Alas, poor production schedule…
There’s a version of this episode, somewhere, that’s a perfectly fine bridge episode, unexceptional but competent, hinting at future conflicts, furthering a few character arcs, tossing in some adorable friendship shenanigans and cuteness, and setting us up for the big relay race (how have we still not gotten to that?!) next week. But we didn’t get that version. Instead, we got a distractingly low-quality nightmare of an episode, full of off-model shots, choppy animation, and some truly jarring scene transitions. Simply put, the second half of orange looked awful this week.