My Little Pony LVI:S Has Left the Playground!

[Madcrafter]

Season 3 episode 1+2 spoilers:

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The problem with Sombra was not that he was an indirect thread. Heck, that perhaps made his encounter a bit more interesting than others. The problem was that he was an ill-defined thread. He's just a big badguy who had done big bad things and threatened with a big bad aura. His entire role could have been accomplished with black billowing smoke and purple crystals; all he really ended up as was a face on said billowing smoke.

The fact that the episode would've probably ended up stronger if he had been kept in the history books is kind of telling on his character as a whole.

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In my opinion, while the job could have been done by evil smoke alone, the fact that it is intelligent is what adds to the sense of tension in the episode, especially at the end. The fact that he doesn't have any development makes it so this doesn't add as much, but an intelligent force of nature is still worse than a normal (magical) one.

I maintain that this is down to their trying to give Sombra dialogue without simultaneously giving him a character. Nothing he said explained anything about him or made him more interesting, and everything he said made him more ridiculous. He would have been a stronger villain if he'd acted exactly the same, but said nothing and communicated by facial expressions and evil laughter alone.

I agree with this view, giving him nothing would have been better than giving him the tiny amount they did, because it wouldn't raise as many questions from the (admittedly over analyzing) audience.