As for the episode, it was as expected - thoroughly entertaining nonsense.
The show's days as a genuinely excellent drama series are so far behind it at this point I think the best outcome is that they deliver some spectacle and don't completely screw up the landing.
It's certainly lost something since they had to diverge from GRRM's writing. Having said that, it's also gained something with the increase in budget and scope since those far-off days when each episode had to make do with a budget of just $5,000,000... Seriously though - it's a classic three-act structure, with set-up/exposition, conflict/rising action and climax/resolution.
I'm really not a fan of how a lot of the nuance and moral ambiguity has been stripped away to (pretty much) leave us with a cast of clear cut 'good guys' and 'bad guys', and how those good guys are essentially now superheroes who are impervious to the laws of physics. A lot of the gritty realism* that defined the early seasons has been jettisoned entirely in favour of shallow spectacle.
It's odd, for example, that the showrunners are evidently so afraid of their pet favourite characters doing anything too dark vs the books, and always tweak the narrative so they can present characters like Tyrion as totally virtuous, when the most enduring and iconic TV characters of the last 10-15 years have all been various degrees of monster (Tony Soprano, Walter White, Don Draper) whom we (somewhat) love and root for regardless. I feel like the Tyrion of seasons 1-3 could have been one of those kinds of characters if they had stayed the course instead of neutering and sanitising him from season 4 on.
Another example is Jon Snow, whose murder in the books is pretty much justified and is the direct and inevitable result of his own actions (ie compromising the Nights Watch's neutrality for personal reasons), making for a far more interesting plot development, whereas the show presented it as a far less interesting cut and dry - Jon was 100% right, his killers were evil and wrong. As a result, Jon is quite a bland, Harry Potter like figure in the TV show.
*Before anyone says it, yes, it has dragons in it, but seasons 1-4 feel infinitely more realistic, where a simple mistake could cost a character their head, a moral misjudgement had severe and far reaching consequences, and a brutal plot twist always felt totally earned in retrospect. The show in its current form doesn't seem to really adhere to any kind of logic or plausibility - the amount of miraculous last minute saves and improbable rescues (
the latest being Theon and Yara in this ep) just defy plausibility to the point where you just kind of have to roll your eyes and move on. It used to be a show that turned genre conventions on their heads, whereas now it wallows in tired action/adventure cliche.
