I gave up after the 4th episode of Leftovers S2 when it became very, very clear that everything in Season One was being abandoned. I'm glad you enjoyed the second season, but I'm not prepared to give Lindeloff the benefit of the doubt.

How anyone can compare this masterpiece with the hackery of Lindeloff and his ridiculous, unplanned, make it up as you go along fan abuse and Esmail's wonderfully crafted, exceptionally tight, perfectly planned and executed show clearly has no idea about art and storytelling.

They can usually get some (often a lot) of tension despite the plot holes and lack of internal logic. But zombies that cannot bite just do not work.

They had to turn the defenders into zombies off screen or the two audience members who didn't realise that the Kraken zombies were NO THREAT AT ALL would have realised what the rest of us knew.

There is nothing good about The Kraken. It is utterly moronic as a concept.

This was unbelievably bad.

Not been able to get through all the comments but tried to parse through most of them.

It's utterly bemusing to see how many comments where people are trying to compare Esmail to Lindeloff. That's truly bizarre. Lindeloff has time and again demonstrated absolutely in interest in plot and simply throws crap on the screen and lets his idiotic fanbois drool about what it means, then fails to provide any…

Isn't that answering your point. From season one we know for certain that Elliot grew up in an abusive family but there was debate as to who was the main source of abuse.

I'm working from memory of text books, predating Wiki but I'm sure there are sources if you want to research it online.

Youtube used to (may still do) have such things from fans. I would expect HBO shut them down but I CBA looking it up.

See my other reply in terms of weaponry. I saw it happen, the crushes developed and Snows force became pinned and unable to move and tried to develop into a push contest but due to their arms were held off by the shield wall but were still being compressed and it correctly showed deaths happening due to suffocation.

Jon Snow's army were predominantly Free Folk, therefore as a partisan force they used short arms. The organised, professional army of Bolton used long arms. It also explains why they were not armed with specific anti-armour weapons. They were not a professional soldiery.

No, Game of Thrones is a serialised story with 10 hours (full hours not TV hours) per season. The narrative has plenty of time to develop and drive forward over that time while still allowing 45 minutes for an epic, truly epic, never before seen, detailed and historically accurate battle.

No, because most soldiers were reasonably well defended, especially in close formation. It was quite difficult to kill lots of people past their shields, long weapons (almost all soldiers would use pikes, halberds or spears) and although lightly armoured, even the usual padded cloth shirt would protect well enough…

He's been in battles with Stannis, so you would expect him to ask at some point why Stannis never ever used his reserve and then find out the entire point of it. Although, he doesn't seem that inquisitive as written, so maybe you've got a point there.

No, the encirclement was after Davos committed the reserve and they were fighting alongside Jon Snow's contingent.

Yeah, this is one of those "only on the AV Club" ratings. For similar check any review by Oliver Saha or Kyle Fowle.

They may have gone slightly overboard on the size of the body pile. Certainly lots of medieval battles have reports of bodies 5 or 6 deep (so probably about a metre). But the three metre pile was slightly OTT.

It wasn't made clear, probably a slight capitulation to the need for heros to stay "clean" in TV narratives. The important thing was it showed the reality that in medieval battle, you really didn't have anyone on your side.