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I've thought about it a bit more, and read some explanations on reddit that made more sense. For the first 7 seasons of this show, it's not been your typical fantasy story of good vs. evil. Which for me is a big reason why it has felt so realistic even though we're talking about dragons and zombies. There's been little plot armor issues just to keep specific characters alive. There's been no saving the day against all odds. In fact, we've been conditioned for the opposite. During Ned's attack and execution, he was a pivotal character. We felt the feeling of dread during his beheading when you realized that nobody was going to save the day here, and his kids are going to have to watch this happen with no chance of a happy ending. No different than Rob Stark's Death. No different than the Red Wedding. When that began, you deeply hoped that somebody was going to bust out of the woodwork and help these characters we've come to love. Nope, they all are brutally murdered. When Hodor got overrun, again the hope of unrealistic avoidance of a main character succoming to death was inevitable. The Mountain vs. Oberyn. Nope. For 7 seasons, it's been pounded into our heads that nobody is above getting killed off for whatever reason. Actions have consequences regardless of who you were. This was GoT, and it was realistic battle where popular good guys and bad guys really died and new main characters were introduced.
But this episode completely spun that trend on its head. After spending silly amounts of time during the last episode to seemingly give many of these main characters some rounding out of their story arcs. Instead, we got an evil wight army that took out the entire Dothraki army in under 2 minutes, but then battled a collection of a dozen of the popular good guys who hold off that same wight army for the rest of the episode. We saw Jaime, Brienne, Tormund, Jon, Sam, Arya, Jorah, Pod, Theon, etc. get bumrushed by dozens of wights at a time, and then just slug through to impossibly survive when they realistically should not have. It just felt so weird and different from everything we've previously seen. It was still enjoyable for sure. But it felt like they really deviated from what made the series great to get to this point. They've got more to go, so who knows. But this just felt off for me.
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