Stranger Things

[K]

 

[Baddar]

Netflix confirmed yesterday that this will return in 2022. 

Also, despite being announced about 9 months ago, I only found out about this the other day. A pretty big name has been cast for S4

Spoiler

Robert Englund

 

[Neil_1113]

On 07/08/2021 at 02:01, Baddar said:

Netflix confirmed yesterday that this will return in 2022. 

Also, despite being announced about 9 months ago, I only found out about this the other day. A pretty big name has been cast for S4

  Reveal hidden contents

Robert Englund

 

I hope he plays a horror villain!

[GoGo Yubari]

 

[Maxx]

Well based on the senseless destruction of that beautiful stained glass window, this season the kids are the monsters.

[livid]

Finally a release date(s)!

 

[Maxx]

Being so used to Disney+'s weekly release schedule now, I was very confused as to how May 27 and July 1st didn't just equate to one continuous series.  Then I remembered Netflix puts all the episodes out at once.

[gunnar hendershow]

Netflix has in some cases starting going with an episode-per-week window. Kinda surprised given how big this particular show is for them that they aren't trying that. But I guess since they haven't for prior seasons they won't for this.

[lanky316]

It's one of those things, an it varies from person to person of course but.... I still get that semi-nostalgic excitement on release day like I used to. Something about "oooh new episode of X" that still gets me. I hadn't noticed Netflix starting to adopt that system these days like Amazon or D+.

[gunnar hendershow]

1 hour ago, lanky316 said:

It's one of those things, an it varies from person to person of course but.... I still get that semi-nostalgic excitement on release day like I used to. Something about "oooh new episode of X" that still gets me. I hadn't noticed Netflix starting to adopt that system these days like Amazon or D+.

For what it's worth their very big TV show releases still are all at once. But they've clearly been testing the waters with anime releases and some other shows - namely Bake-Off. I'm sure there are others as well off my radar.

[LL!]

There would be no stranger thing than if they released episodes weekly. 

[Adam]

3 hours ago, damhausen said:

Netflix has in some cases starting going with an episode-per-week window. Kinda surprised given how big this particular show is for them that they aren't trying that. But I guess since they haven't for prior seasons they won't for this.

This might be purely down to distribution rights for the UK, but there has been weekly release shows on Netflix for a few years here. Off the top of my head though, it's shows like Better Call Saul and The Good Place that I can think of, which is obviously running parallel to a traditional TV release in the States on a network or cable channel.

[livid]

I am hyped!

[lanky316]

After such a long break I wasn't sure how hyped I would be. Now I'm right back up there like I was from the earlier series. Can't wait.

[Maxx]

[Tigerstyle]

I’m working from home after finally being hit with the ‘vid and rewatching Stranger Things and it’s so good. Well, season one is anyway.

[Skummy]

I haven't watched the trailers, as we just finished watching the series to date - I'd seen it all before, my other half had only seen season one, so was seeing the subsequent seasons for the first time with me. She's a little less critical of the last two series than me - I thought maybe I'd warm to series three on repeat viewing, but aside from a couple of points, didn't really.

Thoughts!:

Spoiler

Series one is still brilliant. Just perfectly paced, genuinely fantastic TV that reminded me all over again why I fell in love with the show in the first place. Almost zero criticisms from me.

Series two is flawed, but still great fun. The plot is weaker than series two, and there's a few points where it feels like they're actively trying to rehash what worked first time around - Joyce's house being covered with Will's artwork feels like them trying to recapture the visual appeal of the strung up Christmas lights as a symbol of her obsession in series one, and then her fixation on magnets in series three again feels like treading on the same ground.
Series two - for the most part - makes up for the weaker plot with some stronger characterisation; I love Hopper in this series, and the kids and the dynamic between them starts to feel a lot more fleshed out and believable, beyond the fairly generic '80s kids of the first series. The budding friendship between Dustin and Steve is amazing, of course, and Steve in general probably has some of the best character development of the series, going from high school bully to redemption arc to almost bumbling sidekick, but never losing the essence of his character.
That makes it all the more frustrating that Eleven's character arc is dealt with in the most on-the-nose, clumsy way imaginable, in the worst episode of the show. The whole teenage gang thing is the most obvious backdoor pilot for a spin-off, it feels tonally completely at odds with the rest of the series, and none of the characters are remotely believable or likeable. That, in the context of the series, it serves a means for Eleven to find her humanity - something that could easily have been achieved in countless other, better ways - doesn't help, nor does the fact that it requires her "running away from home" three times in the space of maybe two or three episodes. Rubbish.

Series three has its moments - Cary Elwes is a great addition to the cast, Robin is a brilliant new character, Steve and Dustin continue to be brilliant together, the return of Murray is a welcome one (as is the pay-off to his first appearance being him adamant that there were Russians hiding in Hawkins!) and Dustin gets the best comedy moment of the series in the finale - but otherwise is really, really flawed. I genuinely loved Hopper in series two, and by the start of series three it's like none of his growth or character development ever happened, he's just a belligerent sitcom dad who's never even heard of a "heart-to-heart", despite having had one of the show's most well-written emotional conversations with Eleven the previous series, and his relationship with Joyce is reduced to constant bickering and arguing for its own sake.

Whereas the strength of series one's writing was in how you had different groups of people all pursuing the same goals without realising it, so all organically coming together at the end, here the moment when everyone comes together in the final scenes at the mall feels incredibly forced - the kids in the middle of a crisis, fleeing a giant monster, with Eleven injured, drop everything to rush to the mall based on a half-heard radio message from Dustin, and turn up just in time to save the day. Except not two minutes earlier, a different radio message had the Russians saying that they had secured every entrance to the mall - yet somehow Eleven, Mike et al were able to walk in without incident and, moments later, so were Hopper and Joyce, just in time? Obviously it's a big daft sci-fi horror adventure story, but series three stretches credulity and suspension of disbelief way further than anything that came before it.

 

There's a problem in sci-fi and fantasy writing where the temptation is always to up the ante by making everything bigger, which overlooks that often the appeal of the genre can be in its smallness - Stranger Things works because it's the story of spooky goings on in small town America, rather than a big city. It needs to be a small town that's off the radar of the rest of the country, where everyone knows each other's business, and everyone's trying to keep secrets from one another. When the outcome of series one is that there's a government cover-up around a missing kid and a dead teenager, it's believable that the government and a tame local media could keep that under wraps, that only a small group of people (outside of the Hawkins Lab) know what happened, and that it could be kept as only a footnote in the wider press. By series two, that's even a plot point - Murray acknowledges that nobody will ever believe the full story, but that he can make waves by picking out the fine details and selling it as a story of corruption and secret chemical testing. The stakes are raised in season two but - outside of the rubbish Chicago episode - the story is still confined to Hawkins, still follows on directly from the events of series one, and the "government cover-up in small town America" angle still works, with Murray's story causing the lab to be shut down, and the official narrative in the press being that a chemical leak killed Barb.

But when you get to series three, the possibility of a cover-up becomes untenable. You have to account for dozens, perhaps hundreds, dead, including half the staff of the local newspaper. You have to account for untold property damage, not just to the mall and places like Hopper's cabin, but to the hospital. You have to account for the exposure of Russian involvement on American soil, of (you would have to assume) at least some eyewitness accounts of a giant flesh monster marauding through town, and the arrival of the US military to a mall in sleepy small town America. The bigger it gets, the less it becomes a story of smalltown American weirdness, and the less believable it is that these wouldn't be treated as serious, epochal events - even if the Upside Down is kept secret, how does the presence of Russian operatives in smalltown America not change everything on a geopolitical level? Even if the extent of what they were doing is covered up and its kept to "they were allowed to operate commercial properties thanks to a corrupt mayor", during the Cold War, that would be an international scandal. With all the weirdness going on, surely somebody is going to realise that Joyce Byers, Jim Hopper and the same bunch of kids are on the scene every single time? It gets harder and harder to believe that they're going about their lives in a seemingly ordinary way, and half the appeal and half the drama of a series like Stranger Things is in the mundane, everyday interpersonal relationships.

Maybe the next series attempts to tackle some of those big picture issues, but I'm not convinced - all I've seen is that the scale is only going to get bigger, as it's going to span states, countries and continents. That doesn't fill me with confidence.

That said, series three's mock news report on Hawkins as a "cursed town" is an interesting one - I loved the nod to the Satanic Panic, given that the kids are always playing D&D. Maybe the story will be more about how Hawkins as a whole attempts to deal with whatever's been going on. I wonder if they'll touch on why Hawkins? We know that the Russians were operating there because they knew the Hawkins Lab had succeeded in opening the Gate, but why did the Hawkins Lab choose to set up there in the first place? Was the Gate there before them? For how long? Is Hawkins somehow cursed, is there something in its history that accounts for all of this? Or maybe it's not Hawkins - maybe some aspect of The Upside Down will follow the Byers family all the way to their new home? Or maybe it stayed where it is, and we meet the new owners of the Byers house, and see what living there means to people new to Hawkins. That kind of thing interests me far more than the addition of Russian Demogorgons and new big baddies.
 

 

[Tigerstyle]

Isn't your last point that they were doing work on all kinds of kids with abilities, it just so happens Hawkins was where they were (they had to be somewhere) and Eleven in being a super duper kid accidentally opened the gateway?

[Skummy]

42 minutes ago, Tigerstyle said:

Isn't your last point that they were doing work on all kinds of kids with abilities, it just so happens Hawkins was where they were (they had to be somewhere) and Eleven in being a super duper kid accidentally opened the gateway?

I'm not sure - I think there's sort of two things going on;

Spoiler

Did the experiments start with the kids, or with the gateway? The Russians seem to have been aware of the possibility of a gate, or of the Upside Down, but not necessarily of the experimenting on kids - maybe the lack of a telepath like Eleven is what meant their attempts to open the gate were unsuccessful.

But even then, what's the measure of "unsuccessful" - they somehow ended up with a Demogorgon, after all.

I think the Gate comes first, then the kids. Or at least, then Eleven - maybe it was an earlier kid who opened the gate. So I still think there's potentially something significant about Hawkins itself that caused them to set up the lab there in the first place.

 

[DFF]

Just a side thought, but given that the kids are always playing D&D and the monsters are representative of those there, I think i'd like it if the twist all along was their that D&D set was cursed Jumanji style.