Why Stranger Things 2 was so disappointing
Nov. 4th, 2017 07:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amyvanhymEdit Nov 11: reddit thread
Oct 31st:
I'll try to be chill about this. After giving ST2 the benefit of the doubt for as long as I could, I stormed out of the living room a few minutes into episode 6 last night, and ranted a bit too angrily about it on Gab. I'm sure I'll go back and finish watching it after all, if only just to finish this entry.
Everyone's IQ has dropped twenty points, slowing progression drastically. They have lost sight of their common enemy to get into petty squabbles with each other. The plot is moving far too slowly and repetitively. There is far too much character-focused content with no plot backbone to provide tension and drive. Questions left open at the end of season one (how to harness eggo fuel, how to talk through lights, the role of energy) were forgotten rather than answered. The characters have lost their heart and heroism, the dialogue has lost its honest brevity, the story has lost its tension and mystery, and the pacing has lost its concision. The men are largely passive. The women are largely cold. Drama is constantly either nullified or blown out of porportion rather than resolved or developed. Ideals of justice, truth and honor, once central, are absent. In a story that was once about good people vs bad, the good people are going bad and the bad people are so incompetent they may as well be illusory.
The whole "justice for Barb" fan movement is embarrassing, and to see such a fan movement put into the show is unnatural. Justice movements for characters indicate a failure to separate fiction from reality. And what about justice for Benny? He was Hopper's friend and he was a better person than Barb. Better yet, can we please move on?
Mike's characterization has been muted. His twofold personality -- tender and explosive -- has devolved into passive and jerk. His S1 personality is perfect for dealing with Elle (assuming she can help him file down the sharper points a bit), yet by ep 6 they have hardly interacted at all. She should be haunting him like a ghost, but instead she's focused on tying up loose ends with her mother, with no apparent relevance to the plot, and no new information yet, as what Elle has learned about her mother was discovered and implied in season one. I understand the need for a refresher, but did it have to be so drawn out?
Steve started out strong and interesting. I liked his scene with Nancy before the Halloween party, when he pleaded with her to pretend and have fun just for one night. Steve was maturing. Nancy, on the other hand, got so drunk at the party, repeated 'bullshit' so many times, that it was comical. Were we supposed to laugh at her? I did. Why did Steve take her so seriously? Had he never seen a girl's black-out-drunk tantrum before? Why did he ditch her at the party despite having established himself as a guy who would risk his life beating up a terrifying interdimensional monster to protect her?
Jonathan's balls are smaller than ever when they should be growing. And where is his camera? When he had that video recorder in his hands I thought he was leveling up, but then he abandoned it. Shouldn't he have gotten really interested in it and used it for something in the plot? Shouldn't this have been a way for him to reluctantly bond with Joyce's new boyfriend? If he has "trust issues" (judgmental pop-psych jargon for morally neutral traits like suspicion, skepticism and apprehension), that is where they would manifest, not in his relationship with Nancy. He follows her around like a devoted puppy for crap sakes.
Nancy is no longer heroic. Once she was obsessed with saving a life. Now she's obsessed with getting revenge against "the people who killed Barb," despite knowing that a monster killed Barb and the people responsible for summoning that monster are dead/gone. Why isn't she questioning the specifics of those individuals' fates? Why is she so obsessed with people in the first place? I can appreciate that she's saving Barb's parents from uncertainty and financial ruin, but that doesn't mean Barb should remain her sole concern. Where is her existential fear of the upside down itself? You know, "That... place." Why does she so lack perspective?
When Jonathan and Nancy were in custody, Dr Owens (after prying weirdly into their relationship) made a solid case for secrecy: if competing governments discovered the upside down, they might try to replicate the gate, exascerbating the threat. And yet Jonathan and Nancy never discussed this. Instead of the audience seeing Jonathan (matured beyond his years, worldly enough to understand Owens' point, not attached to Barb) and Nancy (single-minded to a fault and seeking alcohol to cope with the resultant anxiety) work their way through the problem and figure out how to be heroes for themselves, as is the source of their romantic tension, we got to see a useless, smarmy, creepy asshole with a beard shove himself between them, do a bit of the thinking in their place, and then smash their faces clumsily together "Now kiss" style, and it worked. Gag.
There is no justification for that walking turnoff Bauman to have existed in the story at all. He got between Jonathan and Nancy just to violently shove them toward consummation, by magically "knowing" them both (his analyses were bullshit) and telling them to fuck in his house. Were the writers trying to show how smart he is by making him magically know things? I imagine that's what intelligence looks like to stupid people. Like the Pickle Rick therapist, this magical creep came off as nothing but an egotistical writer's self-insert. Rather than developing the romance, the writer/s chose to nullify it by inserting a character who amounted to story antimatter. What's that Wildean line? I remember: "The very essence of romance is uncertainty." This guy ruined Jonathan and Nancy. They could, and should, have done all of this developing themselves by interacting experimentally with the plot and with one another, developing in ways that don't fit into a few judgmental pop-psych labels. Good romance develops subtextually and ambiguously, portraying love as more powerful than conscious choice.
Why didn't Jonathan and Nancy take Bauman to task for taking advantage of the Hollands' grief? Why did they never confront him for being such a generally terrible person? Bauman's role, at best, should have been as an obstacle, maybe a clownish and weirdly skeptical nutcase. For example, if Nancy couldn't even convince him, the crazy conspiracy theorist, of her story, how would she convince the public? Now Nancy and Jonathan have to come up with their own plan, getting more romantically entwined in the process. Having suffered more in life, Jonathan can be assumed to have a better arsenal of coping strategies, so why didn't he share them with Nancy? Music is better for soothing unhappiness than alcohol. He could have helped her make a mix tape for Barb. What was with the weird vodka thing anyway? The J/N plot skirted around trauma-related alcoholism without confronting it.
I did like Elle's ghost costume, that was funny. Though I wish she had snuck out for Halloween, or was even given permission to by Hopper, since wearing a disguise in a crowd of disguises would be pretty safe. "You can go if you promise not to talk to anyone. Not even Mike. Do we have a deal?" Then she would have had to stop herself talking to her friends when she saw them trick-or-treating, which would have been a bit heart wrenching.
Only stupid people fight with children the way Hopper fought with Eleven. Hopper is a leader. An intelligent leader would come to his senses very soon, almost immediately, after unnecessarily ramping up authoritarian punishments on a telekenetic teen girl. He is authoritative, not authoritarian and certainly not abusive. Do the writers no longer know the difference? Why did Hopper become abusive? Why did he get carried away by his emotions so easliy? Where did his heroism go? If Hopper and Eleven really did have to get in that huge fight, it should have ended with Eleven seriously and unnecessarily injuring him, perhaps just as he was coming to his senses, keeping their conflict suitably nuanced rather than ending with Hopper as a villain and Elle as a victim. Elle has been a victim, but she is not a victim anymore. She must grow by making real mistakes.
Will's suffering -- the foggy face rape, the constant terror, the burning and convulsions -- isn't mere drama, it's torture porn. He has suffered much more than the story requires, stealing away from him any opportunity to develop through bravery. In fact, it seems the thing Will is learning in the story is that bravery is useless. That's his development arc: to learn to stop bothering to try to develop. Imagine Nancy, Eleven or Max in Will's place. Could you watch this extremely invasive, dehumanizing suffering happening to a girl? Could you stand it without getting angry? Probably not. Why is it being done to a boy?
My fannish sense is tingling: I smell sadistic female writers getting off on the torture. Same with Hopper getting sucked passively into the ground by rapey tentacles in the tunnels. Why else did they do that to him? He didn't find anything important down there to drive the plot. His getting lost achieved nothing. It might seem like he summoned down the men in white, meaning that at least his actions inadvertantly led to Will getting "burned" to push the plot forward, but no. The men in white showed up to save the three adults at that place and time by pure coincidence. Were the writers punishing Hopper for being mean to Elle? Was that the point?
Fast rescues are bad, guys. Eleven escaping the upside down almost immediately after killing the Demogorgon was cheap. Her spying on Mike through the window, and being seen, nullifying Mike's doubt-vs-longing inner conflict without payoff (so much for Wilde's romantic uncertainty once again), was cheap. Hopper getting saved from the tunnels, and then his 'rescuers' getting miraculously saved by the men in white (the three adult stooges would have been stuck down there together otherwise), was cheap.
Where is Eleven's personality? She is an abused child. She had personal responsibility psychologically beaten into her to control her, and the thing about that is that Brenner, as cruelly calculating as he was, had a point. S1 established that she is dangerous and she knows it. The lab's control-focused conditioning didn't leave much room for her to be a healthy self-directed individual, so she became plagued by excessive self-stymieing guilt enabling occasional uncontrolled outbursts, so that in a sense she was dangerous because she didn't believe in herself. Mike's S1 "You're not the monster, you saved me," was an open door, but that doesn't mean she's just magically dropped the traumatic conditioning. Especially considering how rightly terrified she was of the Bad Men in S1, Eleven should have been much more internally conflicted while hiding in Hopper's shack, wishing to see the people she loves, wishing to do girl things and have fun, but genuinely afraid to endanger innocent people. To put Eleven in the role of prisoner and Hopper in the role of prison guard was oversimple and boring.
Eleven's jealous attack on Max was stupid -- she's a better person than an average petty teen girl, because her life experiences have given her perspective. The boys showed her last season what jealousy does to friendships. We've already been through this theme with these characters. It's also a cheap trick to pull in the narrative, as it was based on pure misunderstanding: Mike doesn't like Max at all. There wasn't actually anything for Eleven to be jealous of. This rendered the conflict meaningless. And also, if Eleven's arc is to learn to better control her powers, her pull on the skateboard should have been an accident, a failure to control herself, and in her surprise she would run away.
What was with Mike's understated reaction? The moment Max said "magnet," he should have impulsively torn off searching for Elle, calling her name at least once before self-consciousness kicked in to shut him up. And because he had already just mentioned Elle, this would have piqued Max's curiosity, spurring her to start investigating independently. Max has the vocabulary of a writer and the skeptical tenacity of an investigator. She could have been a natural investigative journalist, an April O'Neil, a Torchwood-pilot Gwen. Instead we got a bitter whiner who complained about being invited to the boys' club, and then complained about having no place in the boys' club, instead of making herself a place in the boys' club.
Sadly, Max is flat. Because the truth was kept from her for so long, stopping her from participating in the meat of the story (not that there was much), she spent most of her screen time being grouchy, boring and repetitive, and absolutely failing to develop. Why is Lucas chasing her around so much, from a story perspective? Okay, he has a crush on her. So what? What exactly, beyond an advanced vocabulary with no established parallel hobby, does she have to offer the party in their mission? Wait, what is their mission? Why isn't that clearly defined?
Max's skill in games is what brought her and the boys together. Why didn't they ever invite her to play at the arcade with them? Why didn't their relationships start developing through that? The boys' competitiveness against her vs their desire to impress her would have quickly put some genuine heart into the story here, establishing varying dynamics and connecting Max meaningfully to the boys, so we could move on with the plot. Video games should have been used as an explanatory analogy in a way that paralleled S1's use of D&D, with the mind flayer controlling Will the way players control a gaming avatar, but instead of using the opportunity the writers basically namedropped vidyagames for nostalgia cred and abandoned them, leaving the mechanics of Will's teleportation and possession completey unaddressed. Why weren't the party and Max brought together by being bullied together? And where were the mean-girl-bullies for skateboarding tomboy Max? Were the writers reluctant to show girls being definitively mean?
When Max entered the arcade to see the "out of order" sign, Lucas should have run up and pulled it off the machine and told the truth. Because when he told her "Friends don't lie," and she said "Well then what's this?" about the sign, she was right. Lucas betrayed his own ethics. Because he "had to"? He didn't have to. He could have been brave and honest instead. He could have started with proof, knowing she would demand some, instead of slowing down the plot artificially. He is not a dumb kid, and in season 1 he took initiative. He was out in the field investigating, working, gathering evidence; he was the type of guy that an investigative journalist type of girl might be both threatened and fascinated by. Just saying.
Billy is also flat and unbelievable. He looks 25. What's he still doing in high school? And he's a sike-out. By hiding his and Max's home life for so long, the narration implied that there was some plot-relevant secret to it, like maybe they were connected to the robbers in the beginning (Remember them? By episode 6 I didn't). But no, Billy was just a flat jerk (with a hilariously stereotypical mean dad). Invulnerable, uninvolved, repetitive, boring. Unnecessary. "We're stuck here," he and Max agreed once. Why are they stuck there? How on Earth is a headstrong terror like Billy letting anything stick him anywhere? He's got a nice car, which means he has money (by miraculously holding down a job?), and he loves nothing around him. He has zero attachments in Hawkins. Why hasn't he left? If two-thirds of the way through a story it's not clear why the new characters are even in it, you've got a problem.
Baby Demogorgon should have eaten Dustin's cat by episode two. We watched these kids deal with a fully-grown Demogorgon last season, and now they're fumbling around after a miniature as the climax approaches? Yawn. We should be seeing the next stage in the Demogorgon species life cycle, not dillydallying around with its varying infancies. And why wasn't Dustin even a little bit sad about the cat? It's as though he knew the cat was only there to prove the baby demogorgon was dangerous and to get his mom out of the way.
I was really looking forward to Dustin and Steve teaming up. Dustin is active and driven intellectually, Steve is active and driven physically, and they're both brash, funny and shameless. That is, they were. I expected a reluctantly endearing, jock-vs-nerd struggle in which they tossed the sidekick role back and forth like a hot potato to establish hierarchy. Instead we got... meh. Nothing much really.
Why is ST2 so focused on the past? Nancy is obsessed with a dead person. Eleven is obsessed with her braindead mother. The boys are chasing around a precursor to a Demogorgon. People continually discuss events that are already over. It's like the show is moving backwards. The characters have become weaker people and the villains have gotten less threatening. The whole thing has degenerated.
Joyce hasn't developed much either. When she yelled at the doctors in the board room after Will was psychically burned alive, MY BOY MY BOY MY BOY, she became an unflattering caricature of herself. She has all of her emotional intensity and 'power' with nowhere near her previous intellectual drive or underdog position. In season one she solved puzzles and yelled at people for not believing her. In season two her new boyfriend solves the puzzles, freeing her up to yell at people full time.
Nancy used to figure things out herself. Now she's got a smarmy creeper to do it for her. Joyce used to figure things out for herself. Now she's got a normie boyfriend to do it for her. Smells like feminist entryism. This is what feminism does by seeking to privilege women: it creates stories with magically 'smart' women who have no contextually meaningful flaws, and have no opportunities to fail or succeed because they have men to do the work for them. What does this create? Stupid, flat women whose stupidity is glossed over and ignored by a narrative that magically helps them achieve and dominate. This has now happened to both Joyce and Nancy, and somewhat to Eleven.
These mistakes are largely female-style, feminist-style mistakes. The problem seems to be that while in the current sociopolitical atmosphere men are constantly having criticism levied at them for their weaknesses, women are not. Are male writers afraid to tell female writers when their ideas are bad? Are they afraid of being attacked for "mansplaining" and suchlike? Between this and what's happened to Rick and Morty, it really, really looks like it. What a tragic mess.
I really believed in Stranger Things. I can put my money where my mouth is here: I put a few months into a novella-length fanfic. I hunted down Nancy's 14 karat gold ballet slipper necklace to its source, so now an exact replica is one of the only valuable pieces of jewelry I own (others have tried and failed). I started drawing portraits again after years of artistic stagnation. I made a subreddit and paid to advertise it. I curated a bunch of fan art. I even found more genuine love and believability within my own origial fiction ideas than ever before. The Duffer Brothers, born the same year as me (1984, a magical year, the year of ST2 and Orwell's novel), having grown up in the same atmosphere as me, were a true and deep inspiration for me creatively. Everyone else who threw themselves into ST1 really inspired me too.
And now this.
What a tragic mess.
Time to go give out some candy.
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Nov 2nd:
Well crack my knuckles and call me outraged, I've finished season two.
Burn episode seven. Burn it to the ground and eject the ashes into outer space. To get a handle on her own darkness and power Eleven should have annihilated a demodog to teleport herself into the upside down, but instead she hopped onto a bus to hang out with a squad of edgelord comic book illustrations. The punk squad was terrible. Why were they devoted to Eight? Did she "help" them by genuinely being a positive force in their lives, or by manipulating them the way she manipulated Elle using visions of Brenner? Is this a group of devoted friends or a cult? The squad members' vulnerabilities and braveries were not demonstrated, so they never became people. Why write a whole squad? Why not limit it to a significant other, and use that person as an effective mediator to test Eight's claims against her true effect on people? The ethics of Eight's powers and personality were not explored. Why did she use deep fears (spiders, Brenner) to manipulate the people she liked, and then innocuous barriers (collapsing overpass, giant wall) to manipulate police? That is, why was she kinder to the cops than to her own friends? And if Eight had to be foreign, shouldn't she have been Russian rather than Indian to flesh out the show's exploration of the Cold War?
I would have loved to see Eleven venture into the upside down to find another numbered lab victim (or several) in there instead, a powerful yet sick and corrupted kid who might serve partly as an antagonist, partly as a mentor, partly as a bridge to Will's affliction. And also perhaps as a warning, showing what long-term possession might do to Will, as well as what might happen to a psychic kid like Eleven if she made a mistake trying to defeat the mind flayer.
Interesting that Elle didn't check in on Will at all throughout the season the way she did when he was missing. It's almost as though a ton of artificial tension would have evaporated the moment she tapped into Will again, forcing the writers to get their hands dirty and maybe even break a nail. Eleven just showed up at the Byers' house when she was needed by the plot (though the characters had been needing her for a long time), without anyone wishing for her or talking about her or searching for her, or expressing that there was a need for her. Burn that slow-motion entrance shot and eject those ashes into outer space too, please.
Mike and Eleven did not have a single meaningful interaction. Puppydog eyes only. Lame. Jonathan and Nancy didn't have a meaningful interaction after their field trip either. They didn't even speak to one another. WTF? Why were these close relationships undermined and ignored?
Max was useless before she stopped Billy. It should not have taken her until the final episode to do something useful. And all she did was save her friends from the guy who came into the story alongside her, resolving a peripheral conflict with no meaningful link to the central plot.
Why did Steve tell Nancy he was a "shitty boyfriend"? He wasn't. Why did he get the living shit kicked out of him even worse than last season? He didn't deserve it, it didn't develop any characters, and how did it serve the plot? By putting Max behind the wheel of Billy's car? Unnecessary. The kids could have disobeyed Steve anyway.
We learned when Steve fought Jonathan that he cares about fighting fair. This part of Steve's character should have been quickly and clearly reestablished; then he would beat Billy (a known cheater) in a fair fight, and so it would be very clear what a dirty and desperate move it was when Billy proceeded to hit him with the plate. The boys should then have jumped in to help Steve, preventing him getting so horribly beaten. Lucas getting hurt can now be what spurs Max to use the syringe on Billy, finally making the Max/Lucas romance a little bit interesting (the "stalker" thing is bitchy, not endearing). Rather than getting knocked out (agency removed), Steve develops gratitude and respect for the kids for mostly saving his ass, and so they can now convince him to accept their plan to set a fire in the tunnel. They try to take Billy's car, but Steve can't get it to start. Say the car has already been established as Billy's baby, hacked so that "Nobody can start this car but me," Biff Tannen style -- except Max has been paying attention during all that time spent in his car, and so while Steve is messing around under the hood and about to give up, she makes the car work, earning the right to drive and refusing to get out of the driver's seat. Or something. My point is this whole part needed more agency and growth. These changes would have elevated everyone rather than dragging Steve down and emasculating him. The way it played out, the kids used Billy's villainy to their own advantage rather than earning their freedom by defeating it. That is not heroic. It also might have been nice to see some degree of redemption for Billy, but by the end he still has no idea what's going on in Hawkins. BTW, Steve's wounds would not have healed up so perfectly in a month. And the developing "mommy Steve" fan fad is nauseating.
Did Eleven see through the fourth wall and realize what a useless character Max is? Is this why she so shallowly refused to shake her hand? Seriously though, they're on the same team. Why is Eleven being such a petty and smallminded asshole? In S1 she admired Nancy and needed Joyce, and she just left a bonding situation with another girl, so why is she having problems with other women now? Why isn't Eleven self-aware and conflicted about her jealous feelings? Why didn't anyone else notice the jealousy and try to alleviate it? I don't get this. It looks like random unresolved ugliness for no apparent reason. Or is it not jealousy? Does Eleven hate Max just because Mike hates Max for unclarified reasons? It seemed early on that Mike's reason for disliking Max might be that he feared she would replace Eleven. Once Eleven came back, shouldn't she have had a hand in helping Mike accept Max by promising not to disappear and be replaced? But none of this was explored or resolved.
What is with Mike's hyper-emotional outbursts? Explosive personality does not equal tantruming baby. When he got loud in S1 it was because he had something to say and he articulated it clearly. That's what made him so audacious and effective. Why did he lose his mind over the demodogs' attack on the men in white? Why did he run physically into the guards? Why did he have to be restrained? Was he in love with them? He could have just yelled the truth at them. Same goes for his confrontation with Hopper. That screaming tantrum was emasculating, melodramatic and unconvincing. Mike should have had an argument to make. S1 Mike would rightly be ashamed and disgusted by S2 Mike's ridiculous behaviour.
I'm not a fan of "demodogs." I don't like the term and I don't like that they were doglike in the first place. Likening the monsters to a friendly domesticated animal rather than a wild predator removes their scariness. Making it possible for anything from the upside down to become anything like a pet or a friend was a serious mistake. Last season we had 'bear' and 'shark.' This season... how about pirhana? Snake? Wolf? Nope, dog. Coming next season: demohamsters and demokittens. Dustin's excessive repetitions of 'demodogs' outlived the humor of it.
I did laugh when Dustin's mindflayer analogy fell apart at the zombies. Though Lucas's correction, that when Dustin said 'metaphor' he meant 'analogy,' should have been made instead by either Mike, a storyteller, or Max, a vocab queen. Imagine if they had both blurted it out at the same time! Awkward. Making Lucas, an awesome active field guy, better at vocab than bookish Dustin, is a really shallow way to make him look smart. S1 Lucas is more world-smart and Dustin is more book-smart. The way Lucas saved all their asses from the bad men in S1 proved that the party needs the diversity he brings.
That Will's secret message was "close gate" was insultingly lazy. Of course the ultimate goal would be to close the gate. This was so insanely obvious I feel like a joke was played on the audience. Hey Superman, how's this for a climactic reveal: "beat Lex." Hey Mulder, Mulder I got a secret for you, you'd never have thought of this on your own: "pursue truth." Littlefoot, I know this'll be hard for you to accept three quarters of the way into The Land Before Time but you're gonna have to reach the "great valley." The heroes should have been expressly seeking to close the gate very early in the season, within the first two or three episodes. Will's morse-code message should instead have been one of two things, or if possible, two in one: a new piece of information about the upside down without which the gate could not be closed, and/or a new piece of infomation about Will's possession without which he could not survive an exorcism. Will's brain/body should have been a battling ground for Eleven vs monster, and his use of morse code should have signified Eleven's influence, as she and Hopper were the ones using morse code earlier in the season.
This season had far too much discussion of action after the action had taken place and tension had already dissipated. Discussion of action should come before action, should determine action, should be imbued with the tension of impending action. Imagine if the team, realizing that the gate needed to be closed, concluded on their own that Elle was probably the only one who could do it, because they're not stupid and Elle already told the boys that she was the one who opened it. Imagine if Hopper had to ask Mike to contact Eleven, and in so doing would have to admit that he had been keeping Elle hidden, and would have to appeal to Mike in order to get help summoning her. Hopper and Mike would then be forced by the plot to work out their differences (why didn't Hopper trust Mike?) and come to a meaningful compromise about Eleven, you know, "halfway happy." Something like that. My point is, I don't want to see characters talk about things after they've happened, when there's no more tension, stuck in the past without using it to build the future. It removes their agency and weakens the gravity of their choices.
Hopper's after-the-fact confession to Eleven, that his fear of losing another girl was the source of his anger and stupidity, was somewhat convincing as a human failing, but not convincing as Hopper's failing. Last season, his fear of losing a child empowered his heroism. He was disciplined and mature enough to use his fear to actually prevent the fearful outcome. How did he lose that ability? Why has a strength become a weakness? Why now does the fear and anger cause him to lose a child when before it helped him save one? When afraid of losing her, how did he forget to be afraid of scaring her away? Why has he become a weaker person than he was last season, despite having succeeded in saving Will?
I can't believe Eleven was able to close the gate. First she was underused, then overpowered. Extremely overpowered. And how did she get so powerful? By being told to "use your anger?" That's no good. In S1, the emotion behind Eleven's more extreme successes was multifaceted: she was empowered by love, necessity, anger, determination, protectiveness, responsibility, self-assertion, guilt and timing. It's dangerous to reduce that to a single emotion like "anger" because it reduces the character's complexity and realism. She was also empowered by carbohydrates, not just feels. Why doesn't she need fuel anymore? Why didn't we get to see her eggo dependency addressed by brainy characters (cough, Dustin) and extrapolated into a superfuel that would help her get strong enough to close the gate? Bonus: it would have given Nancy's "pure fuel" joke some punch (badum-chh).
Anger wasn't conceptualized thoughtfully for Eleven. It's easier to get deeply angry at a concrete being, like a human torturer, than at an abstract or alien thing like the upside down. When angry at people, Eleven was only able to shift a train car a little. When angry at the upside down, she closed an interdimensional rift the size of a skyscraper. She was exponentially stronger when she should have been weaker. Why? What made her so much stronger this time? Her arc this season should have involved her more in Hawkins and in the upside down, so she could work through her fear of her own power by confronting the horrifying nature of the upside down as a proxy in order to effectively harness both. Negative emotion is a wild card, an uncontrolled bomb. Using it impulsively (rather than balancing it with other parts of the self), causes harm. This is why Eleven hurt Lucas in S1. As far as I can tell it's how she opened the gate too. Negative emotion alone isn't a strength, it's a weakness that allows evil to enter the world, and Eleven's use of it degrades her character. It should not have enabled her to close the gate.
Also, Eleven chose to rebel against and abandon her mentor, Eight (I think. When Eleven smacked the gun from Eight's hand, was that an impulse or a decision?). Why is Eleven now using that same mentor's advice to beat the big baddie? It's thematically confused. Was Eight wise and trustworthy or not? If Eight was wise and trustworthy, why didn't Eleven ask for her help in Hawkins? Ditching the punks suggests Eleven rejected their revenge and rage-based paradigm, so why is she now empowered by embracing it? Shouldn't she have been made her strongest yet by discovering, during her attack on the gate, that some other emotion, like love, was more powerful than anger and hate? Is that too cliche? Too bad, it's true. It's okay to put a cliche like that at the core of a story. Just make the other elements relatively new and surprising. S1 pulled that off excellently. And harnessing anger for supernatural strength is still cliche anyway. Why didn't the writers seem aware of this "use your anger" parallel to Star Wars after StarWarsing all over S1?
What's with the excessive nosebleeds? In S2 Eleven gets one practically every time she uses her powers. What do they mean? Don't they signify that Eleven is hurting herself? Shouldn't they start to go away once she gets healthy control of her powers? Since anger is self-harming, shouldn't she have stopped getting nosebleeds once she embraced love and devotion as the basis of her strength? But I guess that's not happening. She'll continue succeeding by warring with her own better nature, and getting nosebleeds. It's so confused.
I was hoping we might learn about how Eleven and the upside down work. Why was she able to almost but not completely pull Will out of the upside down in S1, and how could that power be utilized further? What was that pink barrier in the wall? Why did simple carbs strengthen her powers? Is the upside down limited to Hawkins, is it a parallel to the whole universe, or is it somewhere in between and growing? How was Will able to manipulate the Christmas lights from the upside down? Whatever that ability was, shouldn't he have tried to use it again during his flashbacks, revealing it to the audience? This season was sorely lacking in competent technicals. I think the reason Eleven was underused and then overpowered was because a failure to explore technicals stopped the writers from having a sense of what her limitations were and how powerful she was. Sci-fi has been replaced mostly with feels. And then when the story did bother trying to get technical they botched it: Bob needing to write a program to restart the power at the lab wasn't believable. That's not how programming works. The program would already be there.
I don't understand what the writers were thinking in the Jonathan-Nancy sphere. They went out of their way to use an unlikeable, throwaway character to nullify all J/N romantic tension, flattening their interactions, as if J/N weren't wanted in the story anymore -- and yet for some reason the writers kept them around until the end. The writers shot themselves in the foot here.
Jonathan was completely emasculated. Why did Nancy choose him so easily? He did nothing lovable. He did nothing, period. His character climax was to cling to Nancy like a whiny, inarticulate girl while Joyce was torturing Will. Why the hell was Joyce torturing Will? I understand she's desperate and headstrong, but why didn't it come up (before Jonathan started melodramatically screaming "you're killing him!") that the creature could easily have killed Will on the way out of his body? This was such an insane, reckless risk to take. Why didn't they talk about it beforehand? I think I know why, and it's the same reason a lot of action wasn't discussed until after it occured: the plot couldn't stand up to the characters' scrutiny and the writers didn't know how to fix it. Going into the exorcism, no one knew how to succeed without killing Will, and so they were kept from discussing the danger.
The dynamics during Will's exorcism were backwards. The way in which Joyce took the lead made it seem like she saved Will by going crazy. Joyce was much more weak and vulnerable than Jonathan: she had just lost Bob, while Jonathan had just gained Nancy. Joyce should have been paralyzed or made antagonistic by panic, unable to continue hurting Will, unable to risk losing another person she loves, requiring Jonathan to take the dominant position. Nancy would then mediate by using Barb to relate to Joyce's loss, and would lovingly help Jonathan keep a cool head by being less attached to Will than Jonathan is. Surely, with no better strategy to aid them, the way to get Will through the exorcism would be to help him stay calm and strong by reminding him who he is, the way they got the morse code out of him. Isn't helping Will assert his individual identity one of Jonathan's fortes? Charlie Heaton seemed hesitant to behave the way he did, as though he knew how degradingly out of character this was for Jonathan.
Managing this situation maturely, admiring one another's strengths and filling in for one another's weaknesses, should have been how Jonathan and Nancy fully realized they were in serious grownup love. The uncertainty should have been ramping up until this point. And then: first kiss celebratory and impulsive yet understated when Will is saved, and no really romantic kiss until they escape out back together at the Snow Ball if at all, and no need for implied intercourse since Nancy should be anxious about being a slut, which I thought was part of the reason she stayed with Steve. Barb didn't want her sleeping with Steve, then the night she slept with Steve, Barb was killed. Naturally, between Barb's death, feeling exposed after having lost her virginity, and the slut-graffiti, Nancy should have some sexual hangups to work though, which should have been a way for Jonathan to differentiate himself from Steve. Jonathan and Nancy should not have slept together so quickly.
I wish Nancy had shot that smarm factory Bauman in the face the moment he presumed a right to opine about their private longings. What a thoroughly nauseating man. Between the degrading "shared trauma" line and the abject creepery of the "pull out" ... thing, I was figuratively vomiting with rage. Was that supposed to be funny? Ick. It seemed like Bauman was trying to use his position of authority and inexplicable trust to get a threesome with them (that breakfast music!), and then was furious about being rejected when they left. Ick.
Melodrama replaced thoughtfulness in ST2, especially for the male characters. It was important for Jonathan to grow into a stronger man this season, but the writers dropped the ball on him so completely that they artificially weakened him instead. Hopper, Steve, Mike and Will were similarly artificially and needlessly emasculated (Perhaps the popularity of hateful shit like this has something to do with it). At the same time, Eleven, Joyce and Nancy were artifically strengthened. Newbie Max is 95% flawless while newbie Billy is 95% flaw. Mr Wheeler has moved from comical stoicism to overt jerkhood, and Mrs Wheeler is his victim, sexually liberated by Billy's flirtations. Dustin's mother is single and Lucas's mother is "never wrong." Inexplicably, anger weakened Hopper yet strengthened Eleven. The power of love in season one has been replaced by the power of women in season two, and this has destroyed what made Stranger Things so special.
Will's unexplained survival has rendered the big baddie, as scary as it looked hovering over the school in the final shot, totally unthreatening, as it had no means of defending itself from a few space heaters; and the fact that it had a conceivable mind, with intentions that Will could grasp, had already reduced its scariness a great deal. A scary monster should not be so easy to understand, especially not from the inside, not by a normal human mind. Eleven has a special mind; she should have been involved in this. Eight's powers would also have been useful. The "mind flayer" used in Dustin's analogy was clearly based on Cthulu, but Will didn't seem possessed by anything like Cthulu. Cthulu's baby sister maybe. Or one of his baby sister's toys.
The whole possession thing should have been much weirder and scarier. Imagine if Will didn't actually suffer at all once possessed, but acted incredibly strange and erratic while being uncharacteristically fearless. Remember how he started off the season so adamant about not being babied? What if that attitude continued after his possession, hijacked by the mind flayer as a defense strategy, so that Will would continually deny and rationalize away his own freakish behaviour? What if Will's PTSD went away? It would leave those close to him, especially Joyce, on edge waiting for the other shoe to drop, certain that Will was possessed by a threatening force without having concrete evidence of it. This would gradually infect other characters with Will's anxieties while he seemed immune, putting reality eerily in question in ways that would resurrect and intensify part of S1's conflict, the problem of conviction: now even Will doesn't believe Will is in supernatural trouble.
More abstraction was sorely needed to exascerbate everyone's existential terror, but there was hardly any existential terror despite many available sources. Why was Eleven's mother abandoned to live in that memory loop? She's stuck in a permanent nightmare. She's in hell. Why didn't anyone, not even her own sister, freak out about this and consider putting her out of her misery? Throughout the season, characters lost their minds when they should have been collected and were collected when they should have been losing their minds.
I bet Eight could fix Terry's brain loop by making her see something else. Maybe she'll do it next season, though I wish it was already taken care of so I wouldn't have to tolerate the punk squad anymore (though, as with Rick and Morty, I'm not sure I want to bother watching the next season anyway). Imagine if Eleven had discovered the nature of Eight's power via her mother's memory loop and some supplemental lab documentation. She would then stop Becky from delivering Terry a lethal dose of secobarbital in order to kidnap Terry and run away with her, hoping Eight might stop the suffering, exhausting herself by having to use her telekenesis to lug her mom along on the journey. That could have been beautiful. And perhaps Becky would give antagonistic chase, only to have her mind changed by one of Eight's visions when she caught up.
I wish the new scientists at the lab had come steadfastly to an incorrect conclusion about the upside down, enforcing a new oppressive status quo based in an ivory tower authoritarian egoism, for Will's possession to disprove and for the heroes to defeat. If only Joyce and Mike had been given something to yell about. I wish Bob had hacked into the lab's systems, and Mike and/or Joyce had picked some locks, to find information that the scientists were hiding because it didn't suit their desired conclusions. I wish Mike had been given a chance to rant about the importance of honesty in science. I wish the scientists had any concrete beliefs at all. Instead they boringly twiddled their thumbs. Imagine if the prestige-driven scientists only shared information that made the gate look benign, and hid the information that proved it dangerous enough to justify its closure, hypocritically doing the exact thing Dr. Owens feared the Russians would do, microcosmically demonstrating the meaningless and irresponsible perpetuation of the Cold War. Owens could have been an obstacle by being naively good natured, dogmatically faithful in the 'science' presented to him, and could still have ended up a good guy by having his mind changed by the heroes' evidence before the end.
I wish Eleven had gotten a chance to tell Nancy the same thing she told Mike: "I'm the monster," or "I brought the monster," or just cut right to it with, "I killed Barbara." I wish Nancy had discovered that an innocent was partially responsible for Barb's death, and had helped Eleven forgive herself by forgiving her. I wish Nancy been forced to grapple with the possibility that vengefulness is too simple to produce justice in a complicated world. It would also have been cute for Nancy to be the one to give Eleven a makeover, during which Eleven would take the reins from Nancy's hands, either physically or verbally, to give herself a dark and "pretty" look, rather than what she got in S2: a dark and messy-ugly look chosen for her by someone else.
There was too much Dustin. He did too much by himself. But he's a fan favorite, so he was given a ton of thought and screentime as fanservice at the expense of the larger story. Big brother Steve and big sister Nancy? Come on. Sure it was cute, but after so many other characters were undermined and underdeveloped, it was also artificial. That he kept a hammy air about him, practically winking to a loving audience all the time, didn't help.
What Will went through this season was so much more acutely torturous than last season. Lost in the upside down, he had some control over his situation. He could hide. This time, there was no escape and no agency at all. I can't believe he was able to go to the Snow Ball a mere month later. He should be in psychiatric care. But I guess having an upside-down Cthulu rape your brain through every oriface of your face while you repeatedly experience being burned alive for extended periods (including by your own loving family!) isn't so damaging for a sweet and sensitive child after all.
Nancy, Jonathan and Eleven should not have left Hawkins. No one should have been able to leave Hawkins without severe pushback. Separating the characters stilted the story, and their expansive freedom proved the authorities to be no threat after all. Where the hell was the CIA? Lucas and Steve were expressly certain they could be killed for making a wrong move, and yet the threat was never demonstrated. Government agents didn't kill, or even credibly threaten to kill, a single person. Remember Benny? That's how it's done, kids. I had been expecting the government to become a huge threat in ST2, especially since the season takes place in eighty-four. What's the worst thing the authorities did? They stalked Jonathan and Nancy in the park just to take them on a friendly tour of Hawkins lab, and they artificially ramped up drama by torturing Will longer than necessary when torching a tentacle in front of him. Jonathan and Nancy should have been scared silly by multiple roadblocks when trying to leak that tape. Bauman really should have been killed. Not just because I hate him, but for the sake of the story, while Jonathan and Nancy were sleeping in his basement. BLAM, wake up kids! Imagine if shit had actually gotten real.
All of that said, it's naive to think the cassette tape leak (which the authorities completely failed to intercept for some reason) would be effective anyway. In a believable world, an alleged chemical leak would not have shut down Hawkins Lab. It would have put the lab under investigation, most likely by the same powers (cough, CIA) that enabled its operaton. The bad men would find themselves not guilty of any wrongdoing and would continue operations. That a bit of news reporting was able to shut the lab down only proves the CIA was never a threat in the first place.
I'm amazed at how little was done with eight hours of running time. All threats -- the authorities, the mind flayer, the gate -- turned out to be paper tigers, giving the heroes little to do but grow self-involved. The whole season came off as a bluff, except for Bob's death by demodogs, which still should have been scarier.
I haven't discussed Bob yet. He was likable but boring and way too longwinded. I should not have been so glad to see him go. After his long, boring speech to Joyce outside her workplace, and then Joyce getting his technical help with the video camera and hanging up on him before he could set up a date with her, I thought that meant Joyce was bored of him too. He was so boring that I thought it was on purpose. I don't think it was made clear whether he would have been able to fit in with the Byers family in the long run because his sentimental speeches were never properly challenged by Jonathan (I mean ST1 critical human Jonathan, not ST2 waterworks zombie Jonathan). Had Bob really proven himself by standing up to Jonathan's suspicions, we would not have had to endure so many overlong sentimentalities (conflict feeds brevity), and we would have felt the loss more concretely when he died.
A couple more things: Why were the trees green at Christmastime in Indiana? What is going on there? And how was Hawkins Middle (of nowhere) able to afford such a lavish Snow Ball? It's a small town. Guess they cashed in some more of those fanservice bucks.
K that's it. I have WriMo to do.
or I'll have to start fabricating rape threats on twitter to pay the rent.
Edit Nov 6: It sure doesn't take much to get a block from Stranger Things writer/editor -- and lover of all things #RAW -- Jesse Nickson-Lopez.
Oct 31st:
I'll try to be chill about this. After giving ST2 the benefit of the doubt for as long as I could, I stormed out of the living room a few minutes into episode 6 last night, and ranted a bit too angrily about it on Gab. I'm sure I'll go back and finish watching it after all, if only just to finish this entry.
Everyone's IQ has dropped twenty points, slowing progression drastically. They have lost sight of their common enemy to get into petty squabbles with each other. The plot is moving far too slowly and repetitively. There is far too much character-focused content with no plot backbone to provide tension and drive. Questions left open at the end of season one (how to harness eggo fuel, how to talk through lights, the role of energy) were forgotten rather than answered. The characters have lost their heart and heroism, the dialogue has lost its honest brevity, the story has lost its tension and mystery, and the pacing has lost its concision. The men are largely passive. The women are largely cold. Drama is constantly either nullified or blown out of porportion rather than resolved or developed. Ideals of justice, truth and honor, once central, are absent. In a story that was once about good people vs bad, the good people are going bad and the bad people are so incompetent they may as well be illusory.
The whole "justice for Barb" fan movement is embarrassing, and to see such a fan movement put into the show is unnatural. Justice movements for characters indicate a failure to separate fiction from reality. And what about justice for Benny? He was Hopper's friend and he was a better person than Barb. Better yet, can we please move on?
Mike's characterization has been muted. His twofold personality -- tender and explosive -- has devolved into passive and jerk. His S1 personality is perfect for dealing with Elle (assuming she can help him file down the sharper points a bit), yet by ep 6 they have hardly interacted at all. She should be haunting him like a ghost, but instead she's focused on tying up loose ends with her mother, with no apparent relevance to the plot, and no new information yet, as what Elle has learned about her mother was discovered and implied in season one. I understand the need for a refresher, but did it have to be so drawn out?
Steve started out strong and interesting. I liked his scene with Nancy before the Halloween party, when he pleaded with her to pretend and have fun just for one night. Steve was maturing. Nancy, on the other hand, got so drunk at the party, repeated 'bullshit' so many times, that it was comical. Were we supposed to laugh at her? I did. Why did Steve take her so seriously? Had he never seen a girl's black-out-drunk tantrum before? Why did he ditch her at the party despite having established himself as a guy who would risk his life beating up a terrifying interdimensional monster to protect her?
Jonathan's balls are smaller than ever when they should be growing. And where is his camera? When he had that video recorder in his hands I thought he was leveling up, but then he abandoned it. Shouldn't he have gotten really interested in it and used it for something in the plot? Shouldn't this have been a way for him to reluctantly bond with Joyce's new boyfriend? If he has "trust issues" (judgmental pop-psych jargon for morally neutral traits like suspicion, skepticism and apprehension), that is where they would manifest, not in his relationship with Nancy. He follows her around like a devoted puppy for crap sakes.
Nancy is no longer heroic. Once she was obsessed with saving a life. Now she's obsessed with getting revenge against "the people who killed Barb," despite knowing that a monster killed Barb and the people responsible for summoning that monster are dead/gone. Why isn't she questioning the specifics of those individuals' fates? Why is she so obsessed with people in the first place? I can appreciate that she's saving Barb's parents from uncertainty and financial ruin, but that doesn't mean Barb should remain her sole concern. Where is her existential fear of the upside down itself? You know, "That... place." Why does she so lack perspective?
When Jonathan and Nancy were in custody, Dr Owens (after prying weirdly into their relationship) made a solid case for secrecy: if competing governments discovered the upside down, they might try to replicate the gate, exascerbating the threat. And yet Jonathan and Nancy never discussed this. Instead of the audience seeing Jonathan (matured beyond his years, worldly enough to understand Owens' point, not attached to Barb) and Nancy (single-minded to a fault and seeking alcohol to cope with the resultant anxiety) work their way through the problem and figure out how to be heroes for themselves, as is the source of their romantic tension, we got to see a useless, smarmy, creepy asshole with a beard shove himself between them, do a bit of the thinking in their place, and then smash their faces clumsily together "Now kiss" style, and it worked. Gag.
There is no justification for that walking turnoff Bauman to have existed in the story at all. He got between Jonathan and Nancy just to violently shove them toward consummation, by magically "knowing" them both (his analyses were bullshit) and telling them to fuck in his house. Were the writers trying to show how smart he is by making him magically know things? I imagine that's what intelligence looks like to stupid people. Like the Pickle Rick therapist, this magical creep came off as nothing but an egotistical writer's self-insert. Rather than developing the romance, the writer/s chose to nullify it by inserting a character who amounted to story antimatter. What's that Wildean line? I remember: "The very essence of romance is uncertainty." This guy ruined Jonathan and Nancy. They could, and should, have done all of this developing themselves by interacting experimentally with the plot and with one another, developing in ways that don't fit into a few judgmental pop-psych labels. Good romance develops subtextually and ambiguously, portraying love as more powerful than conscious choice.
Why didn't Jonathan and Nancy take Bauman to task for taking advantage of the Hollands' grief? Why did they never confront him for being such a generally terrible person? Bauman's role, at best, should have been as an obstacle, maybe a clownish and weirdly skeptical nutcase. For example, if Nancy couldn't even convince him, the crazy conspiracy theorist, of her story, how would she convince the public? Now Nancy and Jonathan have to come up with their own plan, getting more romantically entwined in the process. Having suffered more in life, Jonathan can be assumed to have a better arsenal of coping strategies, so why didn't he share them with Nancy? Music is better for soothing unhappiness than alcohol. He could have helped her make a mix tape for Barb. What was with the weird vodka thing anyway? The J/N plot skirted around trauma-related alcoholism without confronting it.
I did like Elle's ghost costume, that was funny. Though I wish she had snuck out for Halloween, or was even given permission to by Hopper, since wearing a disguise in a crowd of disguises would be pretty safe. "You can go if you promise not to talk to anyone. Not even Mike. Do we have a deal?" Then she would have had to stop herself talking to her friends when she saw them trick-or-treating, which would have been a bit heart wrenching.
Only stupid people fight with children the way Hopper fought with Eleven. Hopper is a leader. An intelligent leader would come to his senses very soon, almost immediately, after unnecessarily ramping up authoritarian punishments on a telekenetic teen girl. He is authoritative, not authoritarian and certainly not abusive. Do the writers no longer know the difference? Why did Hopper become abusive? Why did he get carried away by his emotions so easliy? Where did his heroism go? If Hopper and Eleven really did have to get in that huge fight, it should have ended with Eleven seriously and unnecessarily injuring him, perhaps just as he was coming to his senses, keeping their conflict suitably nuanced rather than ending with Hopper as a villain and Elle as a victim. Elle has been a victim, but she is not a victim anymore. She must grow by making real mistakes.
Will's suffering -- the foggy face rape, the constant terror, the burning and convulsions -- isn't mere drama, it's torture porn. He has suffered much more than the story requires, stealing away from him any opportunity to develop through bravery. In fact, it seems the thing Will is learning in the story is that bravery is useless. That's his development arc: to learn to stop bothering to try to develop. Imagine Nancy, Eleven or Max in Will's place. Could you watch this extremely invasive, dehumanizing suffering happening to a girl? Could you stand it without getting angry? Probably not. Why is it being done to a boy?
My fannish sense is tingling: I smell sadistic female writers getting off on the torture. Same with Hopper getting sucked passively into the ground by rapey tentacles in the tunnels. Why else did they do that to him? He didn't find anything important down there to drive the plot. His getting lost achieved nothing. It might seem like he summoned down the men in white, meaning that at least his actions inadvertantly led to Will getting "burned" to push the plot forward, but no. The men in white showed up to save the three adults at that place and time by pure coincidence. Were the writers punishing Hopper for being mean to Elle? Was that the point?
Fast rescues are bad, guys. Eleven escaping the upside down almost immediately after killing the Demogorgon was cheap. Her spying on Mike through the window, and being seen, nullifying Mike's doubt-vs-longing inner conflict without payoff (so much for Wilde's romantic uncertainty once again), was cheap. Hopper getting saved from the tunnels, and then his 'rescuers' getting miraculously saved by the men in white (the three adult stooges would have been stuck down there together otherwise), was cheap.
Where is Eleven's personality? She is an abused child. She had personal responsibility psychologically beaten into her to control her, and the thing about that is that Brenner, as cruelly calculating as he was, had a point. S1 established that she is dangerous and she knows it. The lab's control-focused conditioning didn't leave much room for her to be a healthy self-directed individual, so she became plagued by excessive self-stymieing guilt enabling occasional uncontrolled outbursts, so that in a sense she was dangerous because she didn't believe in herself. Mike's S1 "You're not the monster, you saved me," was an open door, but that doesn't mean she's just magically dropped the traumatic conditioning. Especially considering how rightly terrified she was of the Bad Men in S1, Eleven should have been much more internally conflicted while hiding in Hopper's shack, wishing to see the people she loves, wishing to do girl things and have fun, but genuinely afraid to endanger innocent people. To put Eleven in the role of prisoner and Hopper in the role of prison guard was oversimple and boring.
Eleven's jealous attack on Max was stupid -- she's a better person than an average petty teen girl, because her life experiences have given her perspective. The boys showed her last season what jealousy does to friendships. We've already been through this theme with these characters. It's also a cheap trick to pull in the narrative, as it was based on pure misunderstanding: Mike doesn't like Max at all. There wasn't actually anything for Eleven to be jealous of. This rendered the conflict meaningless. And also, if Eleven's arc is to learn to better control her powers, her pull on the skateboard should have been an accident, a failure to control herself, and in her surprise she would run away.
What was with Mike's understated reaction? The moment Max said "magnet," he should have impulsively torn off searching for Elle, calling her name at least once before self-consciousness kicked in to shut him up. And because he had already just mentioned Elle, this would have piqued Max's curiosity, spurring her to start investigating independently. Max has the vocabulary of a writer and the skeptical tenacity of an investigator. She could have been a natural investigative journalist, an April O'Neil, a Torchwood-pilot Gwen. Instead we got a bitter whiner who complained about being invited to the boys' club, and then complained about having no place in the boys' club, instead of making herself a place in the boys' club.
Sadly, Max is flat. Because the truth was kept from her for so long, stopping her from participating in the meat of the story (not that there was much), she spent most of her screen time being grouchy, boring and repetitive, and absolutely failing to develop. Why is Lucas chasing her around so much, from a story perspective? Okay, he has a crush on her. So what? What exactly, beyond an advanced vocabulary with no established parallel hobby, does she have to offer the party in their mission? Wait, what is their mission? Why isn't that clearly defined?
Max's skill in games is what brought her and the boys together. Why didn't they ever invite her to play at the arcade with them? Why didn't their relationships start developing through that? The boys' competitiveness against her vs their desire to impress her would have quickly put some genuine heart into the story here, establishing varying dynamics and connecting Max meaningfully to the boys, so we could move on with the plot. Video games should have been used as an explanatory analogy in a way that paralleled S1's use of D&D, with the mind flayer controlling Will the way players control a gaming avatar, but instead of using the opportunity the writers basically namedropped vidyagames for nostalgia cred and abandoned them, leaving the mechanics of Will's teleportation and possession completey unaddressed. Why weren't the party and Max brought together by being bullied together? And where were the mean-girl-bullies for skateboarding tomboy Max? Were the writers reluctant to show girls being definitively mean?
When Max entered the arcade to see the "out of order" sign, Lucas should have run up and pulled it off the machine and told the truth. Because when he told her "Friends don't lie," and she said "Well then what's this?" about the sign, she was right. Lucas betrayed his own ethics. Because he "had to"? He didn't have to. He could have been brave and honest instead. He could have started with proof, knowing she would demand some, instead of slowing down the plot artificially. He is not a dumb kid, and in season 1 he took initiative. He was out in the field investigating, working, gathering evidence; he was the type of guy that an investigative journalist type of girl might be both threatened and fascinated by. Just saying.
Billy is also flat and unbelievable. He looks 25. What's he still doing in high school? And he's a sike-out. By hiding his and Max's home life for so long, the narration implied that there was some plot-relevant secret to it, like maybe they were connected to the robbers in the beginning (Remember them? By episode 6 I didn't). But no, Billy was just a flat jerk (with a hilariously stereotypical mean dad). Invulnerable, uninvolved, repetitive, boring. Unnecessary. "We're stuck here," he and Max agreed once. Why are they stuck there? How on Earth is a headstrong terror like Billy letting anything stick him anywhere? He's got a nice car, which means he has money (by miraculously holding down a job?), and he loves nothing around him. He has zero attachments in Hawkins. Why hasn't he left? If two-thirds of the way through a story it's not clear why the new characters are even in it, you've got a problem.
Baby Demogorgon should have eaten Dustin's cat by episode two. We watched these kids deal with a fully-grown Demogorgon last season, and now they're fumbling around after a miniature as the climax approaches? Yawn. We should be seeing the next stage in the Demogorgon species life cycle, not dillydallying around with its varying infancies. And why wasn't Dustin even a little bit sad about the cat? It's as though he knew the cat was only there to prove the baby demogorgon was dangerous and to get his mom out of the way.
I was really looking forward to Dustin and Steve teaming up. Dustin is active and driven intellectually, Steve is active and driven physically, and they're both brash, funny and shameless. That is, they were. I expected a reluctantly endearing, jock-vs-nerd struggle in which they tossed the sidekick role back and forth like a hot potato to establish hierarchy. Instead we got... meh. Nothing much really.
Why is ST2 so focused on the past? Nancy is obsessed with a dead person. Eleven is obsessed with her braindead mother. The boys are chasing around a precursor to a Demogorgon. People continually discuss events that are already over. It's like the show is moving backwards. The characters have become weaker people and the villains have gotten less threatening. The whole thing has degenerated.
Joyce hasn't developed much either. When she yelled at the doctors in the board room after Will was psychically burned alive, MY BOY MY BOY MY BOY, she became an unflattering caricature of herself. She has all of her emotional intensity and 'power' with nowhere near her previous intellectual drive or underdog position. In season one she solved puzzles and yelled at people for not believing her. In season two her new boyfriend solves the puzzles, freeing her up to yell at people full time.
Nancy used to figure things out herself. Now she's got a smarmy creeper to do it for her. Joyce used to figure things out for herself. Now she's got a normie boyfriend to do it for her. Smells like feminist entryism. This is what feminism does by seeking to privilege women: it creates stories with magically 'smart' women who have no contextually meaningful flaws, and have no opportunities to fail or succeed because they have men to do the work for them. What does this create? Stupid, flat women whose stupidity is glossed over and ignored by a narrative that magically helps them achieve and dominate. This has now happened to both Joyce and Nancy, and somewhat to Eleven.
These mistakes are largely female-style, feminist-style mistakes. The problem seems to be that while in the current sociopolitical atmosphere men are constantly having criticism levied at them for their weaknesses, women are not. Are male writers afraid to tell female writers when their ideas are bad? Are they afraid of being attacked for "mansplaining" and suchlike? Between this and what's happened to Rick and Morty, it really, really looks like it. What a tragic mess.
I really believed in Stranger Things. I can put my money where my mouth is here: I put a few months into a novella-length fanfic. I hunted down Nancy's 14 karat gold ballet slipper necklace to its source, so now an exact replica is one of the only valuable pieces of jewelry I own (others have tried and failed). I started drawing portraits again after years of artistic stagnation. I made a subreddit and paid to advertise it. I curated a bunch of fan art. I even found more genuine love and believability within my own origial fiction ideas than ever before. The Duffer Brothers, born the same year as me (1984, a magical year, the year of ST2 and Orwell's novel), having grown up in the same atmosphere as me, were a true and deep inspiration for me creatively. Everyone else who threw themselves into ST1 really inspired me too.
And now this.
What a tragic mess.
Time to go give out some candy.
=========
Nov 2nd:
Well crack my knuckles and call me outraged, I've finished season two.
Burn episode seven. Burn it to the ground and eject the ashes into outer space. To get a handle on her own darkness and power Eleven should have annihilated a demodog to teleport herself into the upside down, but instead she hopped onto a bus to hang out with a squad of edgelord comic book illustrations. The punk squad was terrible. Why were they devoted to Eight? Did she "help" them by genuinely being a positive force in their lives, or by manipulating them the way she manipulated Elle using visions of Brenner? Is this a group of devoted friends or a cult? The squad members' vulnerabilities and braveries were not demonstrated, so they never became people. Why write a whole squad? Why not limit it to a significant other, and use that person as an effective mediator to test Eight's claims against her true effect on people? The ethics of Eight's powers and personality were not explored. Why did she use deep fears (spiders, Brenner) to manipulate the people she liked, and then innocuous barriers (collapsing overpass, giant wall) to manipulate police? That is, why was she kinder to the cops than to her own friends? And if Eight had to be foreign, shouldn't she have been Russian rather than Indian to flesh out the show's exploration of the Cold War?
I would have loved to see Eleven venture into the upside down to find another numbered lab victim (or several) in there instead, a powerful yet sick and corrupted kid who might serve partly as an antagonist, partly as a mentor, partly as a bridge to Will's affliction. And also perhaps as a warning, showing what long-term possession might do to Will, as well as what might happen to a psychic kid like Eleven if she made a mistake trying to defeat the mind flayer.
Interesting that Elle didn't check in on Will at all throughout the season the way she did when he was missing. It's almost as though a ton of artificial tension would have evaporated the moment she tapped into Will again, forcing the writers to get their hands dirty and maybe even break a nail. Eleven just showed up at the Byers' house when she was needed by the plot (though the characters had been needing her for a long time), without anyone wishing for her or talking about her or searching for her, or expressing that there was a need for her. Burn that slow-motion entrance shot and eject those ashes into outer space too, please.
Mike and Eleven did not have a single meaningful interaction. Puppydog eyes only. Lame. Jonathan and Nancy didn't have a meaningful interaction after their field trip either. They didn't even speak to one another. WTF? Why were these close relationships undermined and ignored?
Max was useless before she stopped Billy. It should not have taken her until the final episode to do something useful. And all she did was save her friends from the guy who came into the story alongside her, resolving a peripheral conflict with no meaningful link to the central plot.
Why did Steve tell Nancy he was a "shitty boyfriend"? He wasn't. Why did he get the living shit kicked out of him even worse than last season? He didn't deserve it, it didn't develop any characters, and how did it serve the plot? By putting Max behind the wheel of Billy's car? Unnecessary. The kids could have disobeyed Steve anyway.
We learned when Steve fought Jonathan that he cares about fighting fair. This part of Steve's character should have been quickly and clearly reestablished; then he would beat Billy (a known cheater) in a fair fight, and so it would be very clear what a dirty and desperate move it was when Billy proceeded to hit him with the plate. The boys should then have jumped in to help Steve, preventing him getting so horribly beaten. Lucas getting hurt can now be what spurs Max to use the syringe on Billy, finally making the Max/Lucas romance a little bit interesting (the "stalker" thing is bitchy, not endearing). Rather than getting knocked out (agency removed), Steve develops gratitude and respect for the kids for mostly saving his ass, and so they can now convince him to accept their plan to set a fire in the tunnel. They try to take Billy's car, but Steve can't get it to start. Say the car has already been established as Billy's baby, hacked so that "Nobody can start this car but me," Biff Tannen style -- except Max has been paying attention during all that time spent in his car, and so while Steve is messing around under the hood and about to give up, she makes the car work, earning the right to drive and refusing to get out of the driver's seat. Or something. My point is this whole part needed more agency and growth. These changes would have elevated everyone rather than dragging Steve down and emasculating him. The way it played out, the kids used Billy's villainy to their own advantage rather than earning their freedom by defeating it. That is not heroic. It also might have been nice to see some degree of redemption for Billy, but by the end he still has no idea what's going on in Hawkins. BTW, Steve's wounds would not have healed up so perfectly in a month. And the developing "mommy Steve" fan fad is nauseating.
Did Eleven see through the fourth wall and realize what a useless character Max is? Is this why she so shallowly refused to shake her hand? Seriously though, they're on the same team. Why is Eleven being such a petty and smallminded asshole? In S1 she admired Nancy and needed Joyce, and she just left a bonding situation with another girl, so why is she having problems with other women now? Why isn't Eleven self-aware and conflicted about her jealous feelings? Why didn't anyone else notice the jealousy and try to alleviate it? I don't get this. It looks like random unresolved ugliness for no apparent reason. Or is it not jealousy? Does Eleven hate Max just because Mike hates Max for unclarified reasons? It seemed early on that Mike's reason for disliking Max might be that he feared she would replace Eleven. Once Eleven came back, shouldn't she have had a hand in helping Mike accept Max by promising not to disappear and be replaced? But none of this was explored or resolved.
What is with Mike's hyper-emotional outbursts? Explosive personality does not equal tantruming baby. When he got loud in S1 it was because he had something to say and he articulated it clearly. That's what made him so audacious and effective. Why did he lose his mind over the demodogs' attack on the men in white? Why did he run physically into the guards? Why did he have to be restrained? Was he in love with them? He could have just yelled the truth at them. Same goes for his confrontation with Hopper. That screaming tantrum was emasculating, melodramatic and unconvincing. Mike should have had an argument to make. S1 Mike would rightly be ashamed and disgusted by S2 Mike's ridiculous behaviour.
I'm not a fan of "demodogs." I don't like the term and I don't like that they were doglike in the first place. Likening the monsters to a friendly domesticated animal rather than a wild predator removes their scariness. Making it possible for anything from the upside down to become anything like a pet or a friend was a serious mistake. Last season we had 'bear' and 'shark.' This season... how about pirhana? Snake? Wolf? Nope, dog. Coming next season: demohamsters and demokittens. Dustin's excessive repetitions of 'demodogs' outlived the humor of it.
I did laugh when Dustin's mindflayer analogy fell apart at the zombies. Though Lucas's correction, that when Dustin said 'metaphor' he meant 'analogy,' should have been made instead by either Mike, a storyteller, or Max, a vocab queen. Imagine if they had both blurted it out at the same time! Awkward. Making Lucas, an awesome active field guy, better at vocab than bookish Dustin, is a really shallow way to make him look smart. S1 Lucas is more world-smart and Dustin is more book-smart. The way Lucas saved all their asses from the bad men in S1 proved that the party needs the diversity he brings.
That Will's secret message was "close gate" was insultingly lazy. Of course the ultimate goal would be to close the gate. This was so insanely obvious I feel like a joke was played on the audience. Hey Superman, how's this for a climactic reveal: "beat Lex." Hey Mulder, Mulder I got a secret for you, you'd never have thought of this on your own: "pursue truth." Littlefoot, I know this'll be hard for you to accept three quarters of the way into The Land Before Time but you're gonna have to reach the "great valley." The heroes should have been expressly seeking to close the gate very early in the season, within the first two or three episodes. Will's morse-code message should instead have been one of two things, or if possible, two in one: a new piece of information about the upside down without which the gate could not be closed, and/or a new piece of infomation about Will's possession without which he could not survive an exorcism. Will's brain/body should have been a battling ground for Eleven vs monster, and his use of morse code should have signified Eleven's influence, as she and Hopper were the ones using morse code earlier in the season.
This season had far too much discussion of action after the action had taken place and tension had already dissipated. Discussion of action should come before action, should determine action, should be imbued with the tension of impending action. Imagine if the team, realizing that the gate needed to be closed, concluded on their own that Elle was probably the only one who could do it, because they're not stupid and Elle already told the boys that she was the one who opened it. Imagine if Hopper had to ask Mike to contact Eleven, and in so doing would have to admit that he had been keeping Elle hidden, and would have to appeal to Mike in order to get help summoning her. Hopper and Mike would then be forced by the plot to work out their differences (why didn't Hopper trust Mike?) and come to a meaningful compromise about Eleven, you know, "halfway happy." Something like that. My point is, I don't want to see characters talk about things after they've happened, when there's no more tension, stuck in the past without using it to build the future. It removes their agency and weakens the gravity of their choices.
Hopper's after-the-fact confession to Eleven, that his fear of losing another girl was the source of his anger and stupidity, was somewhat convincing as a human failing, but not convincing as Hopper's failing. Last season, his fear of losing a child empowered his heroism. He was disciplined and mature enough to use his fear to actually prevent the fearful outcome. How did he lose that ability? Why has a strength become a weakness? Why now does the fear and anger cause him to lose a child when before it helped him save one? When afraid of losing her, how did he forget to be afraid of scaring her away? Why has he become a weaker person than he was last season, despite having succeeded in saving Will?
I can't believe Eleven was able to close the gate. First she was underused, then overpowered. Extremely overpowered. And how did she get so powerful? By being told to "use your anger?" That's no good. In S1, the emotion behind Eleven's more extreme successes was multifaceted: she was empowered by love, necessity, anger, determination, protectiveness, responsibility, self-assertion, guilt and timing. It's dangerous to reduce that to a single emotion like "anger" because it reduces the character's complexity and realism. She was also empowered by carbohydrates, not just feels. Why doesn't she need fuel anymore? Why didn't we get to see her eggo dependency addressed by brainy characters (cough, Dustin) and extrapolated into a superfuel that would help her get strong enough to close the gate? Bonus: it would have given Nancy's "pure fuel" joke some punch (badum-chh).
Anger wasn't conceptualized thoughtfully for Eleven. It's easier to get deeply angry at a concrete being, like a human torturer, than at an abstract or alien thing like the upside down. When angry at people, Eleven was only able to shift a train car a little. When angry at the upside down, she closed an interdimensional rift the size of a skyscraper. She was exponentially stronger when she should have been weaker. Why? What made her so much stronger this time? Her arc this season should have involved her more in Hawkins and in the upside down, so she could work through her fear of her own power by confronting the horrifying nature of the upside down as a proxy in order to effectively harness both. Negative emotion is a wild card, an uncontrolled bomb. Using it impulsively (rather than balancing it with other parts of the self), causes harm. This is why Eleven hurt Lucas in S1. As far as I can tell it's how she opened the gate too. Negative emotion alone isn't a strength, it's a weakness that allows evil to enter the world, and Eleven's use of it degrades her character. It should not have enabled her to close the gate.
Also, Eleven chose to rebel against and abandon her mentor, Eight (I think. When Eleven smacked the gun from Eight's hand, was that an impulse or a decision?). Why is Eleven now using that same mentor's advice to beat the big baddie? It's thematically confused. Was Eight wise and trustworthy or not? If Eight was wise and trustworthy, why didn't Eleven ask for her help in Hawkins? Ditching the punks suggests Eleven rejected their revenge and rage-based paradigm, so why is she now empowered by embracing it? Shouldn't she have been made her strongest yet by discovering, during her attack on the gate, that some other emotion, like love, was more powerful than anger and hate? Is that too cliche? Too bad, it's true. It's okay to put a cliche like that at the core of a story. Just make the other elements relatively new and surprising. S1 pulled that off excellently. And harnessing anger for supernatural strength is still cliche anyway. Why didn't the writers seem aware of this "use your anger" parallel to Star Wars after StarWarsing all over S1?
What's with the excessive nosebleeds? In S2 Eleven gets one practically every time she uses her powers. What do they mean? Don't they signify that Eleven is hurting herself? Shouldn't they start to go away once she gets healthy control of her powers? Since anger is self-harming, shouldn't she have stopped getting nosebleeds once she embraced love and devotion as the basis of her strength? But I guess that's not happening. She'll continue succeeding by warring with her own better nature, and getting nosebleeds. It's so confused.
I was hoping we might learn about how Eleven and the upside down work. Why was she able to almost but not completely pull Will out of the upside down in S1, and how could that power be utilized further? What was that pink barrier in the wall? Why did simple carbs strengthen her powers? Is the upside down limited to Hawkins, is it a parallel to the whole universe, or is it somewhere in between and growing? How was Will able to manipulate the Christmas lights from the upside down? Whatever that ability was, shouldn't he have tried to use it again during his flashbacks, revealing it to the audience? This season was sorely lacking in competent technicals. I think the reason Eleven was underused and then overpowered was because a failure to explore technicals stopped the writers from having a sense of what her limitations were and how powerful she was. Sci-fi has been replaced mostly with feels. And then when the story did bother trying to get technical they botched it: Bob needing to write a program to restart the power at the lab wasn't believable. That's not how programming works. The program would already be there.
I don't understand what the writers were thinking in the Jonathan-Nancy sphere. They went out of their way to use an unlikeable, throwaway character to nullify all J/N romantic tension, flattening their interactions, as if J/N weren't wanted in the story anymore -- and yet for some reason the writers kept them around until the end. The writers shot themselves in the foot here.
Jonathan was completely emasculated. Why did Nancy choose him so easily? He did nothing lovable. He did nothing, period. His character climax was to cling to Nancy like a whiny, inarticulate girl while Joyce was torturing Will. Why the hell was Joyce torturing Will? I understand she's desperate and headstrong, but why didn't it come up (before Jonathan started melodramatically screaming "you're killing him!") that the creature could easily have killed Will on the way out of his body? This was such an insane, reckless risk to take. Why didn't they talk about it beforehand? I think I know why, and it's the same reason a lot of action wasn't discussed until after it occured: the plot couldn't stand up to the characters' scrutiny and the writers didn't know how to fix it. Going into the exorcism, no one knew how to succeed without killing Will, and so they were kept from discussing the danger.
The dynamics during Will's exorcism were backwards. The way in which Joyce took the lead made it seem like she saved Will by going crazy. Joyce was much more weak and vulnerable than Jonathan: she had just lost Bob, while Jonathan had just gained Nancy. Joyce should have been paralyzed or made antagonistic by panic, unable to continue hurting Will, unable to risk losing another person she loves, requiring Jonathan to take the dominant position. Nancy would then mediate by using Barb to relate to Joyce's loss, and would lovingly help Jonathan keep a cool head by being less attached to Will than Jonathan is. Surely, with no better strategy to aid them, the way to get Will through the exorcism would be to help him stay calm and strong by reminding him who he is, the way they got the morse code out of him. Isn't helping Will assert his individual identity one of Jonathan's fortes? Charlie Heaton seemed hesitant to behave the way he did, as though he knew how degradingly out of character this was for Jonathan.
Managing this situation maturely, admiring one another's strengths and filling in for one another's weaknesses, should have been how Jonathan and Nancy fully realized they were in serious grownup love. The uncertainty should have been ramping up until this point. And then: first kiss celebratory and impulsive yet understated when Will is saved, and no really romantic kiss until they escape out back together at the Snow Ball if at all, and no need for implied intercourse since Nancy should be anxious about being a slut, which I thought was part of the reason she stayed with Steve. Barb didn't want her sleeping with Steve, then the night she slept with Steve, Barb was killed. Naturally, between Barb's death, feeling exposed after having lost her virginity, and the slut-graffiti, Nancy should have some sexual hangups to work though, which should have been a way for Jonathan to differentiate himself from Steve. Jonathan and Nancy should not have slept together so quickly.
I wish Nancy had shot that smarm factory Bauman in the face the moment he presumed a right to opine about their private longings. What a thoroughly nauseating man. Between the degrading "shared trauma" line and the abject creepery of the "pull out" ... thing, I was figuratively vomiting with rage. Was that supposed to be funny? Ick. It seemed like Bauman was trying to use his position of authority and inexplicable trust to get a threesome with them (that breakfast music!), and then was furious about being rejected when they left. Ick.
Melodrama replaced thoughtfulness in ST2, especially for the male characters. It was important for Jonathan to grow into a stronger man this season, but the writers dropped the ball on him so completely that they artificially weakened him instead. Hopper, Steve, Mike and Will were similarly artificially and needlessly emasculated (Perhaps the popularity of hateful shit like this has something to do with it). At the same time, Eleven, Joyce and Nancy were artifically strengthened. Newbie Max is 95% flawless while newbie Billy is 95% flaw. Mr Wheeler has moved from comical stoicism to overt jerkhood, and Mrs Wheeler is his victim, sexually liberated by Billy's flirtations. Dustin's mother is single and Lucas's mother is "never wrong." Inexplicably, anger weakened Hopper yet strengthened Eleven. The power of love in season one has been replaced by the power of women in season two, and this has destroyed what made Stranger Things so special.
Will's unexplained survival has rendered the big baddie, as scary as it looked hovering over the school in the final shot, totally unthreatening, as it had no means of defending itself from a few space heaters; and the fact that it had a conceivable mind, with intentions that Will could grasp, had already reduced its scariness a great deal. A scary monster should not be so easy to understand, especially not from the inside, not by a normal human mind. Eleven has a special mind; she should have been involved in this. Eight's powers would also have been useful. The "mind flayer" used in Dustin's analogy was clearly based on Cthulu, but Will didn't seem possessed by anything like Cthulu. Cthulu's baby sister maybe. Or one of his baby sister's toys.
The whole possession thing should have been much weirder and scarier. Imagine if Will didn't actually suffer at all once possessed, but acted incredibly strange and erratic while being uncharacteristically fearless. Remember how he started off the season so adamant about not being babied? What if that attitude continued after his possession, hijacked by the mind flayer as a defense strategy, so that Will would continually deny and rationalize away his own freakish behaviour? What if Will's PTSD went away? It would leave those close to him, especially Joyce, on edge waiting for the other shoe to drop, certain that Will was possessed by a threatening force without having concrete evidence of it. This would gradually infect other characters with Will's anxieties while he seemed immune, putting reality eerily in question in ways that would resurrect and intensify part of S1's conflict, the problem of conviction: now even Will doesn't believe Will is in supernatural trouble.
More abstraction was sorely needed to exascerbate everyone's existential terror, but there was hardly any existential terror despite many available sources. Why was Eleven's mother abandoned to live in that memory loop? She's stuck in a permanent nightmare. She's in hell. Why didn't anyone, not even her own sister, freak out about this and consider putting her out of her misery? Throughout the season, characters lost their minds when they should have been collected and were collected when they should have been losing their minds.
I bet Eight could fix Terry's brain loop by making her see something else. Maybe she'll do it next season, though I wish it was already taken care of so I wouldn't have to tolerate the punk squad anymore (though, as with Rick and Morty, I'm not sure I want to bother watching the next season anyway). Imagine if Eleven had discovered the nature of Eight's power via her mother's memory loop and some supplemental lab documentation. She would then stop Becky from delivering Terry a lethal dose of secobarbital in order to kidnap Terry and run away with her, hoping Eight might stop the suffering, exhausting herself by having to use her telekenesis to lug her mom along on the journey. That could have been beautiful. And perhaps Becky would give antagonistic chase, only to have her mind changed by one of Eight's visions when she caught up.
I wish the new scientists at the lab had come steadfastly to an incorrect conclusion about the upside down, enforcing a new oppressive status quo based in an ivory tower authoritarian egoism, for Will's possession to disprove and for the heroes to defeat. If only Joyce and Mike had been given something to yell about. I wish Bob had hacked into the lab's systems, and Mike and/or Joyce had picked some locks, to find information that the scientists were hiding because it didn't suit their desired conclusions. I wish Mike had been given a chance to rant about the importance of honesty in science. I wish the scientists had any concrete beliefs at all. Instead they boringly twiddled their thumbs. Imagine if the prestige-driven scientists only shared information that made the gate look benign, and hid the information that proved it dangerous enough to justify its closure, hypocritically doing the exact thing Dr. Owens feared the Russians would do, microcosmically demonstrating the meaningless and irresponsible perpetuation of the Cold War. Owens could have been an obstacle by being naively good natured, dogmatically faithful in the 'science' presented to him, and could still have ended up a good guy by having his mind changed by the heroes' evidence before the end.
I wish Eleven had gotten a chance to tell Nancy the same thing she told Mike: "I'm the monster," or "I brought the monster," or just cut right to it with, "I killed Barbara." I wish Nancy had discovered that an innocent was partially responsible for Barb's death, and had helped Eleven forgive herself by forgiving her. I wish Nancy been forced to grapple with the possibility that vengefulness is too simple to produce justice in a complicated world. It would also have been cute for Nancy to be the one to give Eleven a makeover, during which Eleven would take the reins from Nancy's hands, either physically or verbally, to give herself a dark and "pretty" look, rather than what she got in S2: a dark and messy-ugly look chosen for her by someone else.
There was too much Dustin. He did too much by himself. But he's a fan favorite, so he was given a ton of thought and screentime as fanservice at the expense of the larger story. Big brother Steve and big sister Nancy? Come on. Sure it was cute, but after so many other characters were undermined and underdeveloped, it was also artificial. That he kept a hammy air about him, practically winking to a loving audience all the time, didn't help.
What Will went through this season was so much more acutely torturous than last season. Lost in the upside down, he had some control over his situation. He could hide. This time, there was no escape and no agency at all. I can't believe he was able to go to the Snow Ball a mere month later. He should be in psychiatric care. But I guess having an upside-down Cthulu rape your brain through every oriface of your face while you repeatedly experience being burned alive for extended periods (including by your own loving family!) isn't so damaging for a sweet and sensitive child after all.
Nancy, Jonathan and Eleven should not have left Hawkins. No one should have been able to leave Hawkins without severe pushback. Separating the characters stilted the story, and their expansive freedom proved the authorities to be no threat after all. Where the hell was the CIA? Lucas and Steve were expressly certain they could be killed for making a wrong move, and yet the threat was never demonstrated. Government agents didn't kill, or even credibly threaten to kill, a single person. Remember Benny? That's how it's done, kids. I had been expecting the government to become a huge threat in ST2, especially since the season takes place in eighty-four. What's the worst thing the authorities did? They stalked Jonathan and Nancy in the park just to take them on a friendly tour of Hawkins lab, and they artificially ramped up drama by torturing Will longer than necessary when torching a tentacle in front of him. Jonathan and Nancy should have been scared silly by multiple roadblocks when trying to leak that tape. Bauman really should have been killed. Not just because I hate him, but for the sake of the story, while Jonathan and Nancy were sleeping in his basement. BLAM, wake up kids! Imagine if shit had actually gotten real.
All of that said, it's naive to think the cassette tape leak (which the authorities completely failed to intercept for some reason) would be effective anyway. In a believable world, an alleged chemical leak would not have shut down Hawkins Lab. It would have put the lab under investigation, most likely by the same powers (cough, CIA) that enabled its operaton. The bad men would find themselves not guilty of any wrongdoing and would continue operations. That a bit of news reporting was able to shut the lab down only proves the CIA was never a threat in the first place.
I'm amazed at how little was done with eight hours of running time. All threats -- the authorities, the mind flayer, the gate -- turned out to be paper tigers, giving the heroes little to do but grow self-involved. The whole season came off as a bluff, except for Bob's death by demodogs, which still should have been scarier.
I haven't discussed Bob yet. He was likable but boring and way too longwinded. I should not have been so glad to see him go. After his long, boring speech to Joyce outside her workplace, and then Joyce getting his technical help with the video camera and hanging up on him before he could set up a date with her, I thought that meant Joyce was bored of him too. He was so boring that I thought it was on purpose. I don't think it was made clear whether he would have been able to fit in with the Byers family in the long run because his sentimental speeches were never properly challenged by Jonathan (I mean ST1 critical human Jonathan, not ST2 waterworks zombie Jonathan). Had Bob really proven himself by standing up to Jonathan's suspicions, we would not have had to endure so many overlong sentimentalities (conflict feeds brevity), and we would have felt the loss more concretely when he died.
A couple more things: Why were the trees green at Christmastime in Indiana? What is going on there? And how was Hawkins Middle (of nowhere) able to afford such a lavish Snow Ball? It's a small town. Guess they cashed in some more of those fanservice bucks.
K that's it. I have WriMo to do.
or I'll have to start fabricating rape threats on twitter to pay the rent.
Edit Nov 6: It sure doesn't take much to get a block from Stranger Things writer/editor -- and lover of all things #RAW -- Jesse Nickson-Lopez.
