My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic ‘Twilight Time’ Review

We’re now fifteen episodes into Season 4! As sad as it may be, we’re over halfway done with the season. The previous episode, ‘Filli Vanilli,’ was fantastic. (As expected, since it was written by Amy Keating Rodgers.) Dave Polsky writes this one. He’s no stranger to the show, he’s one of the fan-favorite writers. (He wrote the Season 4 spectacle, ‘Rarity Takes Manehattan‘ after all.) The Cutie Mark Crusaders had one other episode to themselves earlier in the season, the 5 star ‘Flight to the Finish.’ So of course coming close to it was going to prove tricky. While ‘Twilight Time‘ doesn’t come close to the greatness of the aforementioned episode, it’s still a pretty nice watch.

Here’s the official episode description from The Hub:

Twilight volunteers to help the Cutie Mark Crusaders with their studies. But soon, the three fillies become very popular with their classmates when news gets out that they are being taught by a princess and they take full advantage of this.

While this is a Cutie Mark Crusaders episode, Twilight is featured prominently, and she was terrifically written. We haven’t seen her interact with the Cutie Mark Crusaders too much in the show, or young fillies in general. It’s always nice to see her taking a mentor role. This episode’s message is an interesting one. If you have a friend that’s a celebrity, it’s not because they’re famous that they’re special, it’s because she/he is your friend. The message could have taken a different route when the other fillies starting doing favors for the Crusaders. The team could have become stuck-up themselves. I’m glad the the story didn’t go down that generic route.

When The Hub released a promo image with the title ‘zombie ponies,’ I didn’t know what to expect. While zombie ponies don’t actually appear, all the classmates act like them. I don’t know whether it’s funny or sad that these young ponies were all written as robots. Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon are once again what you’d expect, the stereotypical bullies because every show with a school needs at least one apparently. (At least here they were utilized well.) While it would have been nice for Twilight to stick it to them for being bullies, (so far in the show only Babs Seed has done that) it was nice to get a little dialogue between them near the end. And despite being four seasons in, not every place in Ponyville has been ventured into. The entire restaurant scene was unique and fun. Hopefully we’ll get more scenes like it done the road. (Wouldn’t it be priceless to have the Mane 6 in a restaurant just chatting?)

Overall, a pretty good episode. ‘Twilight Time‘ may not be as notable as ‘Flight to the Finish‘, but it’s still a lot of fun. In fact, this is one of my personal favorite appearances of Twilight ever. The Cutie Mark Crusaders in small doses never get old, and it’s always nice to see them learning a new lesson, and a solid one at that.