If you didn't glean from the title that this blog will have spoilers, you deserve everything you have coming to you and more.
My other disclaimer is that I'll try to avoid dwelling on differences between book and show, that's been dwelled on enough elsewhere.
Moreover some changes here and there are more than necessary for the sake of avoiding introducing more characters than necessary. On the other hand, what I think the show does suggest is that the books have far more detail and extraneous characters than necessary.
Sansa and Theon
I thought Theon saving Sansa in the end seemed inevitable, he needed a shot at redemption, and was bound to rebel somehow after being kept alive this long. What I liked is that his betrayal was believable as it wasn't in the presence of Ramsay or Roose as I don't think he could confront either. I'm hopeful of both surviving their fall, although what they can do from that position doesn't look promising even if they did land completely unscathed. It'd especially be a shame to lose Sansa as before her marriage to Ramsay she was one of the show's best-developed characters.
The other thing about this story arc was it certainly lacked the presence of Littlefinger, but I'd imagine the plot will dictate that he is biding his time while more battles and unrest eliminate the other power brokers of Westeros. I certainly didn't expect him to leave Sansa in such a hopeless state and I don't deem it likely that he'd underestimate Ramsay's insanity in this case either.
Arya
Meryn Trant is dead now (as I earlier had hoped) and in return Arya has gone blind, I'll take that as a trade. Although the way Meryn Trant was portrayed was so it became somewhat comical. So for the audience, if you don't remember him killing Syrio, beating up Sansa or generally being an essenceless dogsbody for Joffrey; you can see more cartoonish villainry when he walks into a brothel and demands a young girl, which we later see is so that he can beat her with a wooden cane. With Arya being practically the only noteworthy character in her city she was practically bulletproof, and as soon as Trant appeared there, it was clear he was only there as someone to be crossed off Arya's death list.
Cersei
From her emerging rivalry with Margaery at the start of the series, it looked like her walk of shame would be coming at some point sooner rather than later. It would have been better to see more dimension to this scene other than her humiliation, there was little sense of her wanting to see her son again, there was no prospect of revenge against her oppressors. It would've been good to see how Margaery and Tommen reacted to the scene as well; the King's mother had to walk through King's Landing naked, being molested by the hoi polloi and there's no sign of the King in all of this.
On the plus sign we saw
Jon
It was also the long-awaited mutiny at Castle Black with Jon Snow being repeatedly stabbed 'for the watch', again there was little else to happen and the momentary suggestion of Benjen Stark's return was a beautiful bit of trolling.
There was no pink letter, although I think that may figure into Basil Exposition at the start of the next series. At any rate I don't think this is the end of Jon, as the series becomes more and more fantastic, there'll be some way that he will survive this, however contrived it may be.
It also looks like Stannis has been concluded and that serves him right, he was pissing into a force ten gale since he sacrificed his daughter, and compared with when he captured Mance Rayder at the end of the last series it looked like he had lost way more than the half who had allegedly abandoned him. I'm not sure I've ever gone from liking to despising a character on one action like I did as The Mannis watched his daughter burn at the stake. His fall from grace was complete when he turned into Immanuel Kant and told Brienne of Tarth to do her duty before delivering an apparent coup de grace.
I think it was especially harrowing because even book-readers weren't expecting it. Readers were now experiencing the shock that non-readers had been getting for years. That and watching a child scream for a parent's help as she is burned to a crisp is never likely to be pleasant.
Tyrion
Tyrion and Varys is a risible combination as we know, and having the two of them running Meereen with Daenerys and the friendzone twins out of the picture, there shouldn't be much to detract from their scenes next time around.
I haven't a clue what Daenerys was trying to achieve by flying away on her dragon seeing as all of her friends made it out of the fighting pit alive, and now she's been rewarded by being dropped in the middle of nowhere. Suppose she just fell of Drogon and no-one found her, wouldn't that have been more fun?
Finally it's been said that this was the series when Game of Thrones jumped the proverbial shark. You could complain that the show was becoming silly but that would imply it wasn't in the first place. One of my pet peeves about the show I feel is emblematic of the silliness is the weird naming of the characters. There's names with the odd letter unnecessarily added or changed (Eddard, Robb, Margaery), there's foreign versions of English names (Jaime, Joffrey, Petyr), and some that just look like GRRM ran out of ideas and mashed his keyboard with his fist (Ygritte, Xaro Xhoan Daxos, Hizdahr zo Loraq).
But I get the feeling that A Song of Ice and Fire (and by extension, Game of Thrones) is really just an awfully long-winded farce with added shock value: the more bizarre deaths that are added, the more characters can only be seen as two-dimensional caricatures, the more you begin to doubt that there will be a compelling resolution; and without a fitting denouement I don't foresee it being worth the effort. Having said that, as so much of the story line is catching up with the books, the unknown factor leaves it harder to see whether all the loose ends can be tied up in a satisfactory way, or the potentially character developing suffering could be to no end. In fact it's the combination of my time invested in the series along with said curiosity that's keeping me interested and somewhat annoyed that we're about a year away from any extensive addition to the series.
To some extent the show has become whimsical in the same way that the Saw film franchise has; insofar as there's only so many deaths and barbaric acts you can have before you reach the ne plus ultra as it either becomes prosaic or so farfetched that it becomes a reiteration of The Aristocrats joke, and concordantly the only way it can be seen is relatively light and almost humorous. For others it naturally has the opposite effect and just serves to alienate.
But not unlike the Saw films part of the appeal is the masochism of the viewer, and if people want to see uncanonical rape and brutality to the point it becomes a gimmick. Well to quote Jalen Rose: Got to give the people...
