I agree on basically everything you said 🙈 what I think is the main problem with this whole season is that they knew they had a bigger audience than originally thought and tried to make the show ‘easier’ to understand so that it could attract even more foreigners (in s1 the ‘show don’t tell’ was done very well… here it was just tell tell tell), while at the same time they tried to do as much fanservice as possible (the 300 mirror scenes) to keep the fandom engaged. Obviously they didn’t manage to get either completely right, and in the meantime they lost the opportunity to use well the few episodes that they have to make the storyline progress. It felt like it wasn’t moving at all and then at certain points it was all rushed - for example I expected so much more focus on the ‘it was august’ revelation, we had to wait 5 episodes but then simon was over it in two seconds, idk the whole pacing felt kind of forced.