Before I get into Swarm of the Century, I want to quickly go and rank the episodes I’ve already watched:
Ep1+2, Friendship is Magic – 9.4 Ep3, The Ticket Master – 6.5 Ep4, Applebuck Season – 8 Ep5, Griffon The Brush-Off – 7.6 Ep6, Boast Busters – 8 Ep7, Dragonshy – 8.5 Ep8, Look Before You Sleep - 8 Ep9, Bridle Gossip – 7.5
You see, when I saw the word “swarm” I instantly remembered that this was the real first episode that I ever watched. I saw it first as Friendship is Witchcraft, yes, but after watching the two-parter, my memory at least is that I skipped straight to this episode because it felt like a more natural “first episode” to me back then. So, I wanted to establish how good this episode actually was to me now before I even went into it, as in my mind this is the fondly-recalled first experience, and honestly I have at times forgotten that it isn’t actually the first post-pilot episode in the show. So I set out to revisit what I’d written about the previous episodes so far. At first I was thinking of doing a ranked list of my favourite episodes so far on rewatching, but it occurred to me that this would be a tricky process to keep track of, and if I score the episodes, I could simply go back at the end of a season or something and see what rank they fell into based on what score I gave them. So I played around with ideas of different scoring systems, but I decided I’d go with the same one Bridge has gone with.
So there it is, albeit a bit influenced by hindsight. I’m ranking episodes based on a criteria primarily of personal enjoyment, including guilty pleasure without deducting points for the ‘guilt’, and on comfiness factor. Other things may factor in, but only really if they stand out to me as especially good or especially bad. And as I was saying previously, I’m not a great ranking person, so I may drop it later on in the show, but I felt a need with this episode to compare it, so here it is for now!
