User Reviews

The payoff to the previous episode is...underwhelming. There's a lesson about friendship involved, but mostly it's just boring and predictable. The music also isn't great, and there's not much as far as character moments to propel things.

This episode is pretty much following on from the hardly spectacular events of the previous one, so expectations were not high. In fact, pretty much all of Season 1 disappointed with almost all the episodes being mediocre or less and the worst being very poor or near-disastrous. Episodes 3, 12 and 21 were the only ones to be above mediocre and even they were patchy missed opportunities. Have seen a few episodes of shows revolving around putting some sort of show on so there was interest.

Unfortunately, it was not done well in "The Great Collide"/"Sportacular Spectacular Musical", which does nothing to improve upon the previous instalments and repeats all its mistakes and makes some of its own too. Is it unwatchable? No, even all the very poor episodes of 'My Little Pony: Pony Life' had two or three redeeming merits each. "The Great Collide" just felt very over-stretched and "Sportacular Spectacular Musical" felt like a pointless tacked on coda.

Like all the other episodes, the voice acting is the redeeming quality. With all the voice actors giving it everything they got, without over-compensating.

Did think that "The Great Collide" did start off great, with a neat set up and sporadic amusing humour.

However, a lot is done poorly. The animation is unimaginative and less than vibrant, with it looking rushed and careless. The quality of the music always makes or breaks an episode with this premise and the music is again cheesy high school quality and forgettable. "We Shine Brighter Together" sounds inspirational on paper with a well intended message, but the messaging was delivered in too simple a way and there is nothing memorable here other than some really cheesy lyric writing. Characterisation wise, there is nothing as irksome as Rarity's character writing in the previous two episodes, but the Mane 6 do come over as one dimensional stereotypes with merely one or two character traits. Applejack did come over as annoying as did Bulk Biceps.

Furthermore, the writing is simplistic and bland, with no imagination and the too little humour there is is juvenile and at times misplaced. Applejack's fourth wall breaking comes over as irritating and childish. Didn't see the need for it as well. "The Great Collide" is very over-stretched, very predictable and lacks tension. The conflict again is very minor and goes nowhere most of the time. "Sportacular Spectacular Musical" adds little, is very thinly plotted, very little is done with the premise and the episode honestly would have been better as one short film consisting of "The Great Collide". The tension is barely there with the conflict done too little with and the friendship lacks charm as well, they don't come over as friends. The moralising is too simple and too much of a rehash.

Summing up, weak finale to a weak season. 3/10.