Thursday 7 August 2014

Retrospective review: The Show Stoppers

Ugh.

If there's one good thing I can say about The Show Stoppers, it's that it's the season only goes uphill from here. Unfortunately, that's where my praise ends, as this episode has very little in the way of entertainment value. As far as the Cutie Mark Crusaders episodes go, this is perhaps their least popular, and for good reason.

In my review of "Stare Master", I mentioned that the Cutie Mark Crusaders were beginning to grate on my nerves. Well, here we are, with them having reached the peak of their annoyance. While they're a little less noisy than in the previous episode, it's made up for by their stupidity. Their single-minded focus on their cutie marks is only overshadowed by their inability to recognize their own skills. Their commitment to their poor decisions only serves to make them difficult to get behind.

What makes this more bothersome is that the episode presents this as a joke. The main source of humour here is cringe comedy, where we're supposed to laugh because we know the CMC are about to embarrass themselves. This is particularly notable near the end, where the CMC have a performance which the rest of the episode built up to. The whole performance is built to be terrible, and it causes much more cringing than laughing in the end.

Therein lies a bigger issue with the episode: It's not very funny. Everything that is supposed to be funny is more irritating or cringe-inducing, and the result is just an episode that's not particularly fun to watch. But what's worse is that none of it really amounts to anything. In the end, nobody learns anything, except that the CMC are remarkably thick. This could easily happen again, and the whole episode has no real point. The result is unsatisfying and leaves very little to praise in the episode. It's annoying, it's overly reliant on cringe comedy, it lacks good jokes, and it's pointless. It's a terrible episode and I'm just glad to be done with it.

No comments:

Post a Comment