Compromise and Conceit

I was hoping season 5 of Stranger Things would be a tour de force, a final reckoning with Vecna in which the kids from the previous seasons defeat him, learn the truth about his origins and persistence, and ideally destroy the military organizations that gave birth to him. These guys have been fighting this pernicious villain for four years now, they’ve grown up in battle, and in season 5 I was hoping to see them join up for one final adventure as a well-oiled team of monster-hunters. Sure, they’d be under-resourced and forced to do everything secretly, so there would be setbacks and challenges, and maybe there’d be a few episodes where they didn’t realize Vecna was back and took a bit of time to understand what was happening, just like in the previous three seasons. I could even forgive them ignoring Joyce’s warnings like they did in every previous season, even though she always turns out to be right, even if just for old time’s sake. But ultimately once they figured out Vecna was back I was looking forward to them tooling up, spinning out some hair-raising but exciting schemes, figuring out what was going on, and then destroying Vecna, the Upside Down, and everyone who set this whole shitshow in motion, ideally in an epic final showdown where we see them working together as a well-oiled team of friends who have been unified by years of struggle.

Instead, I get whatever the fuck this is: a stumbling, confused monstrosity of a show in which everyone is constantly on edge, everyone is constantly irrationally angry with each other, and their schemes are wildly stupid plans that don’t make sense and don’t matter. What a shambling wreck of a finale! I’m six episodes in and have reached that point where I’m regularly reaching for my phone to distract myself during the tedious arguments and weirdly mistimed heart-to-heart moments. And as is all too common in modern TV shows, I’m alternately raging at the ruination of characters I enjoyed, and frustrated at the absolutely zero-grade, low-effort writing. Let’s explore the three key flaws of this show’s final season, with spoilers.

The irrational rage

The thing that most ruins this season of the show is the constant nit-picking and fighting between characters, both within the group of kids but also generally in the world. I don’t know what directorial or production motivation lay behind the decision to make these interpersonal slanging matches a key part of the script, but they are nonsensical and tedious and yet so omnipresent, spontaneous and angst-ridden that they actually make the show distressing to watch. They’re so bad in fact that the most relaxing scene so far has been the enormous battle between demogorgons and soldiers in episode 5. You know you’re doing badly when a major battle is a break from the dialogue between friends!

Examples of this that are particularly egregious:

• When Dipshit Derek turns up at the army camp to join the other kids that the soldiers took there for their own protection, and is approaching the gates outside the camp, the soldier on guard instantly starts snapping at him and demanding to know why he can’t read the No Trespassing sign (which is obviously about the inside, not the outside, of the base) and continues to yell and snap at him even as he leads him into the barracks where everyone in the base knows they are supposed to protect children
• Dustin and Steve are constantly snapping and yelling at each other, and projecting clear and continuous hate at each other in every scene where they’re present, for no reason I can understand at all, and with no effort by them or anyone else to resolve or defuse this aggression. This is particularly terrible when they’re exploring the “shield generator”, the metaphor Dustin uses for the mechanism to keep the Wall up; we have known for four seasons that these kids use nerd culture references to explain the supernatural phenomena of the Upside Down, Return of the Jedi was an insanely popular film, and Steve is utterly scornful of this well-established mechanism for understanding the world which in this instance is based on a movie he admits he enjoyed!
• Eleven and Hopper have an absolutely antagonistic relationship that has no basis in sense at all, they’re constantly yelling at each other, even throwing things at each other and even arguing when one of them is clearly hurt or in trouble, or when they’re about to be attacked. Now I confess there are lots of reasons to hate Hopper, who is the most tedious and annoying character in this show and has been for a long time, but these two are meant to be really close! And again, the fights spark from nothing and have no antecedent. Just stop it already!
• Nancy’s two suitors, Steve and Jonathan, are an incomprehensible mess. Its been months since this conflict revealed itself (sometime in season 4) and these people are teenagers, this kind of feud just doesn’t last! By now Nancy would have picked one of them, or they would have had a physical confrontation and gotten over it, and in particular Steve would already have moved on to a cheerleader. Having this fight in the bowels of the Upside Down over a girl who, from a teenager’s perspective, is ancient history, is just exhausting. Get it over with!

It’s really hard to explain how frequent, spontaneous, and completely incomprehensible these spats are, how they seem to happen between any pair of people with no explanation or triggering event, and are clearly a directorial or script-writing decision, some kind of theme for the show. Maybe at the end we’ll find out that this was some kind of aura cast over the town by Vecna but by god it is tedious and it has wrecked every character.

It is also being used in one of the most boring, ancient and weak-willed of plot devices, in which characters decide they’re pissed off / bored / frustrated with each other and go off doing things without telling each other. Robin and Will fucking off into the woods at night, without telling anyone, after lying to Will’s mother about what they’re going to do, is a classic example of this. You guys know there are invulnerable monsters wandering in the night! Don’t fucking do this! Also Max not explaining anything to Holly and just ordering her to go to the wall, the kids leaving the church in the Upside Down after they told Hopper and Eleven they were waiting there, Hopper planning to kill himself without saying goodbye to Eleven … This shit was old in season 1 of the X-Files. Just drop it already.

It’s actually exhausting to watch a show with this much pointless interpersonal conflict, which is consistently at such a high level that it objectively interferes with the efficiency of their missions and risks getting them killed. There was less of this shit in Suicide Squad or The Dirty Dozen, for fuck’s sake. Why? Why?

The weird anxious fidgeting

Another strange offshoot of this conflict, or an adjunct to it, is the constant atmosphere of nervous energy from all the characters. The way Henderson reaches for a map in his car, the way Joyce rushes to urgently smash buttons on the walkie-talkie, face contorted with terror, just to say “yes, I’m here, how are you?”, the rushing and snapping and urgent hand movements. What is it all about? Has Joyce suddenly developed some kind of nervous disorder? Is Henderson on speed? Why is everyone so fucking jumpy at the smallest, most ordinary tasks? Not only does this make the slow periods of the show into tense, difficult scenes for no reasons, it drains the actual action scenes of the tension they should have. When the kids are being smuggled out of the barracks and Will and Mike are urgently trying to fix the leaking pipe I can’t tell if their urgency is because the pipe matters (which is actually unclear in this scene, because of the incoherence of the basic plotlines) or because they just need to work off some of this nervous energy.

I appreciate these guys have been through hell and back and they’re teenagers, but it’s exhausting to watch. People don’t need to be constantly stabbing fingers, snapping books and maps open, hammering on switches, and jabbering urgently to put across a sense of urgency, trauma or fear. It’s bad writing, lazy scene-setting. Drop it!

The insane plans and incoherent plots

This season introduces a new setting, a dreamscape of interlocking memories where Vecna keeps the souls or minds of the children he has captured. While physically they are locked in an Aliens-like hive prison being stuffed full of some kind of slug egg things, their minds are off in this dreamscape, enjoying holiday time in a giant house. Max, meanwhile, is trapped in a coma in the real world while her mind is held in this dreamscape. She almost escaped from it by following the sound of her favourite song but failed to make it (because she stupidly paused). She was then almost caught by Vecna but fled to a cave that is part of a memory that terrifies Vecna, for reasons I expect I will discover by the end of the season. Now, she has found Holly at Vecna’s house and is helping Holly to escape by working back through the interconnected memories of how Holly got caught by Vecna. If they can find the initial memory of how she met Vecna, she figures there’s a way out of this dreamscape. As far as we can tell this way out is for both of them, for Holly and Max, and this is clarified even when Holly asks Max “are you coming too?” And Max hints she may stay to help the others. So it is clear that this escape is for both of them. If Max escapes she returns to her body in the hospital and wakes up, a fact made very clear by what happens to her body when Vecna catches them.

But what happens if Holly “escapes”? Her body is in the Upside Down, being face-fucked by Vecna’s octopus. So are we meant to believe that after all the trekking through the dreamscape, if Holly climbed through that final window, we were going to have a scene where a child, a 12 year old girl, opens her eyes in her chitinous cell in the Upside Down, with a tube forced down her throat? What then? A torturous couple of minutes of watching a girl being face-fucked by a tentacle? I put it to you that the writers didn’t really think this through, and the entire dreamscape scene with Max and Holly was superfluous, a scenario that could not be allowed to resolve itself.

Thanks for wasting my time, dickheads.

Or how about the kidnapping of the Turnbow family? Somehow Alicia manages to drug the entire family, and stabs her former best friend with a hypodermic needle, they smuggle them all to a farm and chain them up in a pig pen, then the demogorgon attacks so they flee with just Dipshit Derek Turnbow, leaving the family drugged and chained up in the pig pen in the middle of nowhere, and we never again hear what happens to the family. Do they wake up in terror, chained up in a pig pen far from home with no one to help them, and everything’s okay? Why hasn’t Derek asked about them even once? Not even a sentence to say “Oh yeah Joyce went back and untied them and left a van for them”? Not even an anonymous phone call to the police? We’re meant to believe the army are bad guys for abducting, drugging and using people to further their secret plans, and yet …

What was that about? Or Hopper’s dumb as fuck plan to go kamikaze on Vecna, a guy they know is basically invulnerable to everything. Or what about the army’s plan to put the kids in a barracks right in the centre of Hawkins, knowing from bitter, ongoing experience that none of their weapons work on demogorgons? Why not fly them to California, where Vecna can’t get them? Or at least develop a weapon that actually works, which they’ve shown they can do for Eleven?

If you removed this waffle, and these impossible, inexplicable and incompetent plans and schemes, the show would be about 10 minutes long. But the writers couldn’t be bothered coming up with plans and schemes that work, so we’re left to struggle through long sections of plot that were either designed not to make sense (the dreamscape with Holly) or leave a weird or bad taste in your mouth (the kidnapping of the Turnbow family) or are just straight up silly (everything the army does, and everything Hopper does). Is the entire season filler, sprinkled with incomprehensible spontaneous warprage by the main characters?

Thanks for wasting my time, dickheads.

The destruction of Robin Buckley

Robin was a fun character in earlier seasons, funny and cynical and quite cute, but in this season she has turned into a neurotic weirdo who talks too much. I think the writers are trying to make her the 1980s version of a neurodivergent person, someone who overshares and doesn’t have a filter and is socially awkward, but she wasn’t that person in the previous seasons, and it has reduced a quite strong and rich character into an annoying, overly vulnerable stereotype. (I also expect that since it is Rule 101 of Hollywood that the lesbian and the fat girl always die, she will be killed off this season).

Robin isn’t the only character to have been destroyed. Joyce is now dumb, naive, whiney and weak. Steve Henderson has turned into a raging dipshit. Will and Mike can’t act. Eleven is meant to be some kind of super soldier but is completely emotionally dependent on her abusive, useless stand-in father figure. Nancy retains her strength but is also a constant ball of coiled rage. In time-honored Hollywood tradition, they’ve wrecked almost every character.

Max and Bauman are still okay though. Except Max, the strongest and most active character of the previous seasons, has been bedridden, and can’t do shit anymore. Thanks, guys.

Bonus whinge: The Sorcerer

One of the more memorable moments of the show so far is Will’s discovery that he can “hack” the hivemind, and take control of the demogorgons, which enables him to save all his friends’ lives and makes him pretty cool. Aside from the fact that “hack” as a phrase only really came about in the early 1990s (Neuromancer was published in 1984 but the cyberpunk genre as a whole and its associated lingo only entered popular cultural awareness in the 1990s, so Joyce certainly wouldn’t understand it), this was a fun and exciting ending to a great battle scene. Although there was some really bad acting in that battle scene, it at times had hints of a Game of Thrones battle scene or the great single-shot takes of Children of Men, it was tense and dangerous and seeing the demogorgons in full fury against an entire division of soldiers was great[1]

Except, that as soon as he does this the rest of the team start lauding him as a “bona-fide sorcerer”, a real wizard, and referring to him as “The Sorcerer”. It’s even in the chapter title. They even specify that he must be a Sorcerer because this character class uses their magic innately (as he did) rather than getting it from books.

The Sorcerer character class was first introduced to Dungeons and Dragons in 2000, with the release of the D&D 3rd Edition. It did not exist in AD&D, which is what the characters of this show are used to, and was in fact the title of an 8th level magic user. According to Stack Overflow a Sorcerer kit was introduced in a supplement in 1992, but essentially this class did not exist. I’m sorry but D&D is a fundamental part of this story, and although they get elements of the original playset wrong to make the adventures and phraseology more interesting, introducing a class from 15 years after the show was set as both an episode title and a major dialogue point is just sloppy. Don’t do this, people!

Also, they never ever said this about Eleven, who they met first, who also uses her magic powers innately, and who was vastly more impressive to them than Will and has saved their lives like a million times using her innate powers. Now they’re acting like they’ve never seen these powers before. WTF is that about? That’s stolen valour, is what that is.

An exhausting and disappointing end

I’m going to finish this season, make no mistake, but I am really disappointed in what has been done with it. I don’t know why they’ve made everyone angry, wrecked the characters and written so many complicated, unnecessary and irresolvable plots. I hope they clean it up for the finale. But this is everything I didn’t want from this show. It’s another great TV series that has been wrecked at its end by deliberate, inscrutable writing choices, yet another failure of the engine of modern culture. It joins Game of Thrones and Invasion as a show that had so much promise, and was wrecked for no apparent reason at all. The cultural choices that major writers and producers make in modern TV are a complete mystery to me, and I hope one day they listen to the complaints leveled against them, and actually learn to respect their craft and their audience.

A final note

If you enjoy my reviews and think I have anything interesting to say about modern sci-fi and fantasy, please consider reading my fiction at Royal Road.

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fn1: Incidentally, this battle scene contained some really great examples of the way guns work as a weird kind of magic weapon in American TV. The soldiers – apparently professionals! – surrounded the demogorgons in a loose circle and all started shooting at a single demogorgon at once. So either every bullet they fired hit the demogorgon, or they were using special magic movie bullets that don’t kill their friends, because usually when people stand in a circle and shoot they shoot each other. Ridiculous!