Finally going to get back into watching the post-break stuff as well as Rainbow Roadtrip at some point. Watched today's episode:
Starlight/Trixie episodes feel fairly overdone at this point and it's a bit annoying that they seem to take up half of Starlight's episodes and pretty much all of Trixie's major appearances. I don't hate seeing them together but it would still be nice if we could see episodes featuring Trixie that weren't about her friendship with Starlight because I feel like there's still a lot of fun things that you could do with her. This episode in particular feels very similar to All Bottled Up in that it's essentially about problems arising by Starlight not coming clean and telling Trixie how she really feels, except that one felt more necessary because it was back when Starlight was still going through very important character development. I do feel like this episode has positives over that one (chiefly that this one doesn't have a largely irrelevant B plot taking up a good chunk of runtime) so I don't think it's terrible, but it kind of fits the trend of this season feeling like it's recycling a ton of stuff from previous seasons. And that's sort of inevitable when it's been going on for so long, so I don't entirely blame the crew. But one of the big fears of a show going on for a long time is that newer episodes generally feel like they're just retreading old ground, and I definitely have been feeling that for the past two seasons.
The episode itself more or less plays out how you'd expect it to: Starlight decides she needs a VP, Trixie thinks she's going to be just given it while also giving off major warning signs that she would be terrible for the job, eventually she screws things up massively and Starlight gets mad at her while also acknowledging that she should have came clean and pointed out that Trixie was a bad pick earlier. Her eventually giving the job to Sunburst is a pretty fitting decision especially considering how important he is to Starlight, but it's kind of weird to me that the whole episode is Starlight testing people for the job and then at the end she just gives both VP as well as student counselor away without testing them at all. Trixie as counselor is glaring because I feel like the episode shows she wouldn't be any good at that position either although they try to sell it as "well she sometimes gives good advice." Some of the VP candidates are fun, but I feel a bit uncomfortable because I feel like the characters that were trying out were picked because they knew the fans liked them, not because they actually felt like their characters would actually be interested in being VP. I don't think it's really a big deal, but it felt like transparent pandering to me which kinda took me out of the episode.
Starlight I actually liked quite a bit in this episode. I felt like her portrayal in the past couple seasons hasn't been great but she was pretty enjoyable here. It was a pretty silly joke but her relationship with Phyllis was definitely the highlight of the episode. Seeing her visibly shaken when people brought up equality and time travel was nice to see. Trixie was pretty standard Trixie. It was cool seeing the parents of the students again, it's weird though that later they tried to portray Trixie arguing with Gruff as being a good thing because she was sticking up for Gallus, but the dynamic of "Gallus is afraid to speak his mind to Gruff and others don't usually stick up for him" would have been nice to actually have been set up earlier. (said it before, but I really wish there were more episodes with specific students rather than most the episodes featuring them having to show off all of them) The people trying out for VP had some good gags, again though it felt weird that they the people that were trying out. Overall it was an alright episode that I felt had a lot of little things holding it back for me, nothing particularly bad but all those small things add up and it's also hard to just look at the episode at face value when there's the context that this is the last major Starlight episode ever and one of the last episodes in general.
Starlight/Trixie episodes feel fairly overdone at this point and it's a bit annoying that they seem to take up half of Starlight's episodes and pretty much all of Trixie's major appearances. I don't hate seeing them together but it would still be nice if we could see episodes featuring Trixie that weren't about her friendship with Starlight because I feel like there's still a lot of fun things that you could do with her. This episode in particular feels very similar to All Bottled Up in that it's essentially about problems arising by Starlight not coming clean and telling Trixie how she really feels, except that one felt more necessary because it was back when Starlight was still going through very important character development. I do feel like this episode has positives over that one (chiefly that this one doesn't have a largely irrelevant B plot taking up a good chunk of runtime) so I don't think it's terrible, but it kind of fits the trend of this season feeling like it's recycling a ton of stuff from previous seasons. And that's sort of inevitable when it's been going on for so long, so I don't entirely blame the crew. But one of the big fears of a show going on for a long time is that newer episodes generally feel like they're just retreading old ground, and I definitely have been feeling that for the past two seasons.
The episode itself more or less plays out how you'd expect it to: Starlight decides she needs a VP, Trixie thinks she's going to be just given it while also giving off major warning signs that she would be terrible for the job, eventually she screws things up massively and Starlight gets mad at her while also acknowledging that she should have came clean and pointed out that Trixie was a bad pick earlier. Her eventually giving the job to Sunburst is a pretty fitting decision especially considering how important he is to Starlight, but it's kind of weird to me that the whole episode is Starlight testing people for the job and then at the end she just gives both VP as well as student counselor away without testing them at all. Trixie as counselor is glaring because I feel like the episode shows she wouldn't be any good at that position either although they try to sell it as "well she sometimes gives good advice." Some of the VP candidates are fun, but I feel a bit uncomfortable because I feel like the characters that were trying out were picked because they knew the fans liked them, not because they actually felt like their characters would actually be interested in being VP. I don't think it's really a big deal, but it felt like transparent pandering to me which kinda took me out of the episode.
Starlight I actually liked quite a bit in this episode. I felt like her portrayal in the past couple seasons hasn't been great but she was pretty enjoyable here. It was a pretty silly joke but her relationship with Phyllis was definitely the highlight of the episode. Seeing her visibly shaken when people brought up equality and time travel was nice to see. Trixie was pretty standard Trixie. It was cool seeing the parents of the students again, it's weird though that later they tried to portray Trixie arguing with Gruff as being a good thing because she was sticking up for Gallus, but the dynamic of "Gallus is afraid to speak his mind to Gruff and others don't usually stick up for him" would have been nice to actually have been set up earlier. (said it before, but I really wish there were more episodes with specific students rather than most the episodes featuring them having to show off all of them) The people trying out for VP had some good gags, again though it felt weird that they the people that were trying out. Overall it was an alright episode that I felt had a lot of little things holding it back for me, nothing particularly bad but all those small things add up and it's also hard to just look at the episode at face value when there's the context that this is the last major Starlight episode ever and one of the last episodes in general.
