My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic ‘Trade Ya!’ Review

A week without My Little Pony is pretty torturous. You get accustomed to seeing them every Saturday, and then when they aren’t there it’s like what happened? Well, they’re back with a rather unexpected episode. This one didn’t get too much hype, the only really interesting promo released was a Discord lamp. No one knew what to really expect. Once the ponies arrive in Rainbow Falls, then you get a good understanding of how it’s going to go down. Sadly, it goes down as the weakest of the season.

Here’s the official episode description from The Hub:

The ponies all head to the Rainbow Falls trade exchange, hoping to get some pretty good deals. But things don’t turn out the way they planned as Rainbow Dash tries to make a bunch of trades in hopes of getting a limited edition book and Applejack and Rarity argue over what they should buy. Also, Pinkie Pie tries to convince everyone to buy Twilight’s used books simply because she’s a princess and Twilight is not too happy about that.

The other episode Scott Sonneborn has written for the season is ‘Somepony to Watch over me,’ which was less than stellar. Sadly, this is even weaker. He wrote a pretty awful Applejack, and that translates to the majority of the ponies here. First we have Applejack and Rarity arguing over nonsense. What’s perhaps worst than that is the Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy series of scenes. First we have Rainbow thinking she can trade a rusty old horseshoe for a first edition Daring Do book. We all know she can be arrogant, but she’s not dumb…until this scene. Then we have Fluttershy simply asking, “But, but how is Rainbow Dash going to get the book she really wants?” This is such an awful question, as if these ponies are fillies and not young adults. Really, almost everypony seems to be parody versions of themselves since some of them act like non-friends. Rainbow Dash was so looking forward to getting the book that she actually let Fluttershy almost get taken away for a long time to train the Orthros. (She redeemed herself later on, but sometimes I think she takes their friendship for granted.)

Speaking of the Orthros, it was pretty awful how the Daring Do collector said she didn’t want the dog anymore after saying she would trade away the book for it. You can’t do that, you have to follow through with what you said before. Twilight is the only one acting with any real sense. Though, we know she’s nice, but almost trading away all her books for a used quill? There’s no shred of logic. Pinkie Pie was pretty annoying, sadly. There are two key positives. First we have Twilight now knowing that those books are sacred to her and trading for lesser things just isn’t worth it. But the end message was even better, basically that friends are worth more than material possessions. It was a sea of mediocrity to get to that message.

Overall, I’m sad to say this was the weakest episode of Season 4, and the show in general. Almost all the characters are badly written. At least Fluttershy was (mostly) good and Twilight was pretty solid. The message was nice, but the road there just wasn’t that great.