Recap / My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic S6 E10 "The Saddle Row Review"

Big store debut within a few hours. What can possibly go wrong?

"What would Rarity want?!"

Written by Nick Confalone

Rarity's friends all rush towards Carousel Boutique in Ponyville, eager to stop her from reading a review of her new "Rarity for You" shop in Manehattan. The Mane Six are all quite worried that the review will have Rarity and her shop come off badly, so they want to intercept a newspaper before Rarity can read it. But, when they arrive, Rarity already has a paper, and insists on reading the review together.

The Mane Six recall giving interviews to a newspony in a diner, where they retell the opening of the shop. The space Rarity wants to inhabit is beset with a lot of problems, and she insists on opening that night despite the disrepair. In addition to that, the landlord of the building, Mr. Stripes, demands that Rarity hire his daughter Plaid despite her lack of business sense. Upstairs, on the building's top floor, DJ Pon-3 is holding a loud rave that creates a very uncomfortable atmosphere. A family of raccoons has taken hold of the stockroom, and they refuse to leave, despite contaminating the store with the smell of garbage. When Rarity's clothes arrive, they're all a disorganized mess in their boxes, and Coco Pommel says that she can't work the opening as she promised because she's come down with a bad cold. With all of the problems, Rarity begins to stress out, saying that her new opening is doomed.

The Mane Six all offer to help Rarity make the opening work; Pinkie will tone down the music, Applejack will rein in Plaid Stripes, Rainbow Dash will hire new help, Fluttershy will deal with the raccoons, and Twilight Sparkle will organize the clothes, all while Rarity works on a window display. The Mane Six all take to their tasks, but they all keep wondering what Rarity would want, as opposed to what they think would be best, so all their attempts backfire: Pinkie tricks DJ Pon-3 into playing some boring shopping music but she just remixes it, Rainbow Dash can't decide on which of the fashion applicants to pick, Applejack tries to gently reject Plaid's idea (spoon-based clothing items) which only earns the wrath of Mr. Stripes, and Fluttershy's attempt to get the raccoons to leave ends up with her being chased by them. As the troubles continue to escalate, Twilight desperately locks Rarity in the window display with a chair propped up against the door, with the Mane Six surveying the disaster. They finally all admit they only did what they did because of what they hoped Rarity wanted, and realize that Rarity would want them to do it their own way.

As the opening approaches, Rarity is finally let out into the shop, to find that Pinkie hired DJ Pon-3 to host music in the store, Rainbow Dash has hired three new assistants, Fluttershy has convinced the raccoons to clean up and serve snacks, Applejack has found a practical use for Plaid Stripes's spoon clothes idea, and Twilight has neatly organized everything in an easy-to-find way. The review ultimately gives "Rarity for You" a positive rating, despite calling the Mane Six "a ragtag group of ne'er-do-wells" who were a bit chaotic in their execution.

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Tropes:

• Accents Aren't Hereditary: Mr. Stripes has an accent that ranges between Russian and Eastern European, but his daughter Plaid Stripes speaks with an American accent.
• Added Alliterative Appeal: Slightly, but Applejack says that the opening was a "plum-puckered, pig pushin' disaster." Had "disaster" been replaced by "predicament," the appeal would have been complete.
• All There in the Script: The credits list the interviewer's name as Buried Lede.
• An Aesop: The best way to solve a problem is your own way and not the way a friend should.
• Anthropomorphic Shift: The raccoons start out as pure animals, but end up becoming staff in the store, complete with wearing clothing and walking on their hind legs like humans.
• Arc Words: "What would Rarity want?", uttered by each of Rarity's friends as they try (and subsequently fail miserably) to follow her instructions.
• Audience Murmurs: After a foodie stallion declares Rarity for You "the most whimsical and wonderfully fashionable boutique [he's] ever seen", the crowd responds with a chorus of walla-walla.
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • The opening scene implies that the opening of Rarity's Manehattan boutique was a disaster and the rest of the Mane Six were trying to keep her from reading a bad review. It turns out that the Grand Opening and review were overwhelmingly positive and they were actually trying to keep her from reading about all the mishaps that happened after they locked her into the window display.
  • In the same Cold Open when the rest of the Mane Six arrive at Rarity's:
    Rarity: [with a sour expression] I was wondering when all of you were going to show up.
    Gasp!
    Rarity: [excited] Now we can all read the review together!
• Bedhead-itis: Coco Pommel has a cold and her mane is quite unkempt.
• Be Yourself: It's only when the Mane Six do this instead of trying to do everything exactly like Rarity would that things start to go well.
• Big Eater: Pinkie eats a lot of food throughout her interview at the dinner, the bill for which she tries to pass off to the reporter.
• Big Ol' Eyebrows: Both Plaid Stripes and her father sport these.
• Blatant Lies: AJ and Rainbow deny that Twilight's sweeping chant was catchy while they were chanting along.
• Brief Accent Imitation: Rainbow Dash once again emulates Rarity's dramatic tone.
• Brutal Honesty: True to her element, this is Applejack's assessment of the whole incident. While everyone else tried to sugar coat it, AJ bluntly states that it was "a plum-puckered pig pushin' disaster". (And yet she also told the blatant lie above.)
• Chekhov's Gunman: DJ Pon-3 and the raccoons are introduced as nuisances to be dealt with, but they end up assisting in the boutique's opening.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Plaid Stripes is an eccentric who comes up with impractical ideas.
• Confession Cam: The interview spots have shades of this, despite not being a reality show, because they reveal what the others were trying to hide from Rarity.
• Conflict Ball: Besides starting with OCD sorting arrangements and ending up with one that would arguably be the standard way to organize a clothing store, Twilight was in the best position to ask Rarity for a baseline idea of how to go about her task.
• Continuity Nod:
  • Fluttershy hides among the Gala dresses when Rarity is about to start reading the review.
  • Coco Pommel returns in this episode, although she is stuck with a cold and unable to help Rarity with the opening.
  • Pinkie references "Too Many Pinkie Pies" when Rarity wishes she could make more of herself. During that same scene, one of the clones appears in the diner, revealing that Twilight missed one.
  • The "Too Old" pony from the "Perfect Stallion" song appears in the back of the restaurant during the interviews.
  • The "Valley Girl" ponies from "Putting Your Hoof Down" are seen entering the club rave. Likewise, the bouncer is the same one who worked for Sapphire Shores.
  • Fluttershy cries when sending raccoons out of the shop, just like she did after sending the Breezies out of her house in "It Ain't Easy Being Breezies."
• Coolest Club Ever: The bouncer at DJ Pon-3's "club pony party palace" has no problem keeping Rarity from entering, but allows a couple of Valley ponies in without confrontation. He later lets Pinkie Pie slink her way in under the velvet rope.
• Covered in Gunge: The rest of the Mane Six end up covered to varying degrees in a thick layer of dust when the dirty store causes Pinkie to sneeze.
• The Cuckoolander Was Right: Plaid Stripes's idea for spoon-themed clothes turns out to actually appeal to the customers (well, at least one of them that we see, in addition to Applejack).
• Daddy's Girl: Plaid Stripes. Her father basically forces Rarity to hire her, and when Applejack turns down her idea of "spoon clothes," she goes right to him, and he wastes no time giving Applejack an earful.
• Didn't Think This Through: Apparently Rarity didn't really get a good look inside her new building before announcing her grand opening as it needs a lot of work done before then. And that's before finding out about the raccoons and the upstairs rave club she occupies space with.
• Diving Save: When Rarity is trying to leave the window display for the first time, Twilight jumps in slow motion over the others in the store to slam and block the door shut and prevent her from seeing the mess in the store.
• Door Judo: Unintentional on Twilight's part, but Rarity tries to break down the door from the display window just as Twilight unlocks and opens it, resulting in a Face Plant.
• Double Take: Rarity has a two-part Eye Take reaction when she catches sight of one of the raccoons acting as waiter at her grand opening.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Despite Rarity's friends nearly ruining the grand opening and then giving a candid recap of the whole affair, the gang manages to get the store a positive review.
• Everything's Better with Rainbows: Invoked by Twilight, who first sorts all the clothes of Rarity's boutique in chromatic order before considering other possibilities. She ends up defying it and organizes the clothes by style, "cross-referenced by size and reverse-indexed by fabric", with no regard to color.
• Finagle's Law: The store is a dusty mess, Rarity's landlord forces her to hire his daughter, there's a loud club upstairs, Coco is too sick to work the opening, there's a raccoon trio living in a back room, and the clothes Rarity had shipped from Ponyville are all disorganized. Luckily the group, despite having to lock Rarity in the window display, manage to make it work out OK.
• Flashback Within a Flashback: Of a sort. The episode uses the ponies reading the review in the newspaper as a framing device, with flashbacks to each of their interviews with the journalist, and the events they are describing in the interviews also shown as flashbacks.
• Framing Device: As stated, the episode is told as Twilight, Rainbow, Pinkie, Fluttershy, and Applejack giving interviews to a local reporter on the opening of "Rarity for You". In a bit of a twist, this itself is framed as a flashback when Rarity receives the article and is about to read it.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: When Pinkie is interviewing and mentioning being stuck in a room with 50 clones, she noms a stack of pancakes to reveal a Pinkie clone sitting in the booth behind her, looking concerned.
• From Bad to Worse: When the Mane Six try to handle things the way they think Rarity would want, it ends up with them intentionally locking Rarity in the window display while they sort the mess out.
• Funny Background Event: With the interviews of each of the Mane Six in the diner, the ponies in the background naturally change since there's an implied time-skip every time. Except for one mare who's checking the menu during Applejack's turn, and is still checking the menu after a switch to Rainbow Dash.
• Furry Confusion: Are the raccoons wild animals or hobos? Most of the episode suggests the former, but the ending where Fluttershy gives them a job suggests the latter.
• Genre Mashup: DJ Pon-3 takes the boring shopping music that Pinkie Pie gave her (in an attempt to stop the party) and remixes it with one of her EDM tracks.
  Pinkie Pie: Oh no! Not a shopping music mashup!
• Good Angel, Bad Angel: Pinkie Pie gets an angel/devil pair that look like Rarity when deciding what to do about the rave above Rarity's store. Humorously, the "good" Rarity agrees with "bad" Rarity that they should keep the rave in full swing. However, when Pinkie goes to do so, the "bad" Rarity drags her back with the pitchfork and says she would never say such "balderdash," vanishing. She looks to the "good" one, who shrugs and poofs away sheepishly. Amusingly, both the "good" Rarity and the "bad" Rarity are wearing obviously fake angel and devil costumes.
• Group Hug: Rarity initiates one with her friends after reading the overwhelmingly positive review.
• Handshake Substitute: AJ and Dash do a hoof-bump when saying Twilight's "sweep song" was lame/not catchy.
• Heli-Critter: Pinkie once again uses her tail as a propeller to float off the ground, just like in "Amending Fences". This time, she uses this trick to sweep floors.
• Hipster: Plaid Stripes, both her name and "interesting" fashion sense invoke this sub-culture.
• How We Got Here: The episode begins in Ponyville after the events in Manehattan take place and the rest takes place in a flashback of the Mane Six (and various others) being interviewed.
• Hypocritical Humor: Applejack and Rainbow Dash mock Twilight for the sweeping chant despite chanting as well.
• Impossibly Delicious Food: A foodie stallion is won over by the "blue corn reduction with shallot confit", which he describes as "exquisite".
• Innocent Blue Eyes: Smokey Jr., the youngest raccoon, has large, entirely blue eyes, unlike the two other raccoons' which are black.
• It Makes Sense in Context: At one point, Rarity wishes that she could have more copies of herself to lighten the workload. Pinkie Pie then narrates that this had led to 50 Pinkie Pie clones stuck in a room watching paint dry.
• Karma Houdini: Mr. Stripes extorts Rarity into hiring his clueless and disruptive daughter. He gets his way, and is never shown suffering any negative consequences.
• Locked Out of the Loop: Rarity is kept ignorant of many of the problems the Mane Six run into trying to get everything ready in time (to the point that she's literally locked in the window display) until she actually reads the review.
• The Mafiya: A Lighter and Softer version in Mr. Stripes, who speaks with a heavy Russian accent and wears a track suit jacket and gold medallion. If Rarity doesn't hire his daughter, he'll put her out of business not through physical harm or damage to the shop, but by jacking up the rent and forcing her to close.
• Meaningful Name:
  • Plaid Stripes has terrible fashion sense (at least, to Rarity); the mixing of plaids and stripes in the fashion world is a general no-no.
  • Buried Lede, the reporter pony. The way that the interview is written (as read by in the wrapping scenes), the actual review is put to the last while the interim mess caused by the Mane Six are given top billing, essentially what "burying the lede" means in journalistic terms.
• Missing Mom: Mr. Stripes has a Daughter named Plaid Stripes, But Mrs. Stripes is never seen nor Mentioned.
• Mixed Metaphor: Mr. Stripes tells Rarity that Plaid is the "apple of [his] ear."
• Nepotism: Mr. Stripes the landlord forces Rarity to hire his daughter, Plaid Stripes, or he'll raise the rent for her store.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Rarity's friends very nearly ruin the grand opening of Rarity's flagship store in Manehattan when they force themselves to act out of their elements for Rarity's sake.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Blue Bobbin and the other two ponies Rainbow Dash hires as assistants are based off fashion icons Zandra Rhodes, Betsey Johnson, and Karl Lagerfeld (even though Karl already has another pony expy in the form of Hoity Toity).
• Non-Specifically Foreign: Mr. Stripes has an ethnic accent which at times sounds Russian, at other times, Eastern European, and ranges in between.
• Not Good with Rejection: Plaid Stripes. When Applejack turns down her "spoon clothes" idea as gently as she can, she starts to cry, then angrily tells her father.
• Obsessively Organized: Twilight is in full organizing form. Not only does she come up with a chant for sweeping, but she begs Rarity to let her organize the clothes Rarity had shipped to the store, and later calls the final product some of her best work.
• Out-of-Genre Experience: With this episode, the show dips its hoof into Mockumentary-style comedy, with the diner interviews taking the place of talking head confessionals. To further drive the point home, the working title of this episode was "Saddle Row & Rec".
• Papa Wolf: Mr. Stripes is very protective of his daughter, to the point that he would sell his prized miniature furniture collection to make her happy.
• Punny Name: Saddle Row is probably named after Savile Row, a London street which, according to its entry at Wikipedia, is "known principally for its traditional bespoke tailoring for men".
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: Buried Lede describes the Mane Six as such nearly word-for-word in his glowing assessment of how they came together to pull off a spectacular opening despite such radical differences.
• Real Men Wear Pink: The rather macho landlord Mr. Stripes has no problem admitting he loves miniature doll furniture.
• Sequel Episode: This episode picks up on the plot point started with "The Gift of the Maud Pie", namely, Rarity opening a shop in Manehatten.
• Shockingly Expensive Bill: After eating countless plates of cakes and pastries, Pinkie gets her bill in the end, reads it, and sheepishly passes it over to the interviewer.
• Shout-Out:
  • Buried Lede resembles J. Jonah Jameson from the Spider-Man franchise.
  • Two of the background ponies seen in the background of the diner the interviews take place resemble Vincent Vega and Jules Winnfield.
  • The Planes, Trains and Automobiles background ponies cameo again in the same restaurant.
  • The episode's alternate title, "Saddle Row & Rec", and the formatting of the episode refer to Parks and Recreation. This might be the reason it was changed as it was a little too on the nose. The fact that the animals that have taken up residence as a shop are raccoons could be a nod to Pawnee's frequent issues with raccoons, and Pinkie sweeping the floor by rotating her tail during the "sweep" scene seems similar to Tom's DJ Roomba.
• Stealth Pun: Pinkie's shoulder angel wears a prop halo that's made out of hay. A haylo.
• Subtext: Both Rarity and Pinkie Pie are surprised to learn about the dance club upstairs, and they express their response with the same words, but different inflection.
  Rarity: [dejectedly] Turns out there's a club pony party palace upstairs.
  [jump cut]
  Pinkie Pie: [excitedly] Turns out, there's a club pony party palace upstairs!
• Take a Third Option: Rainbow Dash couldn't decide which of the three ponies to hire to help run Rarity's new shop, largely due to Dash not knowing anything about how clothing works. Finally, she had them race to the river, with the first one to arrive getting the job. She ends up hiring all three of them after realizing that none of them are fast.
• Tears of Joy: At the end of the episode, Rarity sheds these when she sees that her new boutique is a huge success, thanks to her friends.
• The Triple: Applejack has a few uses for spoon clothing. Eating soup, stirring gumbo, and digging little holes.
• Twitchy Eye: After recaping all the problems they're having, and portentously asking "Am I forgetting anything?", Rarity gets a twitchy eye upon the raccoon family crossing the room.
• Unreliable Expositor: The rest of the Mane Six sometimes delve into this, like Twilight saying Rarity was handling the rapidly deteriorating situation well when she was panicking a bit.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Downplayed when Rarity gives her friends a quick, light scolding for keeping her in the dark about all the trouble they went through.
• What Would X Do?: The rest of the Mane Six each ask themselves "What Would Rarity Want?" when doing their specific orders.
• Whole Episode Flashback: Most of the episode is spent in a flashback of the Mane Six and other characters getting interviewed for a newspaper review, which itself leads to a flashback-within-a-flashback showing the events leading up to it, while the beginning and ending are set in the present with Rarity reading the review.
• You Were Trying Too Hard: Most of the problems in the episode are caused by Rarity's friends struggling to emulate her vision and failing at it. Only by doing things their own way are they able to live up to her expectations.

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