Strange Things; No Stakes

How does this show get away with so much?

What follows is a rant that won’t make much sense if you haven’t seen all of Stranger Things: fair warning has been given.

For me, the strangest thing about Stranger Things is that for such a high-profile show, there isn’t that much high-profile negative criticism of it. That’s not to say there’s none; plenty of mainstream outlets have had quibbles with it for years. But I don’t see many critics directly addressing the massive issues with this show's storytelling, issues which only get worse in its most recent season. There are actually a lot of issues critics all seem to accept as baked in to Stranger Things without explicitly deconstructing them (this is an exception); take for instance the repetitive formula of the show or the amount of 80s references the show makes (no chance I’m going to forget which decade this show takes place in), which I find annoying but not terrible. But my main complaints come down to three major storytelling sins: worldbuilding, pacing, and stakes.

Worldbuilding

Prior to this season, we all traveled through three full seasons of this show together and what do we actually know about the mythology of this universe? We know so little I can say it in one reasonably short sentence: another dimension exists (the upside down) and it is full of creepy creatures that want to eat us; there’s some cold-loving smoke that can possess people; Eleven has the ability to find people with her mind and is telekinetic; you can sort of send messages between worlds by using lights or yelling real hard. That is all we can say with certainty about this world. We don’t know why this world exists, we don’t know what the little floating motes are that signify to us visually that we’re in it, we don’t know what the cold-loving smoke is or why, if it can possess anyone it wants it doesn’t use that skill to just possess everyone and win, we don’t know if Eleven’s powers are connected to the upside-down or just coincidental, we don’t know how Eleven got her powers (there’s some vague storyline about her mother being experimented on and given acid in the 70s, but as we learn in season 4 that’s clearly not what creates people with powers like her’s), and we don’t have the foggiest clue why the upside down looks exactly like Hawkins except everything is gross and desiccated and slimy (if I found a portal in Paris would the Eiffel Tower be slimy too or is this just a Hawkins thing?). In season 4 we actually get some answers to these questions but not only do the answers make very little sense, it just underscored to me how unrewarding it is to try to care about a show with so little concrete worldbuilding.

At first, I tried to think of a positive spin for why there’s so little known mythology on the show. My argument was that the audience knows so little about the upside down and Eleven’s powers because the characters themselves know so little. I found it interesting that a show would adhere so closely to its characters’ perspectives as to keep the audience in the dark about how its supernatural world functions. The big bads never even have real names but are instead referred to by Dungeons & Dragons character names because of course the kids don’t know what the creatures are called- the upside down is a world without language, as far as we can tell. But then season 4 comes along and dumps a ton of worldbuilding on both the characters and the audience and so much of it makes absolutely no sense. The more they tried to fill me in the more I felt pulled out of the story because there is no consistency. For example: not only is there an upside down, but there’s also an upside down in your mind/memories? And astral projection Eleven can fight the astral projection body of Vecna and kill him… in Max’s mind? She’s never been able to touch anyone when she’s in her mind palace (for lack of a better term) but suddenly she can go into Max’s memories and find Vecna there and physically fight him but then get pulled into Vecna’s mind which looks like the upside down but Vecna’s body is in the actual upside down so that’s confusing? Eleven banished One/Vecna to the upside down somehow with her powers, but was that just a coincidence? Are her powers from the upside down or was sending him there instead of somewhere else just a random dimensional fluke? How could a human being survive in the upside down? Even though he becomes all gross and slithery he’s still human-ish, right? Is there… food in there? Why is the upside down frozen at the moment Will Byers got sucked into it? I know that’s when El opened a gate, but why would her opening a gate lead to the upside down Hawkins being frozen forever at that date? And if it is frozen forever at that date, why does Eddie’s trailer look exactly like it did when Crissie died? Did Eddie just have every single thing in his trailer looking exactly the same for years? What 18-year-old living in a trailer park has had an expensive electric guitar hanging on his wall since he was like 14? How does Eddie even plug in an electric guitar in the upside down??? Ok, you get the point; the mythology is trash.

Pacing

One of my biggest pet peeves is when a piece of storytelling has bad pacing, and boy does this season suffer from bad pacing. Pacing is, roughly defined, how fast or slow a scene is moving for the viewer. You rarely get the criticism that a show is too fast-paced, but many shows and movies get critiqued for being too slowly-paced. My critique is actually neither- it’s more related to how pacing relates to narrative tension and stakes. When you get the timing wrong in a pivotal scene, it just feels so jarring that it can ruin the narrative. Here’s a classic ST example: in the final episode all the characters are either in the upside down, mentally in the upside down (eye roll see above) or fighting creatures from the upside down in our world. In a rare moment of good (if overly convenient) mythologizing, we have been told that everything in the upside down is a hive mind, that is that everything is mentally connected to everything else. If you punch a Demogorgon in the face every vine, bat, and demodog feels the pain of that punch too and it weakens them. So our characters are trying really hard not to alert any living thing in the upside down or outside of it to their presence, for fear it will alert everything else. They of course mess that up and a vine curls around Robin’s foot, yanking her towards the wall and winding around her neck. At this point, her two companions literally just stare at her for a full beat before doing anything. This makes zero sense for their characters, as they are both experienced upside down slithery vine fighters and are carrying multiple weapons, but whatever. As soon as they wake up and do try to help her, other vines instantly imprison them and curl around their necks. Not looking good for our heroes. We then cut away from them to the various other parties fighting the good fight, all of which start losing really badly: Eddie starts trying to take on all the upside down bats in the universe for no good reason by himself and is getting eaten alive, Hopper is about to get his face eaten by a demodog, El and Max are being taken to the woodshed by Vecna, Erica is being tackled by a racist, and Lucas is being punched repeatedly by another racist. Really not looking good for our heroes! The screenwriters then indulge themselves by having Vecna explain his evil plan, harp on his hurt feelings, and explicate his murderous background for what felt like 20 minutes, all of which is supposed to be taking place while… Nancy Wheeler is strangled to death? None of these characters would survive the predicament they’re in for 20 seconds, let alone 20 minutes, yet the screenwriters stop all the action in the scene and have Vecna basically give a Shakespearean monologue, then have Mike give El a mental pep talk which also feels like it takes 20 minutes until finally she breaks free of Vecna’s slimy vine friends and blasts him into next week. As soon as she does, everyone else miraculously handles their situation (except Eddie, RIP) and Nancy Wheeler finishes Vecna off with the slowest shotgun blasts known to man and everything is mostly fine (except it’s not, the world is now ending but I’ll get to that).

I’m sorry, what? How am I supposed to care about the mortal peril of a single character when every single character is being killed so slowly that we have time to stop for a villain monologue and a hero’s boyfriend’s pep talk about the power of love before those vines crush Nancy’s larynx? The reason the show gets away with doing this, of course, is simple. There are no stakes.

Stakes

I’m just going to say it flat out: if Eleven can resurrect people from the dead just because she really likes them, this show is officially meaningless. Critics have complained for a while now that the screenwriters lack the courage to kill off any of the main characters, and I wholeheartedly agree. But worse than that, this season explicitly structured its impending apocalypse around a known recipe. Vecna has to kill four people (why four? How does Vecna know this recipe? Who the fuck knows! The writers sure don’t.) in Hawkins in order to open a giant gate between Hawkins and the upside down, thus ushering in your standard Hellmouth opening scenario and ending the world as we know it (or just Hawkins as we know it; unclear). The last one of those people is Max. It has to be Max because apparently once Vecna chooses a victim he can’t like change his mind and kill the mailman (why? Unclear!). So we’re getting some strong foreshadowing, especially since we know there’s a season 5, that the Hellmouth is going to open and Max is going to have to die. This would be the first member of the OG squad to get killed and for a minute at the end I thought they would actually do it. Max gets killed by Vecna, dying in Lucas’ arms. But then El just says no way I don’t accept this, thinks really hard about her best memories with Max (the visual sequence for this is frankly embarrassing because Max and El aren’t actually in that many scenes together in seasons 2 and 3, so it’s mostly just different cuts from two main scenes, as if the only memories El could summon in this extremely pivotal moment were from one slumber party and one time they went to the mall together and griped about boys) and resurrects her from the dead.

No. I’m sorry, but no. We all knew that a loveable side character that’s just been introduced this season was going to die. We all knew Eddie was basically a redshirt from day dot. But you cannot have your apocalypse and your doomed friend too. You cannot suit up your whole squad of brave squishy human friends to ominous sad music, have them throw themselves into the jaws of certain death with a frankly idiotic and unnecessary plan, and then have every single one of them come out of it alive except the one funny sidekick you picked up along the way this season who we all knew was toast from the moment we met him.

This is the show that costs so much to make it’s going to bankrupt Netflix? Do better Stranger Things. You have access to the most talented writers and editors of our age. You have a seasonal budget akin to the GDP of Luxembourg. Find a way to use a storyboard!

There is so much to love about this show and so much that genuinely entertains, but the showrunners lean so heavily on nostalgia, cutting and pasting from existing narrative tropes and using 80s power ballads as a replacement for character development that the whole thing just collapses the second you poke it. I guess we will just have to wait until season 5, which probably won’t premiere for a couple of years. So glad the season ends on a cliffhanger that guarantees you can’t insert any kind of time jump between seasons even though all your child actors will look about 10 years too old for their character age by the time it premieres! Great thinking ahead.