Ugh, i was very disappointed with this episode. The battles were so boring, hard to see, and in some cases ambiguous on who died or not.
Seriously, who the hell let them get away with that episode?
Spoilers:
Absolutely one of the worst bits of cinematography and editing I’ve seen outside of a knockoff of a Michael Bay film.
Impossible to follow anything because of how dark it was. No sense of where characters were in relation to each other.
But the greatest sin of all, it was boring. Even in a huge battle, narrative structure is essential. From the moment the Dolthraki charge failed (how boneheaded that was tactically? The Two Towers did horsemen so much better, using them as a flank, at the moment of loss) the same note was played throughout the entire show. There was no rising and falling action, no narrative, and about what, three pages of dialogue?
Lots of stupid drawn-out slo-mo scenes...
Also, way to cheat the audience on Sansa actually doing something except waxing on about how the bravest thing "is to do nothing". Well, she did ---fudgesicle----all that episode. How did we not have her facing down the headless zombie corpse of her father with the dragon glass dagger Aria gave her? Totally missed opportunity for Sansa to be more likable, compared to as of late being a stone of a character with no depth that she's turned out to be.
And Aria was ridiculously inconsistent throughout. First she's at her proper assassin form, kicking ass, taking zombie names. Pretty much fighting like Neo from the Matrix, then halfway through the episode she's cowering around the castle, in a lite-caloric stealth scene that was both cliche and didn't connect to anything she trained for. Oh the old throwing an object to another part of the room misdirection is so played out. What happened to her infiltration training? Her ability to "disappear" into the shadows...then somehow she gets intimately close to the Night King without anyone seeing or hearing her, when they were all out in the open, with his 4 "Night Generals" (who turned out to be useless tits who did nothing but walk through the castle's gates). This made no sense!
Also, called it about the Mormonts dying, but also I thought that Brianne, one of Dany’s dragons, and Greyworm were dead too (the dude basically gave the two weeks from retirement speech last episode. How is he still alive?).
Little Lady Mormont went out pretty good, but again it's the whole charging forward into danger while screaming tactic that they repeated throughout the episode. The dothraki did it, Mormont did it, Theon did it...
Weak episode. Worst battle in the series. And such a disappointment after last week’s episode.
Go back and watch “The Two Towers” and the Battle of Helms Deep to see just how bad this was. This episode didn't even light a candle to the Battle of Helms Deep.