Stranger Things 4.1

I was an unashamed fan of the first three seasons of Stranger Things. Season four part one carries many of the same elements that made seasons one to three so delightful but where someone, presumably at Netflix, forced them to edit their scripts down to around an hour, this season that hasn’t happened. The episodes are about 20 minutes longer, but not necessarily 20 minutes better.

The good scenes are absolutely great, as before, but there’s padding between them that just wasn’t there in previous seasons and it makes too many of the episodes drag for me. Add some problems I had with how they write Robin that I’ll address later and a huge issue with the finale and I struggled with this season for the first time.

If you have come across any media about Stranger Things season four, it has probably mentioned the use of Running Up That Hill by Kate Bush. A lot of the time I’m ambivalent about the music they use in film and TV. I notice when it’s jarringly wrong but very rarely do I think it’s absolutely right. I’m not saying it can’t set mood and things like that but perfect and the only imaginable piece? Lots of music can make you sad, happy, scared and so on. Music to make you feel amorous or horny is more personal but you can still use that to enhance a romantic or sexy scene too. But however they persuaded Kate Bush to agree, whatever the order of getting the music and blocking the scene was, it’s just perfect. I really can’t imagine a better song for that scene and it made me surprisingly happy to hear it there.

The good news? The chunk that’s right is still so very right i found worth persevering. I don’t really do fist pumps, whoops and yelling, particularly when I’m alone at home. Actually, being British, maybe that’s the only time I might, but I still don’t. I think every episode had a least one of those. A lot of the running jokes that double as character traits (Steve complaining about being left to protect the kids but being really good at it for example) are still here in full force and play both for laughs on occasions but it genuinely puts him in a position as a protector on occasion too. Various romances, bromances have been carried through thoughtfully - good writing at its best.

The bad? I don’t think that I managed to watch a single episode without stopping in the middle. I’d stop and read, stop and watch YouTube, stop and watch an episode of something else and then come back to the episode of Stranger Things. I certainly never did that before this season. There might have been rare instances if I was cooking dinner or similar, but mostly I binged through them. For this season I couldn’t do more than one episode in a day. If life intervened I’d miss a day or two, even the odd week, and really wouldn’t be bothered.

That finale - I didn’t read or see any spoilers and I’m going to honour that forwards, even though I suspect most of the readers have seen it already. The finale for this part of season four tries to do a lot of things. For me, there was enough foreshadowing that a chunk of them just didn’t land with the impact that I think they were meant to have. That’s unfortunate and a problem - if you put foreshadowing into your scripts that’s usually a good thing but if there’s too much the big reveal can end up not as big and revealing as you intend. That’s not to say it’s a bad scene, it still had heft and impact, but it could have had a lot more. Because it didn’t have a huge impact I was watching perhaps more analytically than I might have been otherwise and rather than nicely resolving things I was left with these huge questions. Not cliffhangers, that’s set up elsewhere, but questions just left in the writing. They’re not necessarily plot holes, the writers may be aware of them and planning to circle back and answer them but they are bloody annoying. This kind of thing, even though it’s lacking details, perhaps exemplifies the bloat that I think plagues this season. Whoever edited their episodes down to an hour could have got in and cleaned this episode up, plus tightened up the foreshadowing so the finale landed with more of bang as well. And then I’d be writing a more wholeheartedly positive review.

Despite how negative that sounds, I have no major regrets about watching season four and I expect I’ll watch season five but I won’t be in a mad rush.

Bechdel Test: Pass. In the ensemble we have multiple named female characters and while there isn’t fully free talking between them all in every episode, there are big enough groups that do talk you rarely (sometimes but rarely, and pretty organically) get them siloed and isolated. Conversations between the female characters include boys, but are much more likely to be about sexism, the Upside Down and the like. (I should note I’ve used the term siloed for years about films and shows that keep their female characters isolated from each other. Trust Stranger Things to make the metaphor literal.)

Ko Test: Fail. While we have the occasional return of Erica, she’s basically the only named WOC we see and she’s just not In enough scenes, typically one per episode, to let this pass. She still steals all her scenes though.

Russo Test: Pass. While at the top level this is simple, once you start digging this is far more complicated than it ought to be. Robin is canonically a lesbian, remains so and in a large ensemble like this gets her fair share of screen time. In a horror show, she probably gets more time to discuss the fact that she fancies girls than many of the straight characters get to discuss their various sexual inclinations. The trouble I have is that she doesn’t feel like a queer character to me. About 90% of the time she feels like a perfectly well written young woman - whoever writes their girls and young women does a great job of making them seem real and distinct from each other - but the rest of the time she comes over like a horny teenage boy, not a closeted lesbian. Maybe that’s right for small town America in the 80’s but it seems unlikely to me. Will, who is left ambiguous, feels much better written as a queer teen boy - gay but not really sure how to articulate it, especially since his first crush seems to be for someone who certainly appears to be straight.

I was thinking about the cultural differences that might apply to Robin some more after watching Pride at the BBC recently. British culture has always had drag queens, panto dames and the like as an integral part of family entertainment (drag queens certainly since Victorian times if not longer, panto dames since medieval times). Shows like The Goon Show brought Polari (British gay slang) to mass entertainment, theatre and tv had plenty of gay actors portraying camp roles and roles where they’d openly have sexual innuendo between two male characters at a level that broadly matched the heterosexual innuendo in prime time family shows (I could write a whole list but probably the two most famous are Are You Being Served and It Ain’t Half Hot Mum although Morecombe and Wise had a load of sketches where the leads lived together and shared a bed as well (to the best of my knowledge they were both straight and very happily married, but they portrayed what looked a lot like a gay couple for years on TV and never poked fun of the fact it was two men living together). In the years I was 17 and 18 (roughly Robin's age) TOTP showed “Do You Really Want To Hurt Me” and “Smalltown Boy” to millions of households among other hits. A bit later on we had “Don’t Leave Me This Way” by The Communards then “Relax” and that video. That gave us a gay lead singer wearing a dress, a gay lead singer who sang about running away from homophobic attacks to the big city and finding his tribe, a gay dance hit (the original of “Don’t Leave Me This Way” wasn’t but the version most Brits my age and under know certainly is) and a song that was fairly openly about sex with a video filmed in a gay sex club/hedonistic escape. Soft Cell’s version of “Tainted Love” had been a hit a year or two before and maybe it’s history changing my memory but I remember that as a feeling gay with extra overtones of something darker, perverted. There were lots of other songs that weren’t overtly queer, or were overtly heterosexual or political or whatever. There was plenty of “moral outrage” too - although not all of these songs and certainly not all of these examples were affected by that - but, despite the name, there was no real sense of a “moral majority” speaking out against what we were seeing; rather there was a sense of ongoing, increasing acceptance, and the so-called moral majority being the screaming last bastions of the old order. Increasingly irrelevant and soon to be swept aside. As a recent meme has it “how do you think Texas lawmakers would react if they found out children watching men in drag is not only normal, it’s an essential Christmas tradition?”

There was then then and is now, absolutely, prejudice and, more rarely, violence against queer people. We have a government that among its other charming characteristics is not supportive of the queer community and is at least passively, if not actively, supporting the transphobic parts of society. It is better now than it was in 86. But my memory says that 90% of mainland U.K. was better then than large swathes of America seem to be now. So it’s hard for me to tell exactly how Robin should be. But I still don’t feel the 90% girl, 10% horny teen boy mix is right. I don’t want a straight girl trying to be gay, I want a gay girl trying to pass - and I’m not getting that vibe from her.