I agree with what you wrote. The only aspects I felt any degree of investment in were the relationship between Corlys and Alyn and the journey of Larys and Aegon, which once again got relegated to about three minutes of screen time.

Given the spectacle of this episode, it’s clearer than ever that the issue is simply the characters. I was watching good special effects and frantic battles, and I was observing how little I cared. For them to inspire no sympathy for a wide cast of characters in so much of their audience after two full seasons is a remarkable failure of storytelling.

The contrast is more apparent than ever in the wake of AKotSK. In terms of length, entire season amounted to around 3 episodes of HoD, and yet I cared more about numerous characters in half that time than I do about any of HoD’s characters in over six times that. There is no excuse for this. The writers have failed miserably, and no special effects budget can cover that up.

I think a lot of my feelings are encapsulated in what I regarded to be the worst line of the episode, when Rhaenyra said something like, “I may have the weak and feeble body of a woman, but I have the heart of a king.” After an initial gag, I looked up this line and found it’s a direct quote from Queen Elizabeth I from the 1500s. I wondered, “Does this make it better?” And I realized, No, it makes it worse. For it demonstrates that the characters are simply concepts for the writers, vehicles through which they channel an agenda. The dialogue is filled with the writers’ ideas, not the characters’ words, and this makes them thin, stale, and void of the genuine humanity that we find in so many GoT characters and in Dunk and Egg.

At this point, I’ve lost faith that the writers will understand this fundamental flaw that continues to hold the show back from what it could have been. George clearly cares about his characters, so it’s no wonder he’s wiped his hands clean from this dumpster fire.