I agree wholeheartedly with everything Mechanical Ape and (unsurprisingly, because he is my clone) PictishBeast said, and wish I'd been in time to say them myself. Because I totally would have, you mark my words.
That said (by proxy), though...
I find that while Tabitha's performance is a tour de force and amazingly fun for all the aforementioned reasons, it is unfortunately the highlight in what becomes a rather lackluster and poorly edited mess after about the first half. The whole faceoff between Rarihick and Applejewel feels like it's
supposed to be one of the show's crowning achievements of dialogue, akin to the dishing outside Rarity's door in Suited For Success, but it just doesn't feel right to me—like, I can't get my head quite around the motivations of the two players. AJ is reciting these lines about her refined tastes and her shiny hooves, interleaved with Rarity reciting her lines about how much she loves being a countrified slob. But they're not
reacting to each other. They're not goading each other organically to progressively greater heights of pique, like RD and AJ in Fall Weather Friends—they're just reading off a teleprompter. When Rarity yells I LOVE BEING COVERED IN MUD, it's supposed to be a climactic moment of truth—but to me it just sounds like she's reading a line. She's doing a bang-up job of it, sure, but she's still just reading some words someone put in her mouth. I don't get why she's getting more and more worked up to the point where she feels she has to jump in mud. What's she proving? To who? Why does getting progressively more extreme about her outlandish claims lend them more weight, when she knows that AJ knows that they
both know each other too well for any of this to make sense anyway? Why doesn't she show a little frustration, like having her persona crack, instead of just doubling and quadrupling down on this deception schtick that she knows isn't fooling anyone, least of all the one person it's aimed at?
And then when she suddenly gets jolted back to reality by the mud on AJ's dress, the record-scratch mood shift that's supposed to happen just ... I dunno,
doesn't. Like, maybe there isn't enough music underscoring the rising tension and the sudden deflation or something. But it doesn't really feel like Rarity is
herself again, any more than it really felt like she was
someone else in the scene leading up to it. There wasn't enough spontaneity to either the build-up or the let-down, nor was there enough work done at the directorial level to guide my emotions up and down the roller-coaster. I've been spoiled by other episodes that do it much better, I guess. Just look at Best Night Ever or Look Before You Sleep or The Last Roundup for prime examples of what I know the show
can do.
I know it's been noted (by Josh Haber, no less) that there was a lot of stuff left on the cutting-room floor in this one, and I'm sure I can blame a rushed hack-job on a new writer's script for most of the textural issues I have. But ultimately it ends up just not leaving me with a very positive impression of the
entertainment I've just had; and the final stinger is so ambitiously convoluted in its wording and so oddly drawn out that it just leaves me feeling confused:

Real friends will like you for who you are, and changing yourself to impress them is no way to make new ones.
*visual stuff happens, I'm busy looking at how the storyboard sketches of the gala and the cider tasting and so on get transformed into scenes of reality, and I fail to process the line I've just heard*

And when you're as fabulous as I am...
* What? What were we talking about? *

...It's practically a crime!
* uhh... wait. Am I really this stupid? I don't know what the hell she's talking about. What's a crime? Did she just say something about fabulous? What was before that? *
* ...Oh it's the end? Shit, credits. What the hell did I even just watch? Crap, now I need to form an opinion about it? *
Note to Josh Haber: when you're writing a cartoon script, you can't get fancy. Lines gotta be tight, yo.
This is good writing, but it's not good
cartoon writing. You know what I mean?