I guess it could be some weird way of saying "Look everybody, no more filler! See, we're even going to throw you into the next plot right from the start" and then stretch out the fights somewhat. Looking on it now though, they seem to be having trouble stretching the manga material with just this one episode, since most of it was everyone killing time at school and flasrabroadacks on the filler.
But if they're thinking of sticking in small filler arcs and one big filler arc every other season, then forget it. The stuff that happens in this series is awesome, but not awesome enough to pick up that kind of slack.