I'm a little late - just watched it yesterday. I was on the fence right after watching it, but now I'm definitely disappointed. So many letdowns:
- The darkness - it's not just your TV, they shot it that way. What an epic waste of what was billed as the most epic battle in cinematic history.
- They spent 7 seasons hyping up the Night King for this?
- Killed off 3 B-team'ers. For a show that made its bones on no character being safe, that was the safest TV play I've seen in a while that wasn't a sitcom.
- Honestly, what really was the point of having Melisandre there? Just as a reminder to Arya? I expected she'd have a much bigger role than THAT.
- Why was Bran warging as ravens for most of the episode? Zero explanation for that.
Then there are the tactics. Yes, let's devote time and resources to building siege machines and put them IN FRONT of the army - you couldn't put even 1 inside the castle?. Yes, let's send our cavalry charging into darkness without any idea of the disposition of the enemy and THEN use the dragons after the cavalry is snuffed out. Only defensive pit like 20 feet in front of the fortifications? Why not. Where are all of the archers? I've read some speculation that it can't be the actual end of the Night King, based on Bran and the 3-eyed Raven's tales, plus the fact that he was hyped up for 7 previous seasons, but I don't see in what meaningful way there's some aspect of the character/storyline that can fit in the next 3 episode.
Everything was a little too on the nose for my liking. There were no real surprises (except that main characters didn't die) - everything was written to account for recent episodes past in a very neat (not "clever"-neat) way and resolved outstanding issues very poorly. The bad outcomes on GoT have been the most satisfying ones and they completely avoided any of that in this episode. If you have to pin it all on "everything happened the way it did for this reason", that's a little too deus ex machina for me.