Going to say it outright, the first half of the episode was straight ass. Like, I can't think of any real redeeming qualities.
The second half was slow paced, but was still significantly better in pretty much every way. The storyboarding was far more abitious, there were some neat things done with the demonstration of Hawkins ability, and there was some really solid animation, most notably in Masahiro Shimanuki's scene at the start of the second half, and Tu's really great strawman sequence(that probably could have been a bit shorter really). There was some really cool bits of compositing in this half as well, I liked the initial reveal of the first doll crawling out of Hawkins and all the colours associated with that, as well the general creativity around the reveal of aspects of Hawkins ability, and the board itself was pretty dynamic. In saying this, the things that sort of diminished this half was A) the really slow pacing for some scenes, which was exacerbated by B) Some really odd picks of music placement or lack thereof, that was pretty consistent and awkward throughout the episode, it just creates a tonal dissonance in some scenes and feels odd in others.
Also, just going to mention there were a lot of really meh shots this week, that probably shouldn't have stuck on screen for as long as they did.
Overall, a pretty meh product overall. There is definitely some cool stuff in this episode, but there is also a lot making it hard to enjoy, and I'm not sure the good stuff really outweighs the bad in this case.
Next week looks interesting. Looks like they'll be expanding upon the conflict with the straw man, which I'm personally fine with, considering we had a 2 minute transformation sequence, and the hype around it this episode is pretty ominous, it actually doing stuff and having an extended fight scene seems a bit justified considering how much its been set up. No idea how the episode will actually turn out though.