Amazing episode.
In the end it was not really surprising at all... except in just how well done the battle was, and in how intense and harrowing it was to watch despite "knowing" what the eventual outcome had to be. I knew Rickon had to die, I knew Jon Snow had to live, I knew the Vale forces were going to arrive... but seeing Rickon almost reach Jon Snow, seeing Jon Snow facing the cavalry charge alone or getting buried in the crush of trampling men, seeing the wildling and loyalist forces surrounded by Bolton shieldwalls and piles of dead bodies... I felt that maybe Rickon would make it, maybe Jon was brought back to die here, maybe the Bolton forces would destroy the wildlings before the knights of the Vale arrived. That to me is why it was a great episode - with viewers starting to feel a little fatigue with villains winning and twists for the sake of shock value, we really needed the "obvious" outcome that Jon Snow wins and Ramsay dies to happen in this battle... but due to how well it was done, we felt every moment of tension and every bit of loss that was suffered to achieve that victory.
The director Miguel Sapochnik was responsible for Hardhome last year which contains perhaps the greatest sequence in the show, and he also directed The Gift which I was really impressed by even though it flew under the radar comapred to the big episodes to follow. Now with this episode he has lived up to all the hype of having the Hardhome director do the biggest battle in the show - and we haven't even seen the season finale yet which is going to be the longest episode of the show so may have a lot of stuff in it! The directing and the cinematography, particularly in creating the battle that managed to combine the brutal portrayal of the ground-level horrors of war of Saving Private Ryan with the spectacle of the Lord Of The Rings, was brilliant in this episode and I see that it is getting a lot of well earned praise.