Compared to my previous reviews, I'll be posting a first impression of the season three finale first.

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My first impression of the finale is somewhat mixed.

To begin with, the Twilicorn concept was handled a hell of a lot better than I thought it would. Like I wrote in my editorial in the MLP Forums, the concept Hasbro dished out there was needlessly stupid because it had literally no momentum and had many complicated paths that could risk altering the dynamic of the Mane Six. M. A. Larson did what he could and mustered out a canonical idea that made the idea of Twilight evolving to an alicorn intricate and sensible.

The songs were great and told the progress of the story. Each song expressed the characters' thoughts about the moments now and in the future. Particularly Twilight's sad song as her friends struggled. (The scenes of Sweet Apple acres and Carousel Boutique were rather dark.) The best songs were Celestia's Ballad and I've Got to Find a Way; they demonstrated the seriousness of Twilight's consequences and Twilight's reward for solving this problem.

And a small, but happy moment: Derpy's back WITH her derpy eyes! She's spotted twice in the coronation aisle.

But if there was one thing that really hurt the episode's overall quality, it was akin to Keep Calm and Flutter On: The pace was WAY too fast! Each moment leapt from one moment to another and had no time to calm down and relax. It started extremely fast and just increased in speed. Magical Mystery Cure is like a pot of water, except it boiled immediately and kept boiling faster and faster, hotter and hotter, and the water never evaporated. This finale would've been even better if it was a two-parter, as that transformation would've had more plot development and time to slow down the pace and foreshadow the moment even better. Here, her transformation had no in-canon momentum, not in this episode and not for the entire season following Crystal Empire, Part II. For a change this radical, you need to hint these moments more in order to build it up, and it didn't.

The episode has its moments, but the extremely rushed pace made the episode (and execution of the horrid Twilicorn concept) not as good as it should've been. Overall, a decent finale, but very weakly executed.

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Source: S03:E13 - Magical Mystery Cure