Originally Posted by
DavidSeven
There was so much emotional build up to the Frey scene, not just for Arya but the entire arc of the Starks, that it was easy to give them some leeway there. Also, in the way that the scene was presented on screen, it just never struck me as being as logistically impossible as Arya springing out of nowhere through an army of wights to slay the Night King. Maybe if you broke it down into all the necessary elements, you could make that case, but the task was not as superficially impossible as the task in the Battle of Winterfell.
The "Behind the Scenes" stuff from the last episode reveals some of Benioff and Weiss's thinking on Arya's Han Solo moment. It really seemed to amount to little more than wanting to distract and surprise the audience. ("Here's all your favorite characters in immediate peril! You'll never see ninja Arya coming!") They employed the same shallow storytelling technique with Baelish's execution last season -- devising a completely useless scheme by Arya/Sansa that literally served no other purpose than to surprise the audience. These guys are in 100% fan service mode, and, yeah, that results in some big, dumb fun and meme-worthy moments, but this story used to be about the exact opposite of conforming to genre tropes and relying on tired "big fantasy" moments.