That episode was decent. Good visuals, and I like how brutal it was. Kind of reminded me of the old Game of Thrones a little.
If only the writing made any fucking sense. Talk about a rush job, first of all. Varys "betrays" Daenerys and gets executed in ten minutes flat, just over and done with for no good reason. None of that made any sense. What did he actually do? How did they find out? No one reacted either to any of it. And even worse was Daenery's completely nonsensical descent into madness. The end result is good, but the lead up just was. Not. There. At all. Her character changed COMPLETELY from the last season. Hell, from the last episodes. They rushed it like fuck, it made no sense, and it would've been really easy to make it so much better.
And how about the insanely, wildly varying power levels of scorpions and dragons? In this episode, scorpions were fucking USELESS. When just last episode we saw Euron hit a moving target on open sea, where judging distance of an object flying that far away, and its speed, would be next to impossible. Yet, two perfect hits, not even a single shot needed to gauge distance etc. And this episode? We have a metric fuck ton of scorpions, none of them doing anything at all. Oh yeah, and what was Daenerys' plan for dealing with Euron's fleet equipped with them, and the walls? Just fly at them and dragonfire them all to death 4Head. Literally what. She just lost a dragon to their insane power and accuracy, and now she just destroys them all by flying directly at them. With utter ease.
And dragons in this episode are back to invincible nuclear weapons that can keep breathing fire (that explodes walls) for hours, non-stop. Too bad the dragons kind of forgot how to do that in the battle for Winterfell.
Why were there no scorpions at the Red Keep? Daenerys could've literally flown up there and just burned it to the ground unopposed straight from the start.
Probably the worst victim of this episode was Jaime. They absolutely butchered his character and his character arc. He went back to being the season 1 Jaime out of nowhere, and he "never really cared much about the innocent" despite the fact his entire backstory as the Kingslayer is based on that, lmao. Among, y'know, other things like... going to the North to fight for living instead of staying with Cersei, etc., etc.
Golden Company was completely pointless. Also, they fucking hate walls. As does every defending army on this show, apparently. Much better to form up outside them.
Everyone forgot about the Night King already. The entire threat from beyond the Wall was also completely, entirely pointless. Literally may as well not have existed. Even Danenery's army seemed completely intact, logic-defyingly. The Battle for Winterfell had zero impact on anything. So many missed opportunities. I was actually somewhat curious to see how a practically army-less Daenerys was going to defeat Cersei, but I guess I forgot it's D&D writing this show. Just pretend she has an army again!
Why were Arya and Sandor in the city on the day of the attack? HOW were they there? They left on horses before the army left from Winterfell on foot, didn't they? Plus there were a ton of other delays for the army. What was the point of Arya going to KL on the same day as the city gets attacked? Why did Arya decide to suddenly turn back, after having traveled all the way there from Winterfell, when she was ten seconds from her goal? What the actual fuck was she doing there in the first place, if she was satisfied with Cersei dying by someone else's hand? And did the writers kind of forget, with that Arya scene, that Arya is a hardened killer that's killed like 100+ people, not some naive little girl who's just embarked on a path of revenge without truly realizing what it means?
Cersei's death and scenes just felt.... flat and unsatisfying. She just stares out a window, then cries a bit, then dies. Rushed, again.
So many things happened off-screen. Conversations, and things like Jaime magically being smuggled into the city. Par for the course now, of course.
In our series of pointless things: Euron. Euron casually saunters from the sea like an anime character after, apparently, swimming for miles and miles. Just in time to have a retarded, meaningless fight with Jaime. Which he wins, then kind of forgets about Jaime, who crawls 10 meters to a sword and kills Euron. Yay. Guess they had to kill off Euron somehow and their lunch-break was coming up when they remembered they had to write something for him.
Armor: Hound's sword easily penetrates the armor of four Kingsguard. Then does nothing to the Mountain who wears identical armor. And I don't know what it is with people and the "Cleganebowl" meme, but apparently any Hound+Mountain scene is automagically awesome or something (despite Mountain being a weird zombie and not even a person anymore, he already basically died). I guess it was okay, but felt extremely anticlimatic to me. Just D&D quickly killing off more characters in another scene that means nothing outside its immediate context. In fact, that was basically the entire episode. D&D getting rid of characters as fast as they can, so they can finish the story.
Also, the leaks were right about this episode. If they're also right about the ending, and who ends up on the Iron Throne, shit's about to get (even more) hilarious(ly bad).