I always found it a little odd that Ticket Master was the second episode of the series – the first if you exclude the pilot. The conflict relies on the friendship between the characters being established, and it seems to me that it would be a little more concretely established if a different episode was between the pilot and this episode. It also provides foreshadowing to a future event, which also feels odd to set up immediately at the start of the show – though perhaps at this stage in the show, they weren’t actually intending to show the Gala and it was meant to be implied that it happened offscreen? Unsure. Perhaps though, they did want to test the Mane 6’s friendship early on so it could get stronger. Interpersonal conflicts are the heart of the early series, as is appropriate for a show about teaching friendship, so I guess a ‘make it or break it’ moment early on makes sense. It also occurs to me that the catalyst for the whole conflict is technically Spike saying he doesn’t want to go, since clearly the second ticket was intended for him, and had he hung onto it then Twilight’s friends would just have been mentioning that they would ideally want to go too and so Twilight would probably just write to the Princess about it to begin with and avoid the whole mess. In effect it’s really a big misunderstanding, although it is one which serves to illustrate the exclusivity of the Gala, and how generous Celestia is (I’m not sure where she got those other tickets. Did she take them from the invitations of others she was going to write? Was she planning for Twilight to go through a Friendship lesson and had them put aside? I think most likely she just clone-spelled a bunch of tickets, either way it’s a neat little show of her social power, since we’ve already seen some of her magical power). I don’t have as much to say about this episode in general compared to the pilot – I could watch these characters do absolutely ANYTHING and find it entertaining (which is often my measure of good characters, at least in my estimation. Just as I could happily watch Kenneth More’s Father Brown take a trip to Tesco, I could be entertained for hours seeing the ponies check out furniture at IKEA or something) BUT my eye is more tuned for details like worldbuilding, or at least it is in terms I find easy to express. There’s only so many ways I can say that I loved ponies doing pony, but theorising about fantasy worlds is easy. While I still forgive the later seasons a lot, I think it’s quite a bad mark against it that I so much prefer the earlier seasons in spite of the buffet of worldbuilding we get in those later seasons. But anyways – I moreso just noted innocuous details in this episode that I found interesting.
Rainbow Dash peeking through the clouds is probably the most screenshotted scene from this episode, but something I forgot about it in the actual scene is that Dash is framed with the sun behind her head like a halo as she professes innocence. That’s quite blatant for a children’s show, even though the religious imagery is just being used for a lighthearted gag. It just took me a little by surprise.
Spike’s outfit put me in mind of a young Charles II. There might be a more obvious historical or fashion allegory I’m missing, but it made me think of Rarity’s accent and whether the equivalent of England in this world would be wherever the ponies came from before settling in Equestria. Where was that, anyways?
And I don’t have a screenshot of it, but I found it neat that the tickets levitate for even the non-unicorn ponies. I don’t recall any other objects doing the same, but I’d hope such things would become more common in Equestria in future, it would make tasks like writing potentially much easier for non-unicorns.
I have some more bits and bobs saved, but it’s all about the library, so I’ll save it for later.