I love Fluttershy’s whole setup for the animals with the birdhouses and burrows everywhere. Particularly I like the pier she’s made for the ferrets, where their tunnel opens out onto it from under the bridge. Making comfy places for animals to inhabit is something I loved to do for my cat growing up and seeing this all makes me feel like I understand her a little bit. I also love how the cold open does both an establishment of theme with beginning on Fluttershy and her fear of the black smoke, but also a switcheroo where you think it’s going to be about Fluttershy taking care of critters only for the dragonsmoke-from-the-mountain reveal. I also love the cut from that dramatic reveal straight to the theme song, possibly the most hype I’ve felt for the theme song out of the episodes so far as it feels a bit like “hell yes, they’re gonna go and face a dragon” affirmation. Also it struck me both from Angel’s actions in the cold open and seeing him in the opening that as much as he’s a controversial comic relief character, he’s also just a very odd creature. Reading the show more literally (I think a totally literal interpretation might be impossible given some episodes), my reaction is something like “maybe Angel’s a reincarnation of a pony, or a pony’s brains stuck in a bunny, or something?” which again I’m sure is a fan theory somewhere. Another curious detail is Twilight saying “smoke is covering all of Equestria” – naturally at this stage Equestria as shown has just been Canterlot and Ponyville, with the Appleloosas having their colony out in the west, so it makes more sense and even feels a bit gen1-ish, where a lot of the conflicts in that show between the various magical creatures were over small fields, forests and otherwise small plots of land. Now that I think is the real reason, but we could probably say something like this is a district called “central Equestria” or something and so it’s called Equestria for short. You could replace Twilight’s mentions of Equestria with the word “Ponyville” and it’d probably still make coherent sense as an episode, maybe somewhat confusing to some viewers as Celestia can clearly see the smoke perfectly well but as we discussed previously, Ponyville seems very nearby to Canterlot. And that sort of conflation could probably satisfactorily explain Twilight’s use of the term with regard to the later show.
However, I have an additional pet theory. It’s one which it’s just occurred to me as a result of this exact conundrum now to apply it, and honestly I’m only going to half-entertain it as a sort of “possibility”. I may have to return to the episode review in a second post as this is going to derail my post completely!
So, this pet theory of mine is carried over from another show I watch, Doctor Who. In particular I love the old black-and-white episodes, they have an inexplicably comfy-yet-uneasy quality to me. But there’s a lot of contradictions with the later show as it goes into colour broadcasting and then later is rebooted in the 2000s, and these are very much considered just par for the course for a show about such chaotic time travel. However, I had this idea one day reading about the original pitch for the show wherein the Doctor and his granddaughter are fleeing from these particular aliens, who have never shown up at all in the show and the reasons for their flight are still unrevealed to this day within canon – and it made me think of Stein’s Gate, and how in that show they drift across timelines such that eventually they end up in alternate universes and realities. It made me wonder “what if they were fleeing something so threatening, they had to escape via time distortion of constant time-and-space travel that they ended up in a different sort of universe altogether?” or to put it another way, the canon of the show with regard to the past AND future changed as it went along. This would mean that things said early on in the show that are later contradicted are still canon, just as the contradiction is canon. It basically fixes the fundamental paradox of the show.