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My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Review
Season 5, Episode 7: “Make New Friends but Keep Discord”
Sadly for many bronies, “Make New Friends But Keep Discord”, the seventh
episode of the fifth season of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, is probably
the only chance they will ever get to see Fluttershy and the rest of the gang
splattered with goo. Therefore, it's the kind of episode that needs to be
savoured – which is easy enough to do, if you find the character of Discord
enjoyable to watch.
Discord is once again up to his chaotic shenanigans and is more than happy to
ruin everyone else's fun while venting his frustrations that Fluttershy has
friends beyond him alone. Why it took so long for Discord to realise that
Fluttershy has other friends is anyone's guess – after all, she had plenty of
friends in Twilight Sparkle and the gang before she met Discord and has since
gone on many adventures and attended a variety of events without Discord by
her side.
But the villain has it in for one new friend in particular – Tree Hugger, an overthe-top hippie caricature whose entire personality has been designed by
someone whose knowledge of Hippie Culture and its vernacular is as thin as
Discord's reasons for disliking her. Each line of dialogue delivered by Tree
Hugger is all chakras-this and auras-that – and her constant leisurely
demeanour makes her as two-dimensional as they come. If she'd been lost to
the bizarre live-action rift-world alluded to in this episode the only person
crying would have been Fluttershy.
Everyone else in the episode finds reason enough to squeal due to an
altogether greater threat – The Smooze, a returning blob of slime plucked from
My Little Pony's history and made new again. His insatiable appetite for jewels,
each one adding to his size, makes him an obvious bad choice to take to an
event as ornate as the Grand Galloping Gala. But Discord, being Discord, wants
to reap his revenge on Fluttershy for taking Tree Hugger to the Gala instead of
him, and uses The Smooze as his weapon to do so.
At the end of the episode Discord learns the important and not-at-all-obvious
lesson that people can have more than one friend, perhaps suggesting for a
fleeting moment that he will finally stop causing trouble for everyone. But then
Princess Celestia admits that Discord made the Gala fun for her, implying her
desire for Discord to mess everything up again next year. It's like two warring
parents of a disobedient child giving them mixed messages, leaving little
ambiguity as to why Discord is as unruly as he is.
There are a few cute bits in “Make New Friends But Keep Discord”, notably
when Rarity, Applejack and Rainbow Dash take Sweetie Belle, Apple Bloom and
Scootaloo to the Gala for the first time as their 'dates'. Sadly, nothing really
comes of this being their first chance to experience the Gala, and there isn't
even an opportunity to hear from them near the end of the episode about what
they thought of it – they are forgotten almost as quickly as they are
mentioned, lost in a sea of slime, Discord's monotonous blue-balled
frustrations and endless generic hippie phrases from Tree Hugger.
On the plus side, Tree Hugger does sing a pretty cool song in the episode in
order to calm The Smooze. The lyrics of the song are better than anything an
audience has seen so far in Season 5 with its ambitious neighing and soothing
mouth noises accompanied by a background sitar – because that's what
hippies play. More enjoyable still is Discord's stage comedy act, which finally
proves to him that the only time anyone laughs in his presence is at him
rather than with him. Perhaps some of these messages will be finally absorbed,
like a golden sceptre being assimilated into the folds of The Smooze's
gelatinous body fat.
“Make New Friends But Keep Discord” is a decent episode if you find Discord's
constant tug-of-war between being a good guy and being a jerk enjoyable to
witness. However, if you're starting to find the character is wearing thin by
resting on his laurels, nothing in this episode upsets the status quo that is
Discord's entire existence. John de Lancie is surely having a blast rolling
around in the wads of cash he was paid to once again appear in Friendship is
Magic, but the question remains whether or not everyone else is having quite
as good of a time clearing up the mess he now leaves behind on a routine,
season-wide basis.
C-