Digibrony

Immediate Reaction To “A Friend In Deed”

This episode had fanservice (in a purely innocent sense of the word) off the chain—the kind of fanservice where the creators of the show are a member of the fanbase, which just makes it all the more glorious. It’s a sensory overload of great things, and contextually works because it’s about Pinkie Pie trying to make a friend, and sensory overload is the core of her personality. This is the most perfect narrative conceit to pull an episode like this off.

Pinkie Pie tramples the fourth wall and even wrecks havoc on her entire medium. This episode featured an art shift in Pinkie’s imagination, then she pulled an art-shifted giant checkmark into the “real world” right before a commercial break. I think she had four unique songs in this episode, though the main one was her image theme, Smile Smile Smile (I think it’s called?). She managed to pull almost every goddamn background pony into the episode. Most of them appeared during her song—then she netted the spa ponies as by dragging Cranky in to see them. But there was one notable exception—because they had bigger plans for her.

Derpy Hooves was an ornament in a snowglobe. Holy Smooz.

Pinkie seemed intent on putting on a show that could provide a year’s worth of memes—the cold open alone could be one long gif, if not a series of short ones. This episode is a Pinkie meme event horizon.

Pinkie did all of this to make you—her friends—smile. This idea makes the entire plot of the episode that much more powerful. Pinkie, you just owned this entire fanbase.