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I wonder why Spike and Twilight were practicing magic outside this time – if concentration is of the essence, it would have been better for them to practice inside the library so there were less distractions. But since they are outside, distractions do occur, in the form of Pinkie with her special umbrella hat, which I would be fascinated to see as a real hat in action. I’d try wearing one, just to see exactly how dry or undry it would keep one in the rain. But rather than rain, we get a frog splatting onto Twilight’s face.  Does Pinkie know how to speak frog from learning with Fluttershy, or is it perhaps her Earth Pony affinity?

Anyways, we then get Twilight dismissing Pinkie’s first prediction as a mere coincidence, before befalling Pinkie’s next prediction, ending up in a ditch. Here is where the endless questions around this episode start, and probably foremost among them since it’s brought up by the episode itself a little later on, is why does Twilight doubt so dismissively when she herself is a student and practitioner of the magic of this world? Well, one thing that I was trying to recall is instances where magic is shown to have predictive power in MLP, primarily within this season as that’s established canon at this point, but later on as well. I can’t say I recall any instance particularly = in Twilight and Dolores’s fight at the end of season 5 (I think) we see potential futures, and that to me would suggest that magic can’t differentiate between potentialities or probabilities. All of which would give a plausible reason for Twilight to both espouse magic and yet doubt predictive divination. The same seems to apply to curses at this stage in canon, going back to the poison joke episode, where maladaptive magic is as likely to adversely affect the caster as the target, and so doesn’t constitute a true ‘curse’. Pinkie’s predictions are proven accurate a third time in a row as Twilight gets splashed with mud, and whilst she runs Twilight a bath, Pinkie explains how different parts of her body will react in accordance with oncoming phenomena. I assume this was a conscious reference on the part of the writer to the real-life phenomenon where people can feel an oncoming storm ‘in their bones’, a real predictive ability as oncoming storms will affect barometric pressure, which can be felt as a sensation in the body. This has an interesting implication for the episode – if that is indeed a conscious reference, then we could take that to mean that the intended reading is that there is a real explanation for Pinkie’s Pinkie sense, but that we simply don’t manage to discover that explanation within the course of the episode. That seems to track with the episode writer, who has made it clear in the aftermath of the episode that they didn’t wish to convey a pro-faith message – not that such a message is undesirable or bad in any way, merely that it wasn’t the original intent as such. In addition, in this scene we see a sink with taps and a faucet, which is the first I’ve seen of plumbing to my recollection in the show. From what we’ve seen of Ponyville, it seems to me as though some buildings have plumbing but most don’t, a situation that puts me in mind of time I spent in rural Ireland as a child. In this context though, Ponyville is less of a truly rural area at this stage in history, and more of a market town (at least in my opinion), and as such, I interpret this as being some of the earliest beginnings of indoor plumbing for areas outside of Canterlot and some other major cities. Also, Gummy introduction, if I’m not mistaken.