It’s hard to build a solid foundation culling almost exclusively from other people’s work, then attempting to redefine it as something more than it was ever intended for, transforming the joy of nostalgia into a fantasy epic.
I’ll start by being honest: I always thought Stranger Things was at least a little overrated. As a proud member of Generation X and a fan of almost all things 80’s, I watched it shortly after its initial release and enjoyed the first season for what it was, a nostalgic mash up of the movies I loved as a kid, but didn’t think much more about it at the time, little knowing it would soon take on a life of its own. As Rotten Tomatoes summarized the initial effort, released in its entirety on Netflix on July 15, 2016, “Exciting, heartbreaking, and sometimes scary, Stranger Things acts as an addictive homage to Spielberg films and vintage 1980s television.” Then and now, this seems to me an apt description if ever there was one. In the first season at least, what made Stranger Things work so well was the slick repackaging of what was exceedingly familiar in the short dose of an old film into a longer, more immersive television experience, transforming the still popular echoes of the past into a format – big budget, prestige streaming content – unique to the modern era. This framing can be applied to almost everything, from the characters to the plot with the setting in between, making the experience of watching the show similar to seeing a friendly face everywhere you looked. Thus, the small, fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana was a stand in for the freedom enjoyed in the bygone era of my youth, a place where children live relatively carefree existences under the, at times, somewhat neglectful eye of their parents, riding their bikes with abandon, part for fun, part for simple transportation, and gathering where they please as far from adults as they could get and still get home for dinner. In that sense, it could’ve been the Staten Island I called home in the 1980’s, The Goonies’ Astoria, Oregon without the bayfront setting, the suburban San Fernando Valley in California of E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, the equally fictional Midway City, California of the less heralded, still excellent The Monster Squad, or even Derry, Maine of Stephen King’s It.
Regardless of where, it was defined mostly by when, a time when kids roamed, explored, and gained experience on their own, and the sense that nothing really bad ever happens in these places – until it does because even in what many considered a suburban paradise, evil, both manmade and supernatural always lurks just beyond the trees or the water’s edge. Being a mash up, the evil in Stranger Things simply had to be two fold from the beginning. Unlike The Goonies, where the faceless bank foreclosing on the family home sets the gang in search of lost treasure with hardened, slightly comic criminals on their trail, or E.T. where the government searches for the friendly alien for nefarious purposes, there are human villains in the form of a more shadowy government operation and the supernatural, though to be certain, even the shadowy government operation breeding psychic children was already familiar from 1984’s Firestarter. From there, the first season essentially picked and chose various plotlines from these earlier works, teasing out the essence that made them special at the time and blending them back together like a mixologist preparing a newly invented cocktail from existing ingredients. Eleven’s escape from the lab and subsequent pursuit by the government contains elements of both Firestarter and ET, where she is both the young woman, Charlie on the run and the friendly alien. In Firestarter, Charlie is aided by her father. In Stranger Things, Eleven is aided by Mike, Dustin, Lucas, and the rest, as E.T. was by Elliot and his friends, until the meets her new father figure in Hopper. While the kidnapping of Will Byers that opens the season seems to make this effort different on the surface, creating a mystery that runs in parallel with the strange appearance of Eleven, the echoes of the past persist nonetheless. Chunk is kidnapped by the Fratellis in The Goonies, separated from everyone else, leaving the rest of the gang clueless as to what’s happened to him, until he arrives to help save the day at the end. Perhaps even closer to home, if a few years earlier, Will’s mother Joyce can be seen as a male version of Roy Neary from Close Encounters of the Third Kind attempting to divine the meaning of alien, or in this case, supernatural messages. In both, there is a sense they might be going slightly mad, obsessed past the point of reason, even as the audience knows all along they’re on the right track.
Of course, the audience also knows the gang will ultimately protect Eleven and save the day, the same way The Goonies found the treasure and saved their homes, though in this case, The Monster Squad, mentioned earlier as somewhat unheralded, proves the more direct analog, which in many ways can be seen as the underlying framework of the entire effort. While the Stranger Things gang famously plays Dungeons & Dragons and frequently likens the happenings in Hawkins to the world of the game, almost thirty years earlier, The Monster Squad actually pitted die-hard preteen fans of Universal’s classic horror films against the real-life monsters from those films. The same way Mike and team do three decades on, Sean Crenshaw and his team were the first to become aware that extraordinary events are afoot in their seemingly normal suburban town, only to leverage their unique knowledge of monster mechanics to prevail. If you can believe it, The Monster Squad even boasts an alternative world, known as Limbo that Dracula, the Mummy, the Wolf Man, and the other fiends can be cast into, similar to the Upside Down, especially as we will learn in the fifth and final season that it’s really bridge the Abyss. In both cases, pre-teens who are obsessed with imaginary adventures find themselves caught in a real one and as simply has to be be the case in these situations, they show barely any reluctance at all to do what must be done – and somehow find a way to hide what they’re up to from their parents, the same as they hid E.T. in the shed and dressed him in a costume, another important part of the nostalgia. When I was their age, me and my friends were out riding our bikes, fishing, hunting for turtles, and playing manhunt without adult supervision, pretending we were up to something far more epic. These were our adventures, albeit of the mostly imaginary kind. In 80’s cinema, the kids are busy saving the world or at least the town, having the sort of adventures we could only dream of back then, and so it was when Stranger Things season one closed with an epic confrontation, a sacrifice, and a seeming return to normalcy for Hawkins, as though nothing ever happened and the adventure was truly imaginary in the first place. To at least some who argue the series should have ended there, this was fitting. The plotlines wrapped up nicely, the characters, well played by all the actors involved with excellent chemistry and empathetic performances, safe in their beds, the nostalgia still strong.
Unfortunately, the limitations of this approach began to appear as early as season two when nostalgia alone began to run thin. Knowing the show had captured the cultural zeitgeist and become a true phenomenon, the creators, known as the Duffer Brothers, were faced with a dilemma. Could the nostalgia that made the show a success truly be turned into a satisfying multi-season series or would they have to go in another direction? For the second season at least, they tried to recapture the nostalgia by doubling down on what was effectively another version of season one, believing they could mine the past for more inspiration, not realizing there were limits to how far recycling existing plotlines could take them. The “Big Bad” Demogorgon from season one became a bunch of Demodogs in season two, which was actually a homage to Alien becoming Aliens in the beloved sequel to the original science fiction horror film, Joyce has another supposedly new, but now familiar puzzle to solve, Eleven herself is relegated to a handful of scenes with Hopper plus a bottle episode where she meets her “sister,” and the dramatic death during the denouement of the season is of a loveable character seemingly introduced for that purpose at the start of the season. As others have pointed out, there’s also a sense of resetting the clock, inexplicably dialing the outcomes of the first season back, rather pushing them forward, which strikes me as necessary when the goal was to essentially go back and start again seeking new nostalgia, if such a thing can be said to exist. Eleven was given a miraculous rebirth without any real explanation, the shadowy government enterprise that imprisoned her a miraculously nice new leader, ironically Paul Reiser from Aliens itself, and the Upside Down has some kind of new boss as well, albeit one that we never seen and doesn’t seem to do anything at that point, the Mind Flayer. Beyond introducing a couple of new characters, mainly Max and her brother Billy, where even then Max becomes the subject of the boy’s infatuation as Eleven before her, there wasn’t much going and the stakes seemed incredibly low for a sophomore effort, save one that was limited to the now slightly worn nostalgia that made the freshman season so beloved.
Faced with this criticism, the Duffer Brothers appear to have made a conscious choice to abandon nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake and begin the effort of reimagining the show as the sort of true cinematic universe that has become fashionable in recent years. Sadly, this would also prove incredibly difficult, leading them necessarily away from what made the show lovable to begin with. Starting with season three, they attempted to transform simple, well-packaged nostalgia into a modern day fantasy epic, but doing so only seemed to make things worse in many ways. To begin with, they couldn’t simply abandon everything that had come before and start over, though in my ways they tried. The nostalgia that had provided much of the show’s original charm was now tacked on as an ornament serving primarily as the setting – a mall – and as a source of conflict, the Russians, of course. The Mind Flayer is back, but once again, the beast – which like the Demogorgon was culled from Dungeons & Dragons, a move they would repeat in the next season with Vecna – doesn’t directly appear, possessing Max’s brother instead, who assumes the role of another likeably expendable character. Between the Russians and the Mind Flayer, there are once again shadowy government conspiracies and the supernatural at large, converging, where else than the new mall? While there might have been more action and a faster pace than the previous two efforts, the attempts to expand the story don’t really lead anywhere except circles. It seems nostalgia cannot really be folded in on itself to make entirely new shapes, though not for lack of trying. The Russians want to open the rift to the Upside Down rather than the Americans. The Mind Flayer relies on possessed humans merging into a single monster, rather than a single Demogorgon or the Demodogs. Even the ending is recycled, Hopper sacrifices himself instead of Eleven, and though Eleven lives she apparently loses her powers, but having seen it before, the audience was aware Hopper was gifted with some serious plot armor and lived, while Eleven was sure to get her powers back in the subsequent season.
Sadly, things only got worse from there. In season four, it turns out that the Russians were introduced primarily to capture Hopper and create a plotline where Joyce and newcomers to the team have to help him escape, separating him from the main plotline the same as Eleven in season two, but not doing anything meaningful after, what would become a habit of dropping plotlines with abandon throughout the end of the run. The Americans are the bad guys once more while the Russians are never heard from again after Hopper breaks free, but more crucially to the fate of the remainder of the show, the Duffer Brothers attempted to redefine the origin of the Upside Down itself, remaking almost everything about it in what amounts to failed bit of cinematic alchemy, transmuting nostalgia into something radically new and different. Instead of Eleven being responsible for its creation, it’s her brother Henry who has transformed himself into the evil Vecna afterwards. While not bad in principle on its own, the result is a lot of backstory which the creators would likely call world building, but in reality serves to distract or excise all that’s come before, resulting in the original charm of the nostalgia becoming completely lost. The Mind Flayer is absent – relegated to a brief, supposed to a huge twist in the final season – the Demodogs are now Demobats, there’s a new lovingly expandable character, this time a tough-guy Dungeons & Dragons player, and ultimately nothing of substance really happens except Max ends up in a coma and there’s a kind of earthquake in the finale. Somehow, season five managed to repeat and magnify these errors, as if world building and epic fantasy required moving in endless narrative circles. While the Americans are still the human bad guys, this time led by the nostalgic appeal of Linda Hamilton made famous in the Terminator franchise, they serve primarily as obstacles for the gang, contributing nothing to the plot. The Upside Down is suddenly a bridge to the Abyss, Vecna seeks to merge the real world that Abyss where the real Mind Flayer lives, and he plans to prey on weak children like Will to do so. Will, who not surprisingly is gay, thought that was a weakness, and has to overcome it, coming out to his friends in an extended scene culled from Lord of the Rings, minus a gruff, stocky dwarf swearing he has his back with an axe. Perhaps some of these items could’ve worked, but taken together the nostalgia was gone and the world building was weak. Plotlines are picked up and dropped with abandon to the point where I forgot they were even in school when we suddenly end up at a graduation speech after the climax. Linda Hamilton does nothing. Vecna apparently became Vecna as a result of finding a strange rock that could’ve been integral to his demise, yet was never seen again. Instead Dustin works out the whole plot from an obvious plot device of a notebook he discovered that conveniently tells him everything they needed to know to prevail. There’s a new Will, well twelve of them actually spearheaded by Mike’s sister who bizarrely wears a blue Red Riding hood get up. Eleven dies again – or does she – something that frustrated many rather than giving her a happy end, me more so because they did at all before.
Even as the season boasted some of the biggest action scenes to date and handful of intense moments, the characters themselves don’t seem to be in a rush, pausing repeatedly at time sensitive juncture for extended dialogue about themselves, the meaning of life, and their relationships. Taken together, the Duffer Brothers appear to have left behind a frustrating, still somewhat charming mess of their own making, but I don’t think anyone should be surprised. The limitations were inherent in what made the first season popular: Namely, nostalgia isn’t a substitute for a well thought out plot. In many ways, the charm of the movies, shows, and books that inspired Stranger Things is their short, self-contained nature. We might wonder what became of The Monster Squad after they defeated Dracula, or Elliot after E.T. goes home, but we will never know. The stories were short, sweet, and uncomplicated in the first place, but more importantly they exist in a past, a time that is no longer present, unchangeable and beyond our reach, one of the reasons nostalgia is so powerful a feeling in the first place. Attempting to make them more than they are, is counter to what made them lovable. Adding complications, twists, and turns, only serves to undermine the appeal. Some things are better left alone. If Mark Twain could never figure out what to do with Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer as adults, the Duffer Brothers had no way to build a true fantasy world on mere nostalgia. It’s hard to build a solid foundation culling almost exclusively from other people’s work, then attempting to redefine it as something more than it was ever intended for, and as we all learned with the conclusion to Game of Thrones, both the show and the book, endings are a lot harder than beginnings. It was probably always going to be this way, sadly.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 