I think what we see after they basically have no more source material, is a shift in how they direct the show. They went from a story-driven show to a production because no matter how hard they tried, they could never find someone to write the dialogue as well as GRRM. So they had to compensate by boosting production value and switching to a more set-up/payoff narrative style, with some twists thrown in here and there. They shouldn’t be blamed for a writing drop off, it was inevitable.

I think we are giving GRRM too much credit here, he's a good writer sure, but certainly not the best, he's an amazing world builder but my own personal favourite dialogue driven scenes I'd say are; "what's the bigger number, five or one?" - Robert Baratheon wasn't in the books, every scene with just Littlefinger and Varys weren't in the books, the Hound and Arya scene "ill eat every fucking chicken in this room" was in the books but wasn't nearly as tense or memorable imo. The writers are absolutely incredible as evidenced by these three scenes alone, so it seems as though they have given up caring when they can't write a script that draws people in anymore. The show has the same writers it had then headed by D and D.

This season isn’t my favourite, but I don’t think it’s anywhere near as bad as people are making it out to be. I disagree heavily on the Long Night episode, you can pick out certain stupid things that happen during the episode, but it nailed it on the head in terms of creating the tension necessary for such an important moment in the series and there was a ton of great moments within the episode.

Ignoring all the stupid things that happen, generally stupid things need to happen on TV and film to keep things tense and interesting, like Dany landing her dragon in a field full of zombies. The episode was great in its own way, it was tense, dark, it really made you have the feeling of hopelessness our heroes must have felt. All seemed lost and then Arya saves the day, to me, that's great. She's a trained killer, it didn't go with expectations of Jon defeating the NK. The episode on its own was fantastic really. But that's it, only if it was on its own. The series (a Song of Ice and Fire.) has been building this up for years, the army of the dead is the last hurdle, mankind is on the brink of destruction, yet they immediately get wasted in their first real battle. No where else in the world even experienced then but the North and we got no real payoff of what and why they were doing what they were. Bran making a comment about wanting to erase history is just shitty, finally find out what they want and its the episode before they are destroyed. Seems like the writers just flung that in so they could have Cersei as the major problem. The Battle for the Throne seems miniscule in comparison to what's just happened and the viewers just have to now get over that and begin caring about the throne again.

The problem GoT faced this season with its enormous popularity is that they were going to upset big portions of the fanbase no matter what direction they went with any storyline (plot and/or character). Fans come up with all these theories on how they think the show will/should end and completely entrench themselves in those ideas, when they don’t get the pay-off they’re looking for, they say the show did a poor job of writing. This isn’t exclusive to GoT, a lot of extremely popular shows have problems in their final seasons because fans are so divided about how it should end that no one ends up enjoying anything.

I get that compltely and maybe im just pissed off that it isn't ending the way I'd envisioned, but seeing Ep 4's rating and many people on here complaining also has me thinking that my thoughts about how the show aren't without merit.