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LavenderHillBilly on Stranger Things
Oct. 5th, 2019 01:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
froodleAnd 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.
( Read more... )
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.
( Read more... )
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.
