We open with a school trip to the Canterlot gardens, where the CMC are getting in spats with eachother and Miss Cheerilee introduces us to the statue of Discord, which she explains more as a concept than as an actual historical figure. One of the running themes of thought on our previous thread was to what degree Celestia protects her pony citizens from things like knowledge of past or present threats that might induce panic. The ponies, besides Celestia (and at least at this point in the show) are relatively childlike from a human perspective, so I do think knowing that, for instance, the statue of Discord in fact contained a sealed chaos god would cause a bit of hysteria and potentially rash actions. In fact, we will see an example of this in the episode after this two-parter, Lesson Zero… Which I do not recall particularly fondly or positively, I think the episode vastly overdoes this concept. However, Twilight is often shown to be comparatively level-headed and competent next to the rest of Ponyville, and it is interesting that even she is prone to such onsets of panic. In this framing, Celestia is in a sense seeking a second ‘adult’ who she can trust to manage things without losing their cool. Last thread, I said that I found ‘Ticket Master’ to be oddly placed as the first episode after the two-parter, and I thought that Apple-Bucking Season would have made more sense. Here too, with Return of Harmony and Lesson Zero, I find it a little odd that immediately after overcoming Discord, Twilight is going to have a mental breakdown. I’d actually say this is more extreme than the Ticket Master case, and so if nothing in Lesson Zero definitively places it after Return of Harmony chronologically, I may end up theorising that it in fact occurs before the events of Return of Harmony. Other than all this, the opening scene establishes the concept of Discord well enough, although I do find it very implausible that in over 1000 years, no pony (or even creature) has had a mild argument within the vicinity of Discord’s statue. The most charitable I can be is to assume that despite being depicted as if the two are directly related, Discord is in fact breaking free because of either a higher overall level of disharmony across Equestria, or simply because it has taken him this long (thoughout a milennium of remarkable harmony, stability and prosperity under Celestia’s rule) to break down his seal.

After the theme song, we see that Discord’s chaos magic is affecting the weather in Ponyville (which I feel we sufficiently established in the last thread is probably very close by to Canterlot, which is where we’re about to find out he presently is) and we get a nice, even spread of each of the Mane Six reacting to it in each of their unique ways, in the vein of The Best Night Ever and Dragonshy. Each time I get to see scenes where each of the Six get more or less equal opportunity to shine, all at once, I appreciate it all the more, I think so far these types of scenes have all been really well executed in the show. Twilight attempts a fail-safe spell to end the weather problems, which makes me think that she must have some idea of what she thinks is actually going wrong here if she feels she has an effective approach to fixing it. Do freak outbursts of what would in Dungeons and Dragons be called ‘wild magic’ occur in Equestria? Perhaps that is the sort of occurrence that fail-safe spells are intended to address. In any case, it of course fails and so the Six work as a team to work a temporary solution to the problem, before Spike gets a letter summoning them to Canterlot. The first time that the Elements of Harmony are being called upon to help save Equestria since Nightmare Moon, very exciting!