Retrospective review: Green Isn't Your Colour

An episode that both manages to entertain me and infuriate me.

I'm a bit conflicted on how to address this episode. Do I praise its fun humour? Or do I tear it apart for its aggravating plot? In a review, I suppose I can only try to do both.

A lot of the episode is entertaining to watch. Funny character quirks like Spike hiding his obvious love for Rarity and Pinkie popping out of impossible spaces are delightfully silly, and combined with great sight gags they make for a very funny episode. Meanwhile, Fluttershy continues to be as adorable as always. From small screams to timid kicks, everything she does is so small and super cute.

Rarity's better character traits are fantastic here. She's worried about telling Fluttershy her feelings because of her generosity, something that hasn't been displayed well in previous episodes. Meanwhile, as mentioned, Fluttershy's timid nature is very cute here, and it also leads to her worrying about Rarity's feelings. Twilight of course wants to solve the issue, but she's stopped by a typically silly Pinkie Pie.

This is where things start to go downhill. A big element of the episode is not telling secrets, despite its insistence on creating situations where breaking these promises shouldn't only be acceptable, but perhaps encouraged. Even if we ignore that, at no point does Twilight simply tell either pony to just tell the other how they feel, which gets more and more aggravating as the episode goes on and the simple solution is avoided for the sake of their lesson.

The paradox at the heart of the episode-to get one pony to reveal a secret, you'd have to betray the other's trust, and vice versa-is never addressed. The writers could have found a more sensible workaround than the luck-of-the-draw that came to the end, and thus had a more interesting lesson to tell, but instead they left it as it is. As a result, the episode isn't nearly as good as it could be.

Green Isn't Your Colour is entertaining in some parts and infuriating in others, but ultimately the negatives leave a more lasting impression. The reluctance of the season to take any sorts of risks or to at all add to the style of the show leaves the biggest impact here, and the episode is worse off for it. Unfortunately, despite its good qualities, the episode is too fatally flawed to be considered one of the season's best, and instead is closer to one of its worst.