Genre: Sci-Fi/Drama/TV
Premise: The kids from Hawkins, Indiana are back, this time with a mysterious Russian signal to decode and a possessed Billy to fend off.
About: Stranger Things is beloved. How beloved? A seasons 1&2 recap with the show’s stars released two weeks ago garnered 4 and a half million views on Youtube! Just for going over old stuff! Word on the street is that the series is generating more conversation than that Marvel flick we reviewed yesterday. Does this mean Stranger Things seasons 4, 5, and 6 are inevitable? Are we going to follow the lives of Dustin, Mike, and Eleven into their 30s? The way studios are pulling their properties away from Netflix these days, don’t bet against it!
Created by: The Duffer Brothers
Details: This is a review of the first three episodes of Season 3
Yesterday, a commenter brought up the idea that I’d become one of these bitter movie reviewer types who hate everything. I mean, who couldn’t like Spider-Man: Far From Home?? The ONLY thing it wants to do is give the audience a good time!
If I’m being completely honest, the commenter has a point. I think this is something everyone in the business worries about. At what point does it only become about technique, as opposed to how a movie makes you feel? Recently, Gwyneth Paltrow was raked over the coals for not knowing her character, Pepper Potts, was in Spider-Man: Homecoming. Had Gwyneth too, become so blind to the magic of film that she no longer paid attention to her contribution to the community?
Once you’ve figured out whether I just compared myself to Gwyneth Paltrow or not, we can go deeper into that question. I think everyone in movies – especially critics – worry that because they watch so much stuff, they’ll eventually become desensitized to the medium. A french fry is the most amazing invention in the world until you learn that it started out as a big ugly brown thing covered in cow manure.
So to answer that commenter, yes, I do think bitterness shines through at times when I review something. And no, I don’t like when it happens. I don’t want to be the “everything sucks” guy. There are plenty of those people on the internet already. But it’s also hard to endorse something when you’re not feeling it. Spider-Man may have wanted to be the most fun movie in the world. But that doesn’t mean it was. Marvel got to where it got because it took chances. Far From Home was the anti-chance. Like the taco truck selling 99 cent tacos outside the bar at 2am. No matter how uplifting I want to be, I can’t endorse that. At least not sober.
So where does this leave us today? Ironically, Stranger Things isn’t that different from Spider-Man. It’s about high school kids. It’s about having a good time. It’s a big event series. You could argue that these properties are fighting for the same demographic. So who wins in a Spider-Man 2 versus Stranger Things 3 showdown? Let’s find out.
It’s summertime in Hawkins, Indiana and a new mall has opened up, giving our Stranger Things crew of Mike, Dustin, Lucas, Will, and Mad Max something to do besides ride their BMX’s around town. At the mall, Studly Steve now works at an ice cream shop with a girl named Robin who looks eerily like a cross between Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman because, oh yeah, she is a cross between them!
Meanwhile, Mike and Eleven are doing a lot of kissing, as Eleven tries harder than ever to be a normal kid. This is going to be difficult because after Dustin builds a giant antennae to try and communicate with his long distance girlfriend he met at science camp, he overhears a foreboding Russian transmission, which he writes down and later tries to decode.
But things really take a turn for the tubular when Billy, now a life guard, tries to hook up with a MILF, but crashes his car on the way to her house and gets pulled into the upside-down. There, Billy meets… another Billy, and when Billy is sent back to the rightside-up, we realize he’s the alternate possessed Billy. If that’s confusing, you’ll be happy to know that Winona Ryder is now obsessed with the magnets on her fridge, which don’t work anymore. These kids might be growing up but it’s nice to know some things in Hawkins never change.
Here’s the thing about Stranger Things. It’s not a very well-written show. There are too many characters and storylines to keep up with and a good portion of them feel like filler. I mean, do we really need an entire subplot built around Jim Hopper working up the courage to tell a 14 year old boy to cool it on the kissing with his adopted daughter? There’s a scene with Hopper getting drunk and watching Magnum P.I. as he becomes further and further irritated by the idea of kissing that may be the most wasteful two minutes in TV this year.
But the magic of Stranger Things is not that it’s the best written show on television. It’s that it’s the most watchable show on television. I can’t just throw on an episode of Jessica Jones. Or Narcos, or Mindhunters, or even Orange is the New Black. But I can throw on an episode of Stranger Things and, for a little under an hour, every problem in the world fades away. This show takes you back to a simpler time, it surrounds you with incredibly likable people, and it throws just enough zany yet entertaining plot points at you to keep you wanting more.
There are a lot of things we can talk about in regards to this season. But I want to highlight one in particular. The Not-Who-They-Seem Character. The Not-Who-They-Seem Character is any character who, for story reasons, isn’t the person everyone else thinks they are. In this case, that’s Billy. They think he’s Billy. But he’s actually Upside-Down Billy. You see this character everywhere. We just saw it with Spider-Man. Nick Fury is actually Mysterio for a scene. We see it in Mission Impossible. Whoever wears the masks becomes someone else. You see it in more down-to-earth narratives, like Alias. Jennifer Garner is just a regular girl to her friends. But in reality, she’s an international spy.
These characters do double-duty because one, actors love to play them, and two, the very nature of their duality provides numerous avenues for drama. For starters, every conversation they’re in has dramatic irony because they’re lying. They’re not providing the other person with the truth of who they are. And that makes any interaction interesting. These characters become even more valuable in a TV show because you don’t have the spectacle that you do in movies. Your budget-per-minute is a lot lower. So you need to look for clever ways to keep things interesting and utilizing a “Not-Who-They-Seem” character is one of the most cost-effective ways to do that.
Another thing you have to constantly be on top of in TV writing is love stories. But not love stories that are going well. Those never work. Love stories that either have the potential to happen or love stories that are happening, but have too many roadblocks to survive. In this season of Stranger Things, we have the potential romance of Steve and Robin, the potential romance of Jim and Joyce, the potential romance of Billy and the Mom. And in the one romance that’s supposedly going well – Mike and Eleven – we have Jim coming in and telling Mike to stay away from her, effectively ending their relationship. Call this what you want – but relationship management needs to be a strength of yours if you’re going to write in television.
I still struggle with Stranger Things at times. I don’t know if the Duffer Brothers just use 80s homages because they like them or because they don’t have any original ideas of their own. But like I said, this show is so watchable that whatever beef you have with it fades away the further you get into each episode. It and Black Mirror are currently the only must-watch shows on the streaming giant. I hope I still feel this way after finishing the season! What about you guys? What did you think?
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the stream
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Our interest in each storyline will depend on the stakes of said storyline. A big reason the “Jim Hates Kissing” storyline doesn’t work is because the stakes are so low. Who cares if they kiss? I have a feeling that early drafts of this may have had them working up towards having sex but that someone stepped in and said that’s too much for these characters. If that were the case, Jim’s anxiety about the relationship would’ve been justified. But innocent kissing? There’s zero stakes attached to that.
