Written by: Gillian M. Berrow
Cheerilee lets the class know that their final exams are in two weeks, so Twilight takes it upon herself to help whip the Rainbooms into shape. Seeing that the girls are distracted and getting nothing done, Twilight decides to work her drills into their normal routines. It helps and they buckle down for a proper study session after. The exams come and everyone aces them, getting an A-minus or better.
Tropes:
- Artistic License – Sports: Downplayed. The first mistake in Sunset and Twilight's chess game is that they're playing with the board rotated sideways: according to the rules of chess, both players should have a white square to their lower right. Secondly, from the way they react to Sunset's move, they both think Sunset has won, but looking at the board closely shows Twilight can get out of check by moving her bishop to block Sunset's queen. For that matter, Sunset has only her rooks and queen left while Twilight has both rooks, both knights, a bishop, and more pawns. The game could still go either way but Twilight has the numbers advantage.
- Asleep in Class: Rainbow Dash starts the study session asleep, until Twilight wakes her up.
- Continuity Nod:
- Sunset Shimmer has been established to be quite academic herself, just not as smart as Twilight. When the exams are announced she's the only one besides Twilight not visibly worried, and during the initial study session she's the only one to get the right answer to Twilight's practice question.
- The handheld game system Sunset is playing on is the same one that Snips and Snails were playing in the "A Fine Line" short.
- Easter Egg: A brief scene shows Applejack making a model molecule in shop class. As it turns out, if the balls representing atoms are yellow for hydrogen, red for oxygen, and woodgrain for carbon, then the molecule is methyl butyrate
(officially methyl butanoate), a methyl ester that smells and tastes like apples. - Finger Wag: Twilight wags her finger in disapproval at Rainbow Dash after waking her up.
- Idiosyncratic Wipes: An exercise book crossing the screen is used for scene changes during the Training Montage.
- Mic Drop: Once the girls finish their exams, they all lift their pencils and drop them point-down, knowing they've got it in the bag.
- Musical Episode: Most of the episode is a montage set to Twilight's study song.
- Shout-Out: The title is a pun on the song "The Final Countdown" by Europe.
- Smart People Play Chess: Sunset and Twilight's downtime is spent playing chess because they are the smartest of the group.
- Training Montage: The entire short is Twilight helping the others study for the exams.
- Writers Cannot Do Math: Twilight asks Pinkie to find the square of 7/5, and accepts her answer of 0.28 (7/25) as correct. With the entire fraction inside the parentheses, you square the top and bottom to get 49/25, or 1.96. Not to mention that with where the "2" is posited, it could be also interpreted as "express 7/5 in base 2".
- Whole-Plot Reference: It's not hard to draw parallels between this episode and "Testing, Testing, 1 2 3". Human Twilight even discovers that Human Rainbow Dash studies better via exercise.
