>>9849
> The conflict relies on the friendship between the characters being established, and it seems to me that it would be a little more concretely established if a different episode was between the pilot and this episode.
I agree. We don't know how the mane 6 are, normally, as friends and the dynamics haven't been established yet. While not as bad, It sort of reminds me of the third episode of Star Trek A Next Generation. A virus with the main characters acting silly and out of character when we don't even know much of how they are suppose to act in character. One or two episodes before this could've helped.

>though perhaps at this stage in the show, they weren’t actually intending to show the Gala and it was meant to be implied that it happened offscreen?
That is a good question. As I noted:
>>9869
> I suppose if they had fully planed from the get go to have the gala as a story arch such planning ahead make sense (I mean, all the core conflicts of the Best Night Ever were introduced here), but it still stuck out in what I would think be a "low budget" secondary episode.
Would possibly imply otherwise, BUT, you had stuff like Princess Luna being MIA for the rest of that season and I do recall the show staff's attitude being that a lot of things could be a bit arbitrary from episode to episode. Makes me want to look up more into the episode's production.


>There’s only so many ways I can say that I loved ponies doing pony, but theorising about fantasy worlds is easy.
I do enjoy theorizing myself. On thing I think is neglected in this realm is intent of the season/episode versus trying to rationalize how it all works together as a whole.

>While I still forgive the later seasons a lot, I think it’s quite a bad mark against it that I so much prefer the earlier seasons in spite of the buffet of worldbuilding we get in those later seasons.
I think part of it might be the worldbuilding, not from the act of worldbuilding itself, but how it a lot of it was handled: it became demythologized a bit. As fimflamfilosophy once said, the show went from small ponies, big world, to big ponies, small world (note, I don't fully agree with his criticisms, but that point I did). Some of that process I think was natural and would simply happen with time regardless of how the show was run but other things did hurt the comfy a bit (which I may go into later).