Stranger Things S5

[olivermoss]

I finished Stranger Things. I didn't want to rush through the last of it, but the official accounts posted major spoilers like immediately. I wanted to see it before I saw too much more.

It was a slog. I wish it had ended with them putting away Vecna in S4.

When you've got a tight, character focused supernatural story with big implications, the story sometimes needs to become a very different type of story to play out the plot. It's a death of a lot of urban fantasy and supernatural stories. Fun to start, but as stakes get big things get weird. They went from 'missing kid' to 'Earth in danger'. They needed to not let the stakes elevate to insanity.

Robin, Nancy, Steve and Jonathan's goodbye scene was painful because no, they are not getting together every month. Even if I was unfamiliar with the media that inspired the show, there were so many flags that the older teen group was just collapsing. Especially because they decided to commit to every month. With two of them in highly competitive colleges that distance away? Putting that sort of promise on it is going to just make it collapse faster.

The goodbye of the kids was a lot better for me and one of the very few things I liked about the season. It was clear that they would remain close, even if they were drawn apart for a while in their 20s. I really liked Mike's narration and I teared up. I even enjoy El getting an ambiguous ending. I HATE ambiguous endings and there are fridge logic problems with both her alive and dead, but I don't care. In the moment it got me and I love Stranger Things. This canon is important to me, most of it was insanely good. It will stay with me. So, I will pretend that was good.

Fuck I wish they'd killed Venca last season.

And now I've cancelled Netflix and Will Never attempt to calculate how much money I spent just renting access to my favorite show.

Comments

[evilinsanemonkey]

I'm still ruminating on how I feel about the season as a whole. I think I won't know for sure until I do a slow rewatch of the whole show because the binge model and my brain don't mesh well, so I think I need to do that before I fully know if I liked the final or not.

I kind of think the last episode didn't need to be 2 hrs though...

[olivermoss]

As much as binging season 1 was a great experience for me, keeping up with canons shouldn't feel like a job, or a race.

I'm fine with how long the epilogue was, even though the epilogue was hit or miss for me. But the earlier part of the episode dragged for me.

[mistressofmuses]

I still haven't seen the final episode, but was spoiled pretty immediately for it. We'll watch it soon.

The whole escalation of stakes thing really is such a difficult balancing act. There's only so far they CAN escalate without getting a bit silly, and it really is especially frustrating when the initial stakes (often comparatively low, but still enough to matter!) were compelling and drew you in. But at the same time, if the stakes don't escalate at all, it can feel really stagnant. Some series manage it, but it can be a struggle.

(This is also what burned me out on a few of the longer-running anime/manga I was into way back when; how many new swords and ultimate attacks and big world-ending threats is it really plausible to be dealing with??)

[olivermoss]

Too much escalation and the show becomes a different genre, that's tricky to pull off. That's all I'll say because I forget what was in the finale versus previous episodes.

[mistressofmuses]

Yeah, it does feel like a genre shift. "This is about the world being deliberately threatened for destruction" is not where we started.

I have now finished the series! It was...fine.

Agreed that the older group's goodbye was... idk, I can't quite tell if the show wants you to believe that they really are going to get together in Philly once a month, or if we're supposed to recognize that this is the "yeah, we'll totally get together and do lunch!" that never materializes.

The kids' goodbye was sweet.

[olivermoss]

It's easier to care about a mom and her kid than something abstract like the world. If they had kept it to just Hawkins, a place we care about and was built up in the show, that would have worked better.

Stranger Things leans heavily on Stephen King books like It and a lot of 80s movies, so I really, really doubt they are staying together at all. And just... monthly? That is a set up for failure.

The kid's goodbye was sweet.