I enjoyed the episode. The battle certainly felt epic, and had plenty of “oh shit” moments like when the NK revived the dead, leading to the crypt scene that we all knew was coming. And I liked Arya’s video game scene and Lyanna Mormont’s exit (not the fact that she exited, because the character is awesome).

That said, I agree that it was pretty inexcusable plot armor to have only a handful of minor deaths the way some of the fighters were getting overwhelmed. I made the mistake of checking social media before watching, and someone had posted “Game of Thrones! You actually went there?!” So throughout the episode I was wondering how far they were going to go. Wipe out all the humans? It looked like that was going to happen. As it turns out, I didn’t notice that that person had also changed their profile pic to Arya, so I guess that’s what the reference was to, though I don’t see how Arya as super-assassin qualifies as “going there,” but whatever. Now I’m not saying that my expectations of the episode were based on a random Facebook comment, but going in I did expect much higher consequences, and I expected them from the way the battle was going.

Count me among those who found it really hard to see, though I get that the NK was using the blizzard to disorient and confuse. I thought it might have been my streaming quality. My console buffered several times during the battle—fun!—and the post-episode interviews were all fuzzy. I’ll watch it again and see if it’s any better.