Whew, feels fitting to watch this episode during a heatwave!
First off, I'm going to say that I'm shocked that this episode actually covered more than a single chapter (the last few pages of 1001 and the entirety of 1002). I've been saying for a long time that when it comes to covering chapters like this, which are straight action, predominantly double page spreads, and have few to no cutaways the anime staff should just grit their teeth and take the hit and go 1:1.5 or whatever so they won't have to aggressively pad the episode out with dead air. The manga's far enough ahead they should be able to afford it every once in a while.
That was definitely not empty hype from Thurlow. I was genuinely shocked that the episode was just action, action, action, never let up, and all of it was extremely high quality coming from an army of webgen animators like Vincent Chansard, Archiel, Yen Bm, and many more anchored by the regulars like Tu, Henry Thurlow, and of course Ishizuka, whom we hadn't seen in a minute it felt like (the hiatus not helping, of course). 1017 serves as a really nice complement to 1015 and either one of those episodes would've been utterly unthinkable coming from One Piece at any point prior to Wano outside of the bigger movies. The 1015/1017 duo sets an absurdly high bar.
