Right okay now that the season's over it's a better place to judge if some of the things they did this season were actually justified or not. And mostly they weren't...
I mean, as a review I posted on a previous episode mentioned, it's really bad that Sansa went through some really terrible stuff only for it to be used to develop Theon's character, not hers. It just makes her look really weak, and totally unlike the Sansa we were seeing before she moved to Winterfell. This episode was their chance to at least give her some agency in escaping, but that all went to Theon instead.
It seems like the main thing that this season did was remove a lot of ambiguity, for the worse. One of the interesting things about Game of Thrones is that there was usually at least one sympathetic character on each side, so it was hard to know who you actually wanted to root for. While the Lannisters were mostly evil, they still had Tyrion and THE LOVELY CHARLES DANCE, so you sort of wanted them to win. A lot of the Night's Watch were assholes, but you knew they were up against something worse, so you wanted them to win.
This season has taken away a lot of that. Now the bad people are 100% horrible and bad so we know it's okay for other characters to kill them. Meryn Trant is now a woman-beating paedophile, so it's fine for Ayra to brutally murder him. Stannis killed his own daughter, so it's fine for Brienne to kill him. The show goes so over the top in making things bad (so we know it's okay for the 'good' characters to do violence towards them) that it just feels forced.
And really there's only so many times the show can do "Things are looking up OH NO WAIT THEY'RE ALL SHIT NOW FUCK YOU" before it just starts to get annoying. Like the Sansa's candle thing.
Also I thought that they didn't build up the Night's Watch dislike of Jon enough... all you got was him saying "BOY THESE GUYS SURE HATE ME"... but most of them always hated him, so it just seemed like normal I guess.
BUT THE SHOW'S STILL PRETTY GOOD THOUGH I LIKE THE CHARACTERS.