Title: The End of Flutter Valley (Parts 5-6)

Summary: The ponies are on their way to Flutter Valley for the Sun Tuesday celebration with the Flutter Ponies. Meanwhile, the Witches from the Volcano of Gloom are busy hatching a plan to destroy Flutter Valley and the ponies, allying with an army of giant bees to get their revenge on the Flutter Ponies. The bees steal the precious Sun Stone, and if the Flutter Ponies can’t get it back, their home will be destroyed.

Grade: This will be given when bat and I finally reach the end of this 10 part epic. *sigh*

Recap:

Just so you know, instead of running around like headless chickens and trying to recap 2 hours’ worth of episodes between the two of us in a single post, we have decided to do this in two-episode batches. Also, if any one person had to recap this whole thing, I think that person would resign.

Part 5

We open with the Sun Stone glowing angrily and setting fire to flowers, which begs the question, did this thing come with a manual? Are there different settings? Because Flutter Valley looked great in the movie, desolate in this story, and now the Sun Stone is burning the shit out of everything around it. Did someone turn it up to eleven by mistake? [bat: “Alexa, turn off the Sun Stone.”] [Dove: I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave.]

A bee who I’ve just learned is called “Pointer” burns his finger on a blazing flower, and realises he’s going to have to wake up Bumble to tell her that shit is getting toasty. Pointer tells Bumble, who informs him very curtly that the Sun Stone is working perfectly and he needs to be more careful.

Usually when someone complains of tech issues, it’s user error, but on this occasion, no. And you should always perform a cursory check, if only to hear someone say, “Oh, it’s working now. How weird,” which is always useful for your score if you’re playing dimwit bingo with the IT department.

Back in Golden Epcot, the Flutter Ponies are still in a honey trap and Peach Blossom complains that it’s getting very warm. Also, in this shot, she has a regular pegasus wing on her nearest side and a flutter wing on her other. I feel like this shot has won me the DISCONTINUITY AWARD, a brand new thing that I’ve literally just made up right now, but given that bat spends 90% of her recap noting animation errors, I think she’ll be up for it. [bat: Of course I am, these cartoons are RIPE WITH FAILURE.]

Rosedust urges the Flutter Ponies to be brave, Morning Glory will save them.

Yeah, no, she won’t. She’s still trapped in a cage with Sting watching over her. She complains to him that the Flutter Ponies will be homeless if they don’t return the Sun Stone. He says he just does what he’s told, he’s good at bad things. [bat: How punk rock of you, Sting.] Morning Glory, apropos of nothing, asks wouldn’t he rather fly high in the sky? He bursts into tears, and his mouth his animated while she keeps on going about playing with friends and flying in the sunshine. Sting admits that he can’t fly, he used to, but he wasn’t good at it so he gave up. (This is exactly why, days away from being 38, I still can’t drive – although I finally have a provisional licence, so I can learn.) [bat: I didn’t get my driver’s license until 3 days from turning 30, then I didn’t use it for 7 years. Well, not with any regularity. It’s not that I can’t drive; it’s everyone else can’t drive, at least not responsibly.] [Dove: This is actually why I now have a learner’s licence and still haven’t booked lessons. Other people scare me.]

You know what this means? INSPIRATIONAL SONG, BITCHES.

The inspirational song makes Sting let Morning Glory out so she can help him fly. He thanks her, and she’s like, “That’s ok, I’ll be going, ok?” and he throws her back in the cage. She says she thought they were friends, and he says he has a job to do. To be honest, she should’ve been more sneaky and just flown off before teaching him how to fly. What was he going to do, pursue her on foot?

Back with Fizzy, Gusty, Buttons, Spike and Green Furbob, the Furbob is complaining that the valley is ugly. Spike notices that the flowers smell like burning, and Gusty wonders where the Flutter Ponies went. Fizzy just agrees with everyone, because there’s always that one person who has nothing but agreement to offer.

They find themselves surrounded by Hydia, Reeka and Draggle. Hydia informs them that Bumble and the bees have the Flutter Ponies, Draggle says they (the witches) have flutter valley, and Reeka says nothing because animation is expensive.

Gusty uses her Unicorn magic to summon a gust of wind to blow Hydia into a bush, and then Reeka and Draggle take a really long run-up to attack, giving Spike and the Furbob time to hold out a vine for them to trip over. Even though in the earlier shot they were right next to the ponies, didn’t need a run-up and that’s very clearly a path in a forest, rather than the clearing of the first shot.

The girls trip over, and Hydia tells them to try again. Surprise jumps out from behind a rock and yells “SURPRISE!”, which does fuck all. [bat: But that’s all Surprise ever does, is fuck all.] Then she kind of flies into them and swings around to knock them back away. That actually works.

Oh, and the others are surprised that Surprise is there, because they thought she’d stayed in Furbobia. Me? I assumed it was an animation error. They really didn’t need to explain it, we’re used to ponies vanishing and re-appearing.

Hydia then summons Ahgg, which would have been my first plan given that Reeka and Draggle cock up everything. And yeah, Ahgg captures the ponies in record time, causing Hydia to laugh so hard her eyes disappear.

The ponies ask what she’s going to do with them. Hydia doesn’t have a plan. So they’ll start out slow by watching a sunset. Clearly Hydia has been reading Sweet Valley High for tips on the perfect first date.

Over with the Sun Stone, things are so hot that everything catches fire. Bumble keeps snoozing. She eventually wakes and summons Pointer over to ream him out about it. I guess he must be Bumbleland’s Fire Safety Marshall.

Inside Golden Epcot, the Flutter Ponies panic over their impending doom and Honeysuckle points out to everyone else that their hope that Morning Glory would save them was all for now. Rosedust says not to give up hope. I bet she’s a “thoughts and prayers” kind of leader. #ImpeachRosedust #HoneysuckForPrez

What do you know? It appears that Pointer is the Fire Marshall. He leads a swarm of bees to a lake and they each fill a bucket.

Which they promptly drop on Bumble. And it’s HYSTERICAL.

Also, how on earth did a swarm of maybe thirty bees, in a rhombus formation all manage to drop their water from so high up into such a small area? That does not seem logically sound to me.

Pointer offers to get more water, but Bumble says nah, let the fire burn itself out, and they’ll come back when everything for miles around is reduced to charcoal briquettes. This also does not seem logically sound. [bat: Most things of a logical nature are not allowed in these cartoons.]

Back with Morning Glory, she notices the smoke coming from Bumbleland, and Sting says he’ll check it out. And at this point I realised that Honeysuckle is 100% right about Morning Glory. She’s a fucking idiot. She could walk through those bars at any time. They’re easily set apart wider than her body width.

Sting reports there’s a big fire and no sign of the bees. Morning Glory begs him to set her free to save the Flutter Ponies, but he says no, and then flies off and leaves her. I’m sure if she’s alone for long enough, she’ll figure out that she can easily step out of the cage.

We then see Golden Epcot start to melt and hear the Flutter Ponies crying for help.

Wouldn’t it be funny if the regular ponies were like, “Nope, not our problem,” just like in the movie?

Part 6

The fire still rages, but Golden Epcot looks a lot less crumbled than it did at the last episode.

While the ponies are complaining, I notice something they don’t. There’s no honey on the floor. And big holes in Golden Epcot. They could easily free themselves, if only they noticed how inconsistent the animators were. Also, Rosedust is now flying. What?

They decide that if the honey melts enough they’ll be able to move their wings and fly. Yay.

Except, see above, re: not being stuck to the floor and plenty of holes they could escape through without flying. I guess if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Back with Morning Glory, the cage has now shrunk to make her predicament look a little less ridiculous than earlier screencaps implied. However, she’s got her shoulders out, and that means the rest of her could most likely follow. But if the plot says she’s stuck, she’s fucking stuck.

Sting comes back to report he couldn’t find Bumble, so she’s not really his friend. So he unlocks the cage. Which is back to its gigantic proportions and Morning Glory could have easily slipped through the bars. She offers to be Sting’s friend, and he’s so taken with that, he suggests they go save the Flutter Ponies.

When they see the Sun Stone, Morning Glory says they need to move it. Sting hits it with his butt and knocks it off the wooden tripod (shouldn’t that have caught fire by now?) where it immediately melts the ground around it and sinks downwards. Yeah, it really should’ve set the tripod on fire.

Sting’s all like, “I AM AMAZEBALLS, I SAVED THE DAY” and Morning Glory has to point out that without the Sun Stone they’re all doomed. He concedes that may be a problem as he gazes down the hole made by a burning rock. [bat: There’s a lot of questions about how the Sun Stone could burn through DIRT and ROCK but I’ve learned to not ask them. Because, PLOT.]

Back over at Golden Epcot, it appears to be hatching. One of my favourite things about recapping this is making odd gifs. Morning Glory wonders what they can do to help. Bumble rocks up and tells Sting to grab her. He tells her to strongly do one, as they’re BFFs now. No worries there, she just tells Pointer and his swarm to take both Morning Glory and Sting prisoner.

Sting and Morning Glory fly away, and Bumble orders Pointer to go after them. Then her robe rips and falls off because she’s fat. Because she’s been huffing nectar.

Sting punches Pointer right out the sky, and Morning Glory cheers him on. I’m not sure that’s a good message for a kids’ show. Punch people you don’t agree with. People will like you for it.

By now Golden Epcot is roughly the shape of a teddy bear. Not sure why. But then the Flutter Ponies burst out of it as if it’s a hard brittle object, instead of the gooey ball of stickiness that it’s been portrayed as so far.

Weirdly, the Flutter Ponies only have honey on their wings now, so they can’t fly. They get surrounded by bees, and Bumble informs them that she wants the Sun Stone back and they’re going to help her.

(Uh… what happened to Sting and Morning Glory?)

Back in Flutter Valley, the witches are eager for it to rot. Hydia says that once the sun sets, the valley will be dark and dank and dreary forever, just the way they like it.

That… doesn’t really seem to add up. The bees want the sun stone to revive their land, so it kinda feels like the Sun Stone just gussies up the things around it, so should it really come with a caveat that once you remove it, everything gets rotten FOREVER? If so, Bumbleland is fucked. [bat: Maybe there’s a secret form of worship the Sun Stone requires, like, say, BLOOD SACRIFICE. So it doesn’t burn your home down around it. SEE, SO MANY PLOT HOLES.]

Oh, and the regular ponies are still in a net. I had completely forgotten about them. The come up with a plan which goes: get Fizzy to make a bubble with her Unicorn magic, put the Furbob in the bubble, get Gusty to taunt Ahgg that his only friends on Facebook are Hydia and her daughters but if he wants to play with the Furbob, then let him out. Ahgg does just that, then bats the Furbob around for a bit, the bubble bursts and then the Furbob has to run to get help. Somehow, despite the fact that Ahgg is about thirty times the size of the Furbob, and could easily outpace him, Ahgg does not give chase. Hydia then kicks Ahgg for letting them escape.

Wait… so the witches just let this happen? You’d think Hydia would recognise an escape plan when she saw one.

Back with Sting and Morning Glory, Sting feels bad for leaving the bees. He doesn’t know how with only two of them they’re going to save the Flutter Ponies. Morning Glory spots a rainbow and excitedly says that she knows that Megan lives on the other end of it, maybe she can help!

This again provokes Morning Glory to sing another inspirational song. Well, actually, the same one as before, so here’s the link again.

When they arrive, Sting says he’s never seen a Megan before, what does it look like? Morning Glory says she’s “kinda big, and she has long hair – only on her head!” See. I knew Megan was too big to ride the little ponies.

They walk into the barn and start randomly opening doors – for some reason these are full-height instead of proper stable doors – and leaving them open. This leads to them letting out a bull, who wants to kill them. Awesome. This is why non-country people should really just leave farms precisely how they found them.

The bull stomps its foot and snorts a lot, as Morning Glory and Sting call out for Megan.

I hope the bull takes out everyone. Well, actually, I’ve no beef with Sting really, but getting shot of the humans and a pony too dim to realise her cage bars are wider than herself would surely be a win.

However, that’s bat’s problem. Over to you. [bat: Thanks ever so much, Dove. If only this episode was entitled “Die, Die Morning Glory”.]