I think I'm going to have to watch this all the way through again at some point, because it strikes me that the pacing issues that bothered me earlier in the series are pretty much gone at this point. This episode in particular, though it covered some really significant and emotionally charged events, kept to a good pace pretty much all the way through.

I suspect that watched straight through and taken as a whole, the middle parts, where the pacing seemed to switch back and forth from slow to fast too erratically, might actually fit in as a transition between the relatively slow beginning and the much faster paced ending.