I was aware that Stranger Things was a massive hit around the world, but hadn't really felt the urge to watch it until a few weeks ago. I finally found some free time and decided to hit play.
My first impression of Season 1 was that this show is simply Twin Peaks Jr. I got that impression because the opening arc is about the disappearance of a young person in a small town and everyone's reactions to it. In the '80s. That comparison bugged me for the entire first season and actually seriously hindered my enjoyment of it - measuring anything against Twin Peaks is a recipe for disappointment.
After a short break I tackled Season 2. I hated it. Well, most of it. I was literally yelling at my screen 'I DON'T CARE' after every forced cliffhanger. I very nearly gave up after episode 4, which was the lowest point of the Dart storyline, the frustrated Eleven storyline, the possessed Will storyline, the hysterical Joyce storyline 2.0, and many more. Christ, I hated that Dart storyline.
After powering through the second season and enjoying the last couple of episodes far more, I had high hopes for season 3, which I had seen screenshots from and I could tell had a completely different tone. I loved it. Season 3 was one of my favourite TV watching experiences ever. Redemption.
Here's what I thought about some specific aspects of the show:
The Good
Casting
The casting on this show was flawless. Every single character was injected with life by their actor, and you could tell the showrunners allowed the actors to grow their own characters in a way that felt totally natural. The standouts throughout the whole show were David, Millie, and Gaten. Other actors improved vastly as the show went on after shaky starts (Caleb, Joel, Winona)
New characters
Usually when a show introduces new characters, they're not as beloved as the original cast. Stranger things averts this over and over again. See: Casting.
Set design + props
Stranger Things is nostalgia porn. It does not pretend to be anything else. Evoking the mid '80s is impossible without laborious attention to detail and this show nails it at every turn. My guess is that the majority of this show's fans have little to no memories of the '80s, but the way this show fetishizes objects, colour palettes, camera angles, and show compositions signals to us very strongly that these are icons of a golden age - one that we desperately long to be a part of even if we haven't experienced it. In fact, I'd even be willing to bet that people who had lived through this time don't connect to it as strongly as us millennials and zoomers do. Happy to be proven wrong though!
Pop culture references
In Season 1 I groaned at every not-so-subtle reference to an '80s film or TV show. In Season 2 I was indifferent. By Season 3 I was starting to become impressed by just how dedicated they were to the craft of these references. It had crossed the line twice. It had become art.
Genre whiplash
Season 1 and 2 position themselves as a very serious show, with scary moments, heartwarming moments, and funny moments. There's a lot of space between those moments. I cheered aloud when I realised that Season 3 had eliminated the space between those moments. Season 3 is ONLY side-splitting comedy, heartwarming (or -breaking) drama, and terrifying horror. I know a lot of people mourn the change in tone in Season 3, but I celebrated.
Do you know what Season 3 is? It's Thor: Ragnarok. The movie that focused on what people love about Thor movies and jettisoned everything else. The movie that embraced its comic book origins and stopped trying to be realistic. Season 3 did that. It finally realised that the Stranger Things universe allows for literally anything to happen - you can't break the 'rules' of this universe when it barely has any! It went balls-to-the-wall. It gleefully lurched from genre to genre and from setpiece to setpiece. Which brings me to...
Setpieces
Season 3 was kind of like a short story collection. It smashed together a bunch of scenes that logically don't belong together and weaved a story out of them. By the second half of the season I was all-in on every single thing that got thrown my way. Tense showdown in a mirror maze? I'm there. A Soviet comrade discovering the 'American dream' in a small-town festival? I'm down. An abomination tearing up a neon-soaked mall after-hours? More of this. Seasons 1 and 2 had setpieces too, but they spent too long getting to them. Season 3 was all setpiece.
The Meh
Joyce
Now, Joyce redeemed herself in Season 3, but for the vast majority of the show, Joyce's purpose is to frenetically yell people's names. 'WIIIIILLL!!! TETSUUUOOOO! KANEDAAAA' I was so done by Season 2. Even though I thought she got some awesome moments in Season 3, overall I think the writers have done her dirty. She needs a major comeback in Season 4.
Lucas
This one is partly the writers fault, and partly Caleb's inexperience. In the first two seasons the writers don't really know what to do with him (other than throw him at Max in Season 2), and Caleb isn't prepared to make the most of a lacklustre script. Finally in Season 3, I think we say Caleb become comfortable as Lucas, and even through he still didn't have all that much to do, he shone. Writers - you owe Lucas a solid in Season 4.
Music
Blasphemy, I know. I absolutely love certain cues from the Kyle Nixon & Michael Stein composer duo, but others seem like they were thrown together in minutes (which knowing the process of TV scoring is probably exactly what happened). I think the audio editors should have taken a leaf out of the Twin Peaks playbook here and repeated cues far more often. It sounds counter-intuitive, but it actually heightens the emotional connection you get to certain themes. Then the composers can focus on producing fewer, more memorable cues than the huge number they had to do to avoid repeating themselves. The soundtrack of pop songs itself was... Okay? Many of the choices were super-cliched. This show is already ramming visual pop culture references down our throats - they could have used the opportunity to introduce us to some lesser known but even more reeking-of-the-'80s music that is less known by millennials and zoomers.
The Peter Gabriel version of 'Heroes'? Eh. I prefer the Bowie original.
The Terrible
The writing
Sorry guys. But you need to face facts here. The writing in this show is mostly eye-wateringly predictable. Not the story itself, but the way individual scenes are written. If you've seen more than 20 or so movies in your life, you should be able to predict what happens in pretty much every scene as they play out using cliche after cliche. You can even speak the lines along with the actors as they say them even if you haven't seen it before. There's not an overused dialog setup or story beat that this show isn't ready to trot out and expect you to be impressed by. Maybe I'm just spoiled by shows like, you guessed it, Twin Peaks, but I was rolling my eyes out of my head during some of the scenes in this show. Viewers are smart! Treat them like it for once, Stranger Things writers!
Season 2, Episode 7
People rightly trash this episode. Incredibly, it actually deserves the hate it gets. Every part of it makes me angry that it exists.
The (lack of a) sense of mystery
The moment they spelled out for you what happened to Eleven's Mom, my heart sank. This is not a show that draws you into a maddening mystery, and what sucks is it could be. You could have all the zaniness it has right now, but with a huge added quality of a deep and seductive mystery. Instead, the show goes out of its way to show (and tell) you exactly what's going on. Go and watch A Series of Unfortunate events for a lesson on how to better develop a mystery over multiple seasons. A huge missed opportunity.
Don't get me wrong - I truly love this show and I can't wait for Season 4. But my honest opinion of this show is that a large amount of the time I was watching it, I was wishing it was better than it was. If it was a bad show, I wouldn't care, but I do care because this show is so, so close to being great. I mean, parts of it are great, but as a whole it could have been amazing.
If the Duffer Bros. go big for Season 4 (and hopefully 5? Would make sense to end this as the kids reach the end of their adolescence) and don't pull any punches, this show has a chance to redeem its bad points and go down in history as one of the juggernauts of entertainment.
Crossposted from /r/StrangerThings where this review was not well-received.
Submitted August 25, 2019 at 03:20AM by Mitch_NZ https://ift.tt/2U2WqH4
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