`Normal Things:
SPOILERS, which I am honour-bound to report, though I’m sure there are embryos in test tubes who got to the end before I did. . .
Skipped a bunch of episodes and finally gotten to the end. Much of my impressions constitute tidbits, which I will leak out in drips and drabs later, but suffice it to say:
a) it included my second least favourite cinematic trope: the one –sided military confrontation.
b) included my least favourite cinematic trope.
I could see it coming a mile away. “Oh GOD!” I thought. “Don’t go there.
“Please don’t go there. Please don’t go there. PLEASE don’t
go there. Please DON”T go there. Please don’t GO there. Please don’t go THERE.
PLEASEPLEASEPLEASEpretty please? With a lump of sugar on top?
Pleasepleaseplease FORTHELOVEOFGOD don’t do that, having gotten so far. You can
come up with something, you can think of something, all that creativity, all
that ingenuity, all that je ne
I was lied to when I was young: saying “please” never works. They went there.
So Vecna’s got ‘em all down for the count, all our heroes on both sides of the Berring Straight hogtied in otherworldly tendril, all he’s got to do is snap is fingers to crack the portals open and flood our world with unspeakable Eldritch horrors. Checkmate right?
But no, the good guys still have a card up their sleeve. All is not lost. What ingenious, unforeseen ploy have the Duffer Brothers cooked up to knock us on our asses?
Get this: Mike loves El, see? So all he has to do. . .wait for it. . .
Tell her!
Yup, all he has to do is tell her he loves her, and that’ll give her the strength she needs to break free and save the day with her magic powers.
Why didn’t he think of it before?
So we come to my least favourite cinematic trope (at least
for now. The old “Stalk her and she’ll learn to love me” one is probably
worse.) the last minute emotional
steroid boost. A sudden gust of extra strong feelings that gives them the
strength to break free. As if all we needed to achieve anything was to feel
a bit more.
Drives me up the wall. I mean, it’s been used effectively elsewhere – Disney’s Something Wicked This Way Comes springs to mind (it’s more complicated in the book). Hell, I’ve used it in my own fictions. But context matters, and while it made perfect sense in Something Wicked, it really doesn’t feel right here. Maybe it’s overused, maybe it’s too easy. To neat. Too “we can’t think of anything else”. Too “beentheredonethat”: if there were a fault in the just about faultless first series, it was overreliance on El’s powers. Here they go back to it, and everyone else’s effort really don’t amount to anything. I mean, I suppose the other senior characters got to use flame throwers to good effect, but it was really an after-thought. The important thing was the El just had to try harder.
After nine episodes and more than a dozen hours of buildup, it seems more than a bit bathetic. It certainly dampened my enthusiasm, and made it harder to enjoy the epic goings on.
And for all those cliches and contrivances, they still couldn’t save Eddie. Oh Eddie, poor ol’ Eddie, the most charismatic character on US TV since god-knows-when, and they didn’t feel like keeping you on. To think what you could have done and where you could have gone on further adventures[i]. Alas, alas.
How much more it would have meant if his sacrifice hadn’t been so senseless: supposedly, he was trying to buy time for the others, but by then they were already deep in Vecna’s clutches, so what was the point? And Vecna didn’t need those batty things anyway, so Eddie achieved pretty much nothing.
At least he got to play a solo first. It would have been criminal to send him out without one.
To be fair, his character arc did rather suggest a kind of
tragic redemption through sacrifice – this whole “I’m no hero” business. His scene
with Dustin on the hill -
“Don’t change Harrison!” – was backed to the brim with foreboding, though that
might have had more to do with idiot Twitter spoilers. Either way, I found it infinitely
moving, and I swear I teared up. Why? Maybe
it was just moving to see this somewhat aloof jester-figure finally
understanding how much he meant to his young acolytes, and how much they meant
to him. But even more, because it felt such a corrective to the show’
relentless theme about change – yes, things change, but there’s also such a
thing as consistency, and some things, like courage, integrity, individuality,
and yes, friendship, ought not to be so fickle. Certainly, it was an antidote
to season’s 3’s poisonous portrayal of role-players. Here’s the proper message:
role-playing is cool, nerds are cool, and however you might grow or evolve over
time, don’t ever stop being you.
So Eddie’s gone, but Hopper and Joyce are back, and Vecna’s vanquished, and about a hundred threads left untied – Dr. Owens? Dimitri? The General? Jason?[ii] There’s very obviously going to be another series. I do hope it continues along the same line – disappointments aside, it was gripping and moving. I liked the extra length episodes (though they wreaked havoc on the sleep schedule), for giving us a deeper story and more time with the characters, which still felt insufficient. A tenth episode would surely have wrapped things up more smoothly, but would the public had the patience for it?
For all my griping, my impression is still pretty positive. The series was gripping all the way through, clever, atmospheric, occasionally funny, but not so much to dampen a sense of menace. It gave the brain and the imagination a lot to chew on. And I haven’t been this invested in a set of TV characters since Peter Capaldi was Dr. Who. So despite reservations, gold stars all around.
Horns up. \m/
Final thoughts:
-
let’s give a shout out to the other awesome characters
that don’t get enough hype. Murray (Brett Gelman) and Erica (Priah Ferguson) lit up the screen every time
they walked on. I even liked Robert Morgan’s world weary Officer Powell, who
was clearly counting down his days till retirement, clearly sick of all that
supernatural shit.
-
Good for Robin, who might get a happy ending
after all.
-
Vecna’s origins? Call me naïve or dim, but I
didn’t see it coming at all.
[i] And the current repulsive
trend of origin stories wouldn’t help: what’s the point of following a
character up ‘til their starting point? Before all the major
character development? Knowing full well he’s doomed? How are we supposed to
watch and enjoy the character in action knowing their fate in advance? Never
understood that.
[ii] I am reliably informed by
https://strangerthings.fandom.com/wiki/Jason_Carver
that he was killed in the end, I have no memory of this scene. Pitty. I’d be
curious how these god-boys would behave in the aftermath.
(Stay off this site by the way. Don’t let obsessive fandom
shape your impressions).
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