YMMV / My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic S5 E25 "The Cutie Re-Mark – Part 1"

• Accidental Innuendo: "Flutterdash" is the most common Portmanteau Couple Name for Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash shipping. When Applejack uses the term in the episode, it gets lots of eyebrows rising.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Twilight trying to get young Rainbow Dash to perform the Sonic Rainboom involves her following Rainbow around, eagerly trying to convince her to do something she doesn't want to do and at one point making very suggestive bedroom eyes at her. Dash's clearly creeped-out reaction is what sells it.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • The Rainbow Dash of the future in which Sombra reigns, due to her more badass look, including a cybernetic wing, an eye scar, and a piece of her ear missing.
  • The Sombra Bad Future itself is easily the most popular one among fans. From making Sombra seem like a credible threat to showing Rainbow Dash as a battle-scarred Future Badass and making Equestria a grim world locked in an epic war, it's become a veritable font of fandom speculation almost overnight.
• Epileptic Trees: King Sombra eliminated the other villains by ambushing them with his Mind Rape/Power Nullifier traps and/or his Taken for Granite spell from the comics. However, Celestia — much like Spike in the Season 3 premiere — managed to become a Spanner in the Works and keep Sombra at bay before he could fully capitalize on having no competition left.
• Fanfic Fuel:
  • Who or what stopped Nightmare Moon (and the other villains) in the alternate timelines?
  • Exploring more of the setting that is King Sombra's Bad Future.
• Fan Nickname: The version of Maud Pie from the Crystal War timeline is known as "Maud Max".
• Fridge Horror: In Sombra's Bad Future, Rainbow Dash is shown with a metal wing. Unless that's armor (which is highly unlikely considering she doesn't have it on her other wing), that means that she got her wing ripped off.
• Harsher in Hindsight: From the extended theme song, "Once smitten, twice Fluttershy". Flutters' kill-first-ask-questions-later approach setting up the cliffhanger smacks of "Once burned, twice shy".
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • After Twilights' first attempt at stopping Starlight failed, she and Spike are ejected from the past into another alternate timeline: one that as we would find out is a timeline involving Changelings. And what is the first thing that Spike says?
  Spike: "Well, that didn't work."
  • The Season 6 premiere shows that Starlight has quite a hard time finding her way around the castle, raising the question of just how long it took her to find the throne room here. It's funny to imagine Starlight getting lost around the castle, only to find the throne room in time before Twilight arrives to deliver her speech.
• I Knew It!:
  • When the animatic for this episode was revealed at SDCC 2015, many fans started speculating that Starlight Glimmer's plot for revenge would involve Time Travel. It turns out that they were right when the synopses were revealed and messing with schedules causing some spoilers to be leaked.
  • Even before the animatic was revealed, fans were already speculating at the time of Starlight's disappearance that she would return in the season finale with some sort of Revenge plan. They were proven right after the reveal.
  • An AU where the sonic rainboom failed has been a popular fanfic device since "Cutie Mark Chronicles," which has now finally made it into Canon.
• Memetic Mutation: In the timeline with the war against King Sombra, Applejack is an expy of Rosie the Riveter. Didn't take long for fans to make art of Applejack (both pony and human versions) in a bicep polishing pose similar to Rosie's motivational posters.
• Narm:
  • The war scene in the Sombra timeline would've been a lot grimmer if the actual fighting didn't consist of this.
  • Twilight's cry of "I don't know!" sounds less like she's despairing over how to stop a Bad Future from happening and more like she can't work out a math problem.
  • There was simply no way they could've made "CUTIE MARKS FOR CUTIE MARKS!" sound compelling.
  • A lot of the Bad Futures and stakes would've worked a whole lot better if the show didn't use the Stock Sound Effects. It's hard to take the war sequence seriously when Future Badass Rainbow Dash flies away with the usual cartoony "weeoosh" sound effect the show loves using.
  • The Suspiciously Similar Song that sounds like Warner Bros classic "Powerhouse" theme could also be done without, when Twilight gazes into the factory. You almost expect a goofy white glove contraption to appear somewhere and move the cans around and make little hand gestures.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: While the comics had already rescued him (at least for some), this episode does it for Sombra in the show, showing just how much of a threat to Equestria he really is. Without anypony to oppose his return, he forces the Crystal ponies to become his soldiers (wearing kickass armor to boot) and declares war on Equestria. While he does meet resistance, it's clearly a war of attrition, with it taking all of Celestia's forces, supplies, and morale to keep him at bay.
• Salvaged Story: For those who found King Sombra too underwhelming in his original appearance, this episode depicts him brainwashing ponies with intimidating suits of armor and forcing them to fight against Celestia's forces for his conquest, seriously upping his villain profile. "For only five minutes, King Sombra was the best villain ever."
• Spoiled by the Format: Twilight's original plan to simply go further back in time and forcibly stop Starlight Glimmer from changing the timeline sounds like it might work, and in most other time travel stories, doing this would likely serve as the climax. A real pity the first half of a two-parter isn't even done when Twilight tries this.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The music playing during the apple canning scene sounds similar to the middle section of Raymond Scott's "Powerhouse", as heard in many Looney Tunes cartoons.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • On the second trip into the past, Twilight attempts to get Rainbow Dash to do a Sonic Rainboom even though the race had been averted by Starlight talking down the bullies. Since Fluttershy doesn't fall to the woods outside Ponyville in this timeline, the for-want-of-a-nail aspect could have been more meaningful if Twilight had succeeded.
  • While the Bad Futures looks bleak and awful, some would've preferred to see Starlight Take Over the World in an alternate timeline.
  • Not to mention how cool it would have been if the villains of the show were all in one alternate universe and battled each other for world domination. (Some fans speculate this may be why the last world they were in was an absolutely bleak and lifeless husk but nothing is revealed over what the cause actually was.)
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: This was many a fan's reaction to King Sombra's Bad Future, especially with Rainbow Dash's torn ear and missing wing.

---