Hey, my boy Announcer is back!
But now it's time to dunk on the episode.
It was overall a very bad episode and a waste of time. Even in terms of seeing your favorites again, it was a waste of time. People defend it by saying that filler is meant to be like that. Are they forgetting that, filler or story, there is a quality of writing and directing, separate from these genres, that can be bad independent of them?
Right off the bat, this episode has shit pacing. Things happen so fast without letting you get a breather. Viewers must get a break in order to process the events that just happened. From action to breather. But in this episode, it zooms from action to action, giving no time for breaks.
Another bad thing about the episode is the pseudo-challenge. Why was this needed? To justify exploring various moments from the past? Instead of, you know, just showing them? The "episodes must happen at the current point in time" restriction must be the worst quirk of the show, as it limits storytelling potential. And not even the moments themselves were worth anything. Most characters didn't stay in the memories for long to reflect, since they needed to do the challenge. Some characters weren't even present for the majority of the episode. This could've been a great, dare I say /comfy/, episode that would've let us catch up with the post-spliters, but instead it's a steaming pile of shit barely held together. Oh Sam, you never disappoint.
And talking about the characters that did have a meaningful moment inside the memory, what the fuck was that Match reuniting scene? Which writing, audio design and storyboarding decisions let this conceptually great and meaningful moment end up like this? This was horrible.
At this point, I have no hopes for the quality of writing ever improving in any major way.