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Twilight's journey to the bakery is nicely punctuated with her observing and overseeing the decoration-preparations. The episode could have just cut from leaving the library to arriving at the bakery, but it helps establish the preparations that the Parasprites will later destroy, and I also think it establishes a bit of Twilight’s position in Ponyville. Now, I know I already did this with Ticket Master and Applebuck Season, but unless I see something that violates continuity in this episode, I think it would make an even better first episode – here, Twilight still stands apart from the others, both the population of Ponyville and Spike. She’s leaning on her authority, she’s being a little bit selfish, and isn’t quite fitting in yet. If this came straight after the pilot, I think it would feel very natural, and then if Applebuck Season came after this, that I think would flow nicely into Twilight learning how to fit into Ponyville better as she gets closer to her friends. 

At first I was a bit exasperated by Pinkie Pie, as Twilight enters the bakery. My first thought was “how does she manage to bake cupcakes for people and cater for her big parties if she can’t resist eating everything before the party’s even started”? And then, thinking of how tired Mr and Mrs Cake seemed, I even got a bit cross at Pinkie Pie, seemingly taking advantage of them. However, saying she was taste-testing, whilst seemingly self-serving, is the sort of thing Pinkie Pie would try to take seriously, and so I thought I’d better give her the benefit of the doubt and assume that in her mind, at least, she’s doing the right thing. Pinkie’s never been one of my favourite characters, but at least at this stage in the show I don’t think she’s reckless to the extent where it’s bordering on malicious, as is sometimes the case in later seasons. In fairness, out of all of the Mane 6, hers is the character that is trickiest to get right, I think. It’s always a delicate balance with all of them, but for her this is the case twice over. 

When Fluttershy arrives with the Parasprites, Twilight is immediately fascinated. The fact that she doesn’t know what they are is interesting to me – they must be relatively unknown. I’m tempted to say that they’re from further abroad, but honestly the nature of the Everfree Forest is such that I’m sure there’s tons of obscure chaotic creatures abounding there that are relatively unknown, thanks to it being a hard area to study and full of all the other creatures taking up the attention. And then Pinkie knowing exactly what it is, and even sets off to find a trombone, anticipating what will happen - an early example of her mysterious depth of knowledge and abilities. In my mind, Pinkie’s abilities are a manifestation of Earth-pony magic. Earth-pony magic is always passive, at least until G5, and whilst that’s well understood where things like farming are concerned as with Applejack, I think it’s likely that there’s all sorts of latent abilities like Pinkie’s among Earth-ponies that go unnoticed or are dismissed as superstitions. It’s noteworthy that belief in the existence of curses is widespread in Ponyville but seemingly not in Canterlot given Twilight’s reaction to them in the previous episode, and that Twilight later on tries unsuccessfully to understand Pinkie’s premonitions. Perhaps Twilight’s attitude in both cases is prefigured with this urban scholarly perspective that Earth-ponies, particular of the rural variety, are superstitious – and perhaps the real explanation for this is that Earth-ponies observe the effects of their passive magic without understanding themselves as the cause. I like to imagine that being aware of how you use magic precisely as an Earth-pony makes it active and therefore nonfunctional, I.e you have to be unaware to use these abilities, such that Pinkie Pie’s odd degree of obliviousness and ignorance most of the time could instead be part of her method to maximise her abilities by remaining unaware of them. I don’t know, bears more thinking about, as I often say with these magic-matters.