No, you forgot to post an essay (smile):
I think it was neat the OP and ED used footage from throught the anime's history and it was also a breath of fresh air as it wasn't the 20 billionth remix of 1,2,3 or the last ED for JN that I thought was cringe and muted when I watched the latter episodes.
I thought the playful bickering between Ash and Pikachu towards the beginning of the episode was amusing. Considering it was just the two of them at that juncture, that kind of interactions was necessary, and on the subjectof interactions, when the Kakuna evolved into Beedrill, which sidenote I'm kinda sad that the Beedrills aren't emerging from the cocoons nowadays, I was fully expecting a swarm of Beedrills to come and chase Ash, and yet it just flew away.
The scene with Delia and Oak, it didn't occur to me at the time that it was similar to the scene in M02, sans the random Diglett of course.
Another thing I thought was hilarious was when Ash was pointing out the wild pokemon, he did a double take upon seeing a Meowth only for TR to show up and capture Pikachu, and they had the right idea in making the net Pikachu-proof, after all it won the Masters 8 for Ash, yet Ash played 4D chess by also using pokemon that he hasn't used in years. James even said during the blast off "Alas, we didn't prepare anything for his other pokemon..." well of course not, none of the other pokemon he used were in the Masters 8. I do like that it backfired the second time they blasted off when James mentioned that they didn't prep for Pikachu.
I do like that Ash is rotating his 'mons in this miniseries though, giving spotlight to some who haven't been seen/used in years. Having said that, the fact that he only used 5 pokemon rather than a full ensemble of 6 seemed weird, but hey ho, and maybe this sets a precedence that maybe Ash won't be using 6 pokemon each episode.
Given how the narrative played out in this episode, Latias will certainly appear again at some point during this miniseries. The fact that she was distrustful of humans, I don't know why that wasn't explained, but Ash worked hard to gain her trust even after they were caught by TR and were given a blast of cold air, and of course we are no strangers to Ash's reckless actions when it comes to saving pokemon.
All in all, I thought this was a decent episode and if the preview of the next episode is anything to go by, it looks like Ash's Alolan 'mons are probs not in Alola any more.