As you pointed out later, sadly way too much of this episode is taken up by that... one scene, I wouldn't have minded, but this was ridiculous. Episode 4 also deviated a ton from the book, but mostly in ways that made sense for exposition / background purposes. This is just a ton of plain wasting time - as if there wasn't enough plot left to cover in the book.

There was a 'one month later' indication on screen, so that part isn't really the issue with the geography.

You're overlooking the actual problem with the geography: they're on the wrong side of the river. Dragonmount is to the west of Tar Valon, so they should be passing it directly, not seeing it across the river. Based on that view, they're somehow approaching from the east.

Agreed on the WT itself, though TV as a whole does look nice.

Agreed also on many other points, but not going to comment point by point.

Yeah... and the Egwene/Perrin storyline inbetween is cringeworthy for different reasons, so pretty much a failure across the board here.

I mostly liked Loial and Liandrin is working fairly well so far, even if I'm also apprehensive about where they're planning to go with that... that's about it as far as positives from this episode go.

In fairness, the Song of Ice and Fire books are simply a lot closer to TV writing than the WoT ones - not coincidentally, considering Martin's professional background. It was always going to be necessary to deviate much further from the books in WoT to make the storyline shorter, more focused, more spectacular. But yeah, I defended episode 4 as largely good work despite a few questionable things, but episode 5 is hard to defend.