A few weeks back, the kids started agitating for us to get Netflix, specifically so they could watch Stranger Things. So, we broke down and signed up for the streaming service. Whereupon The Pip watched maybe half of the first episode before “Nope”-ing out of the show (it’s hard to get a good read, but I think he was more bored by the middle-school stuff than scared by the monster), and SteelyKid watched the whole first season, but recoiled from the scene of Joyce and Bob making out in the supply closet in the season two premiere. Kids.
On the other hand, I had been sort of peripherally aware of Stranger Things as something likely to appeal to me, so I jumped at the chance to watch all three seasons over the course of the last couple of weeks. And I have this blog, so of course I’ll write up my reactions…
This is, as I said, something that’s very much in my pop-cultural wheelhouse, given that I’m just about exactly the age of the principal characters. So, I have direct memories of being a nerdy 14-year-old boy in 1985 to compare this to, and it does a pretty good job. I was actually a little surprised at how little the show leans on the nostalgia aspect, though, given the social-media conversations I caught the edges of– it basically just determines the sound track and set dressing, but for the most part, they don’t throw the 80’s-ness at the viewer quite as aggressively as I expected. There are a few points when they do– the “New Coke” speech in the third season lands with a thud– but it’s mostly just a period piece, not a “Look at us, we’re doing a period piece!” piece.
It was also interesting to me that there’s very little about the period setting that’s essential to the action. That is, it’s easy to imagine transplanting the core plot to other decades. The Cold War figures as a motivation for some of the characters, but you could easily move it forward 20 years and replace the Soviets with Al Qaeda without significantly changing anything else. Or, for that matter, move it forward to the present day without needing to change any of the Russian-speaking cast at all…
In terms of on-screen spectacle, it’s very well done, mostly because the cast is terrific. They rounded up a really good cast of young actors for the principal roles, particularly Noah Schapp as Will and Millie Bobby Brown as Eleven, both of whom do excellent work with body language.
The adults are also really good, with Winona Ryder doing a great job as the barely-holding-it-together Joyce. I also realized in the middle of the third season that while I was one of the boys at the center of the story, at this stage in my life the character I most related to was David Harbour’s exasperated-dad Hopper. I can’t tell you how grateful I am that SteelyKid doesn’t have telekenetic abilities…
Plot-wise, there was nothing too surprising, but they hit all the necessary beats and hit them well. The third season went a little over the top with the poor-man’s-David-Cronenberg body-horror stuff, but that’s a matter of taste as much as anything. I also could’ve done without Jake Busey; honestly, that whole plot line could’ve gone away, but his part was particularly awful. But, again, a matter of taste, and I’ve always hated that kind of thuddingly obvious messaging.
Of course, being who I am, I can’t help poking at the setting a bit, and really, there’s very little there that makes any sense at all. I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to make sense of the size of Hawkins, IN, which oscillates between “small Midwestern town” (it appears to have one store and a total of six cops) and “mid-size city” (dozens of people vanish without really raising alarm, and nobody knows anywhere near enough about everybody else’s business for it to really be a small town) as required by the plot. And where, exactly, do the presumably hundreds of employees of the Hawkins National Lab live that none of the characters know anybody who works there, and life just goes on as usual after they’re all eaten by extradimensional monster dogs?
Also, the Russian plot in the third season is sublimely ridiculous, in terms of the setting. I mean, the scale of the operation is mind-boggling, and how, exactly, did they get that number of Soviet scientists and military personnel who speak absolutely no English into Indiana in 1985?
This kind of hits the sweet spot of stupid, though, in that it’s dumb enough to be entertaining to think about, but not played so seriously that it gets in the way of enjoying the action. If it continues much longer, it runs some risk of crossing into the MCU Zone where the sheer weight of dopey continuity starts to overwhelm the fun bits, but for the moment it’s still in John Wick territory. As always, your mileage may vary.
Anyway: A fun show, and I’m glad I watched it. When they do a next season, I’ll definitely tune in, and actually maybe be in step with the pop-cultural moment for the first time in years.