If it helps maybe you should think of the story threads as overlapping in their timelines as opposed to running contiguous? I don't think the time frames are nearly so badly out as you seem to.
Not sure why characters will have to die to finish their storyline? I'm sure lots of things won't be tied off neatly with a bow tie. It's not Eastenders or some crappy soap you're watching where someone has a secret affair and it has to come out eventually. Characters will take secrets to the grave or just carry on with their lives once the events of the show are done. For example, Jon will never have that last talk with Ned or Cat will never express her guilt over how she treated him.
This episode was definitely a move the chess pieces around the board ep. Liked it a lot - lots of meetings, reunions.
) For the 50th time, it's got nothing to do with time between scenes. Nobody needs montage of Jons travel to the wall. It was always about events that couldn't happen the way they were arranged/shown for your benefit by very lazy writers fobbing off the story. Danny couldn't surprise Jamie's army with sudden loot train raid because Jon was only two weeks from capital (it's provided multiple times - for example during Iron Bank conversation) - so everything on screen in that episode is out of sequence due to bad editing fodding lousy plot - it's weeks from Jamies perspective, hours from Jon's perspective while it's 13 days of rowing for Theon who was only 12 hours off Dragonstone etc, while in the true time scale of the events Danny would be not just hours but days late in Westeros time to the party anyway. It's not about what you imagined in your head, or what fan fiction you can meister as an excuse on the spot - you have to start looking at it in terms of what was shown on the screen. And what was shown was convenient, lazy and Mary Sue-sque - posters on this forum provided better put together plot and staging than people who take millions per episode.
