Now this will be quite the interesting revisit. While ’Applebuck Season’ wasn’t the episode that really cemented me as a fan of the show, it was the one that made me laugh the hardest out of the earlier run. As such, it’s one that I’ve seen numerous times by now and know like the back of my hand. So I do have a good bit of nostalgia for this one.
That being said, the episode itself is just…okay. It’s not bad by any stretch, and I still do laugh a good number of times at it. But in terms of the plot, it’s fairly lacking.
What I can wholeheartedly praise is how it develops Applejack. This being the first episode to really focus on her, it shows us that she takes great pride in her work to a fault. She’s cocky enough to think she can harvest the entire orchard all by herself, and also too stubborn to admit that she needs help. But once she accepts the fact that the workload is too much for her, she finally allows others to help her. It’s a fairly simple arc for her, but with how it escalates and resolves, it’s still a satisfying one.
While that’s all fine and good, this is an episode that probably should have come way later in the show’s run. Future episodes would go on to build off of Applejack’s stubbornness, and yet the way this episode resolves gives the impression that she moves past it. It ends up making the episode an odd outlier in terms of season 1 character development, and had it come towards the end of the show, it would have benefitted a lot.
On top of that, the repetitive structure rears its head again, but it’s even worse than it was in ‘The Ticket Master’. At least that episode had its repetition restricted to just the second act. In this one, Twilight will go to Applejack insisting that she needs help harvesting the orchard, Applejack will refuse to accept that fact, and then the next favor she made for another pony goes wrong. It’s a really rinse-and-repeat kind of structure, and it gets tiring after a while.
Criticisms aside, I do admittedly have a soft spot for the episode. A large part of it is nostalgia, sure, but the comedy that does work here is solid enough for me to revisit it every once in a while. Not bad by any means, but nowhere near great.
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