[6.5/10] This one was a real disappointment for me. It's not like there aren't high points there. Arya's badassery is rousing, Theon and Jorah's deaths are meaningful and affecting, and everyone from The Hound to Tyrion and Sansa get moments to shine and develop as characters amid the tumult.
But this one is just underwhelming as the climax of the White Walker story. The fact that this existential threat, the one that Jon has been crusading about for ages, that we were teased with in the series' very first scene, is quelled by the acts of one character slaying one enemy is just unsatisfying as a conclusion. The episode does a nice job of making our heroes seem overmatched and failure seem imminent, but that just makes the "the king goes down, they all go down" solution feel that much cheaper. It also takes some of the wind out of the sails of the show's final three episodes, as a fight with Cersei and her very human army can't help but seem a little anticlimactic after fighting ice demons and zombies in a dragon-to-dragon battle.
It doesn't help that the fight was almost impossible to follow. From the darkness and murkiness of the image, to the superfast cuts between scenes and images, the whole "fog of war" thing became overdone, to where it was too easy to lose who was fighting what and where, as the battle became one giant hodgepodge. That sort of disorientation can work when done well and not overextended (see: The Battle of the Bastards"), but here it just became tough to even discern what was happening at various points.
It's not like this is a bad episode or anything. There's still cool character moments and some tense and thrilling scenes. But as the culmination of eight seasons of storytelling and build, it can't help but come off like less than what we, or at least I, was hoping for. Particularly for a show that's done battles as well as this one has, the "Battle of Winterfell" is middling as a skirmish, and meh as the capstone to the White Walker storyline that has been with the series since the beginning/ Again, it's not bad, but I had hoped, and frankly expected, much better.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2019-04-30T00:38:02Z
[6.5/10] This one was a real disappointment for me. It's not like there aren't high points there. Arya's badassery is rousing, Theon and Jorah's deaths are meaningful and affecting, and everyone from The Hound to Tyrion and Sansa get moments to shine and develop as characters amid the tumult.
But this one is just underwhelming as the climax of the White Walker story. The fact that this existential threat, the one that Jon has been crusading about for ages, that we were teased with in the series' very first scene, is quelled by the acts of one character slaying one enemy is just unsatisfying as a conclusion. The episode does a nice job of making our heroes seem overmatched and failure seem imminent, but that just makes the "the king goes down, they all go down" solution feel that much cheaper. It also takes some of the wind out of the sails of the show's final three episodes, as a fight with Cersei and her very human army can't help but seem a little anticlimactic after fighting ice demons and zombies in a dragon-to-dragon battle.
It doesn't help that the fight was almost impossible to follow. From the darkness and murkiness of the image, to the superfast cuts between scenes and images, the whole "fog of war" thing became overdone, to where it was too easy to lose who was fighting what and where, as the battle became one giant hodgepodge. That sort of disorientation can work when done well and not overextended (see: The Battle of the Bastards"), but here it just became tough to even discern what was happening at various points.
It's not like this is a bad episode or anything. There's still cool character moments and some tense and thrilling scenes. But as the culmination of eight seasons of storytelling and build, it can't help but come off like less than what we, or at least I, was hoping for. Particularly for a show that's done battles as well as this one has, the "Battle of Winterfell" is middling as a skirmish, and meh as the capstone to the White Walker storyline that has been with the series since the beginning/ Again, it's not bad, but I had hoped, and frankly expected, much better.