>>9763
That's my more review-y perspective, I'll get more wishy-washy from here on. So something I find quite compelling is the comparison of Twilight and Nightmare Moon - I don't think it's deliberately present in the episode (if it is I'm impressed), but I was thinking about how loneliness essentially drove Luna to become Nightmare Moon. The ancient castle of the sisters is in the Everfree forest, which makes me think that a thousand years ago, Ponyville was the site of the original capital of Equestria - which implies to me that the Everfree is essentially the remnant of how Nightmare Moon destroyed the old capital. She uses elements of the Everfree to hinder the mane six, so that makes sense to me, and so the night and the Everfree go hand in hand for me as her vision of the world under her rule. Since Nightmare tries to use the Everfree to drive the friends apart, I think of both it and the night as extensions or manifestations of her loneliness. The fact that ponies mostly slept at night made Luna lonely to begin with kind of establishes that already. So Twilight's lack of friends in some ways parallels the environment that created Nightmare Moon I think, except Twilight hasn't realised it yet, given she's merely disinterested in friendship and not beyond the point of being able to make friends yet. Since she's in the middle between accepting or denying friendship, I was kind of thinking that it's not only that if Twilight fails the world will fall into darkness, but also that there will be individual consequences for her, that if she doesn't learn the lesson then she might end up like Nightmare Moon eventually as well. Again I'm near certain this was not an intended idea, but I like thinking that the stakes are personal as well as world-affecting. Plus it makes for a perfect thematic jumping-off point, where Twilight was at this crossroads in her life at the beginning of the show, and in this first two-parter chooses her path, and then the rest of the show follows that to the end. We already know what the other path would look like because we're shown via Nightmare Moon.
Other paths were something I was thinking about a lot watching this. What if the prophecy really hadn't come true, for instance? What if the Sun Celebration simply went ahead as planned? What would happen to Twilight? It also made me think: there's been 1000 years since Nightmare Moon last kicked about, and then in the relatively short number of years that the rest of the show takes place in, quite a few ancient threats resurface. I wonder if Nightmare Moon's return influenced that? Anyway, it makes me think that somehow, if the celebration had gone ahead as planned, if Nightmare didn't show up, then it would lead into this weird alternate timeline where we didn't get Discord, or Tirek, or any of those major threats resurfacing.