Over a Barrel

"Over a Barrel"
My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic episode
A battle between the Appleloosans and the buffalo herd ensues.
Episode no.	Season 1 Episode 21
Written by	Dave Polsky
Original air date	March 25, 2011 (2011-03-25)
Running time	22 minutes

"Over a Barrel" is the twenty-first episode of the first season of the animated television series My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. It originally aired on The Hub on March 25, 2011. The episode was written by Dave Polsky. In this episode, Applejack and her friends travel to the frontier town of Appleloosa to deliver an apple tree, where they become involved in a conflict between the town's pony settlers and a local buffalo tribe over land use rights.

Plot

Spike and the Mane Six ride an overnight train to the frontier town of Appleloosa so Applejack can deliver an apple tree named Bloomberg as a gift to her relatives. The next morning, a herd of buffalo stampedes alongside the train and launches an attack. Little Strongheart, a young female buffalo, disconnects the caboose containing Spike and Bloomberg and pushes it away in the opposite direction. The remaining ponies arrive in Appleloosa, and Applejack's cousin Braeburn gives them a tour of the town. He explains that the buffalo want all the apple trees removed, but the settler ponies depend on the orchard for their survival.

Meanwhile, Rainbow Dash and Pinkie Pie venture into the desert to rescue Spike and encounter the buffalo tribe, where they meet Little Strongheart. She apologizes for taking Spike and Bloomberg and explains that the tribe only wanted to prevent the settlers from expanding their orchard, which was planted on the buffalo's traditional stampeding grounds without permission. Chief Thunderhooves affirms that his people have used this path for generations as part of their heritage. The next morning, Little Strongheart accompanies the ponies back to Appleloosa to negotiate, but the discussion quickly devolves into a shouting match between the two sides.

Pinkie Pie attempts to resolve the conflict by performing a song-and-dance number about sharing and recognizing similarities between the groups ("You Got to Share, You Got to Care"), but fails to impress either side. Chief Thunderhooves declares that the townsfolk must uproot all apple trees by high noon the next day or the buffalo will destroy both the orchard and the town, while Appleloosa's sheriff replies that they will be ready to defend themselves. Both sides spend the day preparing for battle.

When high noon arrives, Chief Thunderhooves leads the buffalo charge against the fortified town and a battle ensues with the settler ponies throwing apple pies at the buffalo to stun them. During the chaos, Thunderhooves gets hit in the face by a stray pie and is impressed by its taste, which immediately stops the fighting. The chief proposes a compromise where the settlers keep their land and share their apple pies with the buffalo in exchange for creating a path through the orchard that allows the herd to continue their traditional stampede.

Home media

The episode is part of the Season 1 DVD set, released by Shout Factory, on December 4, 2012.

Development

According to show creator Lauren Faust on her DeviantArt profile, the show staff worked with an "official Native Consultant on this episode and did revisions according to all his notes."

Reception

Sherilyn Connelly, the author of Ponyville Confidential, gave the episode a "C+" rating.

In a critical analysis of the episode, author Jen A. Blue wrote that "Over a Barrel" suffers from attempting to tell a story that cannot be told within the limitations of a My Little Pony episode. Blue compared the episode to a hypothetical musical set in Auschwitz (from Lindsey Ellis' explanation of why Disney's Song of the South is disturbing), writing that it takes "a horrifically violent period of American history, a time of genocide, biological warfare, and forced marches, and turns it into a pie fight." She identified an impossible contradiction in the episode's approach: while the show's core values of love, tolerance, and friendship obligate it to depict both sides as fully complex, the need to make the content suitable for children requires defanging the conflict, which Blue described as "incredibly disrespectful to the entire peoples systematically slaughtered." Blue acknowledged some positive elements, including the humor in the opening scenes and the portrayal of young representatives from both sides who are reluctant participants in their elders' conflicts. However, she criticized the buffalo as "pure obnoxious stereotype" and concluded that while the episode was not poorly executed, it failed because "this is an entirely wrong direction for the show to be taking," though she suggested this misstep may have been necessary for the series to learn from.

Alesha Davis, in a retrospective review for The Post, gave the episode a similar assessment to Blue's critique and described "Over a Barrel" as "the worst offender out of all of the episodes in all nine seasons" of the series. Davis wrote that the episode depicts ponies as colonizers who have taken over the buffalo's sacred lands, noting that the buffalo are "clearly supposed to represent native tribes" through visual elements such as the chief's feather headdress and the use of tipis. She criticized the episode's resolution where "both groups have 'good reason to use this land'" despite the buffalo having used the territory first, writing that the buffalo are "forced to share the land" and receive produce in return rather than having their territory restored. Davis expressed disappointment that "even the natives in this made-up world cannot get their land back" and that the ponies do not admit wrongdoing or return the land in full to the buffalo.

See also

• List of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic episodes

References

Bibliography

• Connelly, Sherilyn (2017-04-01). Ponyville Confidential: The History and Culture of My Little Pony, 1981-2016. McFarland. ISBN 978-1-4766-6209-1.

External links

• "Over a Barrel" at IMDb