art by thediscorded

I think we have finally discovered the secret that has made Season 6 so particularly good. The characters have been so spot-on, and the conflicts so understandable and easy to relate to, because one episode greedily horded all the idiot balls and didn’t let any of the other episodes play with them.

“Applejack’s Day Off” wasn’t a horrible episode, but it was definitely the weakest that we have seen this season. I fully understand the type of behavior and problems that the episode was attempting to tackle, and I applaud going for that goal. A lot of people struggle unnecessarily because they have gotten into routines that initially served a purpose, but are now being continued out of habit long after the routine has stopped being useful and even started being detrimental.

There is a phenomenon called “change blindness” where people will not notice significant changes because they have become used to things being a particular way and are no longer actively, critically perceiving. Change blindness specifically refers to a failure to process when visual changes occur, and may be a result of the limitations of human attention. However, habit and expectation regularly cause similar environmental and situational blindness. Breaking out of habits that no longer serve their purpose, or even recognizing them, can be hard without someone (preferably a friend) helping you see what you have become blind to.

However, “Applejack’s Day Off” took those issues and presented them in such a simplified and over-exaggerated way that it required every character involved to act uncharacteristically imperceptive and/or foolish. While it is possible that the writers bit off more than they could chew attempting to tackle this topic, I rather suspect that the episode suffered instead from excessive simplifying and dumbing-down for the show’s younger audience. In addition, the episode felt padded, particularly with the extended follow-the-pipes sequence.

vector by DashieSparkle

Thanks to my job, I have witnessed similar problems to those the cartoon depicted in exaggeration, and those experiences have made me a little leery of the episode’s lesson. Because while this sort of routine-centered blindness can be an issue, the outsider’s eye can just as easily be a source of problems as it can offer solutions.

Just because a process or ritual does not appear to have any useful function doesn’t mean there isn’t one. And this remains true even if nobody is able (or willing) to explain why doing things that way is important.

When I started my job, the person who trained me was the senior-most employee. Let’s call her “V”. V was an elderly woman who was unfortunately slowly losing her ability to focus and perform the job. The manager loved V and was unwilling to let her go, but couldn’t ignore the steady decline in V’s job performance. So every time V’s performance reached a sufficient threshold of decline, the manager would institute a new policy for the position, creating new double-checks and redundancies.

These would work for a while, but eventually they became routine enough for V that they were no longer effective, and additional ones had to be created. And out of sympathy for V’s pride, the manager never admitted to V why the policies were being implemented.

This had already been going on for years when I started, and it took very little time for me to realize that half of the work I was doing didn’t have any function other than to slow things to a crawl. V wasn’t going to let me alter the routines because these processes were, to her understanding, requirements of the job. After a few weeks, I visited with the manager, who explained the purpose behind all the pointless procedures and allowed me to streamline how I performed my duties.

My “outside eye” did perceive actual solutions to actual problems. However, they weren’t solutions that could be implemented for V, just for myself. For V, some of those “unnecessary” steps were actually needed. And even the routines that no longer produced positive results could have been detrimental to remove.

As an alternate example, a few years ago we hired a young woman whom we shall refer to as “R”. Now R was excellently suited for the position that she was hired for, and could perform her duties exceptionally well. However, R considered herself to be our new “outside eye” and immediately pushed to make a number of changes to things that she believed she could improve. Unfortunately, her ideas were often only slightly better than glow-in-the-dark teeth.

Some of R’s ideas looked like they should be obvious improvements. R believed they were obvious to her and not to us because we were stuck in detrimental routines, and would not accept that her ideas were obvious because they were obvious… so much so that her supervisor had already tried them years ago, and discovered that they didn’t actually work (usually because conflicted with corporate requirements or owner dictates).

R was constantly having arguments with her supervisor, believing the supervisor wasn’t giving her “good ideas” proper consideration and was holding her back. (I know this because my shift was inconveniently between R’s shift and her supervisors, so I heard all about it from both sides.) In this case, the “outside eye” wasn’t helpful at all.

art by luminaura

All of that said, the episode was not without its graces. Tool Time Applejack was a nice bit of fun. I was amused by Spoiled Rich’s cameo. And it may be thanks to padding, but the TARDIS has nothing on the Ponyville spa!

Naturally, Rarity is the spa ponies’ favorite customer. I must admit, with her weekly spa treatments with Applejack, it felt like the writers couldn't come up with anything new to add to Rarity and Applejack’s relationship, so they cribbed from Rarity’s relationship with Fluttershy. One could even view it as doing so at that other relationship’s expense. But instead, I choose to view this as Rarity building a spa-date harem. She had Fluttershy and Applejack… and look, she just snagged Rainbow Dash! (Gotta catch them all!)

The episode’s best bit of character development, surprisingly, was for Rainbow Dash.

Not long ago, we saw Rainbow Dash terrified of the reputation that she would get if she was seen getting pampered at a spa. She freaked out at the idea of having her hooves touched. This episode showed a dramatically change in her willingness to be pampered. Enough so that some might find it out-of-character, but it is actually a wonderful bit of progression.

Remember, that was back in “Ponyville Confidential”, as far back as Season 2, before Rainbow Dash had even gone to the Wonderbolts Academy. When the article came out, her greatest anxiety was that it had reached Cloudsdale, clearly worried that it would make her look un-cool to the Wonderbolts.

Now, she actually is a Wonderbolt. And on her first day as a Wonderbolt, she saw one of her teammates giving another a massage. She’s also seen them willing to pamper themselves at Rainbow Falls. The stigma of getting pampered is gone. What remains is the anxiety of admitting she indulges to her friends, especially after having made such a scene and big deal about it before. And this is an anxiety that is consistent with her character, calling back to “Read It and Weep”.