Welcome to my Season 3 review! I’ll start it off by posting the grades to each episode.
1.) B
2.)B+
3.)B
4.)C-
5.)A-
6.)A
7.)A-
8.)C+
9.)B-
10.)B+
11.)B-
12.)C
13.)C+
Right away you may notice that this season is pretty uneven, in some areas it shines providing episodes of stunning quality. And in other areas it stoops to an all-time low, following trendy clichés to progress a plot, and mostly just treading in the same water until the next episode.
The season highlight being “Sleepless in Ponyville” which I hailed as the best episode this show has ever done. A few honorable mentions being: “Wonderbolts Academy” and “Magic Duel”. There weren’t any inherently terrible, but they did have a lot of missteps dragging down the entire experience.
For example, the worst episode of the season (and perhaps the show) was “One bad Apple”, which trivialized bullying (not immensely, but a little), and missed a glaring opportunity. This accumulated in a below-average score and a disappointing episode.
This season also had a lot of “fluff”, it included episodes that weren’t bad, and they just weren’t as entertaining as I’m used to.
Overall, it was a disjointed and uneven experience, but a good one non-the-less. It had some fantastic episodes, and some that weren’t so fantastic. All I can do is chock it up to the shortened season (only 13 episodes) and hope that season 4 returns back into consistently good family entertainment, jam packed with references, good continuity, and great pacing.
At the end of the day, this season did its job in entertaining me. While it wasn’t up to par to lets say, Season 2, it still provided enough good episodes to keep me satisfied.
Grade: B-
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