It was okay TV. it just wasn't good Game of Thrones.
The thing people tended to love about game of thrones is how characters drove the action. Plot lines stopped full-stop because another character did a thing that was true to their character and went stabby stabby to another one. Characters acted on things you'd forgotten about, but they didn't. Very much a character driven story with no real obvious outcome because of so many character interactions and the carefully crafted limited knowledge of the viewers.
After they ran out of book material, they stopped with character driven story and went plot driven story instead. Stuff happened because it needed to happen. it was destined to happen. Which doesn't necessarily mean a bad ending. As the story went into the end-game section, the outcome becomes clearer and the possibilities become far fewer. All they needed to do was keep true to the characters and respect their motivations.
They did not.
Dialogue became modern and stilted, which felt weird. Characters did things contrary to their arc and personality because the plot needed them to, or at the very least wasn't setup properly or at all. Characters constantly fast-traveled. Time skipped if they didn't feel like explaining how something happened. Things that should have happened, didn't. Small tweaks that'd make the plot work so much better just weren't done because...who knows. Danerys end-point makes perfect sense, but they didn't create a satisfying setup for her actions. She just did it because the plot needed her to. We needed to see the change. We needed to understand the change. We needed to feel and understand how it was maybe, just maybe, justified. We did not see it. She just did it.
They gave themselves a hard limit of a certain amount of episodes to finish the story, and wrote backwards from the ending. This would have been a great idea for a first draft...but they just went with it and didn't adapt to the story's needs.
It's disappointing. It was fine TV, entertaining, and we got an actual ending. But it was the worst of Game of Thrones, and a face-plant of an ending. Better than fade-to-black, though
