I’m going to be honest, this episode is underrated and many call it the worst episode of Spike and of season 5 unfairly.

How fuckin conveinient.

That’s the bad news. The good news is now all those ponies can have fun assembling the puzzle again.

@alidan  
All you need to do is bleep out “bless”. The writers weren’t being subtle here.

is there an edit of this where spike says “oh f me” or something? was looking for that and dont know where it is.

@sargesprinkles  
It’s a metaphor for how fragile friendships really are in Equestria.
 
The artist is not a happy pony.

why did he turn back to the statue. he wasn’t even facing it when he felt the sneeze coming on.  
also I sneezed while writing this comment, isn’t that weird.

this is what you get when you don’t glue down your highly fragile gem Lego statue

It’s funny how he says ‘Bless me’ when in reality, we know exactly what he wants to say.

@gingerninja666  
Even if he was, he doesn’t show anything in the way of malice until considerably after dealing with the only problems that cause the catastrophic failure in the end. And exactly zero of the things he does after he explicitly begins doing purely selfish things and actively abusing his power actually have any impact on the climax of the story at all. Getting his picture painted? Doesn’t matter. Eating cupcakes? Doesn’t matter.
 
Now, I want to be clear that I’m not claiming that I don’t THINK they matter. I’m saying that I didn’t notice any actual influence that those events had on the eventual disaster of any kind.

@gingerninja666  

 
Spike suffers from the Dunning-Kruger effect.

@Background Pony #F61B
 
I’d say from the second ponies came to him with problems, he was acting in his own self interest to a certain degree. It blinded him from realizing that he was trying to deal with problems above his ken. At some point he probably would’ve gone t Cadance and mentioned the stuff Twilight still had to do and she would’ve taken it from there or woken Twilight up out of necessity.

@gingerninja666  
He was being selfish trying to keep everyone from waking her up….which is exactly what he was asked to do?

@Background Pony #F61B
 
He already WAS being greedy though. Maybe I was interpreting the scenes wrong. But all the times Spike made decisions in Twilight’s name had some undercurrent of self serving thinking to them. He was happy and reveling in his ability to exploit Twilight’s name to make himself heard, and then he rationalized it in his head as him merely helping Twilight.
 
I think characters can have multiple motives for doing things.

This episode was good for Spike. I mean her wasn’t the butt monkey like in Power Ponies. He just let the power get to him. I mean come on, wouldn’t that happen to anyone who hasn’t had their share of power to get carried away

@Brony_Conundrum
 
@gingerninja666  
The things that go wrong spectacularly are problems that Spike dealt with for the sake of helping Twilight. Call him a bad decision maker, sure, but I wouldn’t exactly expect a child to be that great at rational thinking.
 
However, what’s important is that the utterly self-serving things that Spike does after Cadance comes along and tells him not to have no consequences whatsoever. The only things that go wrong are the things Spike thought were problems that others wanted him to fix. BEFORE he became power-mad and selfish about it.

@Background Pony #F61B
 
People seem to miss this. Spike may have been SAYING that he was doing it all for Twilight’s benefit, and he may have actually meant it to a degree or convinced himself that he meant it, but he clearly was also doing it because he enjoyed that POWER that Twilight’s name granted him. He said he liked that people were finally listening to his opinions. That sounds more like it applies to the decision making stuff than to the free massages and whatnot. Spike was doing things for the wrong reasons the entire time to some degree, and he refused to take the work seriously and didn’t take heed when it was clear his ideas were awful.

@Background Pony #F61B  

 
I’d say that’s open to interpretation. The lesson I personally took away from it was “good intentions don’t always equal good results”, but I can see how the moral could be interpreted that way. Morals can be pretty fickle things in a show like this, especially if it’s your first attempt at one.

@SkunkStripe  
In fairness, I don’t think it was. It was very similarly tormenting Spike for no adequate reason, but at least Equestria Games was about Spike actually trying to cope with his own inferiority.
 
To put it simply, Equestria Games was about Spike learning to value himself as a person.  
This episode was all about Spike learning….what exactly? Don’t try to help people because you’re actually a total jerk? In fact, Spike honestly didn’t DO anything morally wrong until Cadance pointed out the fact that he COULD, in such a laughably contrived manner that I saw it coming a mile away and was still angry when it actually happened.
 
And even then, nothing Spike did for his own gain actually did cause anything bad to happen, completely undermining the whole point of the episode!

@trueblue02  
Seems that Spike still has some trouble keeping the power of the Thu’um in check. I guess it’s another pilgrimage to High Hrothgar for him.

Spikes has quite the masterful usage of such…
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 
unrelenting force….

@Background Pony #F61B  
You know, it could just be that Spike’s unlucky. He’s kind of like Charlie Brown when you think about it–the poor kid tries his hardest, but trying your hardest doesn’t mean you’ll succeed.

I think the biggest issue with this episode is that the Equestrian games was already a pretty similar episode.  
I don’t think there was any particularly bad or lazy writing. None of Spikes’ decisions were particularly “stupid” just foolish, but justified by the objective that was given to him. A few “contrivances” is just plain how cartoons work. Weird stuff happens and characters make very simple mistakes. Spike sneezing in that direction is honestly the only “stupid” thing Spike did the whole episode.  
If there is any flaw in the writing, I’d say it was that Spike’s supposed to feel bad for abusing power. But all the stuff where he was abusing power for self gain actually had nothing to do with the climax of the episode. Everything that came back to bite him was the stuff he did when he still had good intentions. Aside from that I thought it was good.

@Brony_Conundrum  
“What do you know, haven’t you heard of suspension of disbelief?”
 
I know those ideas exist. My problem is more that those are very flimsy justifications for having the plot of the episode revolve around punishing Spike for the crime of existing by having painfully idiotic contrivances form the basis of the entire episode.
 
Especially when the show has done this four times now

@Background Pony #F61B  
Also, I’d like to ask you to just be patient with this guy. It’s his very first episode for the show, of course it’s going to be rough. For Christ’s sake, Merriwether Williams didn’t break out of her rut until season 4. Just give the guy time to improve.