A huge misconception for action films/shows/scenes is that you're supposed to tell the story in between all the action, and let the action be the spectacle in between. On the contrary, action scenes are when the most dramatic and truthful character moments can happen - because we're watching characters make choices, instead of just listening to them talk. It's true character and it's exciting stuff.
This episode had.... no character moments. In fact, its characters barely even did anything to propel narrative at all, besides, obviously, Arya's final stab. It was just reacting. We're being attacked. Fight back. I know nothing more about these people after this event is over. Dany and Jon's relationship didn't fester or smolder. I don't even know why they ended the previous episode with Jon telling Dany the truth if they weren't going to utilize the tension of that during the battle.
I don't find any of these characters particularly interesting at this point and I don't think they've done much substantial setup for many of them leading into this battle so I'm not doing a good job at finding other examples, but what interesting choices could Brienne have made here to reveal character? Like would she choose to save Winterfell over Jaime? Maybe that could have been revelatory for their relationship. Or Tyrion? He seemed like he was struggling with the tension of doing what his Queen demanded of him vs what he thought would actually win them the battle but it didn't eventuate into anything. He just sort of ran and hid behind a wall. I suppose we got his fondness for Sansa in here.
The notion that killing The Night King destroys the entire army is such hamfisted lazy convenient storytelling. Why were we all so worried about these guys? Why did we need to cook up the largest army in the seven kingdoms for this? You need one good shot at the guy and it's lights out. And likewise, given, presumably, the white walkers are aware of this, this could have been baked into the goals/motivations for the characters in the episode. Like The Night King would be relentlessly defended by the rest of the army to the point that if anyone gets close, a bajillion wights would immediately jump in the way. Anything less just makes them look remarkably incompetent. And maybe then the good guys are like "Look they're all defending him so hard. I think he's the key. We've got to put all our manpower into taking him down" and then maybe the story would ebb and flow a little bit more.
Instead it was the same tired predictable safe blandly executed GoT we've had for the past four seasons now.
EDIT: And yeah we couldn't see shit on our end. Admittedly we were watching on a pretty old plasma that's not well calibrated but nothing I've ever watched on it has been that relentlessly dark to the point where I constantly struggled to make out what the fuck was going on. Likewise the bitrate turned the footage into a blurry mess shockingly often. It's something I hadn't thought about before, but given this is television and not a film - the latter which will be screened on (presumably) professionally calibrated screens in a dark room, it's kind of irresponsible to grade it so dark.
