Stranger Things Didn’t End When it Should’ve

I’m technically on an ER binge but dinner entertainment’s been taken up by the last, most redundant season of Stranger Things. Netflix’s obsession with making movie quality/length episodes which are overfunded and overhyped has never been more obvious with this show. I get this was their biggest originally produced show, but that was literally a decade ago. And nobody signed on for five seasons, they fucking signed on for one, so you can forgive your core acting like they’re so fucking over this and phoning it in the whole time. Noah Schnapps finally gets more than a couple of lines but isn’t particularly good enough to engage me (and I don’t know how expects to have a career after what he said, I don’t think he did since he’s barely got one now). Maya Hawke is going overboard, she’s not burnt out but she’s not cynical, she’s overly goofy. Everyone else is pretty much exactly the same if not more insufferable, there are a lot of montages and a lot of “planning” for their “crawls”, another obnoxious nod to D&D. The way the dialogue’s written you can tell someone’s taken a cursory glance at one player handbook and shoehorned in references, yeah we get it. Plus they’re sneaking in other sci-fi references while forgetting how endearing it was originally. It’s basic bitch writing since the episodes are too long and need padding out. Jonathan’s hair is… the most distracting mess I’ve ever seen. They’ve toned it down on Steve’s iconic cut, everyone else’s hair is still badly designed even by 80s standards. The costuming now looks comical especially when you’re putting little kid clothes on older teens who are clearly more developed than they canonically should be (if there’s been any binding going on in that area, that’s proof enough this show should’ve ended last season and not now). They’ve absolutely de-ageing characters because of this, littler kids have Noah Schnapps’ baby face on them. I totally get people have made 20 somethings play teens forever now but in this case, it’s so laughably inexcusable and so avoidable. I get COVID got in the way but they could’ve shut this shit down well before then, we didn’t need five seasons, people barely wanted four and I was absolutely pissed it didn’t end back then. But the show’s getting better ratings, it seems to be nobody wants to say bad shit about anything anymore, you can’t be critical without seeming “mean” and anything overhyped has to have reviewed favourably like it’s a crime to shit on it. Anything with that much hype rarely earns it.

Max is the only interesting character left and all she does now is monologue. I think they de-aged her since she’s a lot taller than before, they even briefly de-age Winona. Sorry, having the tech doesn’t mean you find excuses to use and abuse it flagrantly. Also, get over the Kate Bush scene, you’ve singlehandedly ruined that song for other people and other shows, I kinda wish she hadn’t given you permission to use it. (I prefer the Placebo cover, too, which is blasphemous). The scene they used it for wasn’t that cool so using it for ‘memberberries when it was only last season shows they have nothing original to add. Every episode feels like a short film, too much visual and not enough decent storytelling. Vecna’s basically the Nothing now, he exploits the weak and hopeless to make himself powerful. It’s even gotten to the point the worlds are about to be sucked into a vacuum and destroyed slowly like the Nothing did, even though it’s a “wormhole” scenario.

Anyway, we did not for the love of Christ need to see Max and Holly waste so much time before they ran for their gates to weep over how strong Holly needed to be and how it wasn’t about the music despite Robyn making a big deal about the “songs” attached to the people in the Upside Down. I don’t know how Robyn knew Holly loved Tiffany, Mike would’ve explained Will’s affinity with the Clash, who Nancy hates. And we had to suffer through a big drawn out scene about how Jonathan and Nancy hated stuff about one another but trauma bonded anyway and loved one another but didn’t want to actually get married. The fact people are demanding the deleted scenes be replaced when there are tedious as fuck, no action moments like this you’re rolling your eyes through, like Netflix picked the wrong shit to edit out and the promotion suggested we’d see more than we’re getting. Again, fans who demand so much and get pissy about what they do get don’t get my sympathy. Netlfix only cares you gave them a decade of subscription money, they don’t care how dedicated you were to the show. Well, they care insofar as they got your money by teasing you with more Stranger Things than you deserved, they didn’t intend for it to turn into this so your rabid fandom produced this half-assed response. I’m not saying I’m not impressed by some of the scenes they did, they weren’t predictable, but they’re not saving me from giving the rest of it a scathing review. 

And they made the unforgivable mistake of having a ‘90s brand logo in a scene, reminiscent of the Starbucks debacle from Game of Thrones, again I did not care enough about this show to notice or care but this is a studio error from being under the pump to rush to print and edit episodes, a symptom of having a rabid fanbase who threatens to remove their subscriptions if they don’t get what they want when they want it. Fans need to realise the pressure being exerted on these people to get a product out quickly not perfectly. So they’re not going to look at every damn frame and shot the way you expect. I really wish these people would spend a day in an editor’s shoes, or any other crew member, they do their best under shit conditions and you demand perfection when any one of you in that position would’ve easily fucked shit up under pressure. Grow up. Yeah the production staff could’ve picked it up, but the boom operator in a lot of movies has been blamed for letting the mic dip into random shots, even on a fucking Scorsese movie he spent literally forty years trying to make. These fuckers are not being paid enough. The money you throw at Netflix and HBO doesn’t go dollar for dollar into these people’s pockets. They’re even giving the finale a theatrical release, and the episode we just watched was supposed to be nearly two fucking hours. It didn’t need to be, and one cast member is already comparing these fans to Snyder Bros wanting the offical cut based on a bullshit rumour spread probably for clicks on articles. Just the way these articles are literally being padded out with random fan quotes because the subject has no real substance beyond reiterating interviews and adding context and links to other articles on the same website. This is why I can’t do this work for a living. You’re not saying anything, you’re not contributing anything to journalism with this fluff. And you have to work so hard to signal boost it you have to write clickbait titles to even hope to get eyeballs. I couldn’t even get an article through an automated review process to get any audience, so I gave up.

I will have more to add at the end of this buffoonery.

I did add more but Blogger stops autosaving on published posts. I had a theory this last episode is trying to be Oscar bait since it’s running in theatres but it’s missed this year’s deadline so next year, maybe. It doesn’t make sense to distribute to theatres unless Netflix is pretending it cares about theatres. But this episode was awful, and people are already accusing the haters of homophobia and nothing else, when it was a bad coming out scene/scenario, and it didn’t need to be this big group love in. Well, it kind of did I guess but having people there who do not know you, it’s a little much. It’s Will’s meeting with the goddess, Southern Oracle mirror gate moment. It was another tedious scene that could’ve been cut down all while people still insist there are reams of footage we’re not seeing. You think you want three hour episodes but you don’t, not ones with pacing issues and dialogue problems as bad as these, not ones with barely any action in between. Not ones with embarrassing epiphanies from dumber characters who owe their inspiration to smarter characters, who are kind of too smart at this point for kids their age. Writing nerds who know literally everything and can decipher complex notes and explain them to the dumb character and audience is a total stereotype. Nerds tend to have niche interests and don’t have encyclopaedic levels of knowledge at their disposal. I know you want a sassy, smart black girl who can make the boys look dumb, but those schools do not have elite level intelligent students who always know the answer and drive teachers nuts with it. You wanted some “you go, girl” moments out of her. I dunno, I don’t care and I wish someone would just leak the entire last episode script or synopsis or just something digestible so I don’t have to endure 2 fucking hours of them stringing all these things back together to conclude with something fans will be split on at best and downright furious at worse.

I was somewhat right they spent so much fucking time on unnecessary dialog, I was so bored with the wrap up scenes that were boring as hell. I didn’t cry when El died, I didn’t cry when they were all wrapping up D&D. When they managed to kill the big bad with a coordinated attack and Winona chopped Vecna’s head off, the movie was over for me. It was done, it should’ve been done. But no I think we had to endure another 40 minutes. I get you had to have a fake out victory, that was all too good to be true, but not actually seeing what happened to Linda Hamilton and her army was anticlimactic. I didn’t care El was even sacrificing herself. I get Mike had to lose her to grow up and Will had to stop being afraid but if they were expecting like massive “fuck yeah” reactions from when Will went full core wizard, it didn’t earn it. It did not earn a theatrical release for how cheap it looked. It wasn’t as bad as Game of Thrones but it definitely means I will never watch it all from scratch for any reason, I’m only glad it’s actually done. and I don’t think it’s blowing up the internet the way they wanted to.

I’m watching a few takes on how badly this went down and there’s been mention of a stage play that’s supposed to flesh out HenryVecna’s arc. This shit literally drives me so insane. Stop making inaccessible supplemental material (comics, graphic novels, TV series, fucking plays, probably the hardest one to consume) then blame the audience for being ignorant to it when the diehards tell them “Oh, well it’s all explained in this thing you will never read/see. It’s on you for not being an uberfan”. Shut up. The point is you built a whole emotional arc for the audience which needed a worthy catharsis and you failed to deliver it. The studios keep burning these people out into absolute fuck it states because they never asked to be where they ended up, but these guys committed to delivering something even if it wasn’t the same plot/characters, you surely wanted five seasons but you didn’t want to make this season as it was. So are the fans to blame for loving the first season way too much? It’s a weird scenario.