Tags
Apple Bloom, Applejack, Big Macintosh, Goldie Delicious, Granny Smith, My Little Pony, My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, opinion, review, The Great Seedling
Synopsis:
At Sweet Apple Acres, the “Confluence”, a time when every apple ripens at the same time, has come; meaning a bumper crop worth of work for the Apple family to harvest. To get some help, Goldie Delicious is in town to assist, but not long after arrival she begins to regale the family with tales about the “Great Seedling”–a mythical creature that grants bountiful harvests and supposedly gives eternal crop prosperity if one manages to catch him. Applejack dismisses the tale as something to make harvest time fun for children, but Apple Bloom is determined to trap the Great Seedling this year. Applejack allows her to spend the first day of the harvest setting up traps with the intent of having her work the next day, but on the following morning the traps are empty but strange apple tracks have been left on the farm. Goldie suggests it’s the Great Seedling daring Apple Bloom to catch him, much to Applejack’s chagrin as there’s plenty of work to do. This, however, prompts Granny Smith to bring up the story about how Applejack herself used to enthusiastically try and catch the Great Seedling, but eventually abandoned it after being caught in one of her own traps for half the day while the rest of the family was stuck working. Nevertheless, on seeing how much fun Apple Bloom is having, she agrees to help her set additional traps if she agrees to work for that day, and on helping Apple Bloom set the traps her old enthusiasm for catching the Great Seedling begins to reemerge. It only gets more so the next day when all of the traps they set have been sprung yet were empty, and even more apple tracks have been left at a point where it could no longer be accidental. Believing the Great Seedling to be real herself now, Applejack helps Apple Bloom set additional traps over working the harvest for that day, before noticing that some of the trees appear to have harvested themselves. Believing the Great Seedling will go after the unharvested apples that night, Applejack and Apple Bloom post a watch that evening. Sure enough, that night they get a visitor, but in the form of Big Macintosh harvesting apples in his sleep rather than the Great Seedling. At any rate, thanks to Big Mac’s actions, the harvest is done on time and the mystery is solved. Applejack learns that you never grow out of having fun together with family, right before she and Apple Bloom notice that the carrots have harvested themselves and arranged themselves into a strange pattern. Believing the Great Seedling is still nearby, the two sisters run off to set a new batch of traps.
Review:
Ah, a muddled moral combined with the final Applejack-themed episode. Hooray… π¦
While a lot of this episode brings to mind “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!”, as noted in the Fun Facts it’s more similar in its theme and moral to an IDW comic episode. I wasn’t a terribly big fan of either one, especially since the lesson came across as flimsy at best. The take-home message is supposed to be that you’re never too old to stop having fun, but it’s mired in two different ways to me. So much of the episode is devoted to trying to convince Applejack to even believe in the Great Seedling in the first place as opposed to just loosening up and having fun that I thought the episode was building to going the same route as “Great Pumpkin” and being about having faith, or, more likely, was going to end up with Goldie and Granny being behind everything to just try and get Applejack to loosen up. (The constant winks and nods didn’t help.) Because of that, the take-home moral/message that it was going for seemed to get lost in translation for part of the episode.
The second and bigger part, however, was the fact that Applejack wasn’t wrong about what she was saying. ThereΒ was a lot of work to get done that just kept piling up on them. And who was the one who ended up having to do it all so that Applejack and Apple Bloom could afford to take all the time out for trap setting? Big Macintosh. He kind of gets the short end of the stick this episode…worn out from sleep-bucking apples all night and then he gets the double-whammy of constantly having to pick up more and more slack for Applejack and Apple Bloom. It’s nice to have fun and take it easy some times, of course, but if it can only happen at someone else’s expense that’s something different. That pretty thoroughly ruins the moral for me, turning it into something more like: “Go ahead and have fun if someone else can be made to do your job for you; no matter how tired or sore they get.”
I will say that the constant plethora of traps and the background action of what’s going on at the farm and with Goldie’s cats prevents this episode from being bland or boring. If nothing else, the shifting storyline makes you wonder what the episode is building up to and it’s not until close to the end that a sleepwalking Big Macintosh felt like a possibility to me. But I still thought it was a lesson at someone else’s expense, and so that makes me vote this one down a little.
And on top of all that, no foreshadowing of the you-know-what moment from the series finale either. π
Fun Facts:
This episode has several things in common with the IDW comic series. The storyline is very similar to Applejack’s story in the “Pony Tales” mini-series (featuring the Sass Squash), and the Great Seedling’s form itself brings to mind the deer race, which appears only in the comic. The Great Seedling itself also brings to mind the Peanuts’ comic “Great Pumpkin”.
The only time there’s a flashback other than in “The Perfect Pear” of Bright Mac and Pear Butter interacting with their family.
Rating:
2 Stars out of 5