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We start off with an introduction to maybe the first character in this show that I – dislike might be too strong a word, so let’s just say the first character that I don’t particularly care for. Which in a sense seems to be the point, but nonetheless I consider this Sapphire Shores to be the first pony I’ve seen thus far in the show that appears to be a somewhat bad person, genuinely a vain, prideful jerk. But that may just be that she’s rather clueless instead, it’s hard to say. The outfit Rarity’s made for her reminds me of something like an Elvis outfit. 

After the cold open and our introduction to Spike helping Rarity dig for gems, Rarity mentions that she promised to share some of the gems (or as we see in just a bit, ONE gem) to snack on, providing the explanation for why Spike is assisting her. My question is, would Spike really have said no if she just asked for his help without any reward? No doubt Rarity offered that deal to him without realizing that Spike would most likely do it for free, but nonetheless it surprises me that Spike didn’t then actually offer to do it for free all the same. Also of note to me is that since dragons eat gems, we might conclude that this makes them rarer – however, as we’ll see later in the episode, within just this relatively small area there is a truly astounding amount of gems, so there may be just more gems in Equestria to begin with in any case. Having said that, it could well be that this area is home to a particularly rich gemstone vein, which would give a perfect explanation as to the presence of the Diamond Dogs. Though, I do find amusing that if that’s true, then in spite of being on the site of an incredibly rich gem vein already, the Diamond Dogs are too lazy to just properly excavate the whole vein and instead nab Rarity to do the work. I prefer this interpretation because it helps to establish that Equestria isn’t just completely studded over with gems throughout the entire continent’s crust, and that the Diamond Dogs aren’t just randomly and conveniently present, especially this close to Ponyville - it seems the ponies are not aware of their presence so I doubt they have permission to mine here.

After Rarity is kidnapped by the Diamond Dogs and Spike gets the rest of the Mane 6 to come and help rescue her, he says that he and Rarity were looking for diamonds in the woods – it looks like a rocky clearing to me, but perhaps a rocky clearing in the woods? So, does that mean the Everfree?

The ponies get pulled down into the mines, and we get a slightly clunky exchange between Spike and Twilight about the gem-finding spell. I believe in a previous episode, specifically Boast Busters, I discussed how it seems like unicorns tend to operate within a limited area of speciality with regards to their magic, and typically seem to struggle outside of that area (at least at this stage in the show). The exception to this of course being Twilight, and here we see that it does not occur to her at first to actually copy Rarity’s area of expertise, in spite of the fact that she has in the past actually inquired of Rarity how the spell works. Given that this is the way it’s presented, that it’s not typical or a readily-considered idea that a unicorn might copy another unicorn’s specialized spells, I feel this strengthens my theory that the majority of unicorns have in fact very limited powers, which I like since it balances out the races a lot more, doubly so since we know the unicorn population is smaller than the other two too.