My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic ‘Pinkie Apple Pie’ Review


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Rarity Takes Manehattan‘ was such a fantastic episode that it was going to be nearly impossible for something to surpass it. I wasn’t too sure what to expect from ‘Pinkie Apple Pie.’ This is the first Applejack and Pinkie Pie themed episode. The timing is pretty coincidental, since these two will be battling each other in IDW’s first issue of Friends Forever in a couple of weeks. So far in Season 4 we’ve had two all-stars, ‘Flight to the Finish‘ and ‘Rarity Takes Manehattan.’ The rest have been fun, but don’t come close to those two. So how about this one? It’s a decent episode, not great but not bad. (They’re never bad.) Though by the end you may be asking what exactly was the point of it all since there’s no real conclusion to its own question.

Here’s the official episode description from The Hub:

After doing a little research, Pinkie Pie believes that she and Applejack might be cousins. To find out if this is true or not, Pinkie Pie joins Applejack and her family on a road trip to meet one of their relatives who might know the answer.

So basically in theory this would have been a game changer episode for the show and for fan-related things. (If they’re actually cousins, this affects a lot of weird shipping fan-fics. If you don’t know about those, trust me, you don’t want to.)  The problem is that by the end we’re left with the same answer from the beginning: no one knows. There’s essentially no payoff, so you have to question why this idea was even brought up in the first place. This would be Natasha Levinger’s first written episode. While the ‘resolution’ is disappointing, there’s still a lot of fun to be had with the Apple Family road-trip. (Perhaps the thing that makes the episode is Apple Bloom’s Dora the Explorer homage.)

There’s one main song and an encore of it at the end, ‘Apples to the Core.’ It’s very well structured, especially with Big Macintosh’s “Yup” every 20 seconds. Pinkie Pie is pretty solid throughout. Her personality is by far the hardest to write since it’s tempting to make her just the comic relief joke character. (And sadly, that has happened a lot of times in the past.) But again, the problem is not the premise or writing, it’s just that there’s no true conclusion. There are two morals to be taken out of here. The first is that family doesn’t have to be perfect in every way, they just have to love each other and get through life’s obstacles. The second and I think bigger one is that you don’t have to be blood related to be called ‘family,’ your close friends can also be ‘family’ to you. I suppose it’s because of that moral the whole thing of Pinkie being Applejack’s cousin was left ambiguous, but it still feels unresolved.

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Overall, ‘Pinkie Apple Pie‘ might be the weakest episode of Season 4. It’s not bad, but the problem, the conflict, the big question…is left unresolved. The point of this episode for fans was to realize (or debunk) the premise, that Pinkie was actually Applejack’s cousin. This will probably never be brought up again. It’s still fun though, let’s not forget that. The end moral is really good, despite the viewer’s feeling of emptiness.

3.5/5

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Daniel is a huge fan of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. His favorite is Fluttershy and you can follow him on Twitter: @Destroyer_199