Episode was entertaining, the directing was great, and emilia clarke did very well. The ground-level carnage against the spectacle view from Cersei and Dany's POVs was excellent in framing just how insane and desperate everything had gotten.
My biggest complaint though is the way the innocents are used in the narrative. I think that was the most extensive depiction of the horrors of war in the show so far. It was troubling. But it was so obviously included to give impact and momentum to Dany's descent. The people were still just tools for the writers to get Dany to a certain point.
And this relates with the most asinine aspect of the show: its insistent sympathy for Cersei. At the end they try to humanize her and make her seem multidimensional, but it doesn't work because her character arc for years has included the flattening of her into a villain from an R-rated Star Trek fanfic. She was a complicated if ruthless mother, then she became the Smirk Empress and the show celebrated her victory.
Where were the scenes with the innocent when Cersei blew up the sept? Why, now, are we finally seeimg actual humans in Kings Landing, and not before?
In conquering the city, Dany became the villain. I actually like that, as a conclusion to her deluded savior narrative. But by staging the deaths of civilians as the momentum of her descent the way it did, the show turned Cersei into the protector bringing people into the Red Keep and the Lannister soldiers into the brave noble heroes. The show reinforces an infuriating imbalance of impact and significance. Some mass crimes are depicted as victories, some as tragedies in the show, and that inconsistency undercuts a ton of the intended response for me.
In short, they should have written Dany's fall in a way that didn't rely upon narrative sympathy for Cersei, who is an utterly myopic monster of a shit.