Just rewatched The Long Night and overall I'm still in the 'very positive' camp.
I've certainly had issues with the writing at times, as much as anyone else, but seeing people complaining about prophecies or theories not coming to fruition is frustrating when by definition the majority of them will be false and there can only ultimately be one way of resolving things. I also think Arya was a good move, and to the people saying it was cliche / fan service, I don't see how Jon doing it could have been anything other than totally expected and uninspired. A couple more deaths would have seemed appropriate, but with this as with the people moaning about lack of fill-in/exposition from Bran about the Night King, I'm sure there will be more to come.
The cinematography was fantastic, and I'm surprised more credit hasn't been given for the extended shots in the opening sequence and the latter stages of the fight in the courtyard and kennels. Moving in sequence past all the different groups of characters without breaking shot made it feel so much more involved and realistic.
If anything though, the episode is an educational in how vociferous the few can be. The episode is getting pretty shredded on Youtube and in some quarters elsewhere by people trying to paint it as some great disaster, when the overwhelming majority of average viewers seem to have loved it and 9/10 instead of 9.6/10 or whatever it's previous record episode was is still pretty insane. Hearing now that episode 5 is the 'big' big one, so will be interesting to see how it squares up against the episode just gone.
I've certainly had issues with the writing at times, as much as anyone else, but seeing people complaining about prophecies or theories not coming to fruition is frustrating when by definition the majority of them will be false and there can only ultimately be one way of resolving things. I also think Arya was a good move, and to the people saying it was cliche / fan service, I don't see how Jon doing it could have been anything other than totally expected and uninspired. A couple more deaths would have seemed appropriate, but with this as with the people moaning about lack of fill-in/exposition from Bran about the Night King, I'm sure there will be more to come.
The cinematography was fantastic, and I'm surprised more credit hasn't been given for the extended shots in the opening sequence and the latter stages of the fight in the courtyard and kennels. Moving in sequence past all the different groups of characters without breaking shot made it feel so much more involved and realistic.
If anything though, the episode is an educational in how vociferous the few can be. The episode is getting pretty shredded on Youtube and in some quarters elsewhere by people trying to paint it as some great disaster, when the overwhelming majority of average viewers seem to have loved it and 9/10 instead of 9.6/10 or whatever it's previous record episode was is still pretty insane. Hearing now that episode 5 is the 'big' big one, so will be interesting to see how it squares up against the episode just gone.