I don't know how many of you read comic books, especially superhero comics, but from time-to-time Marvel and DC have these absolutely massive, line-wide crossover events. It's the sort of thing referenced in Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. But I'd argue that those movies represent a best-case scenario for an epic crossover. They're rarely that conherent.
Most of the time, those mini or maxi-series become a logistical mess as the plot takes over, and to raise the stakes, they keep throwing new angles on top of what we knew to the point of absurdity. In an effort to deal with the scale, they have too many characters in the mix, and so it's like reading plot by bullet-point, often with those crazy ideas comics often do so well now not offered up just one comic issue or so at a time - the ideas are just tossed at you, one after another, until nothing means anything. And character beats? They only happen if they're (a) advancing the overall plot somehow or (b) setting us up for some moment in a book that will debut after the cross-over.
It's pretty bad writing and never feels particularly fulfilling to read.
It may not be a mystery why comic book event crossovers are what I was pondering as I watched the back half of the fifth season of Stranger Things.
Spoiler: If you love Stranger Things, and don't feel like fighting about how I don't get it, etc... - now is a good time to find another part of the internet to enjoy.
Stranger Things Season 5 is a weird slog. It's messy in ways I don't understand, it abandoned what made it interesting to begin with, and just sort of ended in the most dull possible way they could have wrapped the show I saw in Season 1.
I want to be clear - because the internet is full of fans yelling that the only reason not to experience nirvana-like satisfaction with the conclusion of Stranger Things is because you had written a perfect ending in your head: I had not done that. I do not do that. But I can say: this ending had all the excitement of arriving at the airport and finding out my flight is delayed for several hours.
I already whined about this show after the first batch of episodes aired, but if I had any notion they'd right the ship in the second half of the final season, boy... was I wrong. During the finale, when the plan was to have them stand on top of the radio tower and stand on a two inch rail at 500 feet to then *climb up awkwardly* into an adjacent dimension, I felt my soul leave my body and experienced the rest of the show in a fugue state. So that's where I'm at right now.
Silly acrobatics aside, the overarching issue is that the show forgot that even in an ensemble show, you still need focal characters, both for a main-line of the action or for emotional arcs. You need to stick with them and build some sense of continuity and flow, or its just watching people do things.
And this season is so much of just watching people run in circles, run away from Henry, run here, run there. It can feel like watching multiple people play a video game where they're sorting out the objective, which - as it will turn out - is to just hit the bad guy until he quits moving. This season of the show, we were not only changing locations, physical dimensions (I think I counted 5 different dimensions by the time the show ended, and probably missed one or two), we rotated between characters all shouting exposition and formulating implausible Rube Goldberg plans was had enough. It was mostly about putting hats on hats on hats and saying "look at this amazing world we concocted!"
The cumulative effect was that I turned to Jamie sometime around episode 6 and said "it's weird to watch a show in which, if any of these characters dies, I absolutely will not care".
Stranger Things' insistence that they just kept adding characters while abandoning the ones we started with - understandable in Season 25 of Grey's Anatomy, is far less so in Season 5 of a show doing like 8 episodes per season spread over a decade - just shreds the ability to do what the show did so well in Season 1. We simply have no focal characters. Which is wild. I was, frankly, stunned at the show largely diminishing the well-constructed characters of Hopper and Joyce - and b-listing Lucas, Mike, Dustin and Nancy. Eleven is there, but her dialog is sparse - she has emerged in her final form as a pure plot device with no discernible character. She had more going on when she was hoarding Eggos.
It was decided that a minor background character, Holly, was suddenly more important than almost everyone else, even Max. And Robin is now, really, the show's main character. A surprise to me as she's the one person who could/ should have @#$%ed off at the first opportunity after Season 3. But I also kept imaging Netflix Corp and their focus group of youths in hoodies doing the Itchy and Scratchy episode of Simpsons with the kids turning knobs, and somehow Rockin' Robin came out as the ranked voting favorite.
But what went from "yeah, this is weird. This season is just characters I've barely seen in years doing stuff that doesn't really seem to impact anything" to the un-nuanced big "emotional" moments, and I kind of saw the problem in the writing room - they just had too many balls in the air. And, there was clearly an assumption that we all had rewatched four seasons of TV right before watching Season 5.
Example: Do I remember much about Jonathan and Nancy's relationship status prior to this season? Did the show spend a single minute this season reminding us of *anything* about the pair and why we should cheer for them? Care about them? No. Had Jonathon not looked at the engagement ring in a cassette case, I'd have no idea what their status even was.
For the record - Season 3 was arguably the last time we saw Nancy and Jonathan spend time together, and that season showed in 2019. In Season 5, we got *hours* with the two characters bitching at each other. When they break up, it's a wholly unbelievable moment given they are about to die. Is that REALLY when you decide "yeah, I don't love you anymore and it's time to say so." But, also, all I could think was "can I hit fast forward? And, also also, this dialog is atrocious."
Look, Sadie Sink is probably a great actress - but I'm not sure why what the show decided to do was hide her for half the seasons only to have her stand around monologuing at Holly. And not just quick exposition - which this season does absolutely non-stop via Lucas, Mike and Dustin. Sink was conveying a variety of go-go messages, too. And I hate to say every time Sink put on her "I'm about to give a speech posture" I started pulling out my phone. And when she finally has a path to escape - what the fuck was that ten minute sequence of nonsense?
My comment on the "Will comes out" speech is: it's obviously a live wire to touch - but I didn't think that sequence worked in that it didn't pay off. Will never directly confronts Vecna again, never shows the villain who has tormented him for 5 seasons that he's now unafraid. Will being closeted was a storyline over two or three seasons and it just kind of... doesn't matter in the end, unless you're measuring media by checkboxes from Twitter in 2018.
Let's return to the Itchy and Scratchy Focus Group:
In addition to too many characters, and therefore plot threads, the inner logic of the magic (or whatever it was) collapsed completely, in part by trying to explain it, and partly by not giving a shit and hoping momentum would carry us through.
After four seasons, suddenly the incredibly perilous world of the Upside Down is treated like a minor inconvenience. Gone are the literal swarms of killer monsters and vines that, if you touch them, will draw monsters upon you. The spores are just dust mites.
Now, we're to agree that the Upside Down is a newly created dimensional passage (okay... fine), and the monsters are from The Abyss. Which is a planet? Dimension? But the creatures are (very conveniently) not in the Abyss. Shouldn't they be... everywhere there? Instead - we get an empty desert?
And if Vecna controls the creatures with a "hivemind", why isn't he calling on them whenever he needs them? Where are the demogorgons in the final fight? The bats? Surely other beasties? Why didn't Monster-saurus at the end, who seems intelligent and is a native, summon monsters?
What was with needing to keep the kids entertained in a fantasy world? Why not just keep them on ice and dreaming in their pods? What were the kids for, again? Why is a seance necessary, and why did Vecna need to wait?
Why did Will have cool powers for a scene and then it seemed more like a liability? Was he participating in the fight with Eleven at the end? If so, what was he doing?
Can you kill a guy with an axe who seems like he's made of thought?
Are there more Mind Flayers? Didn't we kill one in Season 3?
Why was the castle-sized inter-dimensional monster so easy to kill? Didn't we show the Demogorgons shrugging off multiple dudes with M-16's?
And how are we driving into the Upside Down without flipping our trucks the @#$% over? I assumed they'd show us a twisty ramp or something, but no dice. Why is the Upside Down sometimes rightside up?
I think I'm being pretty nice about letting Dustin understand all of physics as a high schooler. Especially in the dark, reading one guy's notes. But, okay.
And as for the finale's finale?
Why aren't they all in Leavenworth? Nancy killed US Soldiers. Hopper absolutely did. It doesn't matter whether you agree with them or not about what they're up to - they murdered people. US Soldiers. But everyone just... walks.
Surely the US Government knows these kids are involved. Wouldn't Paul Reiser write some of this down? Why weren't they the first people Dr. Kay rounded up when she came to town?
Did our heroes blow up the US Army base inside with the pregnant women? Seems like a problem. Very murdery.
At the end, where did the Army go, and why? Is no further study needed of the interdimensional hell hole? Is everything sealed up? Is there not at least just holes in the town that need to get stitched up?
What was Dr. Kay doing, and why? Who was running all of this?
Did the interdimensional demon fight not make the news? I mean, you had 12 kids under 13 whose parents would sure have questions and you couldn't silence *all* of them. (I am being kind by not dwelling on Hopper and Joyce's decision to not tell the army everything when Hawkins split open).
Dipshit Derek's parents are surely suing the shit out of Erica for drugging them to a near-death state.
Also, and if I may: despite what people were saying online, those Prince songs were woefully fucking out of place. Yes, they were 1980's songs. They are beloved and popular songs. But they also didn't fit, and it was trying to borrow gravitas without understanding the context of the source material.
Cringe AF, gang. But also - a fitting end to "here's another 80's thing we found in our Mom's storage unit" approach to the show.
And, yes, when Eleven "died", I did not care. Amazing.
And the epilogue
Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein is said to have been the father of the "film montage" with sequences in his famed film The Battleship Potemkin. I am taking the Duffer Bros. rejection of montage and insisting we actually sit through 35 minutes of epilogue as their homage to a Reagan-era rejection of the USSR and all thing Russian. By refusing to tell the open-ended part of the epilogue in the narratively economical, as well as emotionally and artistically satisfying manner of Eisenstein, and - instead - choosing to make us sit through all that - we showed the commies.
Sometimes leaving people with an impression is the right idea - and it also won't leave you with a horrendous continuity error when we get the inevitable sequels/ extended universe, and they do something different.
If I wasn't looking at my watch when Vecna's head became a souvenir, I sure was when we checked in with multiple groups of characters, learning nothing, in very, very long scenes. But 35 minutes that could have been 6 or 7 minutes? It's a lot.
Peter Jackson, look out, because we have a competitor for "when will this end?"
Also, Milwaukee, Will? In the 1980's? Look out for Jeffrey's.
To wrap it up
If I asked a lot of questions, it's because: this is the stuff I was thinking about during the show. With no character stuff I cared about to hang onto, and with with so much plot - I paid attention to the plot. And the plot was a mess.
I'm not a fan of saying "oh, there are rules for writing, and you must do X, Y and Z", but you also need to keep faith with your audience. Make sure things make sense, and not just because characters are Geordi La Forging some BS solutions to their BS conundrums when they are *not* Geordi La Forge.
If you spend four years saying "this place is full of monsters" and then show six monsters in Season 5 so you can speed run your way through some goofy shit and not have to write how your characters avoid getting maimed and killed - as a viewer, I am puzzled.
Counting on me, as a viewer, to just accept absolute nonsense that is NOT tied to interdimensional rifts (example: no one gets arrested and thrown in a hole in a federal pen) undermines your story and makes it work on the same level as your average episode of GI Joe. And while Marvel has suffocated under making things tie together and more or less make sense in their world, Stranger Things could have learned from the MCU and understood what kind of stakes they've set up within their own show. Not doing so is an indicator of what effort they want to put in and what they think of their audience.
In short, I think Netflix and the Duffer Bros. broke the contract as storytellers with their audience - and it's going to lead to two very different reactions in the long run.
I understand Stranger Things is someone's Harry Potter/ Star Wars/ Star Trek/ whatever. And I know that a lot of the content in those things isn't all genius-level, either. As a fan, you can wind up chasing the high of whatever you liked about the series to begin with. You imagine the characters are your friends. I get it - I've been there. I am there. We forgive so much.
For me - I'm kinda sad. I liked the show well enough for two seasons, liked it pretty well for another, and the last two, it just felt like a slow roll to dissatisfaction.
For all the referencing of 80's-ness and other media (I can't believe everyone isn't posting pics of the Dark Crystal castle and Vecna's pad/ pal side-by-side), and adoration of Stephen King... they kind of forgot what made those things work, why they stay with people, why they make new fans. I feel like they lost sight of the excellent characterization of the first couple of seasons. Characters didn't have to act in unbelievable ways for the show to work.
I think I would have been happier with a show that didn't overexplain, usually just raising more questions, and didn't end with a boss-fight that was just a slug fest.
A lot of people are going to fill in gaps with explanations that aren't in the show, and that's fine. It's what fandoms do. I'm already seeing people paper over the holes and leaping out as condescending apologists on Threads.net. We'll see articles and explanations to assist them and "revelations from the Duffer Bros." in articles from ScreenRant for years to come.
I'm checking out on what I assume will now be a sprawling property. I mean, for god's sake, there's a whole stage show you can see in New York or London - which I guess is Henry's story? Which is referenced in this season (remember that stage show with the masks the kids run through in the 1950's? That's from the play), but I assume we'll get a movie of the play.
Anyway. Hoorah for a grand experiment of a show.
On one final note - literally no one talked about playing D&D publicly in the 1980's in middle America. And they sure as shit didn't name their characters stuff like "Will the Wise" or whatever.
And, yes, we were allowed to leave the house in high school without a parent holding our hand. Y'all should try it.
In the end, my takeaway was that Karen Wheeler looks amazing with every 1980's hairstyle
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