“You’ve got a real problem alright – and a banjo is the only answer!”
Episode written by M. A. Larson
Entirely unofficial reflections by sixcardroulette
This is a full-length Ponywatching essay. For a condensed review
of this episode, check out The Shorter Ponywatching!
The fifth episode we ever saw, Swarm of the Century is also the first one where the wonky order of the British DVDs really had a detrimental impact.
(These DVDs are about to take a full-on running jump off the high board when it comes to respecting the show’s continuity – the next episode up is Owl’s Well that Ends Well, which ordinarily should come right near the end of the series! – but we didn’t know the order was jumbled at the time, which made Swarm of the Century unnecessarily confusing in places.)
Um… Who the heck is that?
For those keeping score at home, my daughter got the Season 1 DVD box set for Christmas; this was our third day of watching My Little Pony, and despite some trepidation on the part of me and my wife as to whether this was the sort of thing we and our 2 children should be watching at all, never mind whether it would be garbage, following some excellent episodes so far, we were actually looking forward to it. I wouldn’t say we were fans of the show just yet, but certainly we all liked it already, almost (but not quite) to the point where we could start differentiating between good episodes and less-good ones, rather than referring to the show as a whole.
Anyway, this is a strange one. First off, we expected a Fluttershy episode, because the other five main (mane?) characters have already had plenty of screen time in the ones we’d seen so far since the pilot (Pinkie Pie and Rainbow Dash in Griffon The Brush Off, Applejack, Rarity and Twilight Sparkle in Look Before You Sleep). But Swarm of the Century really isn’t a Fluttershy episode.
Secondly, after we figured that out, I always filed this one in my head as a Pinkie episode, because (spoiler alert – although really, if you haven’t watched the episode yet, what on earth are you doing reading some guy’s 9,000-word recap of it? Go and watch it! Do it now!) she’s the one that ultimately saves the day, and because both the problem and her solution to it are bonkers off-the-wall things of the sort normally associated with Pinkie episodes. But, again, it’s not really that either, as Pinkie doesn’t spend that much time on screen, and what time she does get sees her isolated and out of context (indeed, the structure of the plot needs her to be deliberately shown that way, not to mention for half of the jokes to work.)
So if it’s not Fluttershy’s week in the spotlight, and if it’s not actually a Pinkie episode, what is this? It’s tempting to flag up the first appearance of Twilight Sparkle’s OCD and overwhelming will to please her teacher actually driving her to a breakdown, but even that’s only one strand of what happens in these 22 incident-packed minutes.
No, the truth of it is that this is the first episode since Elements of Harmony (or possibly the first episode ever) where there isn’t a central character or pairing, but rather where it’s expressly written as an ensemble piece. It’s also, and I don’t think this is coincidental, the first episode where the plot’s driven by out-and-out comedy. The slightly sketchy moral of the story, the implicit relationship-building, and even the (otherwise extremely serious) threat posed by the titular Swarm, take a back seat to just making the funniest episode possible. Does it work? Let’s watch!
In which Fluttershy strikes a pose or six, and
accidentally seals Ponyville’s fate
Initially, we felt quite smug about this, like we’d sussed out the pattern of the show – apparently this one will indeed be a Fluttershy episode! Go, us.
After her two show-stealing scenes in Mare in the Moon (her outstandingly awkward introduction) and Elements of Harmony (taming the manticore), Fluttershy just sort of disappeared; her two defining traits, kindness towards animals and crippling timidity around ponies, were played up in Griffon The Brush Off in order to contrast the natures of Pinkie Pie and Gilda, but that hadn’t left us much to work with.
Our first ever time meeting Fluttershy. Just looking at this picture, I’m anxious for her.
Here, we again see her in her element, something the show will come back to time and again: when it’s just her and the animals, she’s free to be herself. (Indeed, this episode actually gives us an opportunity to briefly see quite a few of the cast, central and otherwise, at work doing what they love.) If the overarching story of Friendship is Magic, at least in these early days, is how Twilight Sparkle made some friends, well, I’ve made the point before that there are another five shows to be made on that topic for each of the Mane 6, all happening at the same time, of which we only get to see selected highlights.
For some, like Applejack and (especially) Rainbow Dash, the mission is to transition from one kind of friendship (rough-and-tumble, barriers-up, tougher stuff, probably shared with a larger contingent of outwardly tough tomboys) to a much closer emotional bond with a much smaller circle of deeper friends. For Rarity, it’s about what it means to have actual friends who’d reciprocate her generosity, risk everything for her the way she would, the way she assumed made her a fool. For Pinkie, it’s not about making more friends – she’s got hundreds! – but rather what it means to have anyone in your rolodex be especially close, to have best friends (and not one, but five).
And for Fluttershy? Like Twilight Sparkle, it’s about getting used to being around other ponies at all, in the process conquering extreme social awkwardness (antisocial rudeness for Twilight, shyness bordering on panic attacks for Fluttershy). Put even more succinctly: Twilight has spent so much time with her books and no pony company that she not only doesn’t know how to be a friend, but wasn’t even sure if she wanted to be a friend. Replace “books” with “animals” and you seem to have an apt description of Fluttershy, at least in these earliest days of the show, and their journeys are similar, even if one of them gets quite a lot more screen time than the other. To compare both of these ponies’ season 5 incarnations to these early ones is in some ways almost to be looking at different characters.
But as Frasier already pointed out twenty years ago, those are the sorts of relationships that take a couple of years, not a couple of days. And anyway, as it turns out, this episode isn’t about Fluttershy at all, and so this cold open isn’t a chance to see her battling her chronic anxiety step by step. Rather, it’s something else just as important for us to see: here’s a look at Fluttershy when she isn’t being, well, shy.
Keep Calm and… You Know The Rest
So, of the Mane Six, Fluttershy seems to “need” the magic of friendship more than anyone else besides Twilight Sparkle herself, but then we come back to a question we touched on when talking about Mare in the Moon: if someone is apparently happy being a loner, can you really call them lonely?
Seeing Fluttershy on her own here, this whole scene is really just an underlining of the traits we already saw in that episode. She can talk to the animals – something which even now, several seasons later, hasn’t really been explored in terms of how extraordinary this ability is or isn’t – and she’s polite but firm with them, even assertive. She’s still jumpy and nervous, but it’s almost as though we’re seeing the real Fluttershy here, keeping everyone safe and well, taking charge. Much like with Twilight Sparkle the first time we met her, her “problem” isn’t that she’s bad at making friends (indeed, unlike Twilight, who makes ponies think she’s abrasive and bossy, Fluttershy seems to be universally popular, and we’ll later discover she already knew Rainbow Dash and Rarity quite well before the series began); rather, it’s that she doesn’t really want to make friends in the first place, because she’s never really seen the point.
This cold open is an illustration of that: if Celestia suddenly went bananas and banished every pony in Equestria to the Moon, leaving just Fluttershy to tend to the animals forever, well, this early Season 1 version might not be that bothered by the prospect. (Though she has just been through a world-saving quest with her friends, and it’s perhaps telling that after discovering the first parasprite, her first instinct is to run and tell them, before her crippling shyness forces its way back to the surface again). She’s happy right here.
Good for you, Fluttershy.
Of course, the audience by now should have already seen Dragonshy and Fluttershy’s first lesson in standing up for herself; we hadn’t, but maybe the fact we didn’t notice shows the inherent issue some people have with Fluttershy, which is to say that she sometimes seems almost resistant to change. Unlike the rest of the Mane Six, Fluttershy is already kind-hearted and sweet to a fault, and so the lessons she learns about friendship are often variations on the same theme, lessons she apparently repeatedly fails to learn.
“Be more assertive! Your fears are baseless, stand up to them! Stand up for yourself! Stop being a doormat! Believe in yourself!” To what purpose? The next time Fluttershy has an episode, you can almost bank on the writers using her perma-startled timidity as a plot device. I can understand how it might grate after four years; we binge-watched all four of the (then) extant seasons in a little under four months, and while that compression made some trends and callbacks easier to spot, I haven’t had several years alongside this character to watch her growth apparently stunting.
But one of the things I soon came to like best about My Little Pony is that these characters aren’t universally “fixed” when they learn their lessons. Without going all “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature” on everyone, I think what some people see as maddening inconsistency from writer to writer is actually a more realistic approach than saying “wait, didn’t she already learn this?”; it’s not just about the lesson, but how easy or hard it is to live up to that lesson.
Think about real life: bronies are famed for taking the morals presented in these early episodes to heart as genuinely useful life lessons. If you made a change, any change, because of My Little Pony, is that because they’re teaching you something you didn’t already know? Hardly. Rather, it’s the restatement of a basic principle which you could stand to pay more attention to; it’s not that you’ve learned something new, but that you’ve been reminded how important it can be.
Fluttershy is a case in point; in these early episodes, she’s presented as someone who suffers from chronic social anxiety, and (whether cause or effect) she seems to live an almost hermit-like existence in her woodland cottage/barnyard/petting zoo. No relatives, no fixed employment, just her and her animals – and it’s heavily implied on multiple occasions that she prefers the company of animals to ponies.
So, in Fluttershy’s specific case, her anxiety is the biggest obstacle she faces. I don’t have firsthand experience of this kind of anxiety, but I have close relatives who do, and between that and my own experiences with depression, it’s the sort of thing that can’t be “fixed” overnight, even if someone is giving you the exact “right” answers. She just takes it a day at a time, and gets a bit better each time; even if there are setbacks, even if it takes a lot of patience on the part of her friends (and the audience), she’ll get there yet.
Anyway, that’s why I forgive the writers for making Fluttershy “learn” the same thing again, or perhaps rather “un-learn” it; I think it’s important to note these little moments when we see how she is without being conscious of other ponies around, as a look at what Fluttershy is really like.
My Lovely Horse
Also, here’s a look at some quite stunning animation. After I went online to find out more about the show (and, in the process, discovered it was still being made, hugely popular, and that bronies were a thing that exists), I remember reading something from Lauren Faust about how she felt seeing her sketched-out creations being turned into animated reality: something along the lines of being blown away the first time they saw the prototype Flash animations of the ponies’ walking and galloping cycles.
If you get it right, people won’t notice you’ve done anything at all.
Watching the apple-bucking sequence from the pilot, or the start of Griffon The Brush Off, you could really see what she meant, and it’s in full evidence again here in the cold open. After apparently quite fraught discussions on just how horsey our horses should be (boiling down to fundamental, key questions over whether this show was going to feature horses who happen to talk, or humans who happen to be shaped like horses, and coming to what I feel is pretty much the ideal “sweet spot” in terms of a compromise between the two), the decision was made to have the ponies behave – physically – like actual ponies, something that couldn’t really be said for previous generations of the show.
I read something once about the Bayeux Tapestry that said “horse lovers everywhere have long recognised the artist as one of their own”. I’m no horseman (though I grew up in a rural part of England and regularly saw plenty of horses!), but I can tell how much work went into getting this to look right. The animation really is stunning, stunning enough for you to not notice, because the horses trotting look like horses trotting (and so many of them have their own individual movements, Fluttershy’s trotting up the hill as airy and graceful as she herself is); like so many of the little things the show gets so very right, you only notice the magnitude of the achievement when you think about how it could have gone wrong. This world is full of fantastical creatures doing magical things, but it always feels solid, consistent, real.
(Also, her overall design – her mane framing her face in a heart shape – is just adorable.)
I think it really helps the suspension of disbelief, and (especially important for bronies, this) the acceptability of what you’re watching, if only one crazy thing your brain tells you is unrealistic is happening at once; that there are talking cartoon ponies trotting around is a big enough step without having to also question whether that specific talking cartoon pony actually just trotted specifically over there. Take one (the action, which in a “real” setting might be superficial, but which here becomes the underlying foundation) as read, and the other (the setting, usually underlying but here actually resting on top) becomes easier to accept, and then, largely, to take for granted. And once that’s out of the way, you can ramp up the strange, without it appearing so strange.
I’m talking about this here not only because Fluttershy’s animation in this whole sequence looks amazing, but also because we’re about to introduce an explicitly “cartoonish” new presence to the show, one which ends up asking even more of our suspension of disbelief and sense of emotional investment than a show about magical talking pastel horses already asks, and which couldn’t have been introduced until a few episodes in without alienating overwhelmed viewers… and which looks more like a cartoon than anything we’ve had thrown at us to date.
Girls Like Swarms Of Things, Right?
Doing a Tribbles episode of a sitcom is just a stock thing in animated shows now, right? I mean, it’s so much easier to do in animation than in live-action, when you can literally copy and paste new iterations of the most outlandishly-designed creatures all over the screen with little extra effort. But Swarm of the Century wouldn’t have let on it was a Tribbles episode until later, except for that title. The cold open actually suggests an invasion rather than infestation, a pony version of Alien or The Thing.
Fluttershy, clearly happy to the point of trotting along singing, gathers flowers on the edge of the Everfree Forest on a bright, sunny day; even when confronted with a brand new species of fluffy bug thing, she’s unfazed. (It’s the unexpected movement, not the appearance of the bug thing itself, which makes her jump in fright – again, beautifully animated – and she quickly settles down again.)
The cutest thing you’ve ever seen. And a fuzzy blue bug.
But here’s where the cartoon disconnect kicks in. First off, these things just aren’t cute. I don’t know how much time and effort went into designing them, but they’re not adorable. Or maybe they’re a slightly imperfect 2D rendition of something that really was adorable in the designer’s mind, but this scene has happy smiling Fluttershy in it, probably the single most adorable thing that can happen in Friendship is Magic, and so if she’s telling us that:
You’re the cutest thing ever!
…they’d better be pretty darned cute. Instead, it ends up as an informed attribute, something we just take on trust that the characters can see and feel, because frankly we can’t. The parasprites are just fuzzy blobs of gradient-shaded colour with big green featureless eyes and dragonfly wings; not only are they something I’d be more likely to swat away than try to cuddle, they also look really out of place in the show’s 2D flat-textured world, like they literally don’t belong.
Secondly, while it’s heartwarming in the extreme to see just how good with animals Fluttershy is, and how kind her heart is (without reflection or hesitation, she adapts her picnic plans to offer the parasprite some food, via an awesomely credible bit of animation as she crushes an apple with her hoof by briefly putting her weight on it, and her hoof bulges ever-so-slightly with the pressure for just a split second before the apple bursts in a most satisfying fashion)…
…well, while that’s heartwarming, her becoming immediately smitten with the weird little bug is one thing, but her staying smitten with it even after it makes a mechanical buzzsaw noise and devours an entire bushel of apples in one second, her only reaction a slightly startled expression which she quickly corrects, and then letting it live in her hair, only pausing to give a cute little giggle-gasp and remark that:
I guess you were hungry!
…gave us a slightly different view of matters. Fluttershy’s apparent willingness to endanger ponies to protect animals, and the rights and wrongs thereof, is something that hasn’t been properly confronted yet, even after an episode like Bats! where that conflict was served up front and centre, but it was the message we all took from this on first viewing; she’s just seen, first-hand, how destructive this thing can be, and she still decides it’s a good idea to take it back to a built-up urban area anyway.
Maybe the parasprites have some sort of magical ability to make ponies adore them irrationally until they’ve had a chance to nest, or something. (Actually, that would be quite a good twist.)
The end of this little cold open – Fluttershy leaves with her new “pet” buried in her mane, but the camera stays on the picnic scene and zooms in on the empty apple barrel with a dramatic, ominous “SUSPENSE!” musical sting – struck me as weird the first time, and still feels strange now, in that I can’t work out if it was meant as a joke at the show’s own expense. (If it was, the vaguely meta tone feels wrong for Friendship is Magic, a show which wears its lack of postmodern cynicism proudly on its sleeve – but then much of this episode is ever-so-slightly off in that regard anyway). Cue the theme music!
Everything about Swarm of the Century feels like an early instalment, like the show hasn’t quite found its feet, or learned its parameters; a common enough complaint here on Ponywatching when I’ve gone back to watch an early episode with the benefit of hindsight, but this one feels like an oddity in a rather different way than, say, Elements of Harmony.
That one felt strange because the show hadn’t worked out how to successfully integrate epic lore with slice-of-life sitcom (though it did just fine integrating both of those concepts with “colourful talking horses”, just not as well with each other.) This one, on the other hand, while clearly much closer to the sort of silliness-of-the-week model we’ll soon come to know and love, is ever so slightly differently silly.
It’s a pity we haven’t covered the fourth episode (Applebuck Season) yet, as between that, Look Before You Sleep and this one, we have a kind of completed triptych of the most outlandishly-conceived of these early episodes, where the show’s universe hasn’t quite settled down, and where random animation jokes and tics are standard fare; it might not be a very different show, but it’s certainly becoming a different cartoon, if that makes any sense at all.
Seeing the episodes in the correct, intended order might well have helped crystallise this process – looking at the properly ordered list, the “change”, if there is one, seems to come with Winter Wrap Up and the inclusion of the show’s first intentionally decidedly non-awful “real” musical number. Thereafter, the show seemingly begins to find its shape, and to know where its limits are: to discover just what kind of animated show this is, and whether we’re trending more towards the “Looney Tunes” or “Western anime” end of the spectrum, with the former gradually becoming more generally confined to Pinkie Pie and her rule-bending antics.
Watching as a family with all the episodes in the wrong order, we didn’t really get the benefit of that gradual development; piecing together the cleverness of the creators’ vision has to be done with hindsight, and that doesn’t always jibe with the initial reactions of me and my family.
In hindsight, as soon as Fluttershy gets back to Ponyville, this is a farce, the inconvenience and eventual destruction wrought by the parasprites played for laughs against Twilight’s need to get the town ready for a royal visit; her knack for making things much worse, and her being forced to just go along with disastrous events because there’s no time and no backup plan are straight out of the Fawlty Towers playbook.
However, when we watched this one for the first time, it was harder to enjoy it on a purely comedic level; we’d watched Elements of Harmony not two days previously, and while we’d had two character-based slice of life sitcom episodes since then, we were still very mindful of the show being liable to potentially snap back to epic quest mode.
In effect, I didn’t realise until quite late on that we aren’t really meant to be taking the parasprite invasion seriously; my wife (who really disliked the idea of these things buzzing around everypony’s head) found the cast’s failure to heed multiple warnings irritating, not funny, and even my kids weren’t sure what to make of it (at one point later in the episode – I’ll flag it up when we get there – my son loudly proclaimed he “didn’t like this one”). It does eventually all come together as an obvious comedy, and watching it back now, with 97 other episodes to compare it to, it’s hard to take it any other way… but first time out, before we knew where this was going, it wasn’t so clear.
Does that make this episode a failure, then? Heck, no, it’s lots of fun, funnier even than Look Before You Sleep – alright, it definitely got funnier for us once we had a better handle on what this show was about, for sure, but that lack of knowledge didn’t ruin it for any of us.
The third act in particular is amazing, as MA Larson – who we’re meeting here as a writer for the first time on Ponywatching – settles into a groove strong enough to excuse the Pinkie ex machina resolution, and if nothing else we were just curious (in a good way!) as to where else this crazy and unpredictable show was going to take us. Not anywhere near Dream Valley and braiding each other’s hair and throwing tea parties, that much was for sure.
But for maybe half of this one, hindsight makes a big change, because first time out we swatted aside some of the humour, since we were mostly too busy asking two (incompatible) questions: 1, why is nopony listening to Pinkie Pie? And 2, why would anypony listen to Pinkie Pie?
Whose Episode Is It, Anyway?
What turned out to be more surprising than the uneven tone (in relation to the other episodes, I mean, not in itself – once it gets going, Swarm Of The Century is as internally tonally consistent as any early My Little Pony episode, it just doesn’t feel all that much like any of the other ones!) was that, given the events of the cold open – not to mention the erroneous impression we’d got from watching the episodes in this weird order, which led us to expect it was her “turn” – this story isn’t about Fluttershy, and so doesn’t centre on her stupidity in bringing an invasive species of insatiable fluffy bug things to colonise Ponyville.
In fact, she gets off largely scot-free for directly causing the chaos and destruction that follows. (Although I probably shouldn’t be as surprised as I was, because I’m struggling to extrapolate a useful universal moral Hasbro could have satisfied the censors’ educational requirements from that story anyway. “Respect animals, but don’t let your hippie friend accidentally, and repeatedly, become Patient Zero in the infestation that dooms your town?”)
Anyway, the aforementioned chaos and destruction is played largely for laughs as the episode quickly descends into farce, and it’s set in motion in obvious fashion, but before any of that, the first scene takes us right back to the Twilight Sparkle Show. Front-row seats for what we can later recognise as the start of a nervous breakdown caused by her obsessive desire to please her teacher and mentor, but what for now feels like a reprise of her arrival in Ponyville in the very first episode. Even the setting is the same: Twilight supervising Ponyville’s shambolic preparations for a royal visit from Princess Celestia.
The opening scenes are a callback to the pilot in more ways than one, as we’re also seeing some more of Twilight and Spike working in the library, and the complex relationship they developed, Spike as her underling but also her oldest friend. Spike is excellently cheeky throughout this one, and his backchat (and Twilight’s barely noticing it, as if the humming of her stress has become so high-pitched it’s drowning out most other sounds) is entertaining:
Hurry up, Spike! This place isn’t going to clean itself!
(pointedly) …It also didn’t mess itself up.
Here’s another one of those “funnier in hindsight” bits – Twilight is panicking about Princess Celestia making a casual visit, when after we’ve met Celestia a few more times, we’ll fully appreciate that she’s a very easygoing sort with a good sense of humour. Although we didn’t know her that well at this point, and so there was still a chance this could turn out to be a Man for All Seasons sort of deal where the Princess’ trip is ostensibly just a casual thing, one friend dropping in on another, but actually it’s unofficially a full state visit, and it needs about the same level of planning and preparation, or else. Now, in hindsight, we know that (a) this is indeed how Twilight Sparkle perceives the trip, and (b) she’s the only one who thinks that.
Eventually, Spike manages to get Twilight out of the library, and she heads off to town, where she’s apparently enlisted the entire population of Ponyville to get things ready for the visit; is it a sign of her innate authority that nobody seems to mind her micromanagement? Although this lot apparently need it…
You just can’t get the staff.
…What happened to the rest of her name?!
We couldn’t fit it all in!
You can’t hang a banner that says “Welcome Princess Celest”! Take it down and try again.
…unlike Bon Bon, who barely reacts to Twilight’s faintly patronising praise (I like to think she actually had nothing to do with the preparations and was just watering the flowers, and had no idea why Twilight was trying to boss her around.)
…
But yet again, we’re being taken for a ride here – the episode isn’t really “about” Twilight’s OCD either, even though it was clear on first viewing that that was a promising storyline in itself (we’ll have to wait a while for a proper Twilight Sparkle freakout episode!), and so we head into Sugar Cube Corner to see Pinkie Pie at work for (as far as we knew) the first time.
Say Hello To My Little Friend
It probably doesn’t help Pinkie’s cause, with either the audience or with Fluttershy and Twilight, that the first time we see her in this episode she’s doing something unbelievably inconsiderate and stupid, “testing” the food for the Princess’ banquet by eating it all, much to the chagrin of Mr and Mrs Cake (two more awesome new-to-me characters – I love that their body shapes are so distinct from most of the other ponies we’ve met so far):
Add “The Cakes getting stressed for 22 minutes” to the list of made-up MLP spinoff shows I’d watch.
Then Fluttershy bursts in, starts excitedly babbling, and then notices that a room full of ponies is staring at her, whereupon her anxiety visibly kicks in, as though she’s just remembered who she is:
The anxiety, it burns
…Oh, I’m sorry…! Um… am I interrupting?
Poor Fluttershy 😦
So, after some cajoling, Fluttershy shows her friends the, um, “adorable” thing she’s carrying in her mane, only to discover it’s mysteriously turned into three adorable things, one of which Twilight immediately asks to adopt as a pet (without bothering to question the inexplicable appearance of two clones, or asking what they eat, or indeed hesitating at all). Would Pinkie like the other spare one?
Ugh! A parasprite? Are you KIDDING?
Now I’ve got to go find a trombone!
A… what?
A trombone! You know: (mimes playing the trombone) Bwa-bwa-bwa!
And this is where the plot starts to feel a little contrived; the broad structure of this story falls into place straight away, and it becomes frustrating the characters can’t see it. The creatures are shown to be voracious eaters who multiply exponentially in minutes, yet Fluttershy – who has all the data we have – doesn’t see this as any kind of concern. Pinkie Pie clearly knows what they are and how to deal with them, but after she runs off on her trombone quest, instead of chasing after her for more information, Twilight’s reaction is a shake of the head:
…Typical Pinkie.
Now, granted, Pinkie could have taken the time to explain what she was doing, but, well, she’s Pinkie. Given her track record, the others aren’t necessarily wrong to dismiss the non-sequiturs she comes out with as irrelevant, because they often are. And it’s entirely consistent with Pinkie’s apparently warped view of reality that she’d assume everypony understands what she’s talking about (when as we’ll later see, nopony else – not even Zecora or Princess Celestia, later to be established as the two greatest magical authorities on the show – knows how to deal with them either). But still, it feels like an awful lot of this plot relies on our characters acting somewhat out of character.
The remainder of the first act is just an underlining of that scene; Twilight goes to see Rarity, who’s in the dressmaking zone, concentrating hard, using Rainbow Dash as a model (prompting a belly laugh from my daughter):
Something brash, perhaps quite fetching?
…only to find that her parasprite, too, has spawned two new clones in the space of a couple of minutes. Rarity and Rainbow are as smitten as Fluttershy and Twilight were, and they too instantly adopt the extras as pets, again with no questions asked. At which point, Pinkie bursts in and asks with urgency:
The more I watch this, the more I wonder if the “magical thrall” theory actually has some merit, because instead of asking what the hell Pinkie is talking about, or indeed answering Pinkie at all, the smartest, the bravest and the most sophisticated ponies in Ponyville completely ignore her to coo over some fuzzy bugs instead, leaving Pinkie to slam the door behind her in exasperation:
Even my kids had worked out what was going to happen by this point. How it was going to happen, though? That’s a rather different thing.
Here’s a thing, though – I keep talking about the flaws in this episode, but it’s still loads of fun, comfortably in the middle of my Season 1 pack when we come to do the end-of-year rankings, and the reason is because it stays funny and fresh thanks to the execution.
Case in point: the parasprites were obviously going to keep multiplying and multiplying until things got out of control. A lesser show would have that happening gradually over the course of the episode, from three to five to ten, with comical shenanigans as ponies don’t realise what’s happening and think they’re going crazy, and so on, finally culminating in a swarm… but My Little Pony jumps straight to the good stuff:
Well, that escalated quickly.
Spike, help me round up these little guys!
We pause only to see them trashing the library (after Spike so diligently cleaned it of Twilight’s clutter) before getting a grand tour of how the creatures are rewarding their hosts’ hospitality (in much the same way that, say, the norovirus rewards its hosts’ hospitality).
I like that they affect each pony in different ways; Rainbow Dash has them physically clinging to her at all times, forming comedy patterns (a beard, a silly wig, a bikini), and chasing her about whenever she tries to get away. Rarity, on the other hand, is initially entirely unfazed by the unexplained appearance of dozens of extra clones, and has successfully tamed them and got them helping out in her dressmakers’ shop. Sadly, it can’t last; she’s repulsed after actually seeing them reproduce for the first time, a process which involves one of them apparently barfing right in her eye (and leaving a horrible brown stain on her face!)
“Ewww! Gross, gross, gross!”
At which point, enter Pinkie for another chance to set the record straight:
Uh, Pinkie… I’m a little busy right now!
We haven’t really seen Rarity and Pinkie interacting before, but while Rarity’s reaction to Pinkie apparently releasing her inner child at an inopportune moment is understandable –
I don’t have time for some silly scavenger hunt. I’ve got a real problem!
…still, it’s hard not to feel like that was the opportunity, that even these two should have been able to get on the same page somehow here. (There’s even a little animation hint for alert viewers – when Pinkie gives a quick blast on the harmonica she’s borrowed from Applejack, one of the parasprites momentarily pops up for a closer look.)
Almost this entire episode in a nutshell.
Instead, Rarity trots off with saddlebags (emblazoned with a motif based on her cutie mark, a really nice touch!) stuffed full of parasprites, only to run into Twilight, who’s also rocking custom saddlebags full of parasprites. Then, as they’re comparing notes, in a genuinely funny moment, a frazzled Rainbow Dash zooms past the screen, only pausing long enough to shout:
DITTO!
…before flying off again, chased by a cloud of parasprites.
The group decides to go and consult Fluttershy, the town’s resident animal expert (although curiously they don’t mention she was the one who found the initial specimen in the first place, or that she was as clueless as the rest of them when it came to their super-fast breeding). Again, although you can see it coming a mile off, the execution is still outstanding – I was expecting them to find Fluttershy also besieged by a huge swarm of parasprites. I wasn’t expecting them to open her door and have thousands of them blast out, like an oil well full of brightly-coloured little bugs:
A lesser show wouldn’t have bothered to actually animate every single one of these individually.
Find A Way
So, nobody knows how to stop these things, and the royal visit is meant to be happening later today. Twilight has a quick dream sequence (a real oddity for this show!) where Princess Celestia arrives in Ponyville in all her pomp, only to be attacked and physically carried off by the parasprites, before snapping out of her reverie and deciding they need action:
Cue Applejack’s arrival, bringing a cart piled high with apples (which the parasprites devour in the blink of an eye), and suddenly the threat seems a bit less funny – if they’re not stopped from breeding and feeding, then never mind ruining Twilight’s royal reception, they’re going to eat all the food in Ponyville. Twilight scrabbles around for an answer, and nominates Applejack to herd them up (without asking her first – I love the expression of surprise on her face!)
…Wha? Me?
AJ, you’ll note, did not at any stage go googly-eyed over how adorable these little sods were, or ask to adopt one as a pet. Best pony.
Here, she takes up the lieutenant’s role again; just as with Fluttershy, Pinkie and Rarity, we now see AJ at work, in her most comfortable environment, and it’s mightily impressive, as she comes up with a plan on the hoof and sets about rounding them all up and driving them out of town. She’s very cool under pressure, barking instructions at the others (which they know well enough to follow without question), galloping along with a big, determined grin. She loves this job.
Git along, li’l dogies!
And right in the middle of the action, Pinkie suddenly appears at the head of the pack:
She hares off, and obviously nobody else even bats an eyelid, concentrating on the task at hand. After a moment, Pinkie arrives back at the front of the pack again:
…I said, follow me!
Now, Pinkie isn’t stupid, for all her other faults, and surely she could see what they were trying to do – so I wonder if she already knew it wouldn’t work, even if it hadn’t turned out to be a waste of time (as we’ll see in a moment), that you can’t simply bundle parasprites back into the forest and expect them to stay away? Whatever the case, Applejack is unimpressed:
Forget her, ladies. Focus! Head ’em up, and move ’em out!
And it would have worked, too, except that when the five tired ponies get back to Ponyville to clear up the mess, Fluttershy opens her door, and another – less painstakingly animated – swarm of parasprites bursts out of it.
For Pete’s sake, Fluttershy, you moron. This is why for the longest time I found it harder to relate to Fluttershy than the rest of the Mane Six; even if I can empathise with her social anxiety and general awkwardness, and sympathise with her jumpy, skittish character, you can’t be putting the safety of an entire town at risk because an animal is cute.
(This is where my son declared he didn’t like the episode and we should turn it off. Luckily, he loves Rainbow Dash and she gets a spotlight a few seconds later, so we stuck with it and he was fine.)
Twilight points out they don’t have time to round them up again before the Princess arrives (which suggests quite a bit of time has elapsed beyond what we saw on-screen), and so next up, it’s Rainbow’s turn.
Time to take out the adorable trash!
She proposes creating a mini-tornado to sweep them up and dump them far away, and again it seems to be working, only for the cyclone to suck up Pinkie’s new-found cymbals as well, causing a huge crash which results in the creatures being dispersed throughout the town centre.
All the other episodes so far, there’s been an easy way out – wrapping up a plot in a really obvious and disappointing fashion – that the show admirably refused to take. This one’s harder to call; the overall plot has played out in just the way we could have predicted almost from the start (Pinkie knows she needs to gather musical instruments to stop the swarm, but hasn’t explicitly told the others this, and they aren’t listening to her anyway because they think she’s nuts), but in terms of how we’re going to fix everything before the Princess gets here? Not sure. And once again, we’ve ended the second act almost where I’d have expected a lesser show to be wrapping up at the finish. Instead, Swarm of the Century takes an unexpected leftfield turn.
So, the parasprites descend on Ponyville and proceed to make a terrible, terrible mess, terrifying the townsponies and causing complete chaos, with the Princess due to arrive any time now. Panicking, Twilight Sparkle racks her brain for a solution:
Think, purple unicorn, think!
Think of something better! And look, here comes Pinkie again – surely you’ll listen to her this time?
…Look! Tambourines! If you could all just…
…Or not.
Pinkie leaves in disgust, Applejack hares off to protect her orchard, and Twilight casts her spell. For a moment, it doesn’t look like it’s worked – a parasprite sees an apple in a bucket and takes a good, long sniff, and the four remaining ponies hold their collective breath, before the creature rejects the apple and flies off.
And then flies straight back again and eats the bucket. And a shop sign. And starts nibbling the walls. Instead of eating all the food in Ponyville, the creatures are instead just going to eat Ponyville.
Funny that it’s Rainbow Dash who points out the magnitude of Twilight’s mistake…! I think it’s time to break out a counter. Who knows, it might come in handy at some unspecified point in the future:
Yeah, that went well.
Every Pony For Herself
This is such a great little scene – Rarity heads back to her boutique to try and protect her dresses from the horde, but she’s quickly overpowered and ends up cornered, perched on a stool, surrounded by parasprites, sobbing… then in bursts Pinkie Pie, with a triumphant flourish:
Pinkie Pie to the rescue!
Rarity’s grateful expression doesn’t last – Pinkie simply trots in, grabs a recorder off the counter, blows a few wonky notes, and trots out again, leaving Rarity looking on incredulously as the action shifts to Sweet Apple Acres.
Because we skipped Applebuck Season too, we actually haven’t spent any kind of time with the Apple family since they were introduced in a blur of apple-themed names back in the pilot (and we’ve also been denied the explanation as to why the farm isn’t being defended by an army of thousands, but – as so often in these very earliest days – we largely unconsciously (and wholly unfairly!) chalked it up to sloppy kid-show storytelling, rather than shonky DVD compiling).
The Apples man pony the barricades.
So, this is the first time we really got to see the three core Apples (Heh! “Core apples”. Oh, shut up.) together, kind of a momentous occasion in hindsight – the first non-Mane Six regular characters we meet, Big Macintosh and Granny Smith, soon to become stars of one of two shows-within-the-show that feel like viable spinoffs (as well as the Apples, I’d include the Cutie Mark Crusaders, meaning Apple Bloom should really get two paychecks. Maybe that’s why she’s not in this scene…) And look, the first time we met the Apples, they’re manning the barricades in a hopeless but awesomely brave show of defiance. Pretty heroic, even if we had zero chance of remembering who all these ponies were. Well, apart from Granny Smith, we remembered her.
Anyway, all this “doomed last stand” stuff turns out just to be a setup for a joke, as the parasprites skip the apples, fly over the Apples’ barricade, and instead go straight for the wooden barn, which they strip to the frame in seconds, leaving an astonished AJ and family to watch agape as it collapses spectacularly:
Raze this barn, raze this barn, 1, 2, 3, 4….
Didn’t see that one comin’.
Get used to it, Applejack. In fact, hey, let’s use this chance to break out our other running total counter!
Back at the library, Twilight obviously fears for her books, but it turns out there’s cartoonish logic afoot – the parasprites aren’t eating the actual books, but rather sucking up the words from the books. It’s a nice, funny idea, but again it jars with what we know of the show so far, where magical changes to the expected “rules” of everyday life are usually flagged up for the audience.
Zecora, You No Say “Daddy, Me Snow, Me I’ll Go Blame”
Now, this bit just had us completely baffled. In a few weeks’ time, we’ll see what should have been the ninth episode of the season, Bridle Gossip, which is almost entirely concerned with introducing the character of Zecora – a zebra witch doctor/herbalist/voodoo priestess/ magical guru with a strong Afro-Caribbean accent – as a mysterious presence in the forest, racially and culturally set apart from the rest of the ponies, misunderstood and feared.
But whoever compiled the DVDs didn’t think it necessary for us to be introduced to her before just throwing her into a story like this – in fact, I’m starting to wonder if they didn’t watch the episodes at all, or if they were trying to follow our “character of the week” conception of the show and assumed this was a Fluttershy episode after skim-watching the first scene. So we had no idea what the hell was going on here – Twilight heads back into the forest (eh? Weren’t they all terrified of going in there?) and barges into a dark hut where a zebra is meditating, causing her to fall over.
Have you gone mad?!
Zecora is able to successfully identify the creature as a parasprite, but has no helpful advice on how to deal with them. One of Zecora’s established character traits is that she only generally speaks in rhyme (and so her admonition to Twilight is intentionally breaking character), and so some of the humour in this scene just went sailing over our heads:
If these creatures are in Ponyville…
Still pretty funny though.
Crazy For You
With all hope fading, Twilight leaves the forest, the parasprites in tow (she swats at them with her tail in another endearingly “horsey” action), but when she gets back to Ponyville, with the dramatic backing music rising and rising, the place is trashed – ponies running around screaming, bits of broken masonry everywhere, something appears to be on fire – and her time is almost up.
Inevitably, Twilight finally loses it; the backing music stops abruptly with the audible “twang” of a broken string, and the only sounds are the screams of the townsponies and the surrounding buildings collapsing. Twilight gets a deeply creepy look on her face as she breaks into a manic fixed smile:
Okay! Here’s the plan. Rainbow Dash, you distract them.
“AAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaarghhhhhh!!!”
You’d Better Think Before Doubting The Pink!
-ie Pie!
…And then a jaunty polka march strikes up out of nowhere, which Twilight takes to be the Princess’ procession. End of play – but as she collapses in defeat, Pinkie Pie appears over the horizon, her face a picture of steely determination, strapped into some sort of contraption which lets her play ten instruments at once:
Where’s the trombone, though?
And, of course, it works – to Twilight’s astonishment, the parasprites stop what they’re doing and instead start dancing along in an orderly line behind Pinkie. Twilight and the rest of the Mane 6 can only gawp in disbelief as Pinkie, deep in concentration, marches past without a word (or even a glance) and leads the parasprites bouncing out of town.
Next to Pinkie’s “rescue” of Rarity, this is my other favourite scene of the episode, as for the first time we see the full comic potential of Twilight’s neurotic perfectionism matched with her (not-unrelated, but previously unseen) talent for spectacular cock-ups. So, her nightmare scenario has been avoided, the parasprites won’t attack the Princess after all – but Ponyville still looks like an atomic test area, and Twilight has literally no idea what she’s going to do about it, other than just to wing it and see what comes out of her mouth.
Able to run on ahead of Pinkie and intercept Princess Celestia on the approach road into town, the five get there just in time to see her chariot landing, the three wingless ponies appearing on screen with a series of audible “pop-pop-pop” sounds in what feels like a shout-out to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the pegasi lining up behind them. Special mention for whoever decided to animate Rainbow Dash being a moment late to realise they’re all meant to be bowing before pulling a sheepish, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shocked/embarrassed “oops!” face:
I love that nobody in this picture has any idea what they’re going to do next.
Twilight Sparkle, my prized pupil!
Hello, Princess.
Just as Twilight, implausibly, might be starting to believe she’s somehow going to get away with it, Pinkie marches past the screen with her one man pony band and hundreds of bouncing parasprites in tow, and Celestia’s jaw drops in silence as she watches in complete bewilderment. Nobody else has any idea where to look.
There is, as they say, “a moment”.
It’s impossible not to watch Celestia’s face, but check out the others’ expressions too. “Do you think she’s buying this? Is it safe to make eye contact?”
Everything just comes crashing down around Twilight. You can almost hear the cogs turning in her head as she realises she’s got no choice but to simply act as though everything’s fine and dandy, and so she goes for a last-second Hail Mary, absurdly pretending that this crazy thing isn’t happening three feet away:
Celestia is too stunned to respond straight away; lost for words, just watching the endless line of parasprites filing past dancing to the unexplained polka music (her face remains fixed in a gobsmacked expression, only her eye moving back and forth), she eventually snaps out of it with a lovely line reading from Nicole Oliver:
Uh… What is this?
Luckily for Twilight, whose career prospects could conceivably (as far as she knew) have been in some danger here, that informed attribute comes back to save us: Celestia herself is also won over by the creatures’ apparent cuteness. I love that Rainbow Dash, blunter even than Applejack this time (apparently with less inherent respect for royalty), is no longer under any similar illusions.
(sotto voce) …They’re not that adorable.
Celestia, apparently genuinely moved, thanks Twilight and “the good citizens of Ponyville” for the wonderful parade they’ve thrown in her honour. There is another moment as everyone looks at her blankly, before all five ponies give sheepishly unconvincing grins and grimaces which suggest that they’ve all – simultaneously and apparently independently! – decided to pretend that, yes, that was the plan all along…
Is Twilight lucky, or did Celestia know full well what a mess she was making of things and intentionally spare her? Either way, Twilight gets away with it – the Princess apologises, but she can’t stay any longer and see the town itself, as she needs to go to “Fillydelphia” (snort) and deal with some sort of mysterious infestation they’re suffering over there. (So maybe it wasn’t Fluttershy’s fault after all? Or maybe one of these things stowed away in a packing crate of Ponyville apples, or something.)
Celestia is as kind and good-natured as ever, and she gently prompts Twilight to share what she’s learned about friendship this week. Twilight stares at her with a blank expression before she realises what the question was.
Haven’t you learned anything about friendship?
All five ponies seem to realise at the exact same time that yes, they have just learned an important lesson.
(At which point, a clash of cymbals offscreen makes everyone jump in hilarious fashion:)
Crash!!!
Which is not a bad moral, except that the events of the episode didn’t really give rise to it – Pinkie could have explained herself better on several occasions, and the others could have asked better questions (or indeed any questions at all) on several occasions, and nobody really offered their “opinions and perspectives” at any stage of proceedings. But, hey, “your friends are worth listening to” is a good lesson.
Time to wrap this party up.
So you knew what those critters were all along, huh, Pinkie Pie?
That’s a much better summary, really. And again, a lesser show would have ended there, but this episode has another joke to fit in yet:
(smash cut:)
Oh, there’s the trombone. “Bwa-bwa-bwa-baaaaaah!”
The second time we’ve seen Pinkie messing with the iris out in five episodes, enough to make us wonder if it would become a regular thing. It didn’t, but we’re getting a pretty good picture of Pinkie’s status as operating outside the normal rules of life, society and physics.
And that’s five episodes down! This one felt a little less successful than the others on first viewing, even if it’s more rewarding on future plays (especially once you know who everyone is!), and the comic tone is slightly more wacky and abstract than we’ll come to know from the show in future. Plus, unlike all the ones we’ve seen so far, watching Swarm of the Century out of order definitely made it less effective, as well as giving us further red-herring ideas about what the show would be like.
But it was still very good, fast-paced and packed with daft jokes. If it gave us the wrong impression in terms of just how careful this show was going to be in the way it integrated comedy without becoming outright daffy, it also provided more reassurance to me and my wife that this is definitely not the My Little Pony of our childhoods. Silly and inconsequential, but really none the worse for it, once again we finished the episode liking the show even more than when we started, and that’s really all that counts.
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I’d love to hear your own thoughts and comments below – all opinions are welcome and dissent is encouraged!
Alternatively, there’s a lot more discussion and comments on the Reddit post for this essay:
Reddit – /r/mylittlepony on Ponywatching 1.10
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