Talk:Horse Play/@comment-4531340-20180429120935

Well, that was a lot of fun! After the feels of last week's episode, and tackling such a heavy topic in a kid-friendly way, it was kinda nice to get an episode that was pretty much an unadulterated blast of pure fun. So many great gags in this episode (from Pinkie's increasingly destructive "sun"s [especially the end one with those back-alley fireworks she got from Trixie], to Celestia just being adorable with her utter ineptitude for stage acting). I thought the episode showed a nice, mature Celestia - exactly what we'd expect - and it did make sense that she would be good at running the play from behind the scenes (both due to her experience as a leader undoubtedly giving her a skill for adaptation, as well as her experience with pulling strings behind the scenes, getting things to where they need to end up). Interestingly enough, she managed to be both mature and adorable - just a really great showing from her.

Also knew that it was gonna end up with Spike being the sacrifice to appease the audience - to his credit, he seemed to take it in stride (I wonder if those tomatoes were rotten - not that it would probably have mattered to him).

Finally, I'm glad that the scene after Twilight's explosion wasn't as cringy as I thought it might be, because hoo boy, I was preparing for something gut-wrenching, but what we got was quite nice (if totally predictable).

As an addendum, I think the part that really made me love the episode was Celestia using the Royal Canterlot Voice - if I'm not mistaken, that's the first instance of her using it in the show. I'm thinking Nicole had a blast doing this episode.