LavenderHillBilly on Stranger Things
Oct. 5th, 2019 01:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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eerieindianaAnd so with It Chapter Two now well and truly out (and I use the term advisedly) one's thoughts finally turn properly to Stranger Things's third season...
Other people have been more than happy with the latest Stranger Things, and some even reckon it's got back on track after Season 2's slightly tired rehash of Season 1 (and indeed its disastrous 'Lost Sister' episode). Alas, I rather feel that with this new one the Duffer bros slightly took their eye off the ball. I mean it was charming and enjoyable and all, but it still managed to get itself bogged down and distracted.
The main thing that's started to bog things down is the show's ever-expanding cast of characters, together with their "relationships". Indeed this was the first season when a teenage girl "dumping a boy's ass" felt more important than saving anyone from monsters. And unfortunately it also saw the first time when mutant superpowers were used more for laughs than for dramatic effect. In short, this lapsed into fan-service far too much.
So, what of the characters? Interestingly enough - or perhaps just strangely enough - I'm not the only person to have picked up on the possibility of a link between Billy and Will. As it happens though, Billy wasn't gay. In fact in the end his whole Oedipus thing turned out to be rather more interesting, and it could be fun to have him come back as a ghost in later seasons, even if only in El's dreams and visions and so on. Will on the other hand is now gay in all but name. The Duffers have even admitted that he's "a sweet, sensitive kid with sexual identity issues". Steve's new girlfriend is gay too, and has said she is quite explicitly! (She's also quite easily the best new thing in Stranger Things 3, and that's me saying that, so beware!) My feeling though is that these are purely what I think of as "plot-device sexualities" rather than writing decisions based on wholly legitimate character developments. The reason for this, as I'll come to in a moment, is that in a show that is still fundamentally a plot-based genre piece, writing for non-heterosexual characters is actually easier than having to write about straight-up horny straights. Put very simply, the brothers are aware (even if only implicitly) that their show is supposed to be about things that are, well, stranger than all that bog-standard normal boy-girl stuff.
There is then a fairly acceptable plot-based reason why, given that they almost certainly want to put El and Will together in Season 4 (probably for a snow-bound Christmas-themed story), it's easier for Will to be gay - or at any rate not into girls. The Duffers don't want Will having the hots for El and cuckolding his best friend. That's not the story they want to tell, and brother-sister relationships are actually more dramatically rewarding than sexy ones, especially if the main point of your story is not mundane matters of teenage heterosexual self-discovery. And for similar reasons it helps if Steve's new lady friend is a lesbian. After all, they can't be off investigating weird goings on if each of them's too busy trying to get the other one into the sack all the time. (Yes, having Murray Bauman there to lampshade sexual issues from time to time can help, but only to a certain extent.)
Do the Duffer brothers have a "problem" with heterosexuality then? I'd say no, except that television as a genre definitely does. Put very simply, the problem is that once couples have slept together they stop being interesting. For long-running comedy dramas to work (and arguably the genre only really came into its own in the late 1980s), the girl and the boy have to maintain a fairly steady-state, bantering, brother-sister-type relationship. Once Lois and Clark (or Scully and Mulder - or Niles and Daphne for that matter) tied the knot (physically, at any rate - and yes, gross!) their "story" had run its course. So it should come as no surprise that Nancy and Steve were doomed to be boring as soon as they'd done the nasty. And now that she's jumped beds for Will's big brother it's not surprising that she and Jonathan had nothing more interesting to do in Season 3 than snoop around like a couple of very substandard post-coital FBI agents.
Of course it's also possible that Natalia Dyer and Charlie Heaton just aren't easy actors to write "for". They could just be a natural leading man and lady who in the rough and tumble of the series's re-writes have accidentally ended up being shunted into secondary "character actor" roles, and so they currently happen not to have very much to do that the writers can sink their pens into. (But without meaning to be too horrible, Dyer really is little more than a pretty face, and Heaton has to put a lot of effort just into getting his Yankee vowel sounds right - and apparently he also has a little bit of a coke problem.)
As it happens, writing for actors rather than stories is nothing particularly new on long-running genre shows. Tom Baker very much broke down the actor-character division with his Doctor Who back in the '70s, and for that show's last couple of seasons its writers ended up reinforcing their scripts with all sorts of character traits they'd cribbed from the actors themselves, from Sylv's spoons routine to his and Sophie's genuinely delightful "double act" relationship. (And there's a good case to be made that that in turn laid the foundation for Doctor Who's return to more "character-based" drama in the 2005 reboot series.) In much the same way, the Duffers for their part have been keen to beef up their own adorable nerdy characters with the characteristics of their adorably talented nerdy young stars. Joe Keery and Gaten Matarazzo had a massively charming man-boy thing going on. It translated beautifully into the show. Millie and Sadie were having sleepovers in real life. Now they're doing it on the telly as well. In the end even Caleb McLaughlin's impromptu nose-blowing got a write-in.
In general of course Stranger Things has never been frightened of writing to its characters' strengths rather than the needs of supernatural world-building. But that in practice means writing to the strengths of the shows young actors. So Will got a bigger part in Season 2 than he had in Season 1 after everyone realised Noah Schnapp could really act. They'd made Steve a goody even before that after they'd accepted early on that even a cool school bully is still a waste of Joe Keery. They put El and Hopper together because they were easily the two best actors in the entire series. And they paired up Steve and Dustin, and then El and Max, apparently on the basis of the adorable same-sex (but not gay!) chemistry of the actors and actresses who play them.
Alas though, it's seldom a good idea to let the personalities of your actors actually override your fictional characters' development, especially if you still want to tell an interesting plot-based narrative. GoT's fans still can't get their heads round Jaime's going back to Cersei, as he was always going to in the books, simply because Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Gwendoline Christie were so good together in the TV series. Or, to take a less painful example, Steve Kloves ended up quite radically changing the character dynamics of the three Harry Potter kids apparently for no better reason than that Rupert Grint was "the funny one" and Emma Watson was the female one.* So whereas in the books Ron Weasley is Harry's best friend† and an important cultural ambassador for the wizarding world (for Harry and Hermione's sake, not to mention the reader's), in the films he's little more than a glorified comedy side-kick - which leaves Hermione Granger to explain things when they need explaining and, by rights, to be Harry's heterosexual love interest. But that of course was not the story J K Rowling wanted to tell...
So, has this started to become a problem for Stranger Things? Have Millie and David and Joe and Gaten and all their little chums now taken over the asylum? One could be forgiven for thinking so, given how in Season 3 the development of the monstrous ecosystem of the Upside Down (for example) ended up being largely ignored in favour of shopping sprees and fart gags. The problem therefore is that exploring characters and their relationships is all very well, and it is in part what the fans want - and writing for one's audience isn't always a Bad Thing. (After all, even in woke 2019 everyone accepts that Max and Lucas are just gross together.††) But it does bog down the dear old narrative. And, perhaps more importantly, it also has an effect on show's tone.
Tone of course is more than just a matter of aesthetic taste. Some may even have preferred Season 3's new feel, which at times was more Explorers or Little Monsters than Stephen King. But it's a genuine problem. Because Hopper (to take a good example) is not funny. He was never supposed to be. David Harbour is a genuinely good dramatic actor. But he needs to be made to work (and possibly work out!). And given Netflix's looming budget problems that may indeed be asking a bit much of his contract. (If next season's first cold open sees him being fed to the Demogorgon one shouldn't be too surprised.)
More forgivable than "funny Hopper" but similarly ill-advised was the inclusion of "the Russians" as the show's new baddies. It just so happens I would have been quite comfortable with a cool edgy Cold War backdrop, complete with some cold-hearted fanatical commies as the new baddies. Because in fact it would make perfect sense for the Upside Down to turn out to be a future post-apocalyptic version of Hawkin from after a nuclear war between America and the Soviet Union that our heroes are going to have to stop. After all, why not? (If the inter-dimensional gate is really a time portal that would at least explain why the Russians are interested in it.) But the problem isn't with the commies as such or even with any potential backstory they may have. The problem is with how said Godless commie assholes come across in the actual drama. Because, as with their counterparts in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and the latest X-Files series, it's their actual inclusion in the script that lacks conviction.
The problem with commies in a 1980s-based drama now is that even in the 1980s the Americans were still much more scared of Nazis (witness Indiana Jones), not to mention their own government (think The Osterman Weekend) and indeed each other (Mississippi Burning, anyone?), than they ever were of Communism. (Like it or not, Hitler was the Bad Guy during World War II and Uncle Joe, even if not exactly the Good Guy, was at least "on our side".) In Stranger Things 3 the Russians feel like little more than a worryingly token nod to Red Dawn, Rambo and Rocky IV (and just possibly to less well remembered nonsense like Invasion U.S.A. and Firefox). It's also just possible that we're even supposed to think of modern conspiracy theories about Donald Trump - and that of course is even more problematic in that we end up only following the delusions of the modern American Left to their final reductio ad absurdum. (Did Republican politicians collude with Russian communists back in the 1980s, even if only on the level of small-town mayors? I'm really not convinced that they did. Genuine organised crime on the other hand never really minded where its drugs or guns were coming from, whether from the KGB or the CIA. But once again that's not what we're talking about here.)
So, what of Season 4? Well yes, the American is Hopper. But yes, if the show's producers can get Matthew Modine back it's very likely that the mastermind behind the Russian experiments will turn out to be Dr Brenner, who escaped to Russia via the Upside Down in Season 2 and has now, like a proper megalomaniac evil scientist, betrayed his country in order to carry on his ethically questionable research. There are also an increasing number of plot threads to be tied up and potential areas of expansion to be explored. The Upside Down itself did not become more interesting in Season 3, and any hints we may have had (or thought we had) from before, of El's connexion with the Demogorgon or Will's psychic powers or the US government's doing experiments on Demodogs, still have yet to be followed up. And despite audiences' negative reactions to the news that there are other Hawkins lab children out there, Kali and her friends demand and deserve some sort of closure at some point - even if they all end up dying in Russian gulags. So will everyone else be back next year, or will some cast members end up waiting around off-stage for a final showdown in Season 5 (set presumably in spring/Easter 2022!)? It's hard to say, if only because (and in part for the reasons I've already gone into) even a temporary cast cull might be advisable. If Harbour himself does emerge from a Russian jail cell next season it's going to have be as a leaner, harder, more traumatized and more interesting version of Hopper than the one he played in Season 3. All-in-all, it may be a good idea if the Duffers retrospectively nominate Season 3 to be the goofy, charming, slightly fan-wank "summer" season and move on.
It's worth asking of course what the Russians are even doing in Stranger Things. One might conclude somewhat uncomfortably that someone just thought it would make a change from the baddies' being "our government" (as they almost always were in the '70s and '90s) to their being some variety of "them" (see '50s, '60s, '80s, etc.). But beyond the surface problem of "dramatic conviction" that I've already gone into, there is a twofold problem with "them" being "the Russians". One is that even in the 1980s the Russians were actually the baddies much less frequently than people imagine. (Apart from the handful of movies mentioned above, there are very few genuine examples.) Another problem though is that even if "evil Russians" were a legitimate 1980s trope (and I'm not convinced it is), the whole joy and appeal of Stranger Things is not its slavish devotion to 1980s nostalgia per se, much less its dependence on 1980s tropes, so much as its subversion and at times even inversion of those tropes. So sleazy school bullies can become clean-cut older best friends. Stupid adult parents and lazy cops can be real heroes and heroines with intelligence and drive. Sinister government scientists can end up being the cavalry who ride to the rescue. And so on! So, given how unusual actual evil Russian commies really were in 1980s pop culture, it almost feels as if having them in Season 3 was itself just another such "tropical inversion". And yet if that was the intention then even that didn't quite work, if only because Season 3 does genuinely play the nostalgia card (albeit, to be fair, for the first time in Stranger Things to date) and it plays it for all it's worth. It conjures up 1950s-style halcyon summer vistas, and it explicitly invokes both the upbeat feel-good fashions of 1980s and Reaganomic free-market capitalism. Of the three seasons of Stranger Things we've had so far, this one is arguably the least subversive, doing its absolute utmost to appease both its adorable cast and its loyal fans. One can only assume that the Russians are there because somebody somewhere thought that somebody else would appreciate their being there.
So what are my final hopes for the last two seasons (because I'm not predicting any more than five in all)? My big one, at least in terms of tone, is that the show will get back on form with the subtlety and creepiness of its early promise and will perhaps even end on a downbeat 1990s vibe. As it happens, I've never really thought of Stranger Things as a 1980s-type show, despite its setting and source materials. For me it feels much more like Twin Peaks or The X-Files (without UFOs) or Eerie, Indiana or American Gothic or perhaps even Quantum Leap (without any time travel - so far!). Originally it was meant to be an anthology show, like The Outer Limits, which had a reboot in the 1990s (albeit in Canada, oddly enough!). Like The X-Files, at any rate, it would have had a whole multiplicity of unconnected spooky stories to tell rather than just one. One reason for this may be that it was in the 1990s that television started telling the sorts of stories that had previously always appeared first at the cinema. After the 1980s' golden age of genre movies, the following decade was a comparatively dry period for sci-fi, fantasy and horror movies†††, so the small screen took up the slack and really came into its own.
If Will Byers and his friends end up leaving their childhoods behind as they find strange lights in the sky, it would feel strangely fitting.
Other people have been more than happy with the latest Stranger Things, and some even reckon it's got back on track after Season 2's slightly tired rehash of Season 1 (and indeed its disastrous 'Lost Sister' episode). Alas, I rather feel that with this new one the Duffer bros slightly took their eye off the ball. I mean it was charming and enjoyable and all, but it still managed to get itself bogged down and distracted.
The main thing that's started to bog things down is the show's ever-expanding cast of characters, together with their "relationships". Indeed this was the first season when a teenage girl "dumping a boy's ass" felt more important than saving anyone from monsters. And unfortunately it also saw the first time when mutant superpowers were used more for laughs than for dramatic effect. In short, this lapsed into fan-service far too much.
So, what of the characters? Interestingly enough - or perhaps just strangely enough - I'm not the only person to have picked up on the possibility of a link between Billy and Will. As it happens though, Billy wasn't gay. In fact in the end his whole Oedipus thing turned out to be rather more interesting, and it could be fun to have him come back as a ghost in later seasons, even if only in El's dreams and visions and so on. Will on the other hand is now gay in all but name. The Duffers have even admitted that he's "a sweet, sensitive kid with sexual identity issues". Steve's new girlfriend is gay too, and has said she is quite explicitly! (She's also quite easily the best new thing in Stranger Things 3, and that's me saying that, so beware!) My feeling though is that these are purely what I think of as "plot-device sexualities" rather than writing decisions based on wholly legitimate character developments. The reason for this, as I'll come to in a moment, is that in a show that is still fundamentally a plot-based genre piece, writing for non-heterosexual characters is actually easier than having to write about straight-up horny straights. Put very simply, the brothers are aware (even if only implicitly) that their show is supposed to be about things that are, well, stranger than all that bog-standard normal boy-girl stuff.
There is then a fairly acceptable plot-based reason why, given that they almost certainly want to put El and Will together in Season 4 (probably for a snow-bound Christmas-themed story), it's easier for Will to be gay - or at any rate not into girls. The Duffers don't want Will having the hots for El and cuckolding his best friend. That's not the story they want to tell, and brother-sister relationships are actually more dramatically rewarding than sexy ones, especially if the main point of your story is not mundane matters of teenage heterosexual self-discovery. And for similar reasons it helps if Steve's new lady friend is a lesbian. After all, they can't be off investigating weird goings on if each of them's too busy trying to get the other one into the sack all the time. (Yes, having Murray Bauman there to lampshade sexual issues from time to time can help, but only to a certain extent.)
Do the Duffer brothers have a "problem" with heterosexuality then? I'd say no, except that television as a genre definitely does. Put very simply, the problem is that once couples have slept together they stop being interesting. For long-running comedy dramas to work (and arguably the genre only really came into its own in the late 1980s), the girl and the boy have to maintain a fairly steady-state, bantering, brother-sister-type relationship. Once Lois and Clark (or Scully and Mulder - or Niles and Daphne for that matter) tied the knot (physically, at any rate - and yes, gross!) their "story" had run its course. So it should come as no surprise that Nancy and Steve were doomed to be boring as soon as they'd done the nasty. And now that she's jumped beds for Will's big brother it's not surprising that she and Jonathan had nothing more interesting to do in Season 3 than snoop around like a couple of very substandard post-coital FBI agents.
Of course it's also possible that Natalia Dyer and Charlie Heaton just aren't easy actors to write "for". They could just be a natural leading man and lady who in the rough and tumble of the series's re-writes have accidentally ended up being shunted into secondary "character actor" roles, and so they currently happen not to have very much to do that the writers can sink their pens into. (But without meaning to be too horrible, Dyer really is little more than a pretty face, and Heaton has to put a lot of effort just into getting his Yankee vowel sounds right - and apparently he also has a little bit of a coke problem.)
As it happens, writing for actors rather than stories is nothing particularly new on long-running genre shows. Tom Baker very much broke down the actor-character division with his Doctor Who back in the '70s, and for that show's last couple of seasons its writers ended up reinforcing their scripts with all sorts of character traits they'd cribbed from the actors themselves, from Sylv's spoons routine to his and Sophie's genuinely delightful "double act" relationship. (And there's a good case to be made that that in turn laid the foundation for Doctor Who's return to more "character-based" drama in the 2005 reboot series.) In much the same way, the Duffers for their part have been keen to beef up their own adorable nerdy characters with the characteristics of their adorably talented nerdy young stars. Joe Keery and Gaten Matarazzo had a massively charming man-boy thing going on. It translated beautifully into the show. Millie and Sadie were having sleepovers in real life. Now they're doing it on the telly as well. In the end even Caleb McLaughlin's impromptu nose-blowing got a write-in.
In general of course Stranger Things has never been frightened of writing to its characters' strengths rather than the needs of supernatural world-building. But that in practice means writing to the strengths of the shows young actors. So Will got a bigger part in Season 2 than he had in Season 1 after everyone realised Noah Schnapp could really act. They'd made Steve a goody even before that after they'd accepted early on that even a cool school bully is still a waste of Joe Keery. They put El and Hopper together because they were easily the two best actors in the entire series. And they paired up Steve and Dustin, and then El and Max, apparently on the basis of the adorable same-sex (but not gay!) chemistry of the actors and actresses who play them.
Alas though, it's seldom a good idea to let the personalities of your actors actually override your fictional characters' development, especially if you still want to tell an interesting plot-based narrative. GoT's fans still can't get their heads round Jaime's going back to Cersei, as he was always going to in the books, simply because Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Gwendoline Christie were so good together in the TV series. Or, to take a less painful example, Steve Kloves ended up quite radically changing the character dynamics of the three Harry Potter kids apparently for no better reason than that Rupert Grint was "the funny one" and Emma Watson was the female one.* So whereas in the books Ron Weasley is Harry's best friend† and an important cultural ambassador for the wizarding world (for Harry and Hermione's sake, not to mention the reader's), in the films he's little more than a glorified comedy side-kick - which leaves Hermione Granger to explain things when they need explaining and, by rights, to be Harry's heterosexual love interest. But that of course was not the story J K Rowling wanted to tell...
So, has this started to become a problem for Stranger Things? Have Millie and David and Joe and Gaten and all their little chums now taken over the asylum? One could be forgiven for thinking so, given how in Season 3 the development of the monstrous ecosystem of the Upside Down (for example) ended up being largely ignored in favour of shopping sprees and fart gags. The problem therefore is that exploring characters and their relationships is all very well, and it is in part what the fans want - and writing for one's audience isn't always a Bad Thing. (After all, even in woke 2019 everyone accepts that Max and Lucas are just gross together.††) But it does bog down the dear old narrative. And, perhaps more importantly, it also has an effect on show's tone.
Tone of course is more than just a matter of aesthetic taste. Some may even have preferred Season 3's new feel, which at times was more Explorers or Little Monsters than Stephen King. But it's a genuine problem. Because Hopper (to take a good example) is not funny. He was never supposed to be. David Harbour is a genuinely good dramatic actor. But he needs to be made to work (and possibly work out!). And given Netflix's looming budget problems that may indeed be asking a bit much of his contract. (If next season's first cold open sees him being fed to the Demogorgon one shouldn't be too surprised.)
More forgivable than "funny Hopper" but similarly ill-advised was the inclusion of "the Russians" as the show's new baddies. It just so happens I would have been quite comfortable with a cool edgy Cold War backdrop, complete with some cold-hearted fanatical commies as the new baddies. Because in fact it would make perfect sense for the Upside Down to turn out to be a future post-apocalyptic version of Hawkin from after a nuclear war between America and the Soviet Union that our heroes are going to have to stop. After all, why not? (If the inter-dimensional gate is really a time portal that would at least explain why the Russians are interested in it.) But the problem isn't with the commies as such or even with any potential backstory they may have. The problem is with how said Godless commie assholes come across in the actual drama. Because, as with their counterparts in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and the latest X-Files series, it's their actual inclusion in the script that lacks conviction.
The problem with commies in a 1980s-based drama now is that even in the 1980s the Americans were still much more scared of Nazis (witness Indiana Jones), not to mention their own government (think The Osterman Weekend) and indeed each other (Mississippi Burning, anyone?), than they ever were of Communism. (Like it or not, Hitler was the Bad Guy during World War II and Uncle Joe, even if not exactly the Good Guy, was at least "on our side".) In Stranger Things 3 the Russians feel like little more than a worryingly token nod to Red Dawn, Rambo and Rocky IV (and just possibly to less well remembered nonsense like Invasion U.S.A. and Firefox). It's also just possible that we're even supposed to think of modern conspiracy theories about Donald Trump - and that of course is even more problematic in that we end up only following the delusions of the modern American Left to their final reductio ad absurdum. (Did Republican politicians collude with Russian communists back in the 1980s, even if only on the level of small-town mayors? I'm really not convinced that they did. Genuine organised crime on the other hand never really minded where its drugs or guns were coming from, whether from the KGB or the CIA. But once again that's not what we're talking about here.)
So, what of Season 4? Well yes, the American is Hopper. But yes, if the show's producers can get Matthew Modine back it's very likely that the mastermind behind the Russian experiments will turn out to be Dr Brenner, who escaped to Russia via the Upside Down in Season 2 and has now, like a proper megalomaniac evil scientist, betrayed his country in order to carry on his ethically questionable research. There are also an increasing number of plot threads to be tied up and potential areas of expansion to be explored. The Upside Down itself did not become more interesting in Season 3, and any hints we may have had (or thought we had) from before, of El's connexion with the Demogorgon or Will's psychic powers or the US government's doing experiments on Demodogs, still have yet to be followed up. And despite audiences' negative reactions to the news that there are other Hawkins lab children out there, Kali and her friends demand and deserve some sort of closure at some point - even if they all end up dying in Russian gulags. So will everyone else be back next year, or will some cast members end up waiting around off-stage for a final showdown in Season 5 (set presumably in spring/Easter 2022!)? It's hard to say, if only because (and in part for the reasons I've already gone into) even a temporary cast cull might be advisable. If Harbour himself does emerge from a Russian jail cell next season it's going to have be as a leaner, harder, more traumatized and more interesting version of Hopper than the one he played in Season 3. All-in-all, it may be a good idea if the Duffers retrospectively nominate Season 3 to be the goofy, charming, slightly fan-wank "summer" season and move on.
It's worth asking of course what the Russians are even doing in Stranger Things. One might conclude somewhat uncomfortably that someone just thought it would make a change from the baddies' being "our government" (as they almost always were in the '70s and '90s) to their being some variety of "them" (see '50s, '60s, '80s, etc.). But beyond the surface problem of "dramatic conviction" that I've already gone into, there is a twofold problem with "them" being "the Russians". One is that even in the 1980s the Russians were actually the baddies much less frequently than people imagine. (Apart from the handful of movies mentioned above, there are very few genuine examples.) Another problem though is that even if "evil Russians" were a legitimate 1980s trope (and I'm not convinced it is), the whole joy and appeal of Stranger Things is not its slavish devotion to 1980s nostalgia per se, much less its dependence on 1980s tropes, so much as its subversion and at times even inversion of those tropes. So sleazy school bullies can become clean-cut older best friends. Stupid adult parents and lazy cops can be real heroes and heroines with intelligence and drive. Sinister government scientists can end up being the cavalry who ride to the rescue. And so on! So, given how unusual actual evil Russian commies really were in 1980s pop culture, it almost feels as if having them in Season 3 was itself just another such "tropical inversion". And yet if that was the intention then even that didn't quite work, if only because Season 3 does genuinely play the nostalgia card (albeit, to be fair, for the first time in Stranger Things to date) and it plays it for all it's worth. It conjures up 1950s-style halcyon summer vistas, and it explicitly invokes both the upbeat feel-good fashions of 1980s and Reaganomic free-market capitalism. Of the three seasons of Stranger Things we've had so far, this one is arguably the least subversive, doing its absolute utmost to appease both its adorable cast and its loyal fans. One can only assume that the Russians are there because somebody somewhere thought that somebody else would appreciate their being there.
So what are my final hopes for the last two seasons (because I'm not predicting any more than five in all)? My big one, at least in terms of tone, is that the show will get back on form with the subtlety and creepiness of its early promise and will perhaps even end on a downbeat 1990s vibe. As it happens, I've never really thought of Stranger Things as a 1980s-type show, despite its setting and source materials. For me it feels much more like Twin Peaks or The X-Files (without UFOs) or Eerie, Indiana or American Gothic or perhaps even Quantum Leap (without any time travel - so far!). Originally it was meant to be an anthology show, like The Outer Limits, which had a reboot in the 1990s (albeit in Canada, oddly enough!). Like The X-Files, at any rate, it would have had a whole multiplicity of unconnected spooky stories to tell rather than just one. One reason for this may be that it was in the 1990s that television started telling the sorts of stories that had previously always appeared first at the cinema. After the 1980s' golden age of genre movies, the following decade was a comparatively dry period for sci-fi, fantasy and horror movies†††, so the small screen took up the slack and really came into its own.
If Will Byers and his friends end up leaving their childhoods behind as they find strange lights in the sky, it would feel strangely fitting.
