For example, I don’t think anyone would have guessed that Applejack wanted to be a sophisticated pony, but the way she turns it down and returns to the farm goes a long way to explaining her problems with Rarity during “Look before you Sleep,” beyond just “she likes getting her hooves dirty and Rarity doesn’t.”
Moral
Honestly, was there even a real moral to this episode? Twilight writes to Celestia that everypony shares a special bond with their friends, maybe even before they’ve even met each other, but that’s not really so much a moral as it is a very, VERY, sappy observation about life. I’m not so cold hearted that I can’t admit that, yes, friends tend to have something between them that makes them, well, friends, but it’s still so cheesy and gag worthy that it kills the episode’s ending for me.
Story Structure
Like I said, the flashbacks, while appropriate to tell the story of how each character got their cutie marks, make the episode feel more like a series of short stories rather than one cohesive whole. The only thing that ties them all together is Dash’s sonic Rainboom, which only makes sense for Twilight who hadn’t met any of them before. More connections to the others’ stories, even if they were just minor things, would have gone a long way to holding it all together. It isn’t as heavy a blow as the moral was, as it’s still great to see back-story for our little ponies, it’s just something I would have really liked to see.
Overall Feelings
So the Moral was unbearably cutesy, and the stories didn’t really have a good connection to each other beyond the sonic Rainboom; both of which are, alone, only minor problems that I could overlook. Together, however, they give the episode a feeling of contrivance. I mentioned the Plot Convenience Fairy a lot in the summary, and it’s true: everything happened because all the characters were in the right place in the right time and the plot demanded it to be so. I would have believed it with Fluttershy, who had a direct encounter with Rainbow Dash before hand, so their stories didn’t feel so bad. However Twilight, Pinkie, and Applejack were stretching past when they only just saw or heard the sonic Rainboom, and Rarity had it the worse and it seemed like they just didn’t know how to get her from home to the giant rock, so her horn just drags her there.
What I’m getting at is, why? Why did the main 6 need this “Special Magical Connection” from before they’d even met each other? Why couldn’t they just get their cutie marks on their own? Why did they need to all get them, or get led to getting them, on the same day, at the same time, with the same event? It all seems forced, and only the insight to the characters’ pasts by themselves is enough to give this episode a pass in my book.
All in All, an OK episode, saved by some great backstory, but weighed down by contrivances.
Summary
So the Cutie Mark Crusaders are doing something stupid and dangerous to try and get their Cutie Marks: Zip Lining. You got to wonder what sort of desperation drove them to this. The line snaps half way through because they all decided to go at once, but thankfully they fall through a tree that slows their descent. Yet again they end up without their cutie marks, and they half-heartedly brainstorm about what else they could try. Apple Bloom brings up the idea of asking their fellow towns ponies about how they got their cutie marks, and Scootaloo thinks that they should immediately start with her idle, Rainbow Dash. The other two agree and they set off.
The first pony they encounter is Applejack, who’s chasing some apple stealing rabbits. They ask her about her Cutie Mark and we start a flash back to Applejack’s child hood. At some point, Applejack had wanted to be a sophisticated city pony; she left Sweet Apple Acres, and her family, to go live with her aunt and uncle Orange in Manehatten. The Oranges seem to turn her into a proper Manehattenite, but at a fancy party she gets mocked a bit by some smug rich snobs when she mentions back home. The next morning, little filly Applejack is staring out her window, feeling homesick and depressed, when she hears a loud boom and sees a rainbow pointing all the way back to Ponyville. She returns back to the farm and the flashback ends with Applejack’s Cutie Mark appearing.
Present day Applejack finishes her story and then starts chasing after the rabbits again when they come back to taunt her. The CMC speed off again, Scootaloo unimpressed with AJ’s story, but soon run almost headlong into Fluttershy and some ducks she’s escorting. She asks why the three are in such a hurry and Scootaloo explains that they want to hear Rainbow Dash’s Cutie mark story, to which Fluttershy admits that she wouldn’t have gotten her own cutie mark if it wasn’t for RD. The CMC sit back for another flash back to Fluttershy’s childhood stay at summer flight camp. Filly Fluttershy isn’t a great flyer and after a bit of mayhem caused by her clumsiness, she starts getting picked on by some of the younger foals. Filly Rainbow Dash flies in to stand up for her and the bullies challenge Dash to a race. Fluttershy ends up waving the flag to start the race, but the speed that the three reach right out of the starting gate blows her right off of her cloud and she plummets to the earth below. She’s caught just before hitting the ground by a flock of butterflies, (Pegasi can walk on clouds, I can believe they can walk on flocks of butterflies as well) and in her joy at seeing them and the new world around her, she starts to sing about it. As Fluttershy finishes her song, a huge explosion of colour bursts forth from the horizon, scaring off all the creatures that have gathered around her. Fluttershy goes around to their hiding places and begins to comfort all the critters and what not, and they all gather back around her as her cutie mark starts to appear.
Scootaloo interrupts the Flash back, wanting to know what happened to the race and Rainbow Dash, but Fluttershy doesn’t know. The trio again takes off in search of the cyan Pegasus, going to ask Rarity if she knows where she is, but instead the fashionesta ropes them into helping with some of her designs. Inevitably we get another flash back of Rarity when she was a filly, working on costumes for the school play. For some reason little Rarity isn’t happy with the costumes as they are and continues to work on them, but as she starts to doubt her future as a designer the plot convenience fairy takes control of her horn and starts dragging her off across Equestria. Eventually her horn lets her go in front of a giant rock, and Rarity isn’t too happy about that since she assumed this had something to do with her destiny. That colour Explosion from earlier gets shown again, and the shock wave is so powerful it cracks open the rock and reveals a regular smorgasbord of gemstones. Rarity decides that the most logical thing to do with this hoard is to slap all of it haphazardly onto the school play outfits. The audience and her teacher seem to like it though and upon seeing their amazement her cutie mark appears.
Scootaloo is getting more and more frustrated that all these stories seem to be are sappy self-discovery. Uhh, Scootaloo? Didn’t you sing a song not 5 episodes ago about how that was the goal of the Cutie Mark Crusaders? I believe the line was something like “We are the Cutie Mark Crusaders; On a Quest to find out who we are!” Consistency! Some ponies have, others don’t! Anyway, the three head off again and get caught by Twilight next and we get yet another flash back. Twilight was inspired as a young filly to learn magic when she first attended the Summer Sun Celebration and saw Princess Celestia raise the sun in person for the first time. She studied the subject so much that her parents enrolled her in Princess Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns; the only thing standing in her way was an entrance exam where she had to hatch a dragon from an egg using magic. Though she tried her hardest, Twilight eventually gave up, but the Plot Convenience Fairy strikes yet again with the Colour Wheel of Loud Booms, which startles Twilight so much that she begins to loose control of her magic. The egg hatches, but Twilight’s magic also turns her parents into potted plants and wraps the examiners in a magic field, as well as turning the baby dragon inside the egg, which turns out to be Spike, into a giant, almost fully grown dragon that smashes through the roof and attracts the attention of Celestia. Celestia enters in and calms down Twilight enough that everything goes back to normal, and then as Twilight tries to apologize, Celestia offers her a place as the Princess’s personal Protégé in order to learn better control of her magic. Twilight accepts and then Celestia points out to the little unicorn that in the midst of all this she had gotten her Cutie Mark.
Present Day Twilight is getting a little too in to telling her story as her excitement as a young filly is now translating to her current self and she’s now bouncing around town as the CMC slip away. The three ride around a bit more, seemingly by themselves, still on the hunt for Rainbow Dash, when all of a sudden Pinkie Pie is in the wagon with Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle, offering to tell them her cutie mark story, so we get (Say it with me) another flash back. Pinkie Pie, it turns out, was raised on a rock farm, where all she and her family did was… grow rocks? How does one do that exactly? Anyway, young Pinkie lollygags in the fields while her family heads inside their homes and she’s left alone to witness the Plot Convenience Fairy in rainbow form. Pinkie is so overjoyed to see something so beautiful that she gives the biggest and most diabetes inducing smiles she could muster, then she throws a party for her and her family. At first she thinks the other Pies hate it, but as soon as their faces contort from their usual deadpan expressions to full on higher than a kite, they all join together in song and dance and Pinkie’s Cutie Mark appears.
As Pinkie finishes her story (and gives us a great replacement phrase for “Too long; didn’t read”) she and the Crusaders arrive at sugar cube corner and at long last they run into Rainbow Dash, who immediately dives into her story, starting at the beginning of the race at flight camp. Dash goes into detail of the feelings she was experiencing as she rocketed around the course, but that all of it was blown away by the feeling of winning, and as she continued to speed up, she broke every law of known physics and gave us the cause of the multicoloured explosion every member of the main 6 saw that day: Dash’s first Sonic Rainboom. As filly dash flew over the finish line, leaving a rainbow contrail in her wake, her cutie mark appears.
As her story ends, the other members of the main 6 start to put together the fact that Rainbow Dash is the reason that every one of them got their cutie marks, and that, as Rarity so … charmingly put it, “they’d been BFFs forever.” Gag me with a spoon. All of them, including the CMC, join in a group hug and Twilight returns to the library to give her Friendship Report, and further increasing the toxic levels of sappiness of this episode.
Artistic Design and Animation
On the visual side of things we have a lot of the same, but we also have a lot of new things to enjoy. All the main characters are shown as their younger selves for the first time and they all look as D’aww worthy as you’d expect, but I really wish they’d done what they did with Fluttershy and gave each of them a more unique appearance, because aside from hair, eyes, and colours, they all are basically the same.
We also have a few new locals, like Manehatten, Clowdsdale Campgrounds, Canterlot Fairgrounds, (Gee, I wonder where Shining Armor is), and the Pie’s rock farm (apparently it’s a thing now). WE also have a gaggle of new incidental characters, who all get great designs in my opinion: Aunt and Uncle Orange, Twilight’s Parents (I think it’s rather neat that they based her mom after the G1 Twilight), and the Pie family (No, I don’t think that’s filly Octavia).
Humor
Not particularly a funny episode, though funny isn’t really how this sort of story is supposed to be told. It’s mostly a bunch of “Origin Stories” interspersed with the reactions of the Crusaders. I think the only comedic line in the whole episode was, “And that’s how Equestria was made!” and really that’s only because of how random it is.
Continuity and World Building
This section alone is the purpose behind this episode; building the backstory of the main cast of characters, and boy does it do a lot of that. Not that I’m complaining though, I love getting backstory for characters, I just wish they would have spread it around the season instead of dumping it all on us in one go.
All the flash backs, as annoyingly many as they are, do get their point across though and provide great characterization for all 6, to the point where I’d almost recommend this as first episode. Almost, but I’ll get to that. It also gives us a few glimpses of what they were like as foals that are not only surprising, but also make sense in the context of what we’ve seen over the course of the season. For example, I don’t think anyone would have guessed that Applejack wanted to be a sophisticated pony, but the way she turns it down and returns to the farm goes a long way to explaining her problems with Rarity during “Look before you Sleep,” beyond just “she likes getting her hooves dirty and Rarity doesn’t.”
Moral
Honestly, was there even a real moral to this episode? Twilight writes to Celestia that everypony shares a special bond with their friends, maybe even before they’ve even met each other, but that’s not really so much a moral as it is a very, VERY, sappy observation about life. I’m not so cold hearted that I can’t admit that, yes, friends tend to have something between them that makes them, well, friends, but it’s still so cheesy and gag worthy that it kills the episode’s ending for me.
Story Structure
Like I said, the flashbacks, while appropriate to tell the story of how each character got their cutie marks, make the episode feel more like a series of short stories rather than one cohesive whole. The only thing that ties them all together is Dash’s sonic Rainboom, which only makes sense for Twilight who hadn’t met any of them before. More connections to the others’ stories, even if they were just minor things, would have gone a long way to holding it all together. It isn’t as heavy a blow as the moral was, as it’s still great to see back-story for our little ponies, it’s just something I would have really liked to see.
Overall Feelings
So the Moral was unbearably cutesy, and the stories didn’t really have a good connection to each other beyond the sonic Rainboom; both of which are, alone, only minor problems that I could overlook. Together, however, they give the episode a feeling of contrivance. I mentioned the Plot Convenience Fairy a lot in the summary, and it’s true: everything happened because all the characters were in the right place in the right time and the plot demanded it to be so. I would have believed it with Fluttershy, who had a direct encounter with Rainbow Dash before hand, so their stories didn’t feel so bad. However Twilight, Pinkie, and Applejack were stretching past when they only just saw or heard the sonic Rainboom, and Rarity had it the worse and it seemed like they just didn’t know how to get her from home to the giant rock, so her horn just drags her there.
What I’m getting at is, why? Why did the main 6 need this “Special Magical Connection” from before they’d even met each other? Why couldn’t they just get their cutie marks on their own? Why did they need to all get them, or get led to getting them, on the same day, at the same time, with the same event? It all seems forced, and only the insight to the characters’ pasts by themselves is enough to give this episode a pass in my book.
All in All, an OK episode, saved by some great backstory, but weighed down by contrivances.
