Quick! The Doctor is trying to keep the whales alive while the Terminator is sabotaging the Enterprise in the Wild West! Get in the DeLorean and let's talk It's About Time!
Plot:
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| Well now that there's two of us, we should do some "Experimenting" |
Twilight is doing her usual scheduling when a bright light appear, depositing a dishevel version of her from THE FUTURE!!!! Future Twilight tries to tell her younger self something important but Past Twilight keeps interrupting, preventing Future Twilight from telling her. Twilight in the present starts to panic and gets the town together to help safe-proof it. After doing all that, a Cerberus appears and Twilight leads it back to hell but she soon gets a paper-cut and realizes that the future hasn't changed. She tries to stop it, first by doing nothing, then trying to predict it, and then monitoring all existence. Finally she decides to just stop time to prevent the disaster and goes to Canterlot to find a spell to do that, but she runs out of time! Fortunately nothing happens and Twilight learns not to worry so much about the future and then goes back in time to tell herself this, repeating the whole process!
What I liked:
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| I found an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into them I'll never know! |
- The Story
- I'm always a sucker for a good time travel story and this one delivers! The action is well thought out and the pacing good, if a little on the speedy side.
- The Characters
- While Applejack and Rarity are sidelined for this one, everyone else has a moment to shine! But Pinkie, Twilight and Spike at completely in the limelight! Twilight has a very relatable problem and Spike and Pinkie are perfect at playing foil to her, with Spike's "I could care less" attitude and Pinkie's...Pinkie attitude, they balance out Twilight's more neurotic tendencies perfectly! And M.A. Larson didn't fuck up Fluttershy! Good for him!
- The Humor
- Goes hand in hand (or would it be hoof in hoof?) with the characters in this episode since a lot of the humor is derived from their interactions and tendencies, such as Pinkie's secret ball and eye-patch stash and Twilight going off the rails monitoring everything!
- Future Twilight's appearance
- First real time outside of the a few dress episodes where the animators have drastically changed the appearance of one of our heroes and it looks great! I know a lot of people see Solid Snake here, but all I'm seeing is Snake Plissken from Escape from New York.
What I didn't like:
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| I can't look at Magic Eye puzzles now! |
- The Past, Present, and Future all walk into a bar
- This episode is pretty much flawless, but like all time travel works, it can get funked up by tense issues. Personally I don't like it when people do the whole refer to your time travel self in a different tense but this is a really minor nitpick at best.
Interesting Points:
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You have no idea how hard it is to get the taste of chalk out of your mouth.
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- Determinism
- This episode shows us a classic predestination paradox, ie where one goes back in time and sets up the events that lead them to travel in time. So does this mean that in the MLP universe, events are fixed and predestined to happen, since Twilight couldn't change what happened in the past? Might be the reason they don't do this too often.
- Cerberus
- This episode ties in with the events of Twilight's Kingdom where Tirek escape during this time frame. Two questions I have about this. 1) What was Tirek doing in the intervening time (I mean Twilight grew wings, just to name one event) and 2) Who let Cerberus free in the first place?
Overall: Must See
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| How the heck did I lose the cosplay competition? |
This is as close as you can get to a flawless episode! While I do enjoy other episodes more, this has far less to dislike in comparison to what there is to like. Check out this great little time travel story which will play a bigger role in the future of the show!
