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New equestria wrote:

You had the map which seemed treated as an afterthought,

Good! The deus ex mapina is a stupid plot device and I hate it.

The best deus ex mapina episode so far was Spice Up Your Life, which could very easily be made to have worked without it as a normal episode. It barely even featured a friendship problem (I didn't even notice "reconciling father and daughter" was an issue, it just seemed like a story about helping a deserving startup business to succeed against a biased environment), and for once it was located in a place that Rarity had a legitimate reason for visiting without being sent there by a deus ex mapina (she could be in Canterlot to check up on her boutique branch there). The only hiccup would be justifying Pinkie Pie tagging along with Rarity while nopony else does, but there's any number of ways to do that that would be more amusing than a deus ex mapina (and if they ran out of ideas, there's always the fallback of "Rarity wanted a friend and everypony else was too busy with other stuff" - or for that matter it's not like Pinkie Pie ever needs much of a reason to do something).

Granted, the other deus ex mapina episodes this season were at least a little better than last season's, too.

Top Bolt wouldn't have been too bad either, if Sky Stinger wasn't so over-the-top obnoxious (better than Rarity being the problem, I guess), though again that was somewhere Rainbow Dash had a logical reason to be, as opposed to being randomly sent off to Griffonstone/Manehattan/Las Pegasus/some hills in the middle of nowhere. Getting Twilight to tag along would have been harder, admittedly.

New equestria wrote:

Twilight as a teacher which you don't see much of, Flurry heart which was completely sidestepped, and the regular not-so-themed episodes.

Don't forget Diamond Tiara's redemption (they didn't manage to squeeze that one in at all), the Cutie Mark Crusaders' new calling, Rainbow's new career with the Wonderbolts (they did have a couple of episodes about that one)...

New equestria wrote:

There were some great songs to come out of it though (like Pinkie's Hearthwarming song),

I'm more fond of Snowfall Frost's :)

All of the songs in that episode were good, though.

Except for the part in Pinkie's where she stopped to go tapdancing. That annoyed me for some reason.

New equestria wrote:

So, what do y'all think?

Eh. There were more than zero good episodes this season. That's all I'm hoping for at this point.