Before I go into it, I will say that I am caught up with USA/Australia sans one ep and maybe a couple I missed earlier season. I have not looked up spoilers n the subbed final.
This episode was great. Though it depends on where they take it before I can say I 10000% love it. Story was great, it was nice to focus on one group of ponies in one location for once rather then all the fanservicey jumpng around worked with Trixie and Dolores our bridges episode though! I don't know where to go and will certanly need to give a rewatch to try to get caught up on all the lore and concepts introduce here. It feels so weird like season-4-we-actually-have-a-plan logic has taken back over. Everything else felt like a bunch of plot elements that they may not know what to do with. (sans their endgame for the final of course.) A lot of episodes have just felt cluttered a bt as they tried to stuff in as many references and such as possible.
LORE
I don't know what to say. The tree/ possibly elements of harmony having intelligence of their own is a concept straight outta many fanfics. So many questions: how connected is the tree to Twly? Is it just appearing as her or is part of Twilight, being the princess of friendship and all, actually a bit of her essence. Is, as you briefly mentioned earlier, its intentions pure or could it have a dark side. One thing that I could see as entirely possible is it, while still going by it's nature, ding something that is bad for somepony or harming someone. Perhaps it could even gain enough intelligence to have it's own free will that may allow for a confict it's nature? Still too soon to tell.
Another note. Is this a setup for future elements of harmony? Not all the test corrisponed with a element off the top of my head. Sandbar being loyalty, Yona perhaps frendship, but eveypony else just seemed to have to face a fear/admission of it. I'll have to think.
Another other note: the student6 not telling about the crazy adventure doesn't bug me. They are acceptably young and inexpedience enough for that little bit of blackmail to be enough for me in this world of sometimes stupid horses. Though if it had been the mane6 being held on trivial blackmail for something high stakes it'd be a different story.
