#mlp:fim my little pony friendship is magic newbie dash

[sidetable-drawer]

My personal favorite and least favorite MLP:FiM episodes by season

Now that I’m all finished with the show, I thought I’d share which episodes of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic were my favorites and least favorites of each season!

Remember: these are only my personal opinions.

Season 1:

Best: “Suited For Success”

Worst: “Owl’s Well That Ends Well”

Season 2:

Best: Tie between “Hurricane Fluttershy” and “A Canterlot Wedding” (both parts)

Worst: Tie between “The Mysterious Mare-Do-Well” and “Putting Your Hoof Down”

Season 3:

Best: “Magic Duel”

Worst: “Spike At Your Service”

Season 4:

Best: “Twilight’s Kingdom” (both parts)

Worst: “Rainbow Falls”

Season 5:

Best: “Crusaders Of The Lost Mark”

Worst: “Princess Spike”

Season 6:

Best: “No Second Prances”

Worst: “Newbie Dash”

Season 7:

Best: “The Perfect Pear”

Worst: “Secrets And Pies”

Season 8:

Best: “Sounds of Silence”

Worst: “Yakity-Sax”

Season 9:

Best: “The Last Problem”

Worst: “Going to Seed”

[confessionsofamilitarybrony]

“Newbie Dash” - A Pilot’s Perspective

Wall of text incoming!

Well it seems our favorite flyer finally got what she’s always wanted.  The Wonderbolts selected Dash as their newest form partner.  Plenty of good stuff to dive into in this episode, especially from the military side of the road.

First things first, it’s important to note that the overall theme of this episode is the much-reiterated “be yourself” narrative supplemented with reinforcing that humility will always get you further than attempting to toot your own horn.

Now then, let’s get to it.  Dash gets invited to perform with the Wonderbolts, bumping her up from her slot in the reserves.  Spitfire initially states that it’s only for the show in Ponyville, but as the episode and the season progresses, it becomes apparent that she will be performing throughout the rest of Equestria. Pretty neat, right?

Dank memes aside (I have no shame) this is a pretty big deal for our girl. She gets the thing she has been wanting and bragging about since pretty much S1E1.  Off she goes to be a Wonderbolt!

The team is obviously going to be welcoming at first, but any organization like this is going to have a hierarchy established in years of tradition and structure, doubly so as the Wonderbolts serve as a pseudo-military outfit.  Dash is the newbie, and she has plenty to learn.  This show being what it is, things get off to a bit of a rocky start.

Seriously though, who doesn’t look both ways before crossing the street runway?  You’d think that would be common knowledge, along with the fact that Dash should know from Wonderbolts Academy.  This girl just does not learn.  Anyways, she gets her uniform on, fangirls for a quick second, then tries to go set a “good first impression”.  

First interjection:  with a team like this, akin the the Thunderbirds, Blue Angels, Snow Birds, Red Arrows, etc., you’ve already made a good first impression.  They wouldn’t let you in otherwise.  The teams are tight-knit enough that sometimes they don’t let people in because they didn’t mingle well at a party, regardless of how good a flyer they are.  

Dash then lands head-first in a garbage can because she didn’t follow rule number one.  Ribbing ensues, followed by the team reciting rule number one “always check both ways before crossing the runway”.  Dash is brash as usual, gets called on it, and Spitfire stops the conversation with a simple “alright, nopony got hurt, let’s get back to work”.

Well that was refreshing, kinda.  Nobody likes getting called names, especially if it’s a name bullies used (to great effect in Rainbow’s case).  The bit I noticed was how the team just picked up and got to work with a quick word and the phrase “nopony got hurt”.  Huh, that’s a little out of place in this show but it’s very present in the aviation community.  Safety is paramount, regardless if you’re flying a Cessna on the weekend or blasting halfway to orbit in a U-2.  

Moving on, Dash is shown as being a little slow in the practice run, which is to be expected, she doesn’t quite know the routine yet.  That she was doing that well in a precision performance display is impressive on its own.  Then she gets back to the locker room and finds this:

Sweet! Team flight jacket!  Or is it more?  Turns out the team took the liberty of embroidering “Crash” onto the nametape.  Dash obviously raises a fuss, they’re making fun of her after all.  Spitfire responds by saying they all have a jacket, then calls Soarin “Clipper”.  At this point I know exactly what’s going on with this, even if the average 8 year-old girl doesn’t (hey, I’m allowed to poke fun at myself for not being the target demographic). 

They had a naming without her knowing about it.  Rainbow “Crash” Dash got herself a callsign.  Kind of a big deal, callsign right off the bat, not even one day of being the FNP (effin new pony).  A note on callsigns, they never come from a nice/cool story unless that story is seriously cool.  They are also, in some cases, self-fulfilling prophecies.  I knew a guy whose callsign was “Skeeter” because he managed to have toothpaste on his flightsuit for a formal training event where he stands in front of the group and gets grilled on emergency procedures.  Turns out the dude spills a shit-ton of sticky white stuff on himself on a fairly regular basis.  I picked up “Rain Man” during UPT because I had a total brainfart doing a glide ratio problem and started rambling random numbers to myself (read: the whole room).  Completely embarrassing, but it was a learning point for me.  

Bottom line: call signs are almost always embarrassing.  The trick is to embrace it, and soon it becomes more used than your actual name, specifically in fighter squadrons.  Dash obviously doesn’t know this little tidbit of information, and gets pretty upset by it.  She later comes to accept it in the episode after some hijinks with her trying to act like her friends and then, you guessed it, crashing again.

Honestly though, one month probation and clean-up duty is small fish for the fuckery she caused.  Safety, people, safety.

Anywho, the episode resolved as they tend to do, with a lesson to always be yourself.  Also, humility is a virtue, and even Rainbow seemed to understand that at the end of the day.