Fridge / My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic S3 E10 "Spike at Your Service"

• Spike's draconic nature is actually a great help in the impossible tasks given to him. In fiction, dragons are able to keep track of every single coin and jewel in their hoards, just as Spike is able to count every single blade of grass in Sweet Apple Acres. Also, dragons are, in Tolkien-esque fantasy worlds, capable of lifting and moving huge boulders, as well as living on mountains. Such prodigious strength would also allow him to make massive rock towers.
• Is poor Spike so overworked that he never had time to do those quick little things he wanted to do? It would take him longer to make the list than do the things on it. From this we can deduce two things:
  • 1.) He wanted to emulate his list-obsessed big sister/mother figure.
  • 2.) If he's not helping Twilight, he has nothing better to do than smell his feet.
• Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy using cider mugs to produce the sound of timberwolf feet might seem odd if one thinks that they are ponies and thus wouldn't need to use another object to produce a clopping sound. However, the mugs they were using are made of wood and thus they needed something that would make the sound of the footsteps of a creature made of wood!
• Ever wonder why Spike is usually so helpful to Twilight, but completely incompetent when helping anyone else?
  • Maybe he was doing it on purpose, to convince Applejack to get rid of him, thereby letting him fulfill his code and remain with Twilight.
  • Maybe he works more efficiently since Twilight is Spike's Living Emotional Crutch. He is in his comfort zone when doing things for Twilight as he has his entire life, compared to Applejack who he has had limited interaction with prior to this episode. It may also explain why he gets better as the episode progresses, having gotten more accustomed to her.
  • Maybe he was trying too hard. This would keep in consistency with the rest of the series (which continues to follow this trend after this episode). Whenever somepony tries too hard to do something (The CMC being the biggest examples since nearly every single one of their episodes feature this phenomenon, followed by Twilight), they usually fail at it, and fail hard. That's exactly why he became clumsier in this episode, too. The ponies aren't immune to suddenly being failures at stuff they can normally do just because they tried far too hard to do it, and neither is Spike. This episode was his turn to coddle the Trying Too Hard ball.
• It makes sense that an episode would eventually focus on Spike and Applejack, since they're the only two characters to have survived from the original series with their names intact.

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